The English language of the north-west in the late Modern English period:

A Corpus of late 18c Prose

About 300,000 words of local English letters on practical subjects, dated 1761-89

Background	Content of corpus and sample
File format	Copyright and access

Background of the project

Historians of English lack good collections of informal material in electronically-readable form from the early part of the late Modern English period, apart from A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers and Denison’s Corpus of late Modern English Prose, and especially material written by people locally based and unused to writing for publication, which can provide particularly telling evidence. The aim of this project, The English language of the north-west in the late Modern English period, is to help to fill that gap. The material is potentially of interest to linguists and social historians. We have called the present collection of letters A Corpus of late 18c Prose

The project is directed by David Denison in collaboration with Linda van Bergen (from 1998) and Joana Soliva (formerly Proud) (from 1999). Dr van Bergen did the greater part of the work and contributed fully to the planning of the project. We are grateful to the John Rylands Research Institute for two bursaries which enabled Dr van Bergen and Dr Soliva to work part-time to select, transcribe and annotate letters, and to the staff of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester at Deansgate for their helpfulness throughout. The letters belong to the Leghs of Lyme collection.

Content of corpus, and short sample

The transcribed letters were all written to Richard Orford, a steward of Peter Legh the Younger at Lyme Hall in Cheshire. The summary below is adapted from a report submitted to the ICAME Journal in 2000:

The date range is 1761-90. About 300,000 words have been transcribed and ... corrected. The coding system is based on that used in the original Helsinki Corpus. In selecting letters we have erred on the side of inclusiveness. This means, however, that the material is not uniform, nor is it balanced in its coverage, whether by kind of writer or by topic. For example, there is a good deal of plain ‘business English’ of the late eighteenth century; there are some letters which represent more dialectally marked and uneducated writers; there are some from writers higher up the social scale. Nevertheless there is a lot of good linguistic (and socio-historical) material from local and relatively unselfconscious writers. Here, for instance, is part of a letter from James Grimshaw to Orford, written in 1779 (line-breaks omitted here):

There has not been such Mobing this ~~maney~~ many years as at this time there is ab a Mob at this present time that is puling down all the Carding and Spining Machines that go by water, three is {*} allready pul'^d Down

Or in 1790:

I have sent about M^rs.. Hancocks Boxes and there is no boxes come for her. — Molley sends 12 bottles of Vinegar. — We have this Day had the vilantest storm of rain and hale I ever seed; attended with Lightening and Thunder the Lightning killed us two Cows Just by the corner of the Garden; which I leave to you to aquant M^r. Legh of. —

For a slightly longer sample taken from the actual HTML files, click here.

File format

The corpus is currently in two forms: plain text with COCOA-style annotations, like the Helsinki Corpus (one file, 1.6 Mb), and HTML (three linked files, 804-909 Kb, plus a coding description, 6 Kb). The files are extended (8-bit) Ascii (ANSI/Windows default coding), and the text is coded as far as possible according to the conventions used in the Helsinki Corpus, that is, with COCOA-style brackets giving information on writer, date, page breaks, etc, enclosed within carets. If any scholar would like to request a different coding, such as SGML, or indeed to produce one themself, please get in touch with David Denison at d.denison@man.ac.uk. We have had an offer to convert the text to TEI (Text Encoding Initiative-conformant) XML; if this happens, I will let current users know.

Copyright and access

The Corpus of late 18c Prose is available without fee for educational and research purposes, but it is not in the public domain. Copyright to the text is retained by the John Rylands University Library of Manchester; copyright to the annotated files is retained by David Denison and Linda van Bergen (© 2002).

The texts are available only to users who agree formally to the conditions of use by filling out the access request form and returning it via e-mail to David Denison (d.denison@man.ac.uk). Instructions will then be provided for downloading by ftp. Click here for the access request form.

If you have further queries about the corpus, please ask me by e-mail at d.denison@man.ac.uk.

This page last updated 29 April 2003.

longer sample of Orford text