Maria Grace Saffery, Salisbury, to Anne Whitaker, Bratton, Friday, 26 [September] 1806.

Sarum  Friday Eveng in great haste

Dearest Anna

   I have a few moments to devote this eveng to yr service happily my intelligence is pleasing your dr Joshua & yr other folks are well excepting a cold of Janes – which is but slight. My dr S. indeed is just return’d from Portsea rather poorly.  Miss Ryland is here a very interesting young female with many particulars that excite kind attention in her history.  You may suppose that I am sufficiently hurried but I am helped I trust to cast my hourly cares on him who careth for me  I wd write more but fear the post & the return of Mr S– from Meeting who is too weary to endure waiting for Supper – you know Jane bathes at Bodenham.  I saw her pretty well on Monday Eveng   Sally continues much as usual & I believe has given up thoughts of continuing in her present station.  She has been in the country once or twice & is gone again her complaint regularly attacks her once a fortnight – May the Lord direct the means for her recovery to health & sanctify ye long interruption of it –

   Wood has yr Gown & I will endeavor to forward it ye week after next if not before – I have heard from Mrs Burdett respecting another lady, but nothing is yet settled  dr little MA[5] begs her kind remembrances – & I must only add mine to yr household with especial word to yr husband & still dearer Self –

                     Yrs most faithfully

                                 M G Saffery

Text: Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.B.1.(26.), Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford. Address: Mrs P. Whitaker | Bratton Farm | to be left at the | Red Lion | Warminster | 26 1806.  Postmark: Salisbury.  For an annotated version of this letter, see Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, p. 221.

Harriet Frances Ryland (b. 1786), along with her parents, Richard and Harriet Ryland, figure prominently in more than 40 letters in the Saffery Correspondence. Her wealthy London parents have sent her to Salisbury to live a boarder in the Saffery home. Her first experience away from home, with a Mrs Reeves in Somerset, had proved disappointing to Mr. Ryland, for Harriet’s indiscretion regarding some personal items she had borrowed from Reeves and not returned proved embarrassing to both her father and brother. Harriet would spend several years with the Safferys (and much time at Bratton with Anne Whitaker) before her marriage to George Gibbs (b. 1779), a coal merchant from Bradford, Wiltshire, on 15 December 1812. It appears they settled at Frome, though little is mentioned of her in this correspondence after her marriage.  Her sister, Lucy, and other members of her family also appear in the Saffery Correspondence.