Single Letter

HAM/1/1/5/7

Letter from Charlotte, Princess Royal, to Mary Hamilton

Diplomatic Text


My Dear,est Madam,[1]

You do not Know how
much I love you; for
you are so Good-natured &
Good to me, that I cannot
help it.
      My Dearest Madam
           Your most affectionate

      Unknow Friend.
      January 30th 1778


Miʃs Hamilton

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


Notes


 1. Charlotte appears to have opened with ‘My dear,’, then gone back and expanded it to ‘My dear,est Madam,’. We have (charitably) treated the now mid-word comma as overwritten and thus deleted.

Normalised Text


My Dearest Madam,

You do not Know how
much I love you; for
you are so Good-natured &
Good to me, that I cannot
help it.
      My Dearest Madam
           Your most affectionate

      Unknown Friend.
      January 30th 1778


Miss Hamilton

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



 1. Charlotte appears to have opened with ‘My dear,’, then gone back and expanded it to ‘My dear,est Madam,’. We have (charitably) treated the now mid-word comma as overwritten and thus deleted.

Metadata

Library References

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

Archive: Mary Hamilton Papers

Item title: Letter from Charlotte, Princess Royal, to Mary Hamilton

Shelfmark: HAM/1/1/5/7

Correspondence Details

Sender: Charlotte Augusta Matilda, Princess Royal

Place sent: to be determined

Addressee: Mary Hamilton

Place received: to be determined

Date sent: 30 January 1778

Letter Description

Summary: Letter from Charlotte, Princess Royal, to Mary Hamilton. She writes that Hamilton does not know how much she loves her. Hamilton is 'so Good-natured & Good to me, that I cannot help it'.
   

Length: 1 sheet, 39 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: 21 July 2025

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