Mrs. A. Smyth

Mrs. A. Smyth was a correspondent of Hays who lives for a time at the Pennington’s in Dowry Square. She was from Lismore, Ireland, and was the niece of the famed Irish politician, Henry Grattan (see Biographical Index). As her letter to Hays on 13  May 1819 makes clear, she was a widow. Previous to the Penningtons in Dowry Square, Smyth also lived at various times in Bath, for most likely she is the Mrs. Smyth (she may have been a widow by that date, but not  clear) of the Green Park Buildings who subscribed to Samuel Lowell’s Sermons on Evangelical and Practical Subjects (Bristol: Biggs & Cottle, 1801), along with three generations of Dunkins – John Dunkin, Sr. and Jr. and John Hays Dunkin, Hays’s niece who lived at Beeleigh, Essex, where she and her sister often visited – and Henry Francis of the Paragon, most likely the father of the Henry Francis who will marry John Dunkin, Jr.’s daughter in 1803. They were joined by Nathaniel Palmer (he also married a daughter of John Dunkin), Thomas Hills of Gainsford Street (Mary Hays’s other brother-in-law), and Nathaniel Wedd, a member of the Wedd, a member of the Wedd family that will join with the Dunkin and Hays families through the marriages of Peter and George Wedd to two more daughters of John Dunkin, Jr. It appears, however, that Hays did not know Mrs. Smyth at that time but met her upon her arrival at Bristol.