ABSTRACT
‘Thank my own dearest boys for me, for their nice letters,’ Charles Elliot wrote on 15 April 1843. And he continued, ‘I have been a disappointed and troubled man in life, but say to them dearest Emy that I should think myself repaid indeed if the hope of contributing to our happiness should keep them steadily good.’ Henry Taylor was later to put down an enigmatic marker that made us anxious to follow the fortunes of the Elliot family after that; Taylor wrote, that ‘…Charles Elliot’s capabilities of sadness had not been developed, as they were unhappily at a later period, by domestic afflictions…’ 1
