‘With the greatest sincerity’: expressing genuineness of feeling in nineteenth-century business correspondence in English

Abstract

This article is concerned with the history of yours sincerely, a popular closing formula in English epistolary discourse. The formula was already used sporadically in the seventeenth century, gradually increased in frequency in the Late Modern period, and was the preferred subscription in English business correspondence by the end of the 1950s. This study investigates patterns of usage of closing formulae in a bestselling business letter-writing manual William Anderson’s Practical Mercantile Correspondence, A Collection of Modern Letters of Business, etc., whose first edition was published by Effiingham Wilson in 1836 in London. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period during which sincerely appears to have been gaining in popularity. The analysis of the repertoire of the closing formulae in Anderson shows that sincerely was starting to compete with truly for the same slot within the matrix of the extended type of closing formulae. This competition of sincerely with truly can be read as an indicator of a larger social and cultural change, which saw the rise of sincerity, reinterpreted as genuineness of feeling, as the new cultural buzzword.

From I am, with sincere regard, your most obedient servant to Yours sincerely: The simplification of leavetaking formulae in 18th-century Scottish and Irish English letters

“…Studies of leavetaking formulae in the late modern period have approached these from different angles, either focusing on the use of the extended your humble servant formula, on its variation with other, potentially shorter, forms or on the rise of the short formulae yours sincerely and yours affectionately. Research on late 18th-and 19th-century business correspondence has found that these letters rely to a large degree on the deferential servant formula, which is interpreted as an indicator of the social distance between the correspondents (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2006: 160-161;Dollinger 2008: 268;Morton 2016: 193-199;Shvanyukova 2020). Overall, the servant formula seemed relatively fixed regarding its modification patterns.…”

“…While in formal and asymmetrical contexts, the extended servant formula continued to be an appropriate letter subscription well into the 19th century (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2006: 161;Morton 2016: 199;Shvanyukova 2020, see also Section 4.2.1), it is especially in the letters exchanged between correspondents of equal social status that a routinisation of this formula can be observed. On the one hand, we can see a conventionalisation of the semantically bleached servant slot leading to its structural reduction.…”