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 first part of the 19th century. In my thesis, I will explore if working-class females were in possession of a 'stitching literacy', i.e. the capacity to 'write' with needle and thread. To do this, I will perform linguistic analyses of the language used in pauper letters (written by women) from the LALP corpus and of the language used by Elizabeth Parker (a working-class girl having worked as a maid) on her stitched text sampler (ca. 1830), now in the V&A textile collection. A comparison of these linguistic elements will be included in my research.