Single Letter

HAM/1/22/1

Note from Mary Sharpe (later Beauvoir) to Mary Hamilton

Diplomatic Text


      If you are disengaged next
Friday morning my dear Miʃs Hamilton
Mrs Carter & I intend ourselves the pleasure
of breakfasting with you.
      You will excuse the little ceremony
contained in this. My pen is generally
guided by the dictates of my real
sentiments, which much incline me
to subscribe my= self[1]
                             Yr Affect
                                       Humble Servant
                                         M. Sharpe.
3d. March 1779[2]

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


Notes


 1. A peculiarity of Sharpe's handwriting is that words like ‘myself, today, tomorrow, sennight’ and even ‘towards’ are generally written with a space between the two etymological parts. This is quite common elsewhere in The Mary Hamilton Papers as well, and we have chosen not to regularise such split items, which rarely cause the modern reader any difficulty. What Sharpe often does in addition, however, is to put a hyphenation character before the space, usually represented in this subseries by ‘=’, ‘:’ or ‘-’. Another idiosyncrasy is a leading stroke especially before <a> that looks superficially like a mid-word hyphen, e.g. dreary (HAM/1/22/25), valuable (HAM/1/22/34 p.2), material (HAM/1/22/36 p.2 col.1); these we have decided to ignore.
 2. The dateline appears to the left of the signature.

Normalised Text


      If you are disengaged next
Friday morning my dear Miss Hamilton
Mrs Carter & I intend ourselves the pleasure
of breakfasting with you.
      You will excuse the little ceremony
contained in this. My pen is generally
guided by the dictates of my real
sentiments, which much incline me
to subscribe my= self
                             Your Affectionate
                                       Humble Servant
                                         Mary Sharpe.
3d. March 1779

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



 1. A peculiarity of Sharpe's handwriting is that words like ‘myself, today, tomorrow, sennight’ and even ‘towards’ are generally written with a space between the two etymological parts. This is quite common elsewhere in The Mary Hamilton Papers as well, and we have chosen not to regularise such split items, which rarely cause the modern reader any difficulty. What Sharpe often does in addition, however, is to put a hyphenation character before the space, usually represented in this subseries by ‘=’, ‘:’ or ‘-’. Another idiosyncrasy is a leading stroke especially before <a> that looks superficially like a mid-word hyphen, e.g. dreary (HAM/1/22/25), valuable (HAM/1/22/34 p.2), material (HAM/1/22/36 p.2 col.1); these we have decided to ignore.
 2. The dateline appears to the left of the signature.

Metadata

Library References

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

Archive: Mary Hamilton Papers

Item title: Note from Mary Sharpe (later Beauvoir) to Mary Hamilton

Shelfmark: HAM/1/22/1

Correspondence Details

Sender: Mary Beauvoir (née Sharpe, later Douglas)

Place sent: to be determined

Addressee: Mary Hamilton

Place received: to be determined

Date sent: 3 March 1779

Letter Description

Summary: Note from Mary Sharpe to Mary Hamilton. Sharpe writes asking if it will be possible for her and Mrs Carter [Elizabeth Carter] to breakfast with Hamilton the following Friday.
   

Length: 1 sheet, 61 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: Pete Morris, Artificial Intelligence and Ideas Adoption (AIIA), The University of Manchester Library (Plain text transliteration submitted 8 May 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: 7 April 2026

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