The texts here selected are intended to provide as much insight into the specific character of 19th-cenrury English, in its various text types, as possible. They were excerpted from millions of pages I have looked at; a first corpus of 660 representative texts had to be condensed to 98 specimens to be accommodated in a students’ handbook published at a reasonable price. (Plans to ‘publish’ the full text corpus by way of CD-Rom or on a Web-site had to be given up as too labour-intensive.)

I have grouped the texts in four sections allowing the greatest space to I and II, viz. documents dealing with 19th-century EngE in the widest sense – since this is the topic of my book. By contrast, the section on literature and literary criticism is comparatively short: most of the relevant texts are easily accessible and, for all the linguistic importance of literary forms, I did not want to write another book in which literature predominated. Topics dealing with 19th-century conditions are, I hope, adequately represented – there is a huge variety of text types and documents of particular historical and social relevance to choose from, and a selection is especially likely to be subjective in this field. However, various collections (e.g. those by Crowley 1991, Golby 1996, Joyce 1991) will be useful to complement my corpus, and many documents relating to the social history of the period have recently been reprinted, many in facsimile. These range from Charles Knight to Mrs Beeton, and from the Poor Man's Guardian to a few titles from contemporary linguistics.