Henry Crabb Robinson, 30 Russell Square, to Angela Georgina Burdett-Cootts, Torquay, Devon, 11 February 1859. 

Dear Miss B: Cootts:

       The very kind tone of your letter demands an early acknowledgement: And my poor niece will be flatterd by a generous offer of which there is not the least hope that she will be able to avail herself Her’s is a life of suffering, partly it must be owned a self-imposed torment, but in the main arising from the determination to discharge all her several duties most inflexibly. Even now this conduct has it’s reward; for without the consciousness of affording my poor brother some stray moments of comfort on his recognition of her, with his faint remains of memory, And of her being the sole consolation to her sister compared to her couch, she would find her monotonous life at Bury even more oppressive than it is: She seldom leaves the house And when she is freed to quit the town, she counts her absence by hours not days –

       As you have mentioned your intended stay in town for a few days I may flatter myself that you will announce your actual arrival, And allow me without delay to pay my respects to you –

       [f. 20v] Tho’ I have been lately somewhat indisposed yet it might be a much more serious indisposition that shall prevent my attending the ballot on Monday next to give W. Barnes my vote – And so serious an indisposition I am not now afraid of – Your reflexion is just on the death of my revered friend Mrs Wordsworth. She is the last of that generation of friends and associates –

       I presume that you read the account – That is, obituary article,– not of, but copied from the Daily News – It was, I have no doubt, but I only infer from the style, the production of Harriett Martineau – And such as no one who had any womanly delicacy about her, or any sense of the especial excellencies of those of whom she wrote could possibly have written – She exaggerates the infirmities of Miss Wordsworth – and (I believe unintentionally,[)] overstates the precautions when to exclude her from the gaze of strangers – The patience with which Mrs W: bore the loss of her revered husband was indeed exemplary, And I knew it to be the consequence of an intense piety during all the time that I saw her after his death, I never heard her whisper the faintest murmer of complaint She would have deemed it an arrangement of Gods providence.  The whole article contains not the slightest allusion to this feature in her [f. 21r] character – And when her grief at the loss of such a husband is adverted to, he is characterised only as her “old husband”! And his grief at the loss of Dora is insinuated to have been a selfish indulgence a sort of humour so that he compelled her to suffer for him and her too – To those three exquisite stanzas beginning

                         “She was a phantom of delight”

There should be a fourth recording blindness ---

       The weather here has been most ungenial and the Season has been very sickly, I trust that you have had the comforts of a Devon-clime

      In the hope of having soon the pleasure of a cordial cosy chat with you and Mrs Brown to whom you will present – or she would take without any presentation

                         My most respectful salutations

                                     &c &c &c

                                                H. C. Robinson

Miss Burdett Cootts

Postmark: London FE 11 59 

Text: Add. MS. 85291, ff. 20-21, British Library. Angelina Georgina Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts, was the daughter of Sir Francis Burdett (1770-1844), reformist MP, and Sophia Coutts, the daughter of Thomas Coutts, founder of the Bank of London. In 1837 she inherited his fortune of nearly £3m, making her one of the richest women in England. She became a prominent philanthropist as well as art collector. She lived at her family’s estate at Holly Lodge in Highgate and was a close friend to both Charles Dickens and the Duke of Wellington. She never married, living for 52 years with her devoted housemate, Mrs Hannah Brown, her former governess, spending part of each year at Brighton.  After Brown’s death in 1878, Burdett-Coutts surprisingly married William Lehrman Bartlett, an American 38 years her junior.