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A circle of Dissenting women writers that began in the 1770s, centred on Mary Steele of Broughton and Elizabeth Coltman of Leicester, merged in the 1790s in London with a group of Dissenting literary women and men revolving around William Godwin, Mary Hays and Crabb Robinson, a phenomenon revealed almost exclusively through informal life-writings and poems, most of which have remained in manuscript. This cross-pollination of women's literary coteries reveals much about how eighteenth-century women's literary networks were formed and perpetuated, how they overcame geographical boundaries and how they enriched the lives of their members and their male friends.

A fresh examination of the life-writings of Henry Crabb Robinson, which are now being prepared for a new edition, reveals new details about the lives and times of several writers considered "minor" in the 1930's, when Edith Morley prepared her monumental edition, Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers (3 vols, 1938). (1) Those volumes have served as the starting and ending point for information (sometimes firsthand, sometimes anecdotal) by Robinson on scores of writers, male and female, from England, America, and Europe gathered during his long life (1775-1867). (2) Mary Hays is an example. Morley inserted eight references by Robinson to Hays in Books and Their Writers: one from his 1799 reminiscences, one from an 1805 letter, three from his diary for 1813, and one from 1817, 1819, and 1843 (1: 5-7, 124-25, 128, 130-31, 212, 234-35; 2: 629; 3:843-44). (3) The exigencies of print precluded Morley, however, from recording all references to Hays by Robinson throughout his voluminous life-writings. Important additions to Morley's work on Robinson and Hays appear in Marilyn Brooks's edition of Hays's correspondence (which includes twelve letters that passed between Hays and Robinson between 1802 and 1842) and Gina Luria Walker's biography of Hays. (4) Robinson's friendship with Hays, however, has been significantly expanded through the uncovering of nearly 180 references to Hays (composed between 1799 and 1859) in Robinson's diary, reminiscences, and correspondence. These references establish Hays as the most dominant woman writer in Robinson's life-writings, a tribute to their friendship as well as his appreciation of Hays's intellect and literary abilities. (5) Robinson's life-writings focus primarily on Hays's activities after 1803, a period Gina Walker called her "buried life" (Mary Hays 234-37) that commenced with Hays's monumental publication, Female Biography, or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries. Modern editions of Hays's major texts through 1803 illuminate her writing but not her biography. (6) Recovering her bio-text, reconstituting her life within a geographical, social, and religious setting, requires informal sources: diaries, letters, newspaper notices, church books, marriage and death certificates, and detailed genealogical records. For Hays, Crabb Robinson is such a source. As his life-writings become more accessible to scholars, Hays's relationship with Robinson expands in new ways, revealing three fundamental connections between the dedicated diarist and the outspoken feminist: a religious connection as life-long Dissenters; a familial connection through the marriages of two of Hays's nieces to relations (by marriage) of Robinson, marriages that remained strictly within the household of Dissent; and, most important, a cultural connection, one that flourished in the 1790s through the intertwining of several circles of liberal Dissenters and radicals in London and the provinces. These connections became evident in their initial meeting in the spring of 1799, and were further sealed in Robinson's stunning defense of Hays against Charles Lloyd in his letter to Catherine Clarkson the following January, a letter that foreshadows the central features in their enduring friendship that spanned more than forty years. Though known as a heterodox Unitarian and rational Dissenter, Mary Hays was raised an orthodox Calvinist, the third of four daughters of John (c. 1725-74) and Elizabeth Judge Hays (c. 1730-1811) of Gainsford Street, Southwark, near the wharves along the south side of the Thames where the family conducted its business as corn and flour factors and worshiped in the Particular Baptist chapel at the end of the street. (7) Mary's elder sister, Joanna (1754-1805), married John Dunkin (1753-1827) in July, 1774, just three months after the death of Mr. Hays. Mrs. Hays never remarried, living for many years in the family home in Gainsford Street, usually with one or more of her children while conducting business as a wine merchant (Universal British Directory, 1, part 2: 174). …

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867), diarist, traveler, and friend of nearly every important literary figure in England and Germany during the first half of the 19th century, considered the Wordsworths of Rydal Mount and their relations and friends in the Lake District his most important social circle outside his own family. His friendship with Mary Wordsworth (1770-1859) spanned nearly fifty years, though initially William and Dorothy were his primary correspondents. More than 100 letters passed between Robinson and Wordsworth and Dorothy from 1810 to 1835.(1) As Dorothy's mind deteriorated in the mid-1830s, Robinson transferred his attentions to William and Mary. If any letters passed between Robinson and Mary Wordsworth prior to 1833, they are no longer extant, nor are they mentioned in Robinson's chary. However, 129 letters composed between 1833 and 1858 have survived., eighty-three by Robinson and forty-six by Mary Wordsworth. The bulk of their correspondence belongs to the Robinson archive at Dr. Williams's Library, London, from which Edith Morley published the complete texts of Mary's letters an.d brief portions of Robinson's in The Correspondence of Henry Grubb Robinson with The Wordsworth Circle (2 vols, 1927). However, thirty-seven letters by Robinson to Mary Wordsworth, now in the Wordsworth Library, Grasine re, mostly addressed to her during the last ten years of her life are absent from Morley's Correspondence.(2) How these letters became separated from the Robinson collection at Dr. Williams's Library and thus escaped Morley's notice is a mystery, but their contents have continued to elude scholars of the Wordsworth circle and Crabb Robinson. Though the publication of Mary Wordsworth's letters is now complete, scant attention has been accorded Robinson's letters to her.(3) Scholars have generally relied on Morley's published portions of Robinson's. letters to Mary Wordsworth, as well as excerpts pertaining to her from his manuscript Diary and Reminiscences that appeared in Thomas Sadler's Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson (3 vols, 1869) and later in Morley's Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and Their Writers (3 vols, 1938) and Derek Hudson's The Diary of Henry Crabb Robinson: An Abridgement (1967). These publications have resulted in a highly selective and, at times, distorted view of the relationship between Robinson and Mary Wordsworth. From Mor-ley's volumes one primarily learns about Robinson's assistance in various matters of business and legal affairs on behalf of Wordsworth, especially with publishers and the successive editions of his poetry, and, in a lighter vein, his frequent purchases .of candles, soaps, and wedding gifts for Mary Wordsworth and her children as well as her gifts to him of knitted stockings and news of the Wordsworth circle and local gossip at Grasmere and nearby Ambleside. Robinson's letters, however, more than Mary's, reveal the depth of their friendship and the breadth of their shared and, at times, varied interests in literature, religion and politics, as well as the activities and opinions (both good and bad) of their wide coterie of friends and family members. According to Morley, their correspondence "shows the writers setting clown their thoughts and feelings in unrestrained freedom of intercourse" (Correspondence 1: 27). This "unrestrained freedom" was apparent to Morley because of her access to their correspondence at Dr. Williams's Library. Despite knowing the full content of Robinson's letters, she nevertheless published truncated versions in her Correspondence. thus reducing him, as Sadler had largely done, to a compiler of literary anecdotes. Though Robinson understood the importance of recording incidents relating to Wordsworth and his literary. friends, his letters to Mary Wordsworth exceed brief encounters with literary history, as the following discussion of the letters in the Wordsworth Library will make clear. Crabb Robinson became acquainted with the poetry of Wordsworth in the late 1790s through his former Bury friend and then resident of the Lakes, Catherine Buck Clarkson (1770-1856). …

In the West Country of England, between 1720 and 1840, a remarkable circle of nonconformist. (primarily Baptist) women writers emerged in the vicinity of Salisbury and eventually stretched in all directions, to Bristol, Southampton. London, and Leicester. 'The circle encompassed three generations of women writers, beginning in Broughton, Hampshire, with three Baptist women: the diarist, Anne Cator Steele (1689-1760): her talented stepdaughter and poet, Anne (1717-78), who Published Poems on Subjects Chiefly, Devolional in 1760 under the nom de plume "Theodosia"; and her natural daughter, Mary (1724-72), also a gifted poet but whose style differed significantly from that of her more famous sister. The second generation was led by Mary Steele (1753-1813). Anne Calor Steele's granddaughter and Anne Steele's niece, whose reputation as a poet, though eclipsed by (and later even confused with) that of her aunt, was sufficient to sustain her own coterie of literate friends, including Mary Scott (1751-93) of Milborne Port, Somerset, author of The Female Advoeate (1774): Jane Attwater (1753-1843) of Bodenham, Wiltshire, a prolific diarist: and Elizabeth Coltman (1761-1838) of Leicester, Steele's close friend during her later years and who was herself a poet and author of moral and political tracts. The third generation centered upon the poet Maria Grace Andrews Saffery (1772-1858), and her sister, Anne (1774-1865), who came to Salisbury from London in the early 1790s and, through their marriages, became friends and relations of the Steele and Attwater families. Saffery published a narrative poem, Cheyl sing (1790): a novel, The Noble Enthusiast (1792), printed by William Lane and the Minerva Press; and Poems on Sacred Subjects (1831). (2) Besides their obvious religious and literary connections, these nonconformist women all shared an interest in politics, fearing the threat of French oppression against the English and warning against British intolerance toward the American colonies, steadfastly opposing the war with France throughout the Napoleonic ear and never wavering in their opposition to the slave trade. This tradition of political engagement by women in the Steele circle began with Anne Cator Steele in 1730. and continued through the Seven Years' War. The Steeles, like many West Country dissenters, followed politics closely, often out of necessity as dissenters, watchful of any action by the government that might erode the toleration (limited as it was) that had been granted them in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. They also possessed an abiding sense of loyalty to the British throne and its defense of Protestantism against the ongoing threat of Catholic aggression by the French and the Spanish. On Friday, July 31, 1730, Steele writes that she has been in a "quiet peaceable frame reading a great deal of [y.sup.e] time in a large History of [y.sup.e] Monarchs of England, (3) and by reading that about [y.sup.e] powder plot I found my affections warm'd and drawn out to praise God in my evening duty" (Whelan, Nonconformist 8.44).Dissenters in the West Country feared a renewal of hostilities between England and France, not only because of Papal aggression, as Steele frequently mentions in her diary, but also because of English "iniquitys" Steele writes on Thursday, July 8, 1731: I was much the same this morning but it wore off with the company of the day yet I was fir'd up by hearing something in the news of the threachery against this nation by the Spanish & french the first having sent our fleet away & now they say there is 25 thousand French coming tis tho't to invade us, yet I am confident there is nothing but sin can hurt us if our iniquitys be full as indeed I have a great deal of reason to fear tho what can we expect but destruction vet I will endevour to cry to the lord please because the tho'1s of desolation is terible. (Whelan, Nonconformist 8:53) Steele rulers to a recent altercation between England and Spain, in which a Spanish commander cut off the car of Robert Jenkins of the British ship, Rebecca. …

Between 1791 and 1794, William Fox, a Dissenter, collaborated with the Baptist bookseller Martha Gurney in publishing sixteen political pamphlets on topics ranging from the abolition of the slave trade to the perversion of national fast days to Pitt's provocative war with France. Fox's first pamphlet, An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Refraining from the Use of West India Sugar and Rum (1791), became the most widely distributed pamphlet of the eighteenth century. It solidified the abolitionist forces in Great Britain and America by focusing their energies on a boycott of West Indian produce. Though scholars have recognized the historical significance of An Address to the People of Great Britain , Fox has never received proper credit as the author. Neither has Martha Gurney been recognized for her achievement as London's leading female Dissenting printer/bookseller during the 1780s and '90s.

Recently, an unpublished, undated letter by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (in London) to Samuel Purkis (at Brentford), composed between February 26 and March 1, 1800, was found in a collection of autograph letters once belonging to the Baptist minister Joseph Angus (1816–1902), principal of Regent’s Park College, London, from 1849 to 1893. In the letter, Coleridge requests a loan of £10 from Purkis to be sent to Coleridge’s mother‐in‐law in Bristol in order to defray expenses that would soon arise from Sara Coleridge’s visit in March to the West Country. In the letter, Coleridge refers to Richard B. Sheridan as “a Rogue,” boasts of having spent considerable time with Elizabeth Inchbald, Charlotte Smith, Mrs Barbauld, and Mary Robinson (Coleridge’s “list of Illustrissimae!”), and once again declares his intention of giving up newspaper work and returning to the West Country to live for a time with Tom Poole. This essay discusses Coleridge’s past history with Purkis, Coleridge’s current situation with the Morning...

During the 1790s, perhaps no radical was more consistent in his criticism of the policies of the Pitt administration and his advocacy of political reform than Benjamin Flower (1755-1829), editor of the Cambridge Intelligencer from 1793 to 1803. Flower, like many other radicals, paid for his political opinions--six months in Newgate in 1799 for calling the Bishop of Llandaff "the Right Reverend time server and apostate" (Cambridge Intelligencer, April 20, 1799). Flower later described the government's efforts to silence him as a great blessing, for "considering my late imprisonment, with all its circumstances, my heart cannot but expand with gratitude to that all-wise and all-gracious providence, who in the concerns of individuals as well as in the concerns of the universe, brings order out of confusion, and good out of evil" (Proceedings 31). The "order" and "good" were the result of his relationship with Eliza Gould (1770-1810), a twenty-nine-year-old governess whom he met in July, 1799, while in Newgate. They were engaged two months later and married on January 1, 1800. Even before their first meeting, their lives had intertwined in the early 1790's while Eliza was serving as a governess and schoolmistress in Devon. Of the correspondence, only her letters to Flower have survived, along with some other letters she wrote between 1794 and 1799. Her letters reveal a woman of intellectual and spiritual integrity, literary aspirations, radical political opinions, and deeply held romantic ideals, determined to find intellectual fulfillment, financial security, and domestic happiness in the midst of circumstances that constantly threatened her with the loss of all three. (1) Born in Bampton, Devon, where her father, John Gould, was a tanner and deacon/trustee in the local Baptist church, Eliza was educated, first, in a school conducted by the local Baptist minister's wife, then by her father who allowed her to follow her own inclinations, inclinations that led her to adopt democratic ideals and romantic notions. "Plutarch--Telemachus & Jerusalem delivered--The tender Fenelon," she later wrote, moved my heart & Tasso fired my imagination--with Telemachus I read Eucharis & Herminion with Tancred--completely transformed into those personages I had no consciousness of any other existence--I reflected not on myself I was regardless of everything around me I was the very characters themselves & I saw only the objects that existed for them--the works which I have been speaking of gave place to others & their impressions were softened Some of the writings of Voltaire in particular were instrumental in producing this effect-- father made some whimsical presents of books for instance he gave me Fenelon on female education & Locke on the Education of Children thus putting into the hand of the pupil what was designed for the tutor but it was of service ... Rousseau['s] Heloise I was acquainted with a considerable number of contin [ental] historians learned one[s] & philosophers but Rousseau made an impression on me similar to that which Plutarch had done when I was eight years old it appear's that this was the proper food for my mind & the intestines of those Ideas which I entertained but which he alone knew how to explain to me Plutarch had prepared me to become a republican he roused that strength & stateliness of character which constitute one--he inspired me with a real enthusiasm in favor of public virtues & liberty Rousseau pointed out to me the domestic Happiness to which I could aspire & the ineffable enjoyments which I was capable of tasting ... I was arrived at considerable maturity I love[d] to reflect I thought with seriousness of forming my character that is I studied [the] movements of my mind. I sought to know myself I felt I had a destination which I must enable myself to fill--The regularity of a life occupied with a variety of exercises was perfectly suitable to the activity of my mind as well as to my natural taste for method & application. …

Between 1790 and 1795, while working as an articled clerk for a Dissenting attorney in Colchester, Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) participated in the fervor of political radicalism festering among English Dissenters since the late 1780s when they attempted to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts and reform Parliament. In 1795, nearing the end of his apprenticeship, Robinson entered the political arena, in public debates at the Royston Book Club, in his letters, and in his first two pieces of journalism. The first of these essays originally appeared in late autumn, 1794, in The Cabinet, a radical Norwich periodical headed by William Taylor. Robinson's essay was a response to what he termed an "ill-written" essay published in the Cabinet on "Spies and Informers" (Sadler 1.14). (1) Robinson's second political essay appeared the next year in Benjamin Flower's Cambridge Intelligencer. (2) Entitled "Godwin" and signed "Philo Godwin," it appeared on August 1, 1795. This letter, to my knowledge, has never appeared in print since its original publication nor has any portion of it been quoted by any commentator on Robinson. Thomas Sadler, in The Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, includes only a terse statement by Robinson about it (1.20). Edith Morley's Henry Crabb Robinson on Books and their Writers includes a similarly brief version by Robinson of the event (1.3). John Milton Baker's Henry Crabb Robinson of Bury, Jena, The Times, and Russell Square merely paraphrases Robinson's statements concerning the letter (as recorded by Sadler and Morley), and in his bibliography provides only a general date of 1795 (73, 246). Penelope Corfield and Chris Evans, in their recent book Youth and Revolution in the 1790s, though discussing at length Robinson's Godwinism betwe en 1795 and 1800 (16, 29-35), never mention this letter at all. Peter Marshall, in his excellent biography of Godwin, makes extensive use of the Crabb Robinson Correspondence at Dr. Williams's Library, refers to Robinson's letter in the Cambridge Intelligencer, and records its date and the nom de plume. Marshall read the letter, but he does not quote any part of it (122, 214). Robinson's letter reveals not only his youthful allegiance to the principles of Godwin (principles thought "radical" by the majority of his young Dissenting friends) as well as the fundamental beliefs of religious and political dissent in general (principles he had been developing since 1790), but also his emerging rhetorical and journalistic skills, gifts he would make use of the rest of his life. Born into a family of orthodox Dissenters at Bury St. Edmunds (Robinson's mother's family, the Crabbs, were leading members of the Independent chapel at nearby Wattisfield), Crabb Robinson's upbringing was Calvinistic and Independent. (3) Between 1787 and 1789, he attended two Independent (Congregational) Dissenting academies, the first at Devizes in a school operated by his uncle, John Fenner, and the second at Wattisfield, where another uncle, the Rev. Habbakuk Crabb, conducted a school. While at Wattisfield, Robinson experienced the thrill of the French Revolution as well as the subtle influence of his uncle's more radical Dissenting views about politics and religion. Rev. Crabb left Wattisfield in 1790 to assume the pastorate of the Independent chapel at Royston, and adopted an Arian position similar to the Unitarianism of Joseph Priestley and Richard Price. About the same time Habbakuk Crabb arrived in Royston, Crabb Robinson began his apprenticeship in Colchester. During his first year there, Robinson began to identify with the views of his uncle, exchanging the orthodox Calvinism of his parents for Joseph Priestley's brand of rational Christianity, yet maintaining a loyalty to "the importance of religious liberty and the rights of conscience" (Sadler 1.9), principles shared by nearly all Dissenters of that period. Late in 1790 he joined with Dissenters, from Unitarians to Baptists, in appointing deputies who would go to London to seek the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. …