An Emigrant S Home Letters

Excerpt from Emigrant's Home Letters In launching this little book upon the stormy waves of the sea of criticism I am not troubled by many fears. I believe that the name of Henry Parkes will yet be dear to the heart of every patriotic son of Federated Australia, and that all concerning him will be very precious in their eyes. The mistakes, the errors, and the failures of the last years of his life will be wiped away as one would brush dust from a beloved dead face. Who that is just will judge of him by the years between seventy and eighty? No! By the glorious aims, by the high hopes, by the great achievements, and the ringing eloquence of his grand manhood will he be judged; and when Australasia takes her place among the great nations of the world, his name will be inscribed in golden letters upon the annals of her history. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The current volume presents a number of chapters which look at informal vernacular letters, written mostly by emigrants to the former colonies of Britain, who settled at these locations in the past few centuries, with a focus on letters from the nineteenth century. Such documents often show features for varieties of English which do not necessarily appear in later sources or which are not attested with the same range or in the same set of grammatical contexts. This has to do with the vernacular nature of the letters, i.e. they were written by speakers who had a lower level of education and whose speech, and hence their written form of language, does not appear to have been guided by considerations of standardness and conformity to external norms of language. Furthermore, the writers of the emigrant letters, examined in the current volume, were very unlikely to have known of, still less have used, manuals of letter writing. Emigrant letters thus provide a valuable source of data in tracing the possible development of features in varieties of English in the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities gives voice to the Irish, Scottish, English, and Welsh women and men who negotiated the complex and often dangerous world of emigration between 1815 and 1845. Using "information wanted" notices that appeared in colonial newspapers as well as emigrants' own accounts, Errington illustrates that emigration was a family affair. Individuals made their decisions within a matrix of kin and community - their experiences shaped by their identities as husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings and cousins. The Atlantic crossing divided families, but it was also the means of reuniting kin and rebuilding old communities. Emigration created its own unique world - a world whose inhabitants remained well aware of the transatlantic community that provided them with a continuing sense of identity, home, and family.