The present book has been in the making for a long time. Ever since I completed my handbook on Early Modern English (1978, English version 1991) I intended to supplement it with a survey of a more modem period, a project outlined in Görlach (1995b), the summary of which forms the basis of my introduction to this book. While collecting material (and being side-tracked by other projects) the study of the neglected English of the 19th century saw a new wave of interest: the books by Mugglestone (1995) and Bailey (1996) and the publication of Romaine (1998) have changed the scholarly landscape of the period. I hope that my manual will neatly complement the other books; in particular, it might well serve as a handy companion volume to the much more comprehensive (and expensive) volume edited by Romaine.

The methods used in the present volume to describe 19th-century English and the didactic considerations employed owe a great deal to the two books which I published in German in the 1970s; both are now available in English (Görlach 1991, 1997) and can be used to supplement this study. I have not consistently indicated where I have taken over arguments or other material from the two earlier books. One of the most successful features of the two is here repeated – the use of a great number of contemporary texts from various genres to illustrate the linguistic realities of 19th-century England as far as this is possible from printed (rarely written) sources. However, it has not proved possible to correlate the introduction and the textual specimens very closely as I tried to do in my book on EModE.