Letters carefully transliterated from the Mary Hamilton Papers in the John Rylands Library are freely available to any interested reader. The corpus currently stands at 161 letters dated 1764-1819 – over 70,000 words of text. The Image to Text project website displays each letter with mouse-over notes and clarifications alongside a high-quality image of the original letter, plus metadata. The site works best with Chrome or Firefox.

The content will be of interest to historians, students of Late Modern English letter-writing, and historical linguists.

For offline research, including corpus searches or systematic use of metadata, we are happy to supply a zip archive of fully compliant TEI/XML files plus a zip of plain text versions, a frequency list of word forms in the corpus and a table of word counts per letter. The corpus is for non-commercial use, is free, and is being added to each year. Please see the website for a short online registration form.

Contact David Denison and Nuria Yáñez-Bouza for further information.