Addison's Daughter
SIR,—Janus will find a chapter on Charlotte Addison in 'my book, Background for Queen Anne, published shortly before the war. She could write, for a number of her letters (written, it must be admitted, in a painfully laboured and copybook hand) are preserved in a collection of Addison family papers in the British Museum. She was left in the hands of four guardians,, as it was on their earnest but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to marry her off to a succession of eligible young men that my account of her was mainly based. So far as I could judge from the correspondence that passed between the guardians, she was emotionally unstable, and they were all agreed that the sooner they managed to find her a husband the better it would,be for all concerned. She was therefore no idiot ; but she seems to have been a rather silly young woman, who no doubt became progressively sillier in her extreme
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