Maria Grace Saffery, Salisbury, to Anne Whitaker, Bratton, [Friday], 3 October 1817.

Salisbury  Octr 3d 1817

My dear Anne

   It is time I had told you something about your little girl, and asked after my boy, and expressed too the tender regards of a friendship which however unproductive of advantage to you dwells with the integrity of a sacred principle in the heart, where so long since it promised to abide – Since we parted last I have had just that variety of cares, and conflicts, for which perhaps, (with some exceptions) you might be my journalist, you know the dull routine of common life, in all its forms of busy insipidity.  You know what it is to sigh over the flight of hours that yet seems to move with leaden wings, and to feel quite assured that the deficiency of the present day will “not” be supplied by the morrow.  Yet you know all this and you know the blissful antidote to the cruel weariness, the guilty despondency, which must succeed every draught we take of this melancholy sickly beings but for the pursuit of “glory honour Immortality and Eternal life.”

   Your little Anne is well and gay too.  She was poorly a day or two with a Stomach complaint about ten days since but she recruited speedily < > no other medicine than magnesia  her lessons are learned very tolerably.  Her work is neatly executed and I cannot help hoping that there is an improvement in her manner.

   How is the baby Puritan? make him blush if you please with one kiss for Mamma.  Remember to all the circle our united love.  I imagine this remembrance for dear S–  who has been absent some time I expect him home to night from the Oxford Meeting. Dear Philip tells me Alfred is well.  I have had a mournful letter from Mill Hill  dread of expulsion &c &c for neglect, or rather I suppose, contempt of orders.   Alas! I am full of heaviness on every reflection of this poor wayward Child. I learn from his Bror the last Storm has blown over.  Adieu I am yours in nature’s and in friendship’s tie

                     M. G. Saffery

Dear Mary Whitchurch is at home.  I hope, I know indeed that she [is] quite well.  Perhaps one proof of this is a measure of depression.  I am desired to ask about Betty Miall.  Present if you please Mrs W’s love to Mrs Blatch and request information of her accomplishments I suppose a letter from Mrs < > would be taken very kindly saying [what] she can do and what she would expect  If she cannot undertake to be a cook she would perhaps suit as a housemaid let the communication be made as speedily as possible.

   If she is engaged or not at all eligible, it will be desirable to hear of it immediately.

   There is a gleam of Sun-shine just breaking thro ye cloud so long gathering round the Pennys –

   Pray tell Fanny that her father is well and that I have done what I promised –

Text: Timothy Whelan, gen. ed.,  Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, p. 364 (annotated version); Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.B.3.(7.), Angus Library.  Address: Mrs Philip Whitaker | Bratton Farm | To be left at the Red Lion | Warminster.   Postmark: Salisbury, 3 October 1817. Scripture quotation above from Romans 2:7. The Baptist church at Oxford was formed in 1780, with its first minister being a young George Dyer, a figure who would later be a friend of several Romantic poets and writers. At the time of the above letter, James Hinton (1761-1823) was the pastor.

At this time, William Carey Saffery, age fourteen, was attending Mill Hill School in North London, a school that several members of the Saffery and Whitaker families for several generations would attend. The school was founded in 1807 by a group of nonconformist ministers and merchants, led by the Rev. John Pye Smith of Homerton College, for the purpose of providing a similiar quality of classical education as found in the Anglican public schools. The Rev. John Atkinson was the first principal at Mill Hill, but the school did not flourish until the tenure of the Rev. John Humphreys in the early 1820s, under whose direction the school increased to more than 80. At one point, the school had more than 130 students, but the numbers declined in the 1840s. The school closed in 1868, having educated children of nearly every dissenting sect as well as the Established Church. See the entry on Mill Hill by J. D. Mellor in A History of the County of Middlesex, Volume I, ed. J. S. Cockburn, H. P. F. King, and K. G. T. McDonnell (Oxford: Published for the Institute of Historical Research by Oxford University Press, 1969), vol. 1, pp. 307-8.