Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'
Jane Austen letter
Guide to fashion and etiquette
Alphabet books
Soldier's letter: Battle of Waterloo
Jane Austen, Persuasion
P B Shelley, 'Ozymandias'
Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Coleridge's notes on Shakespeare
Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale'
Lord Byron, Don Juan
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Grammar for children
Yorkshire dialect
Punctuation for children
Anti-slavery poem
Diary description of London
Execution of a 12 year old boy
Modern Flash Dictionary
Dickens, Oliver Twist
London dialect in Dickens
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
Browning, Dramatic Lyrics
Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Lear's Book of Nonsense
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
The Communist Manifesto
'How do I love thee?'
Poverty and the workhouse
Poor Letter H
'The Charge of the Light Brigade'
Get your ‘air cut!
Cookery for the poor
Mary Seacole's autobiography
Mary Seacole newspaper article
Nursery rhymes
Florence Nightingale letter
Coal mining
The Woman in White
Mrs Beeton
Mrs Beeton's Christmas
Melodrama: East Lynne
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The Queen's English
Letter from Charles Darwin
Text message poetry
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Music Hall
Victorian fashion
Freakshow posters
Street sellers
Invention of the telephone
Illusionists and conjurers
Oxford English Dictionary
Afrikaans novel
Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
Anglo-Indian dictionary
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Circus poster
Jack the Ripper murders
Match Girls Strike
Babu English
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
H G Wells, The Time Machine
English 'down under'
Towards the end of the 18th century, Received Pronunciation (RP) began to establish itself as the accent of the educated and aristocratic classes. It quickly became a desirable symbol of social advancement for the newly emerging middle classes. In the 19th century, elocution classes, instruction manuals and pamphlets, such as Poor Letter H, were extremely popular among lower-middle-class speakers keen to acquire this prestigious accent.
On these pages
This list assists those keen to avoid ‘dropping’ the ‘h’ sound in words such as ‘house’, a pronunciation still widespread, but stigmatised, in England and Wales. More than 150 years of desperately trying to avoid this social gaffe has had a profound effect, as we now consider humble, humour, humility and hospital to require a h sound. We now say herb with h in the UK, but the older form (without h) survives in the United States.
Poor Letter H: its Use and Abuse, 1854.
Shelfmark: 12985.a.10.