Mary Steele Tomkins [Bompas]

Mary Steele Tomkins Bompas (1793-1861) was the eldest daughter of Anne Steele Tomkins (1769-1859) of Broughton and Joseph Tomkins of Abingdon (they later settled at Broughton House c. 1816). Anne Steele Tomkins was the younger half-sister of the poet Mary Steele (1753-1813) of Broughton, niece of the famed hymn writer Anne Steele (1717-78), and sister to Martha Steele (1770-1834), who never married and lived with Anne most of her adult life. The younger Anne Steele married Joseph Tomkins of Abingdon in 1790 and was instrumental in preserving much of what is known today as the Steele Collection  (residing now at the Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford), whch she passed on to her daughter Mary, who was the namesake and favorite niece of Mary Steele and with whom she corresponded often between 1803 and 1808. 

After their marriage, the Tomkinses lived at Caldecott and Oakley, two large estate homes, in Abingdon. Joseph Tomkins was a banker, but he indulged in other investments and speculations in the early 1800s, one of which forced the family to move to Malpas, Wales, in 1805. They left there in early 1808 for Bath, where they lived for several years. They would later live in two houses near Southampton and after Mary Steele’s death in 1813, assumed ownership of Broughton House (after much refurbishment) as well as most of the Steele properties around Broughton. Mary Steele Tomkins was baptized and joined the Broughton Baptist Church in 1819. In April and May 1806, just prior to her visit to Bath, she was visiting in the home of Dr. Joseph Mason Cox (1763-1818), who operated an insane asylum in the Fishponds and lived nearby at Overn House. The asylum was established at Stapleton in 1738 by Joseph Mason (1711-79), who moved it to the Fishponds in 1760. Dr. Cox’s cousin was Selina Carpenter Bompas (1767-1809); she married Charles Bompas and they had three sons, the eldest being Charles Carpenter Bompas (1791-1844), Mary Steele Tomkins’s future husband. They would have ten children during their relatively short marriage. Selina Anne Bompas (1830-1921), the 6th of the ten children, would be instrumental in maintaining the letters and manuscripts that would later form the Steele Collection.  Her sister-in-law, Charlotte Selina Bompas (1830-1917) would become a writer, publishing stories about her life as the wife of an Anglican missionary and bishop in the Yukon, Canada. Selina's cousin, also named Selina Carpenter Bompas (1833-1915), died in South Africa.

How the Tomkinses and the Coxes became close friends is not known; they may have been relations on Mr. Tomkins’s side, but it may be that they had met through their church affiliation. Both families were Baptists, the Tomkinses being one of the leading families in the congregation at Abingdon and Dr. Cox an attendant at the Baptist meeting in Broadmead, first under the leadership of his friend, Caleb Evans (also a close family friend of the Steeles in Broughton and the Tomkinses in Abingdon, where his son would eventually settle) and later under Dr. John Ryland, Jr. Mary Steele Tomkins’s parents arrived at Overn House in early June 1806, after which they visited Bath with Mary for about a week or so, then brought her back to Overn and returned alone to their home in Wales. Mary would remain in the West Country for remainder of the summer. 

One further note worth mentioning: In 1809, about the time of his wife’s death, Charles Bompas, Sr., deserted his family and emigrated to North America, where he died in 1820. Dr. Cox took the Bompas children under his care in his home at Overn. The Bompases, however, had been connected with Overn for many years prior to Mr. Bompas’s desertion of his family, for in Selina Bompas’s MS history of the Steele family (STE 12, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford), she says that her mother first met her future husband on a visit to Overn in 1802. Charles Bompas, Jr., was smitten with Mary Tomkins from the beginning, but they did not marry until 1822, when she was 29.  He would later become a prominent solicitor on the Western Circuit, eventually settling in London at 11 Park Road, Regent’s Park, and was generally considered to be the original of Charles Dicken’s ‘Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz’ in Pickwick Papers. For her correspondence with Mary Steele and the one surviving poem, see Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 3, pp. 353-76p and vol. 4, 235-37; to read the poem, click here.