Mrs. William Smith of Bedford

Mrs. William Smith assisted her husband, William Smith (see entry above) in a printing/bookselling business in Bedford, selling several of Benjamin Flower’s publications and those of his friends, such as George Dyer’s Complaints of the Poor People of England (1793).  She may have served as Flower’s distributor for his paper in Bedford in 1799 (see letter 71). Mrs. Smith also conducted a school in Bedford. Among her students in 1796-97 were the children of Timothy Thomas, minister of the Baptist church at Devonshire Square, London. See The Church Book of Bunyan Meeting 1650-1821 [facsimile] (London: J. M. Dent, 1928), f. 239; H. G. Tibbutt, Mill Street Baptist Church, Bedford, 1792-1963  (Bedford, 1964), 3; Cambridge Intelligencer, 2 November 1793, 11 January 1800, and 18 June 1803; John Rippon, ed., Baptist Annual Register, vol. 3, p. 326.