Single Letter

MS Eng 1778 31

Letter from Elizabeth Carter to Mary Hamilton

Diplomatic Text


31



      16th. Febry. 1783

      My dear Miʃs Hamilton

      I have no manner of Objection
to your Note to Mrs B. only I
Cannot see why you should not
accept of her Invitation.[1]    Though
ʃhe has thought proper to act
in Such a manner with Regard
to me, as has put an End to our
Intercourse, I have never Endeavoured
to influence any one Person toagainst
her, but leave her to tell her own
Story, Except in Cases where I have been
Obliged to say so much as was neceʃsa-
ry to my own absolute Vindication. I
pity her for being afraid to meet me.
I am not afraid to meet her. I heartily
wish her happy, but she has fully proved


                             ▼

[I] cannot contribute towards it.[2]
      Yours most affectionately
                                                         EC.[3]

                                  To
                             Miʃs Hamilton[4]

[5]

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


Notes


 1. The invitation in question must be Beauvoir's note of 15 February 1783 (HAM/1/22/55), which Hamilton may well have shown to Carter together with a draft response rejecting it.
 2. The ‘I’ covered by pasting the sheet to the support can be read from the image of p.1 in Mirador by enhancing and flipping the image.
 3. The last lines of the letter, including salutation and signature, appear at the bottom of the page, written upside down relative to the image as displayed.
 4. Moved address here from middle of page.
 5. There are a number of remains of seals.

Normalised Text




     

      My dear Miss Hamilton

      I have no manner of Objection
to your Note to Mrs Beauvoir only I
Cannot see why you should not
accept of her Invitation.    Though
she has thought proper to act
in Such a manner with Regard
to me, as has put an End to our
Intercourse, I have never Endeavoured
to influence any one Person against
her, but leave her to tell her own
Story, Except in Cases where I have been
Obliged to say so much as was necessary
 to my own absolute Vindication. I
pity her for being afraid to meet me.
I am not afraid to meet her. I heartily
wish her happy, but she has fully proved


                             ▼

I cannot contribute towards it.
      Yours most affectionately
                                                         Elizabeth Carter

                                  To
                             Miss Hamilton

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



 1. The invitation in question must be Beauvoir's note of 15 February 1783 (HAM/1/22/55), which Hamilton may well have shown to Carter together with a draft response rejecting it.
 2. The ‘I’ covered by pasting the sheet to the support can be read from the image of p.1 in Mirador by enhancing and flipping the image.
 3. The last lines of the letter, including salutation and signature, appear at the bottom of the page, written upside down relative to the image as displayed.
 4. Moved address here from middle of page.
 5. There are a number of remains of seals.

Metadata

Library References

Repository: Houghton Library Repository, Harvard University

Archive: Elizabeth Carter and Hannah More letters to Mary Hamilton

Item title: Letter from Elizabeth Carter to Mary Hamilton

Shelfmark: MS Eng 1778 31

Correspondence Details

Sender: Elizabeth Carter

Place sent: London (certainty: medium)

Addressee: Mary Hamilton

Place received: London (certainty: medium)

Date sent: 16 February 1783

Letter Description

Summary: Letter from Elizabeth Carter to Mary Hamilton. The now-married Mary Beauvoir (née Sharpe) is, she writes, ‘afraid’ to meet Carter and ‘has put an End to [their] Intercourse’, but Carter cannot see why Hamilton should not accept Sharpe's invitation (see HAM/1/22/55).
    Original entry in Houghton Library catalogue: Carter, Elizabeth, 1717-1806. Autograph manuscript letter (signed) to Mary Hamilton, 1783 February 16.
   

Length: 1 sheet, 000 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 26 February 2026)

Cataloguer: Bonnie B. Salt, Archivist, Houghton Library

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

Revision date: 2 August 2026

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