The Discourse of Desperation: Late 18th and Early 19th Century Letters by Paupers, Prisoners, and Rogues

This book discusses how the poor and desperate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries mobilised their linguistic resources in pursuit of vital pragmatic goals, drawing on three corpora of letters written by the poor.

The main question addressed by the book is, ‘How were the poor, often armed only with low levels of education and literacy, able to meet the challenge of writing letters vital to their interests, even to their survival?’ Timmis argues that the answer lies in the ...