Background

[From the project website]

Historians of English lack good collections of informal material in electronically-readable form from the early part of the late Modern English period, apart from ARCHER (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers) and Denison's Corpus of late Modern English Prose, and especially material written by people locally based and unused to writing for publication, which can provide particularly telling evidence. The aim of this project, The English language of the north-west in the late Modern English period, is to help to fill that gap. The material is potentially of interest to linguists and social historians. We have called the present collection of letters A Corpus of late 18c Prose.

The project is directed by David Denison in collaboration with Linda van Bergen (from 1998) and Joana Soliva (formerly Proud) (from 1999). Dr van Bergen did the greater part of the work and contributed fully to the planning of the project. We are grateful to the John Rylands Research Institute for two bursaries which enabled Dr van Bergen and Dr Soliva to work part-time to select, transcribe and annotate letters, and to the staff of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester at Deansgate for their helpfulness throughout. The letters belong to the Leghs of Lyme collection.