Diplomatic Text
Stanhope Street
Sunday. 13th Feby
1780
My dear Miʃs Hamilton
Will you come here this next Thursday afternoon.
It will not be one of our delightfull snugs[1]
but our dr Mrs Carter is to be of the party.
I expect Lady Dartrey, & Mrs Chapone, &
Mr Burrows, &c; I hope you will come if you
can. Accept the flowers as a sovenir d'amitié
rather than as worthy the honour of ornamenting
yr person. Adieu Yrs Affectly
M Sharpe.
Miʃs Hamilton[2]
red text is normalised and/or unformatted in other panel)
Notes
1. This use of snug is not recorded as a noun by OED, though it is evidently related to the adjectival sense ‘[m]arked or characterized by ease or comfort; comfortable, cosy’, recorded in phrases like ‘snug private Party’ (1766), ‘a very snug little party’ (1781) (OED s.v. snug, adj1 and adv, 5.a.(a). Accessed 30-05-2025).
2. The direction is written diagonally.
Normalised Text
Stanhope Street
Sunday.
My dear Miss Hamilton
Will you come here next Thursday afternoon.
It will not be one of our delightful snugs
but our dear Mrs Carter is to be of the party.
I expect Lady Dartrey, & Mrs Chapone, &
Mr Burrows, &c; I hope you will come if you
can. Accept the flowers as a sovenir d'amitié
rather than as worthy the honour of ornamenting
your person. Adieu Yours Affectionately
Mary Sharpe.
Miss Hamilton
quotations, spellings, uncorrected forms, split words, abbreviations, formatting)
Notes
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/1/22/18
Correspondence Details
Sender: Mary Beauvoir (née Sharpe, later Douglas)
Place sent: London
Addressee: Mary Hamilton
Place received: to be determined
Date sent: 13 February 1780
Letter Description
Summary: Note from Mary Sharpe to Mary Hamilton. Sharpe invites Hamilton for a visit. Included amongst the party will be Mrs Carter, Mrs Chapone and Lady Dartrey.
Dated at Stanhope Street, [London].
Length: 1 sheet, 77 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 22 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
