Towards a corpus of nineteenth-century Scottish correspondence

Abstract

This paper presents an overview of the methodological issues relating to the compilation of a corpus of nineteenth-century correspondence (19CSC); these issues will be discussed in the light of some preliminary findings; finally, an outline of the next stages of corpus compilation will be presented. The corpus itself is intended to supplement similar corpora already available or the compilation of which in progress. Concerning the social extraction of writers, the quantity of material available for gentry and the upper-middle classes so far seems to outweigh greatly the quantity of material available from lower orders of society. However, several interesting letters written by emigrants or other partially-schooled encoders have already been included, as these may have undoubted dialectological value. Previously edited letters by literary figures have been deliberately excluded. On the other hand, a fairly consistent sample of business letters have been included, on account of the light they may shed on the development of business correspondence as a genre.

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