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 The Discourse of Desperation Late 18th and Early 19th
Century Letters by Paupers Prisoners and Rogues 1st Edition
Ivor Timmis

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This book discusses how the poor and desperate in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries mobilised their linguistic resources in pursuit of vi-
tal pragmatic goals, drawing on three corpora of letters written by the poor.
The main question addressed by the book is, ‘How were the poor, of-
ten armed only with low levels of education and literacy, able to meet the
challenge of writing letters vital to their interests, even to their survival?’
Timmis argues that the answer lies in the highly strategic approach adopted
by the writers, particularly evident in the way formulaic language is used
in the pauper and prisoner letters. Formulaic language supports the writers
in producing intelligible letters in what they consider an appropriate tone
but also allows them to exploit popular cultural motifs of the time. Data
is drawn from three sources: pauper letters by the poor applying for par-
ish relief, from around 1795 to 1834; prisoner letters by women awaiting
deportation to Australia for defrauding the Bank of England in the early
nineteenth century; and anonymous letters by the poor demanding money
with menaces. Comparison with the Mayhew Corpus of interviews with
the London poor in the 1850s reinforces the idea that part of the writers’
approach was to orient away from the vernacular towards a style they per-
ceived to be more elevated.
Showing how resourceful people can be in communicating their needs in
crises and in turn surfacing new insights into literacy and demotic language
awareness, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in corpus
linguistics and social history.

is Professor of English Language Teaching at Leeds Beckett

University, UK. He has a long-standing interest in corpus research, which
was the subject of his first book for Routledge, Corpus Linguistics for ELT
in 2015. More recently, he has become interested in aspects of historical lin-
guistics, an interest which culminated in Historical Perspectives on Spoken
Language Research for Routledge in 2017. This book arose from two his-
torical spoken corpora he developed himself: the Bolton/Worktown Corpus
of 1930s of informal spoken English and the Mayhew Corpus of 1850s
London vernacular. It was this line of research that led him to the letters
which are the focus of this book: letters by paupers, prisoners and rogues,
c.1760–1830.
Routledge Studies in Linguistics

24 Externalization
Phonological Interpretations of Syntactic Objects
Yoshihito Dobashi

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Studies-in-Linguistics/book-series/SE0719
Late 18th and Early 19th Century
Letters by Paupers, Prisoners, and
Rogues
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an
informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Ivor Timmis to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted
or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be
trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for
identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-0-367-00026-4 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-44492-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra
Taylor & Francis
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 List of Tables ix
Acknowledgements xi

1 Introduction 1

2 Methodology and Sources 6

3 The Poor Law: Origins, Attitudes and Effects 33

4 Education and the Eighteenth-Century Poor 51

5 Literacy in the Community 72

6 Formulaic sequences: A Dual Strategy for the

Uncoached Writer 95

7 Norms, Standards and Prestige 130

8 Discourse and Rhetoric 156

9 Conclusion 178

Index 187
Taylor & Francis
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2.1 Prisoners’ Requests to the Solicitors 14
6.1 Biblical allusions in the TLC 122
6.2 Literary references in the TLC 126
7.1 Use of relativisers in the MC (normalised per
100,000 words) 136
7.2 Semantic links with multiple negation 144
Taylor & Francis
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I would like to thank Jane Templeton for bringing an irreverent but con-
structive eye to the language chapters. Tony Fairman has been immensely
helpful – he generously offered to read the manuscript and I learned
much from his incisive comments, as I did from all our exchanges about
the pauper letters, particularly the way he cautioned me against sim-
plistic interpretations of their writing. As well as bringing a keen and
enthusiastic eye to the editing process, Harriet has, as ever, been a huge
support in so many ways.
Taylor & Francis
Taylor & Francis Group
http://taylorandfrancis.com
Rhetoric and oratory come in many different forms and from very
varied sources. To begin with a famous example, in 1954, the jour-
nalist Edward R. Morrow, commenting on Winston Churchill’s fa-
mous oratory at crisis points in the Second World War, remarked
that Churchill ‘mobilised the English language and sent it into bat-
tle’. While this comment refers to famous speeches by a household
name, it has a curious resonance, I argue, with the main theme of
this book: how the poor and desperate mobilised linguistic, rhetorical
and social resources to write letters to fight their own battles. In this
case, of course, we are not talking about the polished rhetoric of a
Harrow-educated statesman, nor about a national struggle for sur-
vival. We are, however, talking about the strategic deployment of lin-
guistic resources in letters written to achieve vitally important goals,
be this the relief of poverty, the commutation of a prison sentence or a
protest about the price of corn: in some cases, the issues were literally
a matter of life and death. The data on which this book is based comes
from three sets of letters which were largely written by the poor in the
period 1760–1834. We need to keep in mind that these letters were
written long before the advent of compulsory education in 1870, thus
presenting a huge challenge to their authors. It is not easy to find a
term to describe these writers. ‘Semi-literate’ is both too broad-brush
and potentially pejorative. ‘Unschooled’ is a term suggested by Fair-
man (2007), but, if taken literally, this term would not be accurate as
many of the writers did attend school, if only for a short period (see
Chapter 4). I have settled, then, on the term ‘uncoached’. This term
captures, I feel, the idea that, while these writers may have learned the
bare mechanics of writing at school, they are unlikely to have been
coached in the more advanced skill of composing texts appropriate for
a given genre.
2 Introduction

As Snell (2012: 3) has pointed out letters have much to offer different
disciplines:

The wider analysis of letters is important in literary studies, in re-

search on gender and writing, in pragmatics … in genre and text
studies, and historical linguists.

In our case, we will largely be concerned with pragmatics, social his-

tory and historical linguistics. The most important source of uncoached
writing for the purposes of this book is the pauper letters, written by
the extremely poor to parish officials to ask for parish relief. It is worth
noting here that, while ‘pauper’ carries at times a rather pejorative sense,
it also had a simple legal meaning of ‘someone claiming parish relief’.
It is in the latter sense that I use it. The legal and social background to
these letters is more fully discussed in Chapter 3. The second source is
prisoner letters, written by prisoners convicted of defrauding the Bank
of England, who were awaiting deportation to Australia for a period of
14 years. This source is more fully discussed in Chapter 2. The third
source is anonymous threatening letters, written (most often) by the
poor to local dignitaries such as large-scale landowners, factory owners
or wealthy farmers, typically demanding money, a reduction of prices in
staple commodities or the removal of factory machinery. This source is
more fully discussed in Chapter 2. These three sources, as Hitchcock,
King and Sharpe (1997) point out, are far from the only uncoached writ-
ings by the poor in this period. Among the other kinds of uncoached
writing they mention with potential to shed light on the lives of the poor
are bastardy and settlement examinations, court depositions, pauper in-
ventories and criminal autobiographies. What all such sources have in
common as historical evidence, Hitchcock, King and Sharpe (1997: 5)
argue, is that

… questions need to be asked about who was writing what, for and
to whom; about the precise strategic positions of the writer and the
receiver; and about the underlying beliefs both groups had concern-
ing their rights and obligations in the precise social location where
the document was created.

All these questions are relevant to this book, particularly the strategic
positions of the writer and the receiver, but the driving question is, ‘How
did the letters in these sources come to be written the way they were,
given the low level of education of the poor who wrote them during
this period?’. We need, then, to examine the linguistic skills they had
at their disposal for the task at hand and to consider how they may
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