Maria Grace Saffery, Salisbury, to Anne Whitaker, Bratton, Good Friday, [4 April] 1817.

Salisbury  Good Friday  1817

My very dear Sister

   Among the infelicities of my mortal state, I reckon an incapacity for writing letters.  I have a contempt for the insensitive style so I may not call it a “misery” and yet my daily trials on this account, scarcely allow me to put it on the list of subordinate vexations.  But you must have a specimen to morrow which will more than answer the purpose of confession.  Little Anne has prepared her Epistle and is I know anxious to send it.  She is quite a good Child, & is I think, rather improved in appearances  we have been in no difficulty hitherto with her manners or with her wardrobe as you seem to imagine.  The white frocks however are wanted now.  Can’t you bring them?  I hope dear Mr Edminson will be spared a great while yet to this bad world.  Your silence encourages our expectation of his recovery.  What do you think of Rowe? Alas! the Righteous & the wise are taken.  Trowt our most valuable junior Missionary is no more.  His widow & his infant child are left in the sickly clime of Java.  Well, the God of the Widow & the fatherless is there.

   I have been much inclined to melancholy during the week.  Philip has been considerably indisposed, but the Lord has shewed mercy to him and to his < > mother we had tidings yesterday of his convalescence.  Adieu my dear Anne.  Many a care burthens my spirit, many a sorrow has altered its tone of feeling, yet the sweet sense of our early and our faithful friendship abides still with soothing influence upon the heart of

                     Your’s in complicated ties

                                 M. G. Saffery

My dear S. would be kindly remembered I am afraid his arm is getting under the discipline of < > heal-all.  What shall I do for him?

Text: Timothy Whelan, gen. ed.,  Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, p. 356 (annotated version); Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.B.3.(5.), Angus Library. Address: Mrs Whitaker. No postmark. " Little Anne" is Anne Whitaker’s daughter, Anne (nine years of age at the time of this letter), who was attending Saffery’s school. Joshua Rowe and Thomas Trowt were BMS missionaries who were particularly close to the Saffery family and to the congregation in Brown Street and West Country Baptists.  For Saffery’s poems on both men, see Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers, vol. 5,  pp. 103-04, 109. For Rowe’s correspondence with John Saffery, see Reeves Collection, R7/1-44, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford.