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This is not a love story: Mary Hamilton and George IV

This is not a love story: Mary Hamilton and George IV

Dr Sophie Coulombeau, Senior Lecturer, Department of English and Related Literature

Summary:
This case study describes how an innovative, open-access digital edition of the archive of Bluestocking writer Mary Hamilton (1756-1816) enabled new research and public engagement. A longform blog post analysing the correspondence between Hamilton and George IV received wide media attention and was a catalyst for a BBC Radio 3 documentary. These materials were embedded in open-access A-Level teaching resources and shaped a broad programme of engagement with public, educational, and media audiences.

Case Study:
As part of the AHRC-funded research project Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers (2019–2023), a new open-access digital edition of Mary Hamilton’s archive was created. This edition uniquely presents high-quality images, metadata, and edited transcripts in parallel, with large-scale tagging enabling digital analysis.

Fragment of a hand written letter
Letter from Mary Hamilton to Charlotte Margaret Gunning. 8 November 1779 / HAM/1/15/2/1 / John Rylands Library

In 2021, Dr Coulombeau authored a c.10,000-word blog post titled This Is Not a Love Story: Mary Hamilton and George IV, hosted on the project’s website. The post reinterpreted the correspondence between Hamilton and the teenage George IV, arguing that it should be understood as evidence of workplace sexual harassment rather than romantic infatuation. The blog post was intentionally published as open access, with hyperlinks allowing direct access to the letters under discussion.

The blog post went viral on social media and received coverage in The Times, Tatler, The Telegraph, and the Daily Mail. History Today commissioned a 10-page article based on the research. The blog post also led to a public talk for a Canadian public history charity, now available on YouTube.

In 2023, Dr Coulombeau was invited to write and present a BBC Radio 3 documentary on the same topic, in collaboration with contributors including Alesha de Freitas (Fawcett Society) and Polly Putnam (Historic Royal Palaces). Radio Times praised the programme, noting its powerful reframing of the historical relationship.

The blog post, History Today article, and radio documentary were embedded in open-access classroom resources for A-Level English, used by educators affiliated with Oxford and Harvard. The open nature of all outputs enabled deep engagement with journalists, educators, and cultural organisations. Open access was described as intrinsic to the project’s methodology and impact.

Portrait of Mary Hamilton
Mary Hamilton by Saunders, from a miniature in a ring given by her to Mr. John Dickenson after their engagement.

Frontispiece to Mary Hamilton, afterwards Mrs. John Dickenson, at Court and at Home, from Letters and Diaries 1756 to 1816, edited by her great-granddaughters Elizabeth and Florence Anson (John Murray, 1925).

Other contributors:

  • Full project team for Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers (see project site)

  • Student research assistants: Katie Crowther, Elinor Bailey, Caroline Anjali Ritchie (University of York)

Group of 7 researchers at John Rylands Library
The Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers team. L-R Cassandra Ulph, Hannah Barker, David Denison, Sophie Coulombeau, Tino Oudesluijs, Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, Christine Wallis.

Links:

Funding acknowledged:

  • AHRC Standard Research Grant

  • Three student internships through Placements

  • York Internal Research and Impact Priming Fund: 'MeToo In The Georgian Court'

Licensing Information

Except where otherwise noted copyright in this work belongs to the author(s), licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License