Philip Whitaker, Bratton, to Maria Grace Saffery, Salisbury, [Saturday], 7 May 1825.

Bratton May 7, 1825

My dear Sister

   I hope my good wife will be again able to resume her correspondence with you but she has of late pleaded inability not bodily but a more lamentable inability, we do not forget you we pray for you and I would cheerfully devise things for you and your familys good if I knew how. Whether my Anne will come soon to Sarum is yet doubtful  she has been for 5 or 6 days almost stationary with Lumbago  it is a little better now and a removal at present will be desirable for her, as we have pulled down the old side of the house and are in a most pitious mess and shall be for many weeks. Philip has been with us a few days and is @ to take John back with him the beginning of the week. Mrs Bullar & 2 sons were with us yesterday they are staying with Alfred we could not lodge them for a night.  I wish you would desire Mr Marsh to pay Fanny Jones the five pound she asked for (and which my Anne forgot to notice in her letter to Jane) I will account to him for it when I come tell him with my respects.

   I am glad to hear that Carey is likely to be permanent at Marshalls. I hope it will do very well. Philip says he seems very comfortable – My wife had a few days ago a letter from Mrs Dawes (late Scott) after years of silence – she pleads the best excuse she can I suppose for marrying but by some hints we imagine the family or part of them have been much hurt.

   Will you remember us kindly to the Bodenham friends  tell them my Sister is much as usual  she was quite ill a week ago. I dont hear her say when she intends coming to them but I know it is to be shortly.  

   I begin to think you will be weary of this short news paper and therefore will conclude with wishing you and yours the merry blessings a praying circle of friends are asking for you and which gracious God has to bestow beyond all they and you can ask or think

                                             Yours affectionately

                                                         Philip Whitaker

Text: Saffery/Whitaker Papers, acc. 142, I.A.19.(b.), Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford. Address: Mrs Saffery | Salisbury. Postmark: Warminster. For an annotated version of this letter, see Timothy Whelan, gen. ed., Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011), vol. 6, p. 401. Mentioned above are the wife and two sons of John Bullar of Southampton, a friend of the Safferys. Also mentioned in the former Mary Egerton Scott, now Mrs. Hawes. After Thomas Scott's death in 1821, Mary Egerton Scott remained for a time with her stepson, John, but she had remarried by 1825. Apparently, Philip Whitaker’s concern that the family was not pleased about her remarriage had some merit, for in the 1825 edition of John Scott’s The Life of Thomas Scott, he added some new information on his stepmother in the only passage in the book that mentions her, but removed all references to her publications in the advertisement at the end of the volume that had been present in the earlier edition.