‘With the greatest sincerity’: expressing genuineness of feeling in nineteenth-century business correspondence in English

Abstract

AbstractThis article is concerned with the history ofyours sincerely, a popular closing formula in English epistolary discourse. The formula was already used sporadically in the seventeenth century, gradually increased in frequency in the Late Modern period, and was the preferred subscription in English business correspondence by the end of the 1950s. This study investigates patterns of usage of closing formulae in a bestselling business letter-writing manual William Anderson’s Practical Mercantile Correspondence, A Collection of Modern Letters of Business, etc., whose first edition was published by Effiingham Wilson in 1836 in London. The first half of the nineteenth century was a period during whichsincerelyappears to have been gaining in popularity. The analysis of the repertoire of the closing formulae in Anderson shows thatsincerelywas starting to compete withtrulyfor the same slot within the matrix of the extended type of closing formulae. This competition ofsincerelywithtrulycan be read as an indicator of a larger social and cultural change, which saw the rise ofsincerity, reinterpreted as genuineness of feeling, as the new cultural buzzword.