Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers

This ambitious project exploits an almost untouched archive to answer important questions about reading, letter-writing and everyday language in Georgian England and the contribution made by social networks to these significant cultural practices. A multidisciplinary team from the fields of linguistic, historical and literary studies will address questions and combine approaches that contribute to current academic debates across a broad range of research areas in innovative ways. It will shed new light on the culture of English society in this period and will help to launch an exciting new genre of Hamilton studies by exploring a remarkable, but relatively unknown archive, presently scattered over eleven libraries in Britain and the USA. We will use the Papers to explore four related research questions on reading, letter-writing, language practices and the role of social networks in Georgian England.

(I) Our research starts from the premise, increasingly important in various disciplinary fields, that social networks are crucial to the maintenance and change of both linguistic and cultural behaviour. Having constructed a 'personography' of writers, addressees and others mentioned in the Papers, we will map all the social networks to which Mary Hamilton belonged. This strand will subsequently include a ground-breaking comparison of the operation and effects of social network membership across the different domains of reading practices, letter-writing and grammatical structure, where we will carry out more specialised investigations.

(II) We will make a comprehensive analysis of accounts of reading practices mentioned in the archive, ascertaining whether patterns of circulation, reception and response show any significant differentiation in line with the genre of a text, or the class/gender/perceived character of that text's author. We will distinguish print and manuscript texts throughout. This strand will contribute to our understanding of, inter alia, eighteenth-century canon formation.

(III) In the late Georgian period, politeness was of central importance not just as a sociocultural phenomenon but in language use. The correspondence will be examined from several angles to track the influence on usage of normative rules in historical grammars and letter-writing manuals. We will analyse how gender and social status, including social network relationships, bear on forms of address and thus contribute to face-saving strategies. This strand of the study will add significantly to our knowledge of sociolinguistic and sociopragmatic factors in the history of Late Modern English, and the history of language standardisation.

(IV) The Hamilton Papers cover a crucial period in the history of English verb structure, particularly changes in usage of 'be' as auxiliary, such as the loss of 'your being looking well' and the advent of 'was being debated', two symptoms among many of a major but relatively neglected realignment of the auxiliary system. We will make a fine-grained analysis of the progress of change both across social networks and during the lifetime of individuals, leading to a better understanding of the language of the period, the history of English and mechanisms of language change generally.

Each of the four research strands will produce and draw on its own systematic database of instances. The essential groundwork for these databases is an edition of the Mary Hamilton Papers that is reliable and searchable for text, names, concepts and parts of speech. A valuable additional product of the project will therefore be a complete, scholarly, readable edition of the Papers, available in Open Access online.

This project will create and share new knowledge that will enhance beneficiaries' intellectual, cultural and creative quality of life. Impact will be measured through two complementary pathways, the first engaging schoolchildren on a local scale, and the other adults on an international scale.

Pathway 1: Contribution to schools programmes at the John Rylands Library

Beneficiaries: Primary School children (Key Stage 2) based in or visiting Manchester

Strategy for achieving impact: We will produce lesson plans and supporting materials for schoolchildren linked to the Library's Hamilton papers. Fitting neatly with National Curriculum requirements, these will help pupils to identify and discuss themes and conventions in and across a wide range of writing, and to identify how language, structure and presentation contribute to meaning, as well as considering the impact of different forms of writing on the reader. Letter writing is a popular exercise amongst schoolteachers to address many of the demands of the English curriculum, with children typically being asked to write a letter of complaint. We seek to introduce the children to different forms of letter writing, and in particular the use of letters to inform, tell stories and entertain. For many children in years 5 and 6 (ages 9-11), the type of letters that Mary Hamilton and her circle produced with their formal conventions and extended descriptions are totally alien. Our workshops will help children to bridge this gap with the past by introducing extracts from some of Hamilton's letters and helping the children to produce their own. We will evaluate these outputs with both children and their teachers.

Pathway 2: Media outputs addressing women's histories

Beneficiaries: In recent years, women's histories have become extremely popular with the general public. Sociological research and demographic data addressing this phenomenon is thin on the ground (with precise topical interests unaddressed by, for example, the Audience Agency's profiles of culturally active segments https://www.theaudienceagency.org/audience-spectrum/profiles, or the DCMS-commissioned Taking Part survey https://www.gov.uk/guidance/taking-part-survey). However, examples abound of commercially and critically successful exhibitions, radio programmes, TV documentaries, trade biographies, online features and viral videos, and public campaigns for commemoration that 'recover' and 're-tell' the stories of 'forgotten women' (examples include: TV programmes e.g. Amanda Foreman's The Ascent of Woman; historical novels e.g. the fiction of Sarah Waters; and campaigns e.g. Caroline Criado-Perez's project to install a statue of a woman in Parliament Square and feature a woman's portrait on a banknote). Our project offers opportunities to further address this wave of interest.

Strategy for achieving impact: we will produce three outputs - a short film, a radio programme, and a blog with linked social media feeds. These outputs are designed to correspond to the three main ways of "being audiences" - "reading, listening and viewing" (Nightingale, 2011, 5). Recognising that the advent of digital media has transformed 'audiences' into 'produsers' [sic] (not passively responding to content, but also creating it through comments, shares and online reflections), the outputs will also be freely accessible online and available to interactive activity, with robust mechanisms in place to facilitate feedback and exchange with our beneficiaries. We will use Altmetric software to collect and collate shares, reach and comments in order to calibrate the impact of these outputs on audiences' knowledge, understanding, and identities. Previous experience within our project team suggests that well-crafted media features about women's histories can produce demonstrable qualitative evidence of impact in terms of changing how people think about their own situations and identities (see Pathways to Impact.)