Background

The University of Manchester Library’s Special Collections, mostly housed at The John Rylands Library on Deansgate, include remarkable archives and manuscript collections. Many have been photographed (digitised) and made available on the internet. This project aims in the first place to enhance the utility of certain English documents among the holdings.

The Mary Hamilton Papers consists of 2,474 pieces of correspondence, 16 diaries and 6 manuscript volumes. The catalogue describes the contents as follows:

• approximately 1,200 pages of autograph diary describing in detail Hamilton’s daily life, chiefly between her leaving court in November 1782 and marrying John Dickenson in June 1785
• a very large collection of letters and notes sent to Mary Hamilton by her relatives and friends, but also including letters addressed to her husband, together with occasional explanatory notes, drafts or copies of letters by Mary Hamilton, 1768–1815
• six manuscript volumes, largely commonplace books containing anthologies of verse and prose, copies of correspondence, and “Notes to the Portraits in Woburn Abbey by Horace Walpole”

Mary Hamilton (1756–1816), courtier and diarist, was the granddaughter of Lord Archibald Hamilton, the youngest son of the 3rd Duke of Hamilton and Lady Jane Hamilton, daughter of the Earl of Abercorn. She was also the niece of Sir William Hamilton, envoy at the Court of Naples. She was a friend of many of the prominent Bas Bleu (the Bluestocking circle) and literary figures such as Mary Delaney, Hannah More, Elizabeth Montagu and Frances Burney. She was also acquainted with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole and Samuel Johnson. In 1777 Mary Hamilton became a member of George III’s court, acting as sub-governess to the Princesses, a position she held until late 1782. She corresponded with court figures such as Queen Charlotte, the Princesses and the Royal Governess Lady Charlotte Finch. In 1785 she married John Dickenson, only son of John Dickenson of Birch Hall, near Manchester, and they had one child, Louisa Dickenson (later Anson).

Mary Hamilton’s voluminous correspondence and extensive, intimate diaries provide unparalleled insights into the day-to-day life of the royal household and of the artistic and social elites during a period of rapid change in the nation’s political, economic and cultural life.

NB. The background information about Mary Hamilton’s life and correspondence has been drawn from the ELGAR catalogue and the John Rylands Library website.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the students who have taken part in this project as part of the course unit LELA30171/2 Modern English Language, 1500–Present from the academic year 2013/2014 to 2017/18; to students in the ‘Undergraduate Scholars’ programme at Manchester (2019, 2020); to final-year dissertation students at Manchester (2011/2012) and at Vigo (2014/2015); and to MA students at Manchester (2015/2016 to 2017/18), Vigo (2015/2016, 2018/19) and Uppsala (2017–2019). See further details on our website.

The project was carried out in collaboration with The John Rylands Library, Special Collections, Manchester. We are grateful for their continued support and encouragement, notably John Hodgson, Joint Head of Special Collections, Carol Burrows, former Heritage Imaging Manager, and Fran Baker, former Archivist, Special Collections. We thank Fran for informative Library visits and for help at every stage. The ELGAR catalogue descriptions by Lisa Crawley have proved invaluable. Digital images are supplied by the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC).

Henri Kauhanen (postgraduate student, Manchester) provided crucial advice on coding. Sebastian Hoffmann kindly provided word counts and a frequency list for the 2013/14 files. The original XSLT script for online presentation was developed by George Bailey, now considerably modified by David Denison and Jim McGrath.

The cost of research assistance has been borne by the G.L. Brook bequest, the Department of Linguistics and English Language, and by The John Rylands Research Institute. The digitisation of the images has been carried out by the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collection Care (CHICC), and the catalogue compilation was funded by a generous contribution from the Wolfson Foundation as part of the National Cataloguing Grants Programme for Archives.