Text: Bette Statsky Weidman, “Appendix I,” Charles Frederick Briggs, dissertation, 1968 (This material is protected by copyright)

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William Page painted a portrait of Charlotte Briggs ca. 1870, when she was in her early twenties. It is owned by Mrs. Lesslie Stockton Howell, a granddaughter of the painter, and has not been seen by the author. Charlotte, living the life her mother barely escaped, remained a spinster. She was thirty at the time of her father's death, ‘and loyally cared for her mother, suffering the hardship of reduced circumstances, until Deborah Briggs died, twenty-two years later, in 1899. Charlotte remained in the family home at 257 Steuben Street, Brooklyn, for another twenty-eight years, until her own death at the age of eighty.

Although she revered her father, she left no written account of his life or papers, claiming in response to an inquiry from Charles Eliot Norton, “I am afraid I should be too full of love and tenderness to be of any use to you.” She poignantly testified, not only to her loyalty to her father and her care of his papers, but to her own poverty, when she repeatedly requested Norton to return the letters from Lowell to Briggs that she had courteously loaned:

Edward Cary, who wrote a biography of George William Curtis, also borrowed letters from Charlotte. Evidently he and his publishers were aware of her hardship, for they enclosed payment when they returned the correspondence, in gratitude for her eager cooperation. There are no known descendants of the Briggs family.