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Based on letters from prison written by a peasant farmer, this tentative, exemplar study tries to show the interconnection of two sides of the same historical process: the striving for linguistic ‘expression’ and the development of the modern self. The analysis shows that the letters’ author, J. H. Friedrich, succeeded in the creative act of expressing his psychological self on paper when the circumstances pushed him to do so. He communicated complex facts by using a rather elaborate syntax (while his writings also reveal misspellings and an erroneous morphosyntax). However, Friedrich did not archive his pragmatic aim of maintaining his much needed social bonds to his wife, family, and friends. The paper discusses the possibility that this might have been the case because his written style contrasted starkly with the oral communication of his former communities of practice. The study contributes to the third-wave approach in historical sociolinguistics (Conde-Silvestre, J. C. 2016, A ‘third-wave’ historical sociolinguistic approach to late Middle English correspondence: Evidence from the Stonor Letters. In Cinzia Russi (ed.), Current trends in historical sociolinguistics, 46–66. Warsaw & Berlin: de Gruyter) that seeks to present in detail that historical ‘speakers’ are anything but stable carriers of a given language variety but ‘tailor’ their own linguistic styles.

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