Variations from letter-writing manuals
Humble petitions signed by women in Late Modern
London
The present study analyses two sets of 25 petitions
each. They were signed by different women who possibly belonged to lower
social ranks, and they were addressed to the governors of the Foundling
Hospital and the Bank of England. These were most probably men who occupied
high positions in society. The study focuses on the comparison between the
information present in the manuals and the petitions selected for this
study. The petitioners had different needs and their circumstances also
varied. This is reflected in the results, which show differences, and also
similarities, between the two sets of petitions. Furthermore, most display
some features found in the manuals, but not all of them follow the rules or
recommendations faithfully. The writers, who cannot always be identified and
may not have been the same as the signees, seem to have been aware of the
existence of letter-writing manuals, but they may not have had first-hand
contact with them.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Letter-writing and petitions in eighteenth-century England
- 3.Letter-writing manuals in Late Modern England
- 3.1The instructions in these manuals
- 3.2Features of the petitions in the manuals
- 4.The present study
- 4.1The data
- 4.2The manuals
- 5.Method
- 6.Results
- 6.1Group 1: Petitions that include a superscription and/or an opening
formula
- 6.2Group 2: Petitions that do not include a superscription and/or an opening
formula
- 7.A comparison between Group 1 and Group 2
- 8.Conclusions
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
Sources
-
References
References
Sources
Anon
1721 The
Young Secretary’s
Guide. London: H. Tracey.
Anon
1756 The
Complete Letter-Writer or New and Polite English
Secretary. London: S. Crowder and H. Woodgate.
Anon
1765 The
Ladies Complete Letter-Writer, 2nd
ed. London:T. Lownds
Anon
1772 The
Complete Letter-Writer or Polite English
Secretary. London: S. Crowder.
Anon
1778 The
Complete
Letter-Writer. Edinburgh: W. Darling.
Anon
1797 The
Complete Art of Writing
Letters. London: T. Lowndes.
Brown, George
1790 The
English Letter-Writer or the Whole Art of General Correspondence […]
together with the Universal
Petitioner. London: A. Hogg.
Cooke, Thomas
1791 The
Universal Letter-Writer or New Art of Polite Correspondence […] to
which is added the Complete
Petitioner. London: W. Osborne, T. Griffin and J. M. Mozley.
Gent, G. F.
1721 The
Secretary’s Guide.London: T. Norris.
Hill, John
1719 The
Young Secretary’s
Guide. London: D. Rhodes.
Auer, Anita
2015 “
Stylistic
Variation.” In
Letter
Writing and Language Change, ed.
by
Anita Auer,
Daniel Schreier, and
Richard J. Watts, 133–155. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Auer, Anita, Daniel Schreier, and Richard J. Watts
(eds) 2015 Letter
Writing and Language
Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bannet, Eve T.
2005 Empire
of
Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bickham, George
1743 The
Universal
Penman. London: R. Sayer.
Brant, Clare
2006 Eighteenth
Century Letters and British
Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Coar, Thomas
1796 A
Grammar of the English
Tongue. London: James Phillips.
Crystal, David
2018 The
Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English
Language, 3rd
ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dossena, Marina, and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
(eds) 2008 Studies
in Late Modern English
Correspondence. Bern: Peter Lang.
Dossena, Marina, and Gabriella del Lungo Camiciotti
Evans, Tanya
2005 ‘Unfortunate
Objects’: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century
London. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fairman, Tony. David Barton, and Nigel Hall
Fens-de Zeeuw, Lyda
2008 “
The
Letter-writing Manuals in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries:
From Polite to
Practical.” In
Studies
in Late Modern English Correspondence: Methodology and
Data, ed, by
Marina Dossenam and
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, 163–192. Bern: Peter Lang.
Green, Lawrence D.
2007 “
Dictamen
in England,
1500–1700.” In
Letter
Writing Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the
Present, ed. by
Carol Poster, and
Linda C. Mitchell, 102–126. Columbia:University of South Carolina Press.
Greenwood, James
1737 The
Royal English
Grammar. London: J. Nourse.
Johnson, Samuel
1755 A
Dictionary of the English
Language. London: W. Strahan.
King, Steven
2007 “
Pauper
Letters as a Source.”
Family and
Community
History 10 (2): 167–70.
Laitinen, Mikko
2015 “
Early
Nineteenth-century Pauper
Letters.” In
Letter
Writing and Language Change, ed.
by
Anita Auer,
Daniel Schreier, and
Richard J. Watts, 185–201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levene, Alysa, Steven King, Alannah Tomkins, Peter King, Thomas Nutt, Deborah A. Symonds, and Lisa Zunshine
(eds) 2006 Narratives
of the Poor in Eighteenth Century Britain. Vol. 1: Voices of the Poor:
Poor Law Depositions and
Letters. London: Taylor & Francis.
McClure, Ruth K.
1981 Coram’s
Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth
Century. Yale: Yale University Press.
Meldrum, Tim
1997 “
London
Domestic Servants from Depositional Evidence, 1660 1750:
Servant-employer Sexuality in the Patriarchal
Household.” In
Chronicling
Poverty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor,
1640–1840, ed. by
Tim Hitchcock,
Pamela Sharpe, and
Peter King, 47–69. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Meldrum, Tim
2000 Domestic
Service and Gender 1660–1750: Life and Work in the London
Household. Harlow: Pearson Education.
Mitchell, Linda C.
2007 “
Letter-writing
Instruction Manuals in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
England.” In
Letter-Writing
Manuals and Instruction from Antiquity to the
Present, ed. by
Carol Poster, and
Linda C. Mitchell, 178–199. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press.
Nevalainen, Terttu
2007 “
Introduction.” In
Letter-Writing, ed.
by
Terttu Nevalainen, and
Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen, 1–11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nevalainen, Terttu, and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen
Nixon, Cheryl, and Louise Penner
2009 “
Materials
of the ‘Everyday’ Woman Writer: Letter-writing in Eighteenth-century
England and
America.” In
Women
and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material
Strategies, ed. by
Beth Tobin, and
Maureen Goggin, 157–187. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Palk, Deidre
2007 Prisoners’
Letters to the Bank of England,
1781–1827, Vol.
42. London: London Record Society.
Pugh, Gillian
2007 London’s
Forgotten Children. Thomas Coram and the Foundling
Hospital. London: Tempus.
Sokoll, Thomas
(ed) 2001 Essex
Pauper Letters, 1731–1837.
Records of Social
and Economic History, New Series
30. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sokoll, Thomas
2006 “
Writing
for Relief: Rhetoric in English Pauper Letters,
1800–1834.” In
Being
Poor in Modern Europe: Historical Perspectives
1800–1940, ed. by
Andreas Gestrich,
Steven King, and
Raphael Lutz, 91–111.Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steinbach, Susie
2004 Women
in England 1760–1914. A Social
History. London: Phoenix.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid
2011 The
Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of
Prescriptivism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid
2014 In
Search of Jane Austen. The Language of the
Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Timmis, Ivor
2018 “
The
Pragmatics in the Essex Pauper Letters,
1731–1837.”
Corpus
Pragmatics 2: 243–263.
Tomkins, Alannah
2011 “
‘I
mak Bould to Wrigt’1: First-Person Narratives in the History of
Poverty in England, c.
1750–1900.”
History
Compass 9 (5): 365–373.
Waddle, Brodie
2016 Was
Early Modern England a Petitioning
Society? Retrieved
from
[URL] (accessed 27th April
2019).
Whyman, Susan E.
2009 The
Pen and the
People. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Woolley, Hannah
1673 The
Gentlewoman’s Companion or a Guide to the Female
Sex. London: A. Maxwell.
Woodfine, Philip
2006 “
Debtors,
Prisons and
Petitions.”
Eighteenth-Century
Life 30 (2): 1–31.
Zaret, David
1996 “
Petitions
and the Invention of Public Opinion in the English
Revolution.”
American Journal of
Sociology 101 (6): 1497–1555.
Zaret, David
2000 Origins
of Democratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in
Early-Modern England. Vol.
5. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Cited by
Cited by 1 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 23 april 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.