By Miranda, Mary Hamilton, Mrs Dickenson … Self-reference in Late Modern English private correspondence

Abstract

This paper is set in the late Georgian period, when letter writing became a widespread social practice and letter-writing manuals established norms of propriety and elegance of style for addressing persons of all ranks. More specifically, it turns its attention to author-oriented address with a focus on the use of personal names in self-reference expressions, as these address the recipient of the letter at the same time as they describe the status of the writer. The aim is to explore their role as a means of socially-governed linguistic practice and as an index of politeness on the positive-negative continuum, as proposed for Early Modern English correspondence. The study is based on a set of private letters written by Mary Hamilton (1776–1814), a well-connected figure in royal, aristocratic and literary circles. The analysis traces intra-speaker variation in the use of self-reference in the main text and in the signature, and explores sociolinguistic factors (gender) as well as notions traditionally connected with pragmatic language use (distance, relative power). The research presented here will thus contribute to the growing body of literature that considers ego-documents as representations of the self, of particular interest in the fields of historical sociolinguistics and historical sociopragmatics.