Single Letter

HAM/1/1/5/1

Illustrated card and note from Charlotte, Princess Royal, to Mary Hamilton

Diplomatic Text


[1]
 ------------ [2]
All Hami

H[3]


      Princeʃs Royal presents Her compliments to Miʃs
Hamilton & begs to know why she w-o-uld not Kiʃs
Her last Night.
                             December, 20th. 1777.

(hover over blue text or annotations for clarification;
red text is normalised and/or unformatted in other panel)


Notes


 1. A drawing by the eleven-year-old princess covers almost the entire page.
 2. The first line at upper left is uninterpretable and consists most likely of pen trials rather than words.
 3. The second and third lines have been tentatively and charitably interpreted as if meaningful.

Normalised Text



 ------------ 
All Hami

H


      Princess Royal presents Her compliments to Miss
Hamilton & begs to know why she w-o-uld not Kiss
Her last Night.
                             December, 20th. 1777.

(consult diplomatic text or XML for annotations, deletions, clarifications, persons,
quotations, spellings, uncorrected forms, split words, abbreviations, formatting)



 1. A drawing by the eleven-year-old princess covers almost the entire page.
 2. The first line at upper left is uninterpretable and consists most likely of pen trials rather than words.
 3. The second and third lines have been tentatively and charitably interpreted as if meaningful.

Metadata

Library References

Repository: John Rylands Research Institute and Library, University of Manchester

Archive: Mary Hamilton Papers

Item title: Illustrated card and note from Charlotte, Princess Royal, to Mary Hamilton

Shelfmark: HAM/1/1/5/1

Correspondence Details

Sender: Charlotte Augusta Matilda, Princess Royal

Place sent: to be determined

Addressee: Mary Hamilton

Place received: to be determined

Date sent: 20 December 1777

Letter Description

Summary: An ink drawing presumably by the Princess Royal with a message on the back from the Princess presenting her compliments to Hamilton and 'begs to know why she would not kiss her last night'.
   

Length: 1 sheet, 26 words

Transliteration Information

Editorial declaration: First edited in the project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers' (Hannah Barker, Sophie Coulombeau, David Denison, Tino Oudesluijs, Cassandra Ulph, Christine Wallis & Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, 2019-2023).

All quotation marks are retained in the text and are represented by appropriate Unicode characters. Words split across two lines may have a hyphen on the first, the second or both fragments (reco-|ver, imperfect|-ly, satisfacti-|-on); or a double hyphen (pur=|port, dan|=ger, qua=|=litys); or none (respect|ing). Any point in abbreviations with superscripted letter(s) is placed last, regardless of relative left-right orientation in the original. Thus, Mrs. or Mrs may occur, but M.rs or Mr.s do not.

Acknowledgements: XML version first created without transcription as part of project 'Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers', funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council under grant AH/S007121/1. Transcription added after the funded period under the supervision of David Denison and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza.

Transliterator: Mercedes Bermúdez-Santiago, undergraduate student, University of Vigo (submitted 20 February 2025)

Cataloguer: Lisa Crawley, Archivist, The John Rylands Library

Cataloguer: John Hodgson, Head of Special Collections, John Rylands Research Institute and Library

Copyright: Transcriptions, notes and TEI/XML © the editors

Revision date: 8 August 2025

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