Mary Steele [Dunscombe], [Broughton,] to her niece, Mary Steele Tomkins, Peckham, near London, [Thursday] 5 April [1804].

   I must write a line or two tho I can do no more at present, just to tell my Dear Girl how much I was gratified by her Letter & to thank her for it – I have too just now some very pleasing intelligence to impart, I have received this morn a Letter from Wales. Your Papa & Mamma had a very pleasant Journey thither & were with Emma quite well. Emma enlivens the scene very much to her Mamma who would otherwise be a good deal alone.

   I am pleased to find that you are about to learn Botany – it will furnish you with an inexhaustible sense of amusement.  I hope my Dear Mary you are sensible of the great Advantages you enjoy in such Opportunities of Improvement, Opportunities which thousands sigh for in vain and as you say so kind an Instructress must render the acquisition of knowledge doubly pleasing as well as make its attainment much easier.  It is soothing to my heart my Dear Mary that you remember this place & its inhabitants with so much affection – the Garden can boast nothing yet but a few Violets & Pansies & here & there a hardy Anemone, but I hope you will see it in a very different state a few months hence & then you will be able to tell me many things about flowers that I am ignorant of.

   I long to see you & could chat with you on Paper much longer but am obliged to attend to other things. Your Uncle ever remembers you with Affection.  Lucy begs her Love. She is tolerable well & her Garden in rather better order than when you worked so hard in weeding it – assure Mrs Biggs of my Affectionate regards & present my Compliments to Miss Thomas.  The tender wishes my heart forms for my dear Marys Happiness can never be expressed by her Affectionate

                                 Aunt M Dunscombe

Broughton  April 5th

I fear you will find some difficulty to read it.  I write in haste.

I have just heard by a Letter from Miss Mullett that My Dr Mary is unwell & going to Denmark Hill for a few days. I hope it will restore her health & shall long to hear it has done so.

Text: Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 3, p. 362 (annotated version); Steele Collection, STE 5/13/iv, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford. No postmark. Address: Miss M Steele Tomkins. 

Miss Thomas was the assistant teacher in Mrs. Biggs’s school. She may have been the daughter of Lemuel Thomas (1761–1825) of London, a relation of Timothy Thomas (1753–1827), Baptist minister at Devonshire Square who married the half-sister of Caleb Evans of Bristol. The latter's cousin, Thomas Thomas (1759–1819), was the Baptist minister at Mill Yard (1789–1799) and later a schoolmaster in Peckham and secretary of the Baptist Union (1813). Timothy Thomas also operated a school for boys in Peckham. If Miss Thomas was Timothy Thomas's daughter, then she would have been a first cousin to Sarah Evans Norton Biggs. Biggs and Miss Thomas were close friends of the daughters of Thomas Mullett, as well as relations and close friends of Mary Steele and her half-sisters, Anne Steele Tomkins and Martha Steele, and, into the next generation, Mary Steele Tomkins, the "Mary" mentioned at  the close of the letter.  The more likely alternative is that Miss Thomas was the daughter of Thomas Thomas, since both schools were located in Peckham.