Strategies of Knowledge Transmission and Dissemination of Values in Nineteenth-century Letter-writing Guides

In this study I analyse linguistic solutions employed to encode prescriptive norms of appropriate business conduct in model letters offered by two epistolary guides, The Universal Letter-Writer; or New Art of Polite Correspondence, a British manual published under the name of the Reverend Thomas Cooke (1850 [1770]) and its revised American version, edited by David Hogan and entitled New Universal Letter-Writer (1818 [1800]). The goal of the investigation is to explore the connections between the linguistic and the contemporary social and cultural practices which, as it will be argued, the manuals accurately reflected, imposing and reinforcing prescriptive norms of proper conduct on their readers. The investigation focuses on the model letters included in the specialised sections of the two guides dedicated to business correspondence, which describe a wide variety of trade-related situations in the context of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century business environments on both sides of the Atlantic. The comparative analysis of these two manuals offers an opportunity to draw some preliminary conclusions on the specific strategies of knowledge dissemination characteristic for this historical genre of self-help books.