William Clift (1775-1849)

© The British Museum

biography

• Dobson, Jessie (1954), William Clift, London: William Heinemann Medical Books Ltd.

 correspondence

• Austin, Frances (ed.) (1983), The Letters of William Home Clift 1803-1832, Shaftesbury: Meldon House.

• Austin, Frances (ed.) (1991), The Clift Family Correspondence 1792-1846. Sheffield: CECTAL, The University of Sheffield.

language of the Clift Family

• Austin, Frances (1973), “Some epistolary features of the Clift Family Correspondence”. English Studies, 54, 9-22; 129-40. Reprinted (1998) in Mats Rydén, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Merja Kytö (eds.), A Reader in Early Modern English. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 319-347.

• Austin, Frances (1984), “Double negatives and the eighteenth century”. In N.F. Blake and Charles Jones (eds.) English Historical Linguistics: Studies in Development. Sheffield: CECTAL, University of Sheffield. 138-48.

• Austin, Frances (1985), “Relative which in late eighteenth-century usage: The Clift Family Correspondence”. In Roger Eaton, Olga Fischer, Willem Koopman and Frederike van der Leek (eds.) Papers from the 4th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics, Amsterdam, April 10-13, 1985. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

• Austin, Frances (1994), “The effect of exposure to standard English: the language of William Clift”. In Dieter Stein and Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds.) Towards a Standard English 1600-1800. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 285-313.

• Austin, Frances (2000), “Letter writing in a Cornish community in the 1790s”. In David Barton and Nigel Hall (eds.), Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

See also:

• Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Ingrid (2002), "You was and eighteenth-century normative grammar". In Katja Lenz and Ruth Möhlig (eds.), Of Dyuersitie & Chaunge of langage. Essays Presented to Manfred Görlach on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday. Heidelberg: C. Winter. 88-102.

miscellaneous social matters

• Austin, Frances (1978), “London life in the 1790s”. In History Today, ix  (November), 738-45.

• Austin, Frances and Bernard Jones (1978), “William Clift: the surgeon’s apprentice”. In Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 60, 261-65.

• Austin, Frances (1983), Robert Clift of Bodmin Able Seaman 1790-1799. Shaftesbury: Meldon House.

• Austin, Frances and Bernard Jones (1984), “The Clifts and the arts”. In Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 66, 63-70. 

• Austin, Frances (1991), “The Channel in the Clift Family Correspondence”. In Studies on Voltaire and the eighteen century, Oxford: The Voltaire  Foundation, 97-105.

(for additions, contact Frances Austin)

The following books may be ordered from Frances Austin: