Mary Steele Tomkins, [Malpas, Wales,] to Mary Steele Dunscombe, Broughton, [Monday] 23 February 1807.

My dear Aunt,

   I hope you have not thought it unkind my not visiting before, – for I am almost ready to suppose it must appear as though it did not proceed from my principles of that sort but from mere negligence and as I have no better excuse I must trust to your goodness for that forgiveness which I know you are ever ready to bestow.

   I very very often think of both you and dear Uncle D [Thomas Dunscombe]– and though not really with you am often so in imagination – I long for the time to come when you have promised to visit us and expect much pleasure in showing you our favorite walks which are delightful, the country here is truly beautiful and in some parts much beyond anything I had any idea of. – I thought when we first came down here that after a little while we should be so accustomed to this scenery that we should either grow weary or at least think little of it, but I find it far different. There is so much variety that one is never weary, as every walk we take we find fresh beauties to attract us and every view becomes more interesting – the oftener we gaze on it like an old friend the more we see of it the more we admire it.

   I miss dear little Emma very much and long to see her but I don’t know when my longings will be satisfied.

   What a remarkably mild season it has been. We have had little or no winter, the hedge banks have not been entirely deprived of their verdure and the spring flowers are many of them in bloom; I gathered a primrose on New Years day which was very early.

   I have just finished reading Robertson’s history of Charles fifth with which I was very much pleased it is highly interesting and I have begun Rollins Ancient History to Mamma.

   Have you heard anything of the Miss Mulletts lately? Mrs Biggs has not written to me a long time therefore I know nothing of them now.

   We spent a week in Brecnockshire a little while ago we were very near a village called Crickhowel which you have perhaps heard of. Its situation is beautiful, it is seated in a very fine valley [with the] river Usk winding along the [bank] it is surrounded by mountains, the Sugar ye and the Table Mountain are the principal ones the latter is so settled from its being flat on top which though uncommon is not beautiful. – But there is a Mountain nearer Abergavenny, which we admired more than the others. It is the Skirrid Holy Mountain, it is extremely rugged and barren but very fine. – But I think on the whole I admire the country about us more than that at Crickhowel, the foreground is more beautiful here though the other may strike more at first.

   Pray give my best love to Uncle D –   and remember  me to Betty Sheppard and Nancy Reeves. I hope they are well.  Papa and Mamma beg their kind remembrance and little Anne sends her love to Aunt and Uncle D –  Baby is very well and would add hers if she could.  Adieu, I am my dear Aunt your very affectionate niece

                                             Mary Steele Tomkins

Written across a portion of the first page and part of the back page is an additional note by her mother, Anne Tomkins:

My Dr Sister,

   I have foolishly waited for my lovely girl to write till I find you are uneasy. Marys pride I believe has kept her silent & made what might to be a pleasure a task – time will remove this lacking & she will learn to appreciate the value of such a correspondent as her Aunt D –  I never assist in her letters or correct them except to point out the faults that she may avoid them in future.  You will kindly forgive the errors of a child – I acknowledge myself still your debtor – I will write soon – we are all well – pray present my friendly regards to Miss Frowd & believe ever ever yours

                                                                                 A T

kind line to Mr D –

Text: Steele Collection, STE 5/13/vii, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford.  Postmark: Newport, Wales. Address: Mrs Dunscombe / Broughton / Stockbridge /Hants. For an annotated version of the above letter, see Timothy Whelan, ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, 8 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 3, pp. 368-70. The two texts young Mary has been reading are Charles Robertson (1721-93), The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (London, 1769), and Charles Rollin, The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, and Persians (London, 1730). 

Mary Steele Tomkins (1793-1861) was the eldest child of Joseph and Anne Steele Tomkins, Mary Steele’s half-sister. Mary Steele Tomkins was Mary Steele’s namesake and favorite niece, corresponding with her on many occasions during her childhood and time at boarding school in London. Her parents, Joseph and Anne Tomkins, lived for a time at Caldecott and Oakley, two large estate homes, in Abingdon. Joseph Tomkins was a banker, but he indulged in other investments and speculations in the early 1800s, one of which forced the family to move to Malpas, Wales, in 1805. They left there in early 1808 for Bath, where they lived for several years. They would later live in two houses near Southampton and after Mary Steele’s death in 1813, assumed ownership of Broughton House (after much refurbishment) as well as most of the Steele properties around Broughton. Mary Steele Tomkins was baptized and joined the Broughton Baptist Church in 1819. In April and May 1806, just prior to her visit to Bath, Mary Steele Tomkins was visiting in the home of Dr. Joseph Mason Cox (1763-1818), who operated an insane asylum in the Fishponds and lived nearby at Overn House. The asylum was established at Stapleton in 1738 by Joseph Mason (1711-79), who moved it to the Fishponds in 1760. Dr. Cox’s cousin was Selina Carpenter Bompas (1767-1809); she married Charles Bompas and they had three sons, the eldest being Charles Carpenter Bompas, Mary Steele Tomkins’s future husband. How the Tomkinses and the Coxes became close friends is not known; they may have been relations on Mr. Tomkins’s side, but it may be that they had met through their church affiliation. Both families were Baptists, the Tomkinses being one of the leading families in the congregation at Abingdon and Dr. Cox an attendant at the Baptist meeting in Broadmead, first under the leadership of his friend, Caleb Evans (also a close family friend of the Steeles in Broughton and the Tomkinses in Abingdon, where his son would eventually settle) and later under Dr. John Ryland, Jr. In 1809, about the time of his wife’s death, Charles Bompas, Sr., deserted his family and emigrated to North America, where he died in 1820. Dr. Cox took the Bompas children under his care in his home at Overn. The Bompases, however, had been connected with Overn for many years prior to Mr. Bompas’s desertion of his family, for in Selina Bompas’s MS history of the Steele family (STE 12), she says that her mother, Mary Steele Tomkins, first met her future husband on a visit to Overn in 1802. Charles Bompas, Jr., was smitten with her from the beginning, but they did not marry until 1822, when Mary Tomkins was 29.  He would later become a prominent solicitor on the Western Circuit, eventually settling in London at 11 Park Road, Regent’s Park, and was generally considered to be the original of Charles Dicken’s ‘Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz’ in Pickwick Papers. Mary Steele Tomkins Bompas preserved much of the Steele Collection before passing the collection on to her daughter, Selina Bompas (1830-1921). 

The "Miss Mulletts" are Sarah (1780-1852) and Jane Mullett (1782-1837), the latter sister about to be married to James Tobin; they were daughters of Thomas and Mary Anne Evans Mullett of Bristol and later of London. Sarah Evans Norton Biggs (1768-1834) was the daughter of Robert and Hannah Evans Norton of Bristol and later at Nailsworth. Both Mrs. Mullett and Mrs. Norton were sisters of Caleb Evans (1737-91), minister at Broadmead in Bristol and leader of the Bristol Baptist Academy;  According to Jane Mullett Evans, family historian, Sarah Norton "was a woman of decidedly superior intellectual powers, which it was her delight to cultivate. She was also, though not handsome, a striking looking woman, with an elegance of manner and possessing much taste. Her health was unfortunately not good, and as energy, amongst ladies, was not at that time their habit as much as it is now, she was influenced more by her want of health than I believe she would have been had she lived now..." (Evans, Jane Mullett Evans, Family Chronicle of the Descendants of Thomas Evans, of Brecon, from 1678 to 1857 [Bristol: privately printed, c. 1870], 40). Sarah Norton married Matthew Biggs, an attendant at the Unitarian meeting in Lewins Mead, Bristol, in the mid-1790s but by 1803 she was a widow with three young children. She moved to London were a number of her relations were living and established a boarding school for girls in Peckham and Denmark Hill, South London. It was at this school t Anne Steele Tomkins’s eldest daughter, Mary Steele Tomkins, attended c. 1803-05. Some letters by Biggs to Mary Steele Tomkins and Anne Tomkins can be found in the Steele Collection, STE 6, Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford.  For a detailed study of the Evans, Mullett, and Biggs families, see Timothy Whelan, “From Thomas Mullett to Charles Dickens, Jr.: Creating, Sustaining and Expanding a West Country-London Baptist Circle,” Baptist Quarterly 48.2 (2017): 78-100.

Betty Sheppard [Shepherd] and Nancy Reeves were intimately connected with the Steele family and Broughton House since the 1770s and were members at the Broughton Baptist Church along with the Steeles. They appear in numerous letters in the Steele Collection.