Category Archives: Uncategorized

A highly interesting novel to read is ‘Possession’. It typically fits into this blog for it is about a correspondence between two writers in the 19th century. Moreover, the main characters researching the works of these writers are two academics. This … Continue reading →

Having learned that in the 18th and 19th century, people of high status liked to have themselves depicted writing a letter, I started wondering to what extent letter-writing was a central theme in the arts. In Dutch Genre Paintings in … Continue reading →

What do Late Modern English grammars, cookbooks and letter-writing manuals have in common? They all show a remarkable increase in popularity during the 2nd half of the 18th century. I’ve described this for grammar books in Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2008), … Continue reading →

Reading the post on Julia Maitland’s letters, one of our readers, Tony Fairman, was struck by the reference to “Dr Bell his sytem”. He kindly sent us his notes on Dr Bell, for others to read. The notes relate to the work … Continue reading →

For his MA thesis in Linguistics at the University of Leiden, Marijn Verschuure analysed two corpora of letters written in English by Dutch people. The first corpus consisted of 83 short commercial letters that were presumably written by the directors … Continue reading →

Last night I came across a nice example of text crossing on someone’s blog. I haven’t seen one like this before, and it appealed to me immediately. I think it’s fascinating to see how letters could be written, in a certain pattern. … Continue reading →

Julia Maitland’s letters, reported one earlier in this blog, are part of a larger tradition of women publishing their correspondence from the time they spent in India. We have two more such editions at home: Emily Eden, Up the Country: … Continue reading →

Looking for studies on the language of the Browning letters I was reminded of James Pennebaker’s discussion of pronouns in the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning. See his intreaguing and very readable (though non-linguistic) book called  The … Continue reading →

One of the best introductions to 18th-century letter writing is that by Frank Baker in Vol. 1 of the edition of John Wesley’s letters. Wesley was a Methodist minister who lived from 1703–1791, and he was a voluminous letter writer. There is … Continue reading →