Mary Hughes (1756-1824) was the youngest daughter of the Rev. Edward Hughes, Anglican Rector of Norbury, in Staffordshire. He died in 1758 but her mother (d. 1818) fervently instilled in her, despite their meager financial means, the virtues of the devotional life and a life of “rigid self-denial” (Aspland, “Memoir” 735). Later the family lived at Hanwood, near Shrewsbury, where Mary Hughes became known for her charitable giving, establishing a Sunday School with her sister (see her story, ”The Sunday Scholar”). Though they belonged to the Church of England, the Hughes family were influenced by another local clergyman, a Rev. Edward Harries, who had become a Unitarian. Though he remained in the Church and did not openly teach Unitarianism, he was eventually asked to give up his congregation at Hanwood (Aspland, “Memoir” 735-36). Mary Hughes was about 18 when her family became Unitarians (she was not living at home at that time). Initially, she was grieved at their actions, but soon became a believer in the “Divine Unity” herself, as Robert Aspland, Jr., terms it (736). Upon Harries’ death in 1812, Mary Hughes wrote a tract in his honor, shortly before she met her literary patron, the Unitarian minister and editor of the Monthly Repository, Robert Aspland, Sr.

Robert Aspland felt a need for the distribution of moral and religious tracts from a Unitarian perspective and in 1808 the Christian Tract Society [a Unitarian endeavor, not to be confused with the evangelical Religious Tract Society] was proposed in an issue of the Monthly Repository. Mary Hughes contributed money to the Society and composed the first tract, “William’s Return, or Good News for Cottagers”; the second tract was by Richard Wright and the third by Catherine Cappe. Mary Hughes’ niece, a Mrs. Price, also wrote some of the early tracts. Aspland’s son notes that “At the time when it was established, there were comparatively few publications for the poor that were not disfigured by a sectarian spirit, or by other objectionable qualities. This, happily, is no longer the case; yet it is to be hoped that the sterling excellences of the Christian Tracts and the increasing demand for such works, will ensure to the Society a succession of supporters as liberal and successful as were its founders” (“Memoir” 359). The original Committee of the Christian Tract Society included Aspland, William Frend (Mary Hays’s former beau and friend of George Dyer), and J. T. Rutt (Hays’s friend and distant relation by marriage). Hays, however, does not appear to have written any tracts for this Society.

Though he had known of her as a writer for some time and even corresponded with her, they did not officially met until the summer of 1813, when Aspland was on a preaching tour of various counties in the Midlands and the West of England (734). She wrote to him on 23 January 1812 about her life (she had only been introduced to Unitarian culture and the Monthly Repository in 1807), lamenting, with him,

the coldness and worldly-mindedness of many rational believers, a stronger proof of which could not be given than a diminution in the sale of the Repository. To view our Maker as he is, all goodness and benevolence, does not seem to excite a degree of love and gratitude sufficient to animate them to exertion; the base principle of fear appears to have a more powerful influence on the generality of people than the brightest and most glorious hopes and expectation. ‘This,’ Hannah More would triumphantly say, ‘clearly proves the deep corruption of our nature.’ But we shall not be forward to join her in throwing our crimes and follies on our first frail progenitor, or rather in believing that an infinitely just God formed a weak, fallible creature, and to punish his transgression caused all his successors of the human race to be born with hearts ‘desperately wicked’ and inclined to evil continually. You will guess that I have been reading ‘Practical Piety,’ a work which, though much that is good is taught in the course of it, as far as I have gone, leaves a gloomy, disagreeable impression upon my mind, unfavourable to a love of our Creator, or a cheerful performance of the duties he requires from us” (Aspland, “Memoirs” 737-38).