Edwardian Postcards as an Insight into the Edwardian Mind and Community

Abstract

One of the family heirlooms bequeathed to Barb Becker is a collection of postcards addressed to her maternal grandmother Miss C. Campbell of Edinburgh at the turn of the twentieth century. The collection includes over a hundred postcards sent mostly by half a dozen women from various locations throughout Britain between 1904 and 1908. Apparently these postcards were a fad amongst the working class in Scotland at the time. On their days off, staff would hop a train to a nearby destination, and then purchase a few postcards to send to friends and acquaintances who shared their hobby. Their adventures were a form of inexpensive entertainment. Experientially, interpersonally and textually, using Halliday’s terms for the functions of language which communicate representations of the world as exchanges encoded in messages, these cultural documents reveal much about the interlocutors' idiolect and their choice of register.

In this paper, we analyze the verbal texts taken from several postcards using Gregory and Malcolm’s descriptive framework Communication Linguistics, in order to distinguish the various interlocutors, writing styles, the differences in their relationships with the decoder, their communicative purposes, and their choice of register. While encoding information concerning the communicative situation and event in these ways, the interlocutors who sent the postcards also made linguistic choices which reflect their temporal, geographical and social dialect, as well as the prevalent attitudes, belief systems and values of their culture. In contrast to the emails and text messaging of our contemporary world, these postcards shed light on an interesting genre of informal correspondence of the period, between interlocutors who share a close, albeit not intimate, interpersonal relationship.