Maria Grace Saffery, Salisbury, to Anne Whitaker, Bratton, [Tuesday], 4 January 1825.

My dear Anne

   I reached home last night after an absence of three or four days in London spent in great anxiety on various accounts, but hitherto I am helped to endure  Oh that it may be as seeing him “who is invisible to the dim eye of sense alone.” God is in my thoughts, or they would be a chaos of distraction  You know that Jane is gone with Samuel on a visit to Norwich, and that I went with them and Carey to Town to help forward an arrangement made for the latter by his father with a Mr Marshall, who offers to introduce him into the circle of London traders &c and gives him access into his own Shop and a home for a few weeks at least in his own house by way of experiment.  Marshall is [a] good Man in great credit with Society civil and religious for he is rich as well as good.  You know the Son who [is] rather a pleasant Man. 

   But you are inquiring and very tenderly too for your Brother.  He alas! is sick.  I met him at Andover in my way to Town better than he has usually been of late and so he returned home but on Friday he was seized with symptoms of disorder in the liver  these are subdued by medicine but the discipline of the remedy is very severe and he is a great sufferer from lassitude and depression

Our life how poor a trifle ’tis

Salter, Mary, Miss Dendy and John are from home so that I am once more in my life at the head of a small family composed of not more than seven persons  I saw dear Edward & Philip several times and went with the latter to hear the fine eloquent “barbarian” who is certainly very sublime “withal!” The young men do not answer to the old Rylandic sarcasm of being “quite blooming,” but they say they are pretty well.  How is everybody with you  I hope you will be able to read my question or indeed all my letter written & composed at random.  Your Brother is certainly better and thinner would he were well!  Adieu I am always

                     Yrs Maria

Text: Timothy Whelan, gen. ed.,  Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, pp. 396-97 (annotated version); Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.B.3.(24.), Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford. Address:  Salisbury  Jany 4th 1825 | Mrs Whitaker | Bratton Farm | near | Westbury. Postmark: Salisbury, 4 January 1825. At the time of the above letter, Carey Saffery was twenty-two (and working in London), Jane Saffery was twenty, and Samuel Saffery eighteen. Others mentioned above include Ann Salter, who lived with the Safferys for many years (probably assisting in the school), and Mary the house maid.

Miss Dendy is probably a new assistant in the school; she was a member of the congregation in Brown Street, along with Walter Dendy (d. 1881), most likely her brother. He would be appointed a BMS missionary in 1831 from the church in Salisbury, during the ministry of P. J. Saffery, Maria Saffery's son. The Dendy’s sailed for Jamaica in 1831. Dendy was imprisoned in 1833 for promoting abolition, at which time government forces killed twenty-one members of his congregation. The Dendys and the Safferys would become connected in later years not only through the BMS but also through marriage. P. J. Saffery’s second wife was Ann Dendy. Whether the ‘Miss Dendy’ mentioned in this letter is Ann or another member of the Dendy family is uncertain.