Introduction: Commerce, Community and the Circulation of Benevolence

In September 1829, Thomas Binney, the minister of Newport on the Isle of Wight, wrote to Earl Spencer on behalf of Ann Gomersall (1750–1835). Binney had successfully solicited his aid in recommending Gomersall's case to the Literary Fund Committee twice before: due to Lord Spencer's ‘prompt and benevolent interest in her favor’, Binney acknowledges, Mrs Gomersall ‘has at both times received £10 from the Literary Fund’. Soliciting Spencer's aid yet again, Binney wrote: ‘It might be thought, indeed, that to have succeeded twice ought really, to content us – but alas! as life and poverty equally continue, the same necessity remains for something to be done – and I am sure I shall find the same, unchanged benevolence in your Lordship, and, I hope, the same beneficent disposition in the committee of the Institution to which I have referred’. Binney's plea was partially successful. The Committee voted to grant Gomersall £5, half the amount they had previously granted to her. Yet Gomersall's circumstances – evoked so poignantly in Binney's phrase that ‘life and poverty equally continue' – were dire. Aged seventy-nine in 1829, she was partially paralysed due to a stroke and was barely subsisting, aided by the grants from the Literary Fund.