Jane Attwater, Bodenham, to Mary Steele, Broughton, [Monday] 7 February 1785.

Bodenham  Feby 7

   When I consider my Beloved Friends partiality & tender anxiety for my welfare it determines me to write many times when if otherwise my pen wd lie unemploy’d nothing but these motives could induce you to wish to receive such unentertaining insiped Epistles – but happy for me where true Friendship subsists every Intelligence every occurance every triffling event is Interesting wn it concerns those we love –  I thank you my dear Friend for this kind Indulgence for the heartfelt pleasure of being assured I possess that real treasure tho’ unworthy of such an inestimable blessing.

   I am sorry to find my dear Friends eyes are no better I fear they are worse than you let me know I hope I have remedy’d ye inconveniency of pale Ink I had a bottle of the japan Ink last Tuesday on purpose but I believe its my pens are more in fault yn ye Ink. Let me know in your next if there is any difference thank you my dear for giving me the hint about it.

   I have to thank you for the books you kindly favor’d me with.  Will it be too long if I detain ym a fortnight longer as then I hope to send ym together. My Bror has read Peru but I wish to peruse it myself wn I shall have better opportunity to enjoy it wn alone – I have sent an account to my sister Whitaker about ye Tar water with ye recipe how to make, have written another for myself should I need [it] in futurity as it is so very highly recommended and as we know it in many Instances to have been so serviceable.

   Poor Mrs Howe! Her path in Life as you justly observe indeed is troublesome.  I was really shocked at ye recital of her situation. What must her feelings be? My love await her wishing her every divine support wch her complicated distress calls for – how is Miss Scott now? & Miss Mary Frowd?  I hope e’er this time you have quite lost yr Rhuematick Complaint & that a kind providence has protected you & all our dear Friends from ye Epidemical disease wch you mention – We have several people around us has violent Colds. My Bror Cousin Sally Maria & ye maid have had ym  it affects the head so much yt it quite Lays ym up for some days they are better now but not quite recovered. – Cousin William went to school last week.  I had ye pleasure of hearing they were all well at Bratton I have not hd from Bradford a long time.

   I was last Tuesday at Sarum. Enquired of Mr Kendal particularly about his intended Circulating Library – he says he has several books but they are not yet bound – he intends having a written Catalogue wch he will let me see wn its finish’d  it is to consist of Divinity, History plays novels &c.  I suppose something to please every body if that End is accomplishable.  Any book that his subscribers chuse he will send to London for if he has it not. Thus you have as near as I can remember his account of it. His terms are ye same as others. –

   Yesterday the weather was so that we was obliged to be prisoners at home –

   I have not yet altered my mind about Engaging in Business. What do your & my hond Friend think of it? If a pretty little (for I should not chuse to ingage with much at first) Estate should offer near my Bror, I should like much to take it as I see no reason why I should be like ye sluggard or drone Bee to sleep away ye morn of Life in inactivity & uselesness to myself & others. My Cousin Thos is now near 18 careful & attentive to Business & I have vanity enough to think I should not fail in attention &c within if he with [paper torn] Assistence was equally assiduous without. What say you my Friend if this answers no other end I think it will make you Smile & I hope consider for me wch is my best way to act.  The winter Evenings I shall still have leasure to read & ye Summer mornings will not be past I hope without improvement. – I long to receive your answer on this. –

   Poor Mrs Gardener is still ill but I hope better – Mrs Bartholmew is also ill in the universal Complaint.  She has lent me some Biographical Sermons written by Enfield. She told me she thought I should like ym  she said she had several books of Divinity that was her Aunts yt she had never look’d in.  I readily believe her as she does not seem fond of reading. Her Children seems to engage her sole attention – I look in upon her sometimes  a task wch I force myself to perform as I wd not be thought as neighbourly but a long visit I cannot pay.

   Thro’ divine goodness we are blest with Health except as before we unite in affecte Commendations of Friendship to all your much lov’d Circle.  Adieu my beloved Friend. I fear this scrible will be too tedious for you to read if so beg you to let Miss Lucy be my Interpreter. It wd give me much pain to know I occasioned you any difficulty. May the best of blessings be yours, blessings wch can enliven the most dreary scene & cast a pleasing ray through the most darkest hour wishes your truly affecte

                                                         J Attwater

Have you or Mr Steele ever read [paper torn] intitled Florae Solitariae

if you have not I think it wd afford [paper torn] pleasure  its written by Mr Serle whom you have hd me speak of  I am [paper torn] it

Text: Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols.  (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 3, pp. 305-07 (annotated version); Attwater Papers, acc. 76, II.B.2.(f.), Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford. Attwater Papers, acc. 76, II.B.2.(i.).  Address: Miss Steele / Broughton / Hants. During the 1780s, Mary Steele had several bouts with recurring blindness in one or more of her eyes. She composed two poems about her affliction: "Stanzas written when in Danger of Blindness," and "Occasioned by the Increasing Defect of my Sight." 

References above are to Helen Maria Williams's poem, Peru, a Poem. In Six Cantos (1786); Gay Thomas Attwater, his daughter Sarah (now twenty), her younger sister, Maria (born in 1783), and her brother Thomas Attwater; and two titles, William Enfield's Biographical Sermons (London: J. Johnson, 1777), and Ambrose Serle's Horae Solitariae or, Essays upon some Remarkable Names and Titles of Jesus Christ, occurring in the Old Testament (London, 1776).

Circulating libraries like that of Mr. Kendal in Salisbury were appearing in numerous towns and villages in the West Country. In a letter to the editor of The County Magazine for the Years 1786 and 1787; particularly dedicated to the inhabitants of Berkshire, Dorsetshire, Hampshire, Somersetshire, and Wiltshire (Salisbury: B. Collins, 1788), vol. 1 (May, 1786), p. 68, the writer, from nearby Dorset, pays a visit to his friend, ‘a bookseller, in a market-town in this county, who keeps a circulating library’. The visitor is surprised to witness a young woman approaching his friend’s shop on a Sunday after church, knocking on the door, and asking if he had obtained for the library a copy of Goethe’s Eleonora; not long afterward, another young woman of about the same age knocked and asked if a copy of Smollett’s Roderick Random had arrived. To the writer of the letter, however, the actions of the young ladies did not provoke admiration about the expanding reading public that was occurring in the West Country; instead, he cited the incident as an instance of the prevalence of ‘immorality, and contempt of the Sabbath’ pervading the youth of his county!  He could only wonder if such goings on would have occurred in that village fifty years previously. In Steele’s home county of Hampshire, circulating libraries began to appear in the late 1760s and proliferated thereafter in such cities as Southampton, Winchester, and Portsmouth. Like the one in Salisbury, these libraries purchased a ‘high proportion of novels, romances, and plays, the standard fare of circulating libraries’. Subscribers, like Mary Steele, ‘expected to be kept abreast of the latest fashions and to be able to read new titles almost as soon as they were published in London.’ As John Oldfield contends, though ‘dismissed and ridiculed by nineteenth-century commentators because of its association with the passion for popular romances, this simple innovation [of circulating libraries] nevertheless played a crucial role in the dissemination of ides among the leisured classes’.  See Oldfield, Printers, Booksellers and Libraries in Hampshire, 1750-1800 (Hampshire County Council, 1993), pp. 17, 20.