Late Modern English language use across gender and class: a historical sociolinguistic investigation

My doctoral project focuses on the forms and developments of literacy among working-class girls and women during the Late Modern English period (18th and 19th centuries). In my thesis, I will explore if working-class females acquired a kind of 'needle literacy', i.e. the capacity to 'write' with needle and thread, instead of writing with pen and ink. To do this, I will perform linguistic analyses of the language used in pauper letters (mainly written by women) from the LALP corpus and of the language used by Elizabeth Parker (a working-class girl who worked as a domestic servant) on her stitched text/ile (ca. 1830), now in the V&A textile collection, as well as textile samplers worked by (presumably) lower-rank girls. Both a quantitative and a qualitative analysis will be presented.