Victorian letter writing guides

[1] Other sources, however, disagreed and suggested high outward ornamentation such as ribbons, flowery drawings, and interesting colors could be used by females, but part of this may have been the date of the guide, as vogue changed by the decade.

Men were warned against complimenting their chosen bride too heavily, as it seemed insincere; rather, their moral traits and the feminine virtue of indifference were set as prime subjects to appreciate in a marriage proposal.

Your extravagant wishes are utterly beyond my means, and your bitter and sarcastic remarks upon those of your friends who are not wealthy prove that you covet a life of luxury.

I know that honor binds me to you, and therefore will not ask for my release if you do not desire it, but will, if we marry, endeavor faithfully to make you demand the reasons for my coldness, I have given them.

Of course, what is merely your opinion, I have no right to resent, though I regret that it should be so unfavorable, but I have a right to demand your grounds for asserting that I am an arrant flirt, a hypocrite, and concerned in more than one dishonorable transaction.

[8] Paul Smith, Esq.,--The high tone of your letter might impose upon one who was not so well acquainted with your history previous to your arrival at this place as I happen to be.

If you consider your course of conduct in deceiving your uncle, endeavoring to ruin your young cousin Charles, and attempting to elope with an heiress of fifteen, honorable, I can only say that I differ in opinion.

Lucy Johnston.Aside from their use as a means of correspondence, letters can be seen as a form of a representation of people's lived experiences during different historical eras.

[9] Believing that letters are valuable historical documents, James Willis Westlake, who was a public school teacher born just before the Victorian era in England in 1830, had moved to America at a young age where he published his book on the subject.

[9] In the New London Fashionable Gentleman's Writer, is an example of the usage of letter writing as a collection of quaint correspondences between hopeful men and the ladies they wished to court.

[11] Such a manual may have been used by anxious men as they prepared to write to their love interests and express their feelings, and perhaps by women as they decided how best to accept or reject the advances.