[The richest woman in Victorian England: Angela Burdett-Coutts, philanthropist.] Autograph Letter Signed to Mrs [Charlotte] Cowan, wife of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, declining an invitation connected with ‘The Blind System’.

See her entry in the Oxford DNB. 3pp, 12mo. Bifolium. In good condition, lightly aged. Folded twice for postage. Addressed to ‘My dear Mrs Cowan’ and signed ‘Burdett Coutts -’. Thirty lines of text. The ‘blind system’ appears to have been a form of education for the blind, possibly involving a precursor of braille. (An advertisement by ‘A Lady, who has the care of a Blind Child’ in the Medical Times, 25 March 1876, offers ‘First-class education given under the blind system.’). Lady Burdett-Coutts’s handwriting is quirky, and the reading is not entirely clear: ‘Although we had heard The Blind System in London we should have been very glad to have had the pleasure of coming to You and the Lord Provost when you so kindly bring the system into notice in Edinburgh but we have made it a rule not to go out of an Evening and we have declined so many Invitations we scarcely like to make Yours, though so exceptional an exception in fact we are both of us afraid for the only time I did go out to the Public [?] I caught cold - With Mrs [Burn’s?] kind rememberances & regards with mine / I am / Yours Sincerely / Burdett Coutts -’.