Lamb’s essays and letters describe various instances in which sharing a book with someone results in feelings of embarrassment or exposure. He describes reading in the public setting of a reading room, the professional context of the period’s review culture, as well as the more intimate, semi-private, and domestic settings in which he reads alongside friends or his sister Mary. Where public and professional contexts promote an element of performance which helps to shield from exposure, Lamb suggests, it is those more intimate forms of shared reading which in fact prove far more personally revealing. As Lamb recounts these moments in a parodic, part-defensive and part-confessional manner, he reflects on what such social phenomena as embarrassment and blushing have to say about sharing more generally.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.

This chapter focuses on the role that allusion plays in establishing a shared language of intimacy. It describes how Wollstonecraft and Godwin, in their letters to one another, trade literary allusions as a way of flirting. That practice cast doubt on the transparency of speech, however, since the difficulty of openly expressing feeling, versus the relative ease of slipping into a literary cliché, led to the sense of distrust that also features throughout their letters. The tension between transparency and trust is further explored in the pair’s novels. Wollstonecraft’s The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria presents a heroine who falls in love with a man based on the books he reads, in a manner which suggests either quixotic delusion or a defiant trust in the imagination. Godwin’s novels depict scenes of shared reading which rethink his earlier philosophical discussions of personal affection versus independence, and openness versus secrecy or reserve.

Chapter 8: In constitutional terms the emperor operated under the law and Tiberius noted the importance of the law in imperial actions, though it came to be accepted that emperors were also free from the constraint of the laws. The emperor, receiving his power by statute, could himself make law or change administrative procedures, which he did by edict or letter or suggestion or speech in the senate or by instructions to governors. The emperor was deeply involved in the process of the law by holding judicial hearings, dealing with appeals from Roman citizens on a capital charge, and responding to individual petitions from all over the empire on a wide range of issues both personal and legal; it was part of the emperor’s role to be accessible.

Print creates frames and slots in which equivalences between genres, texts and languages become visible or imaginable. The iterative and segmented character of newspapers, in particular, lends itself to the perception of equivalences. In 1920s Lagos, the public culture of the literate elites was bilingual, and it was in the weekly bilingual newspapers that the interface between Yoruba and English was most consciously signalled and creatively explored. Contributors in both langauges deliberately enriched their texts by working across the linguistic interface — quoting, recycling, translating and answering back. The Yoruba-language writers were especially inventive. Taking as an example Yoruba obituaries and ‘In Memoriam’ pieces, this chapter shows how they fluidly combined elements of traditional orature, translations of sentimental Victorian verse, and local popular nicknames and anecdotes. In the formal print sphere this moment of creative intertwining has long passed, but today, comparable experiments can be seen in popular song genres

The need to share news and information and circulate ideas about politics, commerce, and other issues, together with an accompanying desire to control how others circulated them, led British officials, American colonists, Native Americans, and people of African descent to develop overlapping and competing pathways of communication. Through formal structures such as the imperial Post Office and military communications, and through informal networks of individual connections, they attempted not only to connect with others but also to shape and control narratives about the world around them, and in particular brewing controversies over continental diplomacy and imperial policies. Their communication took three forms: oral – the spoken word was available to all; written – mostly in the form of manuscript correspondence; and print – which encompassed official announcements, pamphlets, and periodicals such as newspapers. Communication proved vital to all the inhabitants of North America in the 1760s and 1770s.

This chapter focuses on both the publication and reception histories of the private writings of Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey, Vanessa Bell, and E. M. Forster, among others, and explores the appeal of such works for scholars and Bloomsbury enthusiasts. Scholars have regularly mined these private writings for biographical information and for insights into their authors’ creative processes, while readers also experience the vicarious sense of being inside Bloomsbury lives, loves, and homes. This chapter provides a decade-by-decade survey of Bloomsbury life writing, highlighting the major publications and situating them within the larger context of the revival of interest in the Bloomsbury group from the 1950s onward.

This chapter presents one of the most recent additions to the historical sociolinguistic toolkit, a community of practice (CoP). The discussion of definitions and delimitations of this concept places it in the ‘three waves’ of sociolinguistic research and builds comparisons and contrasts with two neighbouring frameworks: social networks and discourse communities. The focus moves on to the applications of CoPs in historical sociolinguistics. The dimensions of practice – joint enterprise (or domain), mutual engagement, and shared repertoire – are redefined for the purpose of historical sociolinguistics and illustrated with examples from studies which engage with the sociohistorical and cultural context of communication. We show how language change – or, indeed, resistance to change – may be observed through a CoP lens. Prolific contexts where the concept of a CoP has been fruitfully employed include letter writing, the production of manuscripts and early prints, professional discourse, trial proceedings, multilingual practices and online blogging.

The chapter is concerned with ego documents, that is sources like autobiographies, diaries and letters, as a data source for historians of the English language. First, the term ego documents is defined and its merits for historical sociolinguistic research are outlined. Thereafter, literacy and education opportunities, and the availability of and approaches to ego documents, are traced from the later Middle Ages to the Modern English period, followed by an illustration of language use across social layers, and a comparison to another contemporary text type. A particular focus is put on ego documents as a source of vernacular speech, for example as data for varieties of English for which there is no other contemporary documentation. The examples given illustrate the sometimes more speech-like and informal nature of ego documents and highlight the value of the text category for historical linguistics.

This tri-part chapter reports early and modern women’s roles in language contact, transmission and codification, acknowledging limitations of mediated and absent evidence. In contact, English has been both a colonising and colonised language. Women’s surviving Englishes index privilege or vulnerability, and contextualised social values: Standard English mediating ex-slave narratives symbolised tyranny and humanity simultaneously. In corpus studies, surviving correspondence and other genres hint at literate women’s roles in the transmission and development of English; records and roles are more elusive as status falls. Women’s linguistic innovations in changes ‘from below’ may reflect social subordination. Educated women increasingly lead changes ‘from above’, as education and standardisation spread. Women’s codifying texts initially overrepresented their roles as domestic educators, but their rhetorical responses to social inequities occasionally provoke statutory redefinitions of terms such as person and woman.

While the joint diaries are the primary source for Michael Field, had they never existed scholarship would still be better served by Bradley and Cooper’s letters than by most other women writers. This chapter explores the family letters as the only contemporary account of Bradley and Cooper’s relationship in the 1880s: Michael Field’s most successful decade. Reading these letters in the context of women’s production of intimacy through correspondence, the chapter considers the tensions in the Cooper household, and the ways in which Bradley and Cooper use their letters performatively to assert a claim for the primacy of their intimate partnership – and the writerly activities entwined in it – as a marriage, over Cooper’s responsibilities as a dutiful, unmarried daughter. This positions the letters as an early experiment with crafting identity as man and wife in practices that would evolve into more complex and audacious revisionings of self in Michael Field.

This chapter is dedicated to Bill Shankly’s sudden retirement, and the letters it inspired, as a window into a history of emotions among Liverpool supporters in the mid-1970s. These hitherto unseen letters, from the Shankly Family Archive, are written manifestations of the club’s increased ability to appeal across lines of class, gender, nationality, and race, particularly via its most beloved figure, the charismatic Scottish socialist, Shankly.

This chapter reposits the dominant narrative of the United States to shift away from a monolithic identification whereby American means English speaking and Christian, to one that embraces plurality and difference in its origins, and specifically includes the Sephardim as a group that was part of this foundational effort. The Sephardic Diaspora in New England was connected through trade to the early modern Atlantic world (1640–1830). Within the boundaries of the present-day United States, Charleston, South Carolina, New York, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island were key nodes in these commercial and slave networks. These merchants who fled from religious persecution in the Iberian Peninsula and sought religious freedoms in New England, also became slave traders who made huge profits on trafficking the freedom of others. Although often espousing endogamous ideals for unions, the lived reality of those members of the Sephardic Diaspora demonstrates how race became a contested site of identity for practitioners of the Jewish faith living in widely disparate places.

Explores how Ovid in the Tristia and Ex Ponto adopts imagery associated with the eschatological exile of the soul and instead applies it to his own fate at the shores of Tomis so as to give his geographical banishment cosmic significance. Ovid plays upon a longstanding association between philosophy and exile and the notion that the philosopher may be seen as a citizen of the world and so is effectively immune to banishment; Ovid instead views himself as superseding the philosophers and especially Socrates in the hardships he endures in Tomis. The dangers of misreading and the potential destructive dimensions of the text are discussed in relation to Ovid’s Ibis and Plato’s myth of Theuth from the Phaedrus. Connections are also traced with Plato’s Phaedo and the Epistles, as we turn our attention back to ideas of misreading and failures of communication that result from the dislocations of exile.

Chapter 5 reveals the numerous specific challenges experienced by emigrant soldiers and explores the coping mechanisms they employed. Compared to other soldiers, they experienced additional difficulties related to sending and receiving letters from abroad, in finding their preferred brands of foreign cigarettes and, for those without close family in Italy, in using their infrequent periods of leave. In addition to such practicalities, integration into the Italian Army was often challenging. A significant obstacle was their weak grasp of the Italian language and the fact that they were often treated as foreigners by others. There was no widespread recognition of the need to consider the emigrant soldiers as a distinct cohort within the Army and the men often felt forgotten and disregarded. Within a few months of Italy’s entry into the war, intense feelings of regret surfaced for most of the emigrants, even those who had previously been patriotic. While feelings of being Italian may have increased for many non-emigrant soldiers, the opposite was true of large numbers of those who had returned to Italy from abroad and many of them found their feelings of national belonging severely weakened as a result of their military service.

Shelley was a prolific and varied writer of correspondence throughout his short life. The work of collecting, editing, and annotating Shelley’s letters has been going on since the 1840s, but large portions of his early and Italian correspondence remain lost. The essay discusses this corpus and its critical history before examining three types of letters that Shelley was particularly adept at writing. Shelley’s adversarial letters to older men such as his father show his mastery of a radical bombast; correspondence with contemporaries such as Hogg and Hitchener shows him harnessing the form for the debate of ideas; and his long descriptive epistles about Italy, addressed to his friend Peacock, constitute some of the finest travel writing in English. T. S. Eliot was quite wrong to claim Shelley’s letters are ‘insufferably dull’: this essay begins to think about the elements of their content and style that reveal their literary achievement.

This chapter explores Hopkins and rhyme: both his views on the subject and his practice as a poet. It considers Hopkins as an artist caught between two conceptions of rhyme that stood in tension with one another. In the first view, rhyme is a metaphor for thinking about questions of cosmic design and coherence, and hence carries philosophical weight, and a religious and ethical charge. In the second, rhyme is aligned with pleasure and beauty, and needs to be disciplined and harnessed if it is not to be decadent or self-indulgent. The chapter considers Hopkins’s observations and pronouncements on the subject of rhyme in his letters and lectures and compares and contrasts them with the evidence of his poems, in which he often breaks his own rules. The chapter argues that Hopkins needed to be in more than one mind about rhyme in order to write the way he did.