British Colonial Office correspondence on the Cape Colony (1820-1821): Metatextual keywords vs. analytic categories

Abstract

In 1820, the Cape of Good Hope, a British colony since 1795, became the new home to c. 4,500 English-speaking settlers. Correspondence surviving from this period in reference to this settlement enables insights into early nineteenth century letters, a still understudied area. Moreover, it provides a good setting to disambiguate the term letter from an internal, bottom-up perspective. Such a perspective may offer "a key for disclosing historical forms of communication" (Hübler and Busse 2012: 1) as first-order phenomena. This is achieved in an analysis of categorial labels (keywords) and metacommunicative clues found in the internal correspondence of the Colonial Office, a British government department, in the years 1820-1821. The results of the analysis provide a partial answer to what the label letter meant for this professional community. Adding a researcher's perspective to such a description allows proposing a twofold approach to "the letter" as an analytic category in the study of historical correspondence.

Historical Sociopragmatics

“…The characters treat each other with superficially exceedingly polite and polished language, which is used to hide their underlying devious motives and intentions. Włodarczyk (2013) combines a first-order with a second-order approach in her study of nineteenth-century British colonial office correspondence to examine the letter as an analytic category from different angles. She concludes that neither approach on its own can fully conceptualise letter-writing in the past.…”