Dr. Christine Wallis
"Franks and Friendship: Postal Fraud and Pragmatics in The Mary Hamilton Papers"
"Franks and Friendship: Postal Fraud and Pragmatics in The Mary Hamilton Papers"
In the eighteenth century, postage was usually paid for by a letter's recipient, and was comparatively expensive. After 1764, Members of Parliament could avail themselves of free postage by adding their signature to the address of a letter (a 'frank'). This privilege was intended only for MPs themselves, and not their families and friends - nevertheless, fraudulent use of franks was widespread. This talk examines evidence for this type of postal fraud in a corpus of eighteenth-century correspondence, The Mary Hamilton Papers. Sociolinguistic and pragmatic analysis shows, not only how Hamilton and her correspondents made full use of their social networks to get free postage, but also how 'frank talk' (discourse about obtaining and using franks) played an important role in identity work and promoting and maintaining friendships.
Dr Christine Wallis' research focuses on language variation and change in historical English, examining how ideas about language variation are reflected in the writing of individuals. She uses historical sociolinguistic and philological methods to analyse material texts, and explore how language learning was transmitted, and how wider notions of linguistic norms or language standards impact on individual writers’ training and output. Dr Wallis' research projects have involved the study of scribal behaviour in Old English manuscripts, multilingual medieval manuscripts for teaching Latin, and dialect and identity in eighteenth-century personal letters.