regency period letter writing.

[pitselly]

Oh, hey. I need to write something taking place in the early 1800s, during the Napoleonic wars. It will involve letter writing, in period-style.

Comments

[pentane]

That's pretty much how I remember it. If you had an Important Word, you would capitalize it so Everyone would know it was Important.

[pitselly]

Aha, thanks. I just recall somewhere that, in another book, a character refered to another's letter written 'hastily, with misplaced capitals', and am inclined to fret.

[pitselly]

I will definitely put that on my reading list; thank you.

[saozinha]

You can actually find letters written by Jane Austen to various people on the Pemberley.com site - http://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/brablets.html.

[pitselly]

Oh, definitely bookmarking that. Thank you.

[jayb111]

Spelling was still quite idiosyncratic.

As to abbreviations, letters were paid for by the recipient based on the number of sheets in the letter. So if the writer had a lot to say and was trying to squeeze it all into one sheet, she would abbreviate more, and perhaps even more as she got near the bottom of the page. And don't forget the habit of turning the page and writing across the first lines of writing.

As to specific abbreviations, it would depend on the age and personality of the writer and who he or she was writing to. Letters to sisters or close friends could be heavily abbreviated, business letters would not be. It's the difference between when you'd use txtspk and when you wouldn't.

Typically, words beginning with par, per or por were abbreviated - parish to pish or psh, parson to pson, portion to ption or even pn, if the context made it clear. County became cty. Queen Victoria habitually wrote pcess for princess. Rule of thumb, drop the middle syllable of a word, rather than the first or last.

[pitselly]

Idiosyncratic to person or period?

And I am one of those ultra-annoying people who never uses txtspeak even in actual txts; I have been known to include semi-colons in sms messages. But I will ask family about it, they are normal human beings, I'm told.

And that is an interesting rule of thumb, right there. Dully noted, and thank you for it.

[corvideye]

"Idiosyncratic to person or period?" Yes, both. It simply wasn't standardized, so people would write a word how they had seen it written or how it made sense to them, and they wouldn't necessarily spell it the same way twice (cf. Shakespeare's signatures). The way I tend to think of it is that in earlier times, the identity of a word was almost entirely its sound, not its spelling; the spelling was just a loose transcription. It's hard for us to wrap our brains around because we have people correcting our spelling from an early age, but think about the mistakes and misconceptions kids have about words... just as a small example, I used to think "scheme" (as I heard it spoken) was spelled "skeem", and that the word "scheme" which I saw in books was something else, pronounced "sheem

[nuranar]

Ditto on the spelling. The easy way to think of it is phonetic - spell it like it sounds. Not on all words, of course.

[notadate]

Well, letters were written for their recipients, not the world in general, so as long as the person who was on the other end of the letter knew what was being said, it didn't matter if some things were incomprehensible to everyone else. Abbreviations were often used for people's names, if it was obvious who was being spoken of. To take an example from Jane Austen, Elizabeth would probably write to Jane about 'Mr. D' or maybe even just 'D' instead of taking the time to write out 'Darcy'. But they abbreviated everything, not just names. The post was expensive and you paid more for sending more sheets, paper was expensive. Sometimes people would turn the paper sideways and write across what they had already written to save paper and postage, and abbreviations helped save space even more

[pitselly]

That is really helpful, thank you. I think I just need to stop thinking of hand-written letters as some huge deal like they are in this time period. Especially the bit about capitalization and content; thank you.

[justashow]

This is unhelpful, but there's a novel called Sorcery and Cecelia or the Enchanted Chocolate Pot which I read when I was younger and it made me want to do fanfiction in epistolary style.

And so far I've never come across another person who's read it. XD It is Very Good for a children's novel. And it's the only epistolary novel I haven't gotten incredibly bored with and given up half-way through. Or slogged through for the sake of Victorian Lit class. God, but Dracula was excruciating.

[auriaephiala]

There's lots of people who loved that book.

There's also two sequels: The Grand Tour, and The Mislaid Magician. And Patricia Wrede also wrote a related book called Mairelon the Magician.

[syntinen_laulu]

And I'm one of them. It's wonderfully funny.

[pitselly]

I WAS SO CONFUSED AS TO WHY THIS JOURNAL WAS REPLYING HERE I CAN'T EVEN.

But, yes. I will definitely put it on my reading list, as it is slowly dawning on me that books from/around/about/etc this period are not akin to a lobotomy preformed with a brick to read.