In this paper1 I demonstrate that the present‐day research model of social network analysis can successfully be used to describe and explain linguistic variation and change in a historical context. I do so by presenting a case study of the language of the Walpole family in relation to the norm as set in contemporary eighteenth‐century grammars. I select three linguistic features which were commented on by Lowth and test these against the corpus of the letters of Walpole family members, which I have created from the complete edition of Horace Walpole’s correspondence.