William Steele, Broughton, to Mary Steele, Bodenham, [Monday] 1 May 1769.

Broughton  May 1st 1769

My Dear Polly

   As you express’d a good deal of Anxiety at leaving home at a time when I was not well, it will doubtless give you pleasure to know that thro’ the Goodness of God I am now much better.  I was not well enough to go to Meeting yesterday but my understanding is so much firmer today that I can traverse the Garden with one Stick. 

   We were not sensible before you went how much my Dr Girl wou’d be miss’d, Mamma notwithstanding her little Nursery, complains how solitary it is without you & I think she is much oblig’d to my Gout for keeping me at home, for Nancy with all her Goos & Gaas wou’d scarcely dissipate the Gloom if her bigger Nursery was absent.

   The Garden is getting every day pleasanter & I cant help wishing you & Miss Jenny here to enjoy it, but I believe the stronger Motive is that we might have your Company.  We are all thro’ Mercy well as usual & join in due Commendations to the good & worthy Bodenhamites both great & small.  Adieu my Dear Child my best wishes attend you.  Your affectionate Far

                                                                             W Steele junr

  (I hope to hear from you tomorrow –

Text: Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols.  (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 3, pp. 205-06 (annotated version); STE 4/5/i, Steele Collection, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford. Postmark: illegible. Address: To / Miss Steele / at Mr Attwater’s / Bodenham. 

This is the first of sixty letters, all written between 1769 and 1777, from William Steele to his daughter. Her letters to her father, for whatever reason, have not survived. His letters are remarkably clean, with very few interpolations or marked out words. At the time of the above letter, Mary was visiting her Attwater relations, Jane (“Myrtilla”) and Marianna (“Maria”), at Bodenham, Wiltshire. William Steele, as with all of his daughter’s correspondents, addressed his letters to her as “Miss Steele.” The family pet name for Mary Steele was ‘Polly’ (her literary name was “Silvia”/”Sylvia”), which William Steele uses frequently in his letters. Mary Steele was now sixteen and had probably just completed her time at boarding school in London. Her father married his second wife, Martha Goddard of Pershore, in the spring of 1768. Initially, Mary Steele was not supportive of the marriage, but she would soon come to love her stepmother and would care for her at Broughton House until her death in 1791. In this letter William Steele mentions the “Waters,” which is, of course, the Attwaters of Bodenham. ‘Jenny’ is Jane Attwater. “Nancy” is Anne Steele, Mary’s half-sister, born 24 February 1769.