America through the eyes of Nineteenth-century Scots: the case of ego documents and popular culture

According to the statistics on the website of the Oxford English Dictionary, more lexical items and new meanings were first recorded in the nineteenth century than at any other time in the history of English. They mostly reflect the scientific discoveries, technical innovations and social and political novelties that characterized those decades, and they provide a clear indication of our indebtedness to Late Modern times. In addition, the changes that occurred in nineteenth-century English vocabulary are a function of the way in which new information was made available to the reading public: magazines and circulating libraries opened windows onto new worlds which elicited curiosity and the desire to know more, thus encouraging more publications. Also, the reports published in periodicals (or indeed presented as objective background descriptions in novels) could be supplemented with the narratives found in the letters sent home by emigrants, who strove to illustrate their new reality to readers who could only imagine such unfamiliar settings. Consequently, travelogues, autobiographies, letters and diaries make up a valuable set of documents by means of which we can investigate how geographical, geological and anthropological knowledge was popularized. In this contribution I intend to discuss how description, narration and
evaluation appear to interact in texts pertaining to the representation of North America. This transatlantic perspective is in line with recent methodologies in diachronic studies of English, and its interest in popular writing is consistent with current trends in historical sociolinguistics, in which ‘language history from below’ has shown increasing viability. Specific attention will be given to Scottish texts. My investigation will therefore centre on materials currently available in the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, the Corpus of Nineteenth-century Scottish Correspondence, and other digital repositories, such as the Internet Library of Early Journals and the online collections of the National Library of Scotland.