Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) and his letters

Posted on March 8, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

Not exactly Late Modern English, but interesting all the same! I’m giving a talk on his language use in the Kettle’s Yard letter collection on 18 April 2024 in Leiden from 2 to 5 pm, as part of the LUCL Retired and Kicking Symposium. We’re planning to livestream the event, so if you wish to attend, send me an email! i.m.tieken@hum.leidenuniv.nl.

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About the Wills of Jane Austen and her immediate family

Posted on February 16, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

This Sunday, I will be giving a talk at the Leiden Mayflower Bookshop on Jane Austen’s Will and those of her mother and sister, both called Cassandra. The talk will be in Dutch, but I would be happy to present it in English as well, so let me know if you are interested!

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Cassandra’s last wishes

Posted on February 4, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

Cassandra Elizabeth, Jane Austen’s sister (1773–1845), not only left a Will but also a private document in the form of a letter to her brother Charles, in which she specified who were to inherit her most prized personal possessions. The contents of the letter are summarised in Deirdre Le Faye’s Chronology of Jane Austen and her Family 1600–2000 (2013), an amazing book because of its enormous scope and detailed descriptions of the documents relating to the Austen family. The book is a must for anyone doing research on Jane Austen and her close relatives.

I’m writing an article on Cassandra’s Will and several other wills, as a follow-up to the one I published in 2014 in English Studies on the Will of Jane Austen herself. Having submitted the article, I received suggestions for revision from two referees. All this would have been very helpful, were it not for the fact that the two most interesting articles mentioned were published in annual reports of the Jane Austen Society in the UK. These reports, however, are not generally available: my university libray doesn’t subscribe to it because you have to be a member of the society to be able to have asccess to them. The Jane Austen Society does give access to its annual reports online, but not beyond the year 2018, while the articles I needed were published in 2019 and 2022, respectively. So how could I follow up the referee’s suggestion to look at them? Fortunately, I remembered that a friend of mine had once mentioned that the best thing she’d ever done was to become a life member of the Society – and yes, she very willingly lent me the two reports I needed.

The two articles do indeed contain relevant material for my revised article, though I do think that they should have been more generally available to scholars working on the subject other than through the willingness of a friend I happen to have. I also think, having read both articles, that it wasn’t academically acceptable not to refer to my earlier publication on Jane Austen’s Will. It seems that we have to do here with two worlds that do not mix, which is not as it should be in academia.

Be all that as it may, I made a really interesting (personal as well as academic) discovery, in that the most recent article of the two, by John Avery Jones, Devoney Looser and Peter Sabor called “Cassandra Austen’s last years and wishes, with new documents and transcriptions”, contains some fascinating material: a digitised image of the second page of Cassandra’s letter to Charles mentioned above, her “Letter of Wishes”, as the authors call it. Not many letters by Cassandra have come down to us (Jones et al., p. 33), so this felt like a unique opportunity to look at her letter writing in an original document, just as I had done for my book on Jane Austen, called In Search of Jane Austen. The Language of the Letters (2014). So I immediately transcribed it, despite the fact that the authors had done so themselves as well.

My transcription follows below. It differs from the one by Jones et al. in a number of ways. For one thing, mine is an attempt at a diplomatic transcription, and thus reproduces the lines as found in the original document. This means that Cassandra’s practice to indent new paragraphs has been retained, which makes the text easier to read to begin with. But also her language, so that it shows her use of long <s>, as in the Caſsandra (twice) and the word croſs. The authors silently substituted short <s> for it without mentioning that this is what they did when reproducing the text.

Why would it have been important to reproduce Cassandra’s use of long <s>? Because it shows that this feature, which was abolished by the printers around the year 1800, continued to occur in private documents like letters (see Fens-de Zeeuw and Straaijer 2012). Cassandra appears to have kept the spelling patterns she had been acquired in her youth, just as Jane did. This tells us something about her linguistic personality, as in the case of my study of Jane’s letters. For Cassandra, we don’t have as many letters available for anlysis as in Jane’s case, so this tiny piece of evidenc is very valuable indeed.

Language is hardly ever focused on in studies of Jane Austen and her work, which is why I decided to write my book on the language of her letters in the first place. And Jones et al. do not refer to Cassandra’s language in the letter they reproduced either. Yet at least two things can be said here that are of interest. To begin with, Cassandra varied in her use of the preposition to in constructions requiring an indirect object after the verbs bequeath, give or leave. Those instances without to would seem archaic to us today, and it may be that her variable usage reflects a change in progress at the time that deserves further study.

The second point of interest is her use of the word Hoop-ring. Not knowing what a hoop-ring was, I turned to the OED, which defines it as “A ring consisting of a plain band; (also) a finger-ring encircled with stones in a cut-down setting”. The OED also provides quotations, though only three of them, with the first being dated 1545 and the last one a1817, surely a significant date in this context. All instances are spelled without a hyphen, in contrast to what we find in Cassandra’s letter. The last quotation is from Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. So with Cassandra’s usage of the word we have found a postdating for the OED by nearly thirty years! And perhaps the unhyphenated forms recorded by the OED represented the printers’ preference. Again, Cassandra’s usage cofirms the importance of studying private usage, which my be different from what we find in printed books.

So all in all, my plea here is for staying closer to an author’s original writing when reproducing their text (by for instance copying their indents and reproducing older spelling patterns but other features as well), even if their language use is not a main topic in the publication concerned. And secondly, what this brief piece shows is that even in a small text like part of a letter, it is worth looking at the author’s language in the context of the times in which it was produced. I at any rate feel that I’ve gained a tiny bit more insight into Cassandra’s personality.

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Jane Austen on the death of her sister Cassandra. Huh?

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Ingrid Tieken

Looking up Jane Austen in Amy Froide’s book Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (OUP, 2005), I encountered a somewhat bizarre reference. The author quotes from a letter by Jane Austen addressed to a niece. The niece was Fanny Knight, her brother Edward’s eldest daughter, and the quotation reads: “I have lost a treasure, such a sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed. She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, and it is as if I had lost a part of myself” (p. 56).

But it was Jane who died as the first of the two sisters, and it was Cassandra who lamented her death to their niece Fanny! Cassandra lived to be an old woman: she died only in 1845, at the age of 72. (The letter is dated 20 July 1817, and was written two days after Jane’s death.) Froide identifies Deirdre Le Faye’s edition of Jane Austen’s letters as the source, but claims that she took the quotation from Terry Castle’s article “Sister-Sister” published in the London Review of Books of 3 August 1995. So would it have been Castle who was wrong about which of the sisters died first?

No, as it happens: Castle writes about Cassandra sitting beside her dying sister’s bedside, and she even quotes the passage from Le Faye’s edition correctly (“I have lost a treasure, such a Sister, such a friend as never can have been surpassed, — She was the sun of my life, the gilder of every pleasure, the soother of every sorrow, I had not a thought concealed from her, & it is as if I had lost a part of myself”).

Froide’s book was recommended to me for an article I’m writing on Jane Austen’s Will. The book, however, focuses on urban unmarried women (which Jane Austen wasn’t) and on the period 1550-1750. Frankly therefore, I wonder why it was recommended in th first place. And if the author didn’t bother to check this unusual reference as well as misquoting her source, I think I’ll let it go.

(Furthermore, singlewoman is not an entry in the OED, so how common was the word after all?)

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Special issue on Third-Wave Historical Sociolinguistics

Posted on December 28, 2023 by Ingrid Tieken

If you’re looking for anything to read during the Christmas recess period, here is something you’ll find interesting: a special issue of the International Journal of English Studies (23/2) entirely devoted to studies within the fairly new and burgeoning field of Third-Wave Historical Sociolinguistics. Four articles, three of which focus on Late Modern English letters (Mary Hamilton, Irish emigrant letters and Derbyshire spelling features), preceded by an enlightening introduction by Tamara García-Vidal. And all available Open Access.

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On Intra-writer Variation

Posted on December 7, 2023 by Ingrid Tieken

Earlier this year, a book was published, edited by Markus Schiegg and Judith Huber, called Intra-Witer Variation in Historical Sociolinguistics (Lausanne etc.: Peter Lang, 2023). In includes a substantial number of papers on a variety of different languages and on different periods, and its introducation aims to contextualise the field into various approaches and linguistic research models that have been applied.

So far so good. But the editors also claim that the field is new and emerging, and that “observable variation within individual behaviour” has been “under-researched”. Nothing could be further from the truth, at least, not for the history of the English language. I may not have called my research that, but intra as well as inter-writer variation is the air I have been breathing, in as well as out, for more than forty years.

So for my own sanity and also by way as a kind of bibliographical supplement to the book – though much more could be added, such as the work of Frances Austin or that of Carol Percy and Joan Beal and many others – I will post a list of my own publications on the subject. And further publications by other scholars could easily be added here, so do drop a note or a comment if you wish to make any additions here.

My work on Intra-writer Variation since the mid 1980s (with names of individual authors highlighted; some more papers being in press or under review at the moment):

Monographs

(1987) The Auxiliary Do in Eighteenth-Century English: A Sociohistorical Ling. Approach. Dordrecht: Foris.

(1995) The Two Versions of Malory’s Morte Darthur. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer.

(2011) The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

(2014) In Search of Jane Austen: The Language of the Letters. New York: Oxford University Press.

Articles and chapters

(1985) “Do-support in the writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: A change in progress”. Folia Linguistica Historica 6. 127–151.

(1986)  “Negative do in eighteenth-century English”. Dutch Quarterly Review. 16. 296–312.

(1987) “Negative do in eighteenth-century English”. In: G.H.V. Bunt, E.S. Kooper, J.L. Mackenzie and D.R.M. Wilkinson (eds.), One Hundred Years of English Studies in Dutch Universities. Amsterdam: Rodopi. 157–171.

(1988) “Maatschappelijke aspiraties in het taalgebruik van Betsy en Richard Brinsley Sheridan”. In: Korrie Korevaart (ed.), Vrouwen in Taal en Literatuur. Amersfoort/Leuven: Acco. 39–47.

(1988) “Dr. Johnson and the Auxiliary Do”. Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature 33, 22–39. Also appeared in Folia linguistica historica 10.1–2: 145–162 (1989). 

(1990) “Betsy Sheridan: fettered by grammatical rules?”. Leuvense Bijdragen 79, 79–90.

(1991) “Samuel Richardson’s role as linguistic innovator: A sociolinguistic analysis”. In: Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and John Frankis (eds.), Language, Usage and Description. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 47–57.

(1994) “Standard and non-standard pronominal usage in English, with special reference to the eighteenth century”. In: Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a Standard Language 1600–1800. Berlijn/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 217–242.

(1994) “Eighteenth-century letters and journals as evidence: studying society through the individual”. In: Roger D. Sell and Peter Verdonk (eds.), Literature and the New Interdisciplinarity. Poetics, Linguistics, History. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 179–191.

(1994) “‘After a copye vnto me delyuerd’: Multiple negation in Malory’s Morte Darthur”. In: Francisco Fernández, Miguel Fuster and Juan José Calvo (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 1992. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 353–364.

(1996) “Social network theory and eighteenth-century English: The case of Boswell”. In: Britton, D. (ed.), English Historical Linguistics 1994. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Benjamins. 327-337.

(1998) “Standardisation of English spelling: the eighteenth-century printers’ contribution. In: Fisiak, J. & Krygier, M. (eds.), English Historical Linguistics 1996. Berlijn: Mouton de Gruyter. 457-470.

(1999) “Of formulas and friends: expressions of politeness in John Gay’s letters”. In: Tops, G.A.J., Devriendt, B., Geukens, S. (eds.), Thinking English Grammar. To Honour Xavier Dekeyser, Professor Emeritus (Orbis Supplementa). Leuven/Paris: Peeters. 99-112.

(2000) “Social network analysis and the history of English”. European Journal of English Studies, 4/3, 211-216. 

(2000) “Social network analysis and the language of Sarah Fielding”. European Journal of English Studies, 4/3, 291-301. 

(2000) “Sociohistorical linguistics and the observer’s paradox”. In Kastovsky, D. & Mettinger, A. (eds.) The History of English in a Historical Context. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 441-461.

(2000) “A little learning a dangerous thing? Learning and gender in Sarah Fielding’s letters to James Harris”. Language Sciences, 22, 339-358. 

(2002) “Robert Lowth and the Corpus of Early English Correspondence”. In Raumolin-Brunberg, H., Nevala, M., Nurmi, A., Rissanen, M. (eds.), Variation Past and Present. VARIENG Studies on English for Terttu Nevalainen. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. 161-172.

(2002) “Robert Lowth and the strong verb system”. Language Sciences 24. 459-469. 

(2005) “Of social networks and linguistic influence: The language of Robert Lowth and his correspondents”. In Conde-Silvestre, J.C. & Hernandez-Campoy, J.M. (eds.)., Sociolinguistics and the History of English: Perspectives and Problems. Special issiue of International Journal of English Studies 5:1, 135-157.

(2005) “Eighteenth-century English letters: In search of the vernacular”. Linguistica e Filologia 21. 113-146. 

(2006) “‘Disrespectful and too familiar’? Abbreviations as an index of politeness in 18th-century letters”. In Dalton-Puffer, C., Ritt, N., Schendl, H., Kastovsky, D. (eds.), Syntax, style and grammatical norms: English from 1500–2000. Frankfurt/Bern: Peter Lang. 229-247.

(2006) “James Merrick (1720-1769): Poet, scholar, linguist”. Historiographia Linguistica, 38 (1/2), 39-56. 

(2006) “Edward Pearson Esqr.: the language of an eighteenth-century secretary”. In: Dossena, M. & Fitzmaurice, S. (eds.) Business and Official Correspondence: Historical Investigations. Bern: Peter Lang. 129-151.

(2007) with Anita Auer. “Robert Lowth and the use of the inflectional subjunctive in eighteenth-century English. In: Smit, U., Dollinger, St., Hüttner, J., Lutzky, U., Kaltenböck, G (eds.), Tracing English through time: explorations in language variation. Vienna: Braumüller. 1-16.

(2008) “Letters as a source for reconstructing social networks: The case of Robert Lowth”. In: Dossena, M. & Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I.M. (eds.), Studies in Late Modern English Correspondence: Methodology and Data. Linguistic Insights 76. Bern: Peter Lang. 51-76.

(2010) “Eighteenth-century women and the norms of correctness”. In: Hickey, R. (ed.), Eighteenth-Century English: Ideology and Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 59-72.

(2010) “Communicative competence and the language of eighteenth-century letters”. In: Brownlees, Nicholas, Del Lungo, Gabriella, Denton, John (eds.), The Language of Public and Private Communication in a Historical Perspective. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 24-45.

(2012) “‘For alas! there was not affection between us’: Letters from Alexander and James Boswell to Abraham Gronovius”. In: Claudia Lange, Beatrix Weber and Göran Wolf (eds.), Communicative Spaces. Variation, Contact, and Change. Papers in Honour of Ursula Schaefer. Frankfurt am Main etc.: Peter Lang. 345-363.

(2012), English at the Onset of the Normative Tradition. In: Mugglestone L. (red.), The Oxford History of English [updated edition]. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 298-339.

(2013), Flat adverbs and Jane Austen’s letters. In: Wal Marijke J. van der & Rutten Gijsbert (red.), Touching the Past. Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of ego-documents 91-106.

(2014), “To my dearest sister Cassandra”: An analysis of Jane Austen’s Will”, English Studies 95(3): 322–341.

(2015), Jane Austen’s correspondence with James Stanier Clarke. In: Emig R. & Gohrisch J. (red.), Anglistentag 2014 Hannover, Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. 79-90.

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Frances Austin – a pioneer in historical sociolinguistics

Posted on October 30, 2023 by Ingrid Tieken

Last week, we received an uncharacteristically early Christmas card from Frances Austin. But the card was not to wish us a merry Christmas: it was accompanied by a note from her nephew to say that she had died on 30 September, the result of a fall from which she never recovered.

Frances was a pioneer in historical sociolinguistics. Based on a PhD thesis from the 1970s and supervised by Noel Osselton, she published an edition of the Clift family correspondence, a lower working-class family from Bodmin, Cornwall, followed by several articles on their language. Fantastic material for anyone interested in how men and women with barely any formal education wrote, and also demonstrating how one of them, William Clift, attained standard English language use through reading literature and other informal ways of educating himself. But she did not only analyse their language: she also studied their letter writing habits, discussing their use of epistolary formulas as well as the question whether they had had a letter-writing manual at their disposal. A comparable article is the one on Julia Miles, the poet William Barnes’s wife, on whom Frances’s husband Bernard Jones was a specialist. Indispensible publications for anyone study Late Modern English letter-writing practice.

She also contributed several entries to the ODNB, on William Clift’s son William Home Clift, but also on the 18th-century grammarians Daniel Fenning, James Greenwood and William Ward. And in addition she was for many years responsible for the interactive feature called Points of Modern English Syntax (later Usage), which she had taken over from Noel Osselton in the 1980s. The idea behind the feature was to ask readers of the journal English Studies to contribute their “thoughts” on debated and debatable language issues, and reading the different items, we find comments from people like John Honey as well as, of course, Noel Osselton. Her latest contribution dates from 2010 (ES 91/2, 170–179).

Frances died at the age of 88, and her ashes will be scattered at Stourhead, a lovely National Trust park in Wiltshire, close to where she lived and where her husband’s ashes lie scattered as well.

Her In Memoriam for English Studies is now available online.

Here is a list of most of her publications (and please let me know if anything is missing):

1973    Epistolary Conventions in the Clift Family Correspondence. English Studies 54. 9–22, 129–140. Reprinted in: Mats Rydén, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Merja Kytö (eds.) A Reader in Early Modern English (1998). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 319‒347.

1983    (ed.) The Letters of William Home Clift, 1803–1832. Sturminster Newton (Dorset): Meldon House.

1983    Robert Clift of Bodmin, Able Seaman, 1790–1799. Sturminster Newton (Dorset): Meldon House. (41 pp.)

1985    Relative which in late 18th century usage: The Clift family correspondence. In Roger Eaton, Olga Fischer, Willem Koopman and Frederike van der Leek (eds.), Papers from the 4th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 15–29.

1989    The Language of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Basingstoke/London: Macmillan.

1990    Text as social indicator: The letters of Julia Miles Barnes. In Jacek Fisiak. Historical Linguistics and Philology, Berlin/New York: De Gruyter Mouton. 29–43.

1990    ICEHL at Helsinki, 23–26 May 1990. The Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas Newsletter 14 (1990): 37–38.

1991    (ed.) The Clift Family Correspondence, Sheffield: CECTAL.

1991    The Channel in the Clift family correspondence. Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 292. 97–105.

1991    Points of Modern English Syntax 1968 – 1983. In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and John Frankis (eds.), Language. Usage and Description. Studies Presented to Noel Osselton on the Occasion of his Retirement. Amsterdan/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. 173–194.

1994    The effect of exposure to Standard English: The language of William Clift. In Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.), Towards a Standard English 1600–1800. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 285–313.

1996    Lindley Murray’s “Little Code of Elementary Instruction”. In Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Two Hundred Years of Lindley Murray. Münster: Nodus Publikationen. 45–61.

2000    Letter writing in a Cornish community in the 1790s. In David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds) (2000). Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam/Phila­delphia: John Benjamins. 43–61.

2004    “Heaving this Importunity: The Survival of Opening Formulas in Letters in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries”. Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics 4. http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/hsl_shl/heaving_­this­_im­­p­ortunity.htm.

2010    A Chertsey Childhood, 1935–1945: Reminiscences. Gillingham: Meldon House (80 pp.).

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Workshop on Late Modern English (polite) letter writing

Posted on April 12, 2023 by Ingrid Tieken

For those readers interested in LModE letter writing, sign up for this online masterclass: The (polite) letter writing in Late Modern Times. Registration is free!

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A virtual tour of Jane Austen’s letters

Posted on October 6, 2020 by Ingrid Tieken

In their autumn news letter, Jane Austen’s House Museum announced a virtual exhibition of Jane Austen’s letters. Great news for anyone not able to travel due to the worldwide COVID-19 restrictions.

If you visit their website, you’ll find a piece by Sophie Reynolds on one of Jane Austen’s rather more interesting correspondences, with James Stanier Clarke, the Prince Regent’s librarian. Theirs was a rather controversial relationship, and I’ve written about it in an article published in 2015:

Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2015), Jane Austen’s correspondence with James Stanier Clarke. In: Emig R., Gohrisch J. (red.) Anglistentag 2014 Hannover, Proceedings. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag. 79-90.

And if you wish to read more about the language of Jane Austen’s letters, read my book on the subject. It was published by Oxford University Press in 2014. After reading it, you’ll find that you’ve truly got to know her!

(Meanwhile, here is a blogpost about the book, and another one about the birthday letters which she wrote from the house where she lived in Chawton, and which now houses the museum.)

Cover for In Search of Jane Austen
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Het plakboek in het Jane Austen’s House Museum

Posted on August 9, 2019 by Ingrid Tieken

Dat plakboek wilde me maar niet loslaten, want we hebben het erover gehad dat een aantal brieven van Jane Austen werden verknipt en aan fans werden gegeven. Vaak alleen maar de handtekening. Ik heb zelf ooit zo’n stukje brief op de kop weten van de beroemde grammatica-schrijver, Robert Lowth, maar had liever gezien dat de hele brief bewaard was gebleven.

Maar in dit plakboek hebben we dus een stukje van de brief (wie zou de handtekening hebben gekregen?), onmiskenbaar het handschrift van Jane Austen. En ook de spelling, zoals ik die heb beschreven in mijn boek In Search of Jane Austen (OUP, 2014). Als je goed kijkt, zie je dat ze ook de lange <s> gebruikt, maar niet zo vaak als wat we op haar grafsteen aantreffen.

Blijkbaar is dit een recente vondst, want de Telegraph schrijft erover in februari dit jaar. Leuk, dit soort dingen, zo is onderzoek dus nooit klaar!

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