Martha Goddard Steele

Martha Goddard Steele (c. 1734-1791) was the daughter of Mark Goddard of Bristol, who died when Martha was very young. She lived thereafter primarily with her sister, Elizabeth, who married the Revd John Ash, Particular Baptist minister at Pershore, in 1751. Ash was also a close friend of Caleb Evans, co-editing with Evans a collection of hymns published in Bristol in 1769. Martha Goddard was thirty-four when she married William Steele, who was then fifty-three. Initially, Mary Steele (1753-1813), the lone child of William Steele's first marriage, was not supportive of the marriage, but she would soon come to love her stepmother and would care for her at Broughton House until the latter's death on 31 May 1791, just prior to the death of Caleb Evans in August 1791. On 8 June 1791 William Steadman, the minister of the Baptist chapel in Broughton who was living with the Steele's in Broughton House at the time, wrote in his diary, ‘The mortal remains of our dear friend Mrs. Steele were deposited in the grave this evening, about half-past five o’clock. Preached upon the mournful occasion from John xi. 11, and was carried through the service better than I expected. The meeting was quite crowded, and considerable numbers were obliged to stand without. Mrs. Steele was originally a member of the Church at Pershore, in Warwickshire, baptized by Dr. Ash, being descended from a highly respectable family in that neighbourhood. Upon her marriage with Mr. Steele, in 1768, she was dismissed to the church at Broughton, and has been a very useful and respectable member of it. Her deportment and behaviour in every relation she sustained, did honour to her profession. She was seized with a violent bilious attack at Bristol, about the 27th of September last, which turned after a while to the jaundice, and terminated in her death’. At the time of this letter, Mary Steele had witnessed the deaths of her natural parents, her stepmother, and both her aunts, leaving her the head of the Steele family at Broughton.  See Thomas Steadman, ed. Memoir of the Rev. William Steadman, D.D. London: Thomas Ward, 1838), 54-55; for her appearances in the correspondence and poetry of Mary Steele, see Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 3.