Christmas week of 1836 was a very special time at the vicarage in Tavistock. The vicar’s wife, the writer Anna Eliza Bray had invited the Poet Laureate Robert Southey and his son Charles to stay. There must have been much excitement in the household as they prepared for this important Christmas visit and Anna’s forty sixth birthday on Christmas Day.
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MARY PHILP GRAVESTONE
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Anna had begun her career as a writer after touring parts of France with her first husband, the artist, Charles Alfred Stothard, and her first book, Letters written during a tour through Normandy, Britanny and other parts of France in 1818, was published in 1820.
In 1821 Charles died in a tragic accident at Bere Ferrers church, when he had fallen from a ladder while tracing a portrait from one of the stained glass windows. Anna married the vicar of Tavistock, the Reverend Edward Atkyns Bray in 1822, and her second book Memoirs of Charles Alfred Stothard was published in 1823.
Most of Anna’s literary work was completed while she lived in Tavistock. Her most enduring work, A Description of the part of Devonshire bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy was published in three volumes by John Murray in 1836. The idea for this work on the people, customs, and folklore of West Devon had emerged from discussions by letter with Robert Southey and it was published as a series of letters. These volumes can be found in the Tavistock Subscription Library. The book proved very popular and was republished in 1879 as a two volume edition.
In 1830, Anna became acquainted with a young woman called Mary Maria Colling, a member of the congregation at St Eustachius church, where her husband preached unfathomable sermons. Anna recorded in her Autobiography (published posthumously in 1884), that she had noticed Mary Colling at church; she was intelligent, of neat appearance and had written some poetry. Mary, then 25, was employed as a domestic servant in a house near the river not far from the vicarage, owned by the Hughes family.
Mary had been born in Tavistock on 20 August 1804 to Edmund and Anne Colling. Edmund was a farm labourer and the family were very poor, but Mary did attend the local dame school, where she was more interested in books than domestic crafts. Her maternal grandmother, Mary Philp, was later said to have been one of the greatest influences on Mary’s early life, although she had died when Mary was only four. Mary had been inspired to write a long poem about her, and when she was older she was able to fund a gravestone for her beloved grandmother. This headstone remains in the churchyard in front of St Eustachius Church in Tavistock, but does not mark the original grave.
Mary submitted some of her writing for Anna Bray to read and she was so impressed, that in 1831 she had a selection of Mary’s poetry Fables and other Pieces in Verse privately published. Robert Southey, who had been consulted about the merit of Mary's poetry, became a patron of the publication, and there were also other notable subscribers, such as William Wordsworth.
Mary Colling’s talent as a poet was considered quite curious and remarkable at the time as, for someone of her class, but also slightly inappropriate, because it might disturb the natural (class) order. Although Mary Colling and Anna Bray both had interests in writing it was mutually agreed that they occupied rather different places in life, as ordained by God.
During the Christmas week of 1836 it had snowed heavily and Anna was not able to take her guest Robert Southey around the local attractions of Tavistock and Dartmoor, mentioned in A Description of the part of Devonshire bordering on the Tamar and the Tavy. However, being the season of goodwill, Mary Colling the poet was invited to join the Brays and Southeys in the evenings for their readings and discussions. Southey, the ‘king of poets’ enjoyed Mary’s artless company and Devonshire accent during that Christmas week. He remarked that Mary – with her pretty appearance and intelligence – would have been a ‘sweet creature’, if only she had been brought up in a higher sphere in life.
Sadly, towards the end of her life Mary developed some extraordinary behaviours, which might have been due to alcoholism or an undiagnosed illness, possibly Tourette’s syndrome, and spent some time in an asylum before she died on 6 August 1853.
In 1873 (by which time she was living in London) Anna Bray, in editing her memoirs for publication, came across a letter she had written, forty years before to Robert Southey, describing Mary Colling in glowing terms as her ‘friend’. Anna with hindsight revised this letter before publication, deleting the inappropriate sentence referring to Mary as a friend. However, during that snowy Christmas week of 1836 the ‘natural’ class order was temporarily forgotten.