Fanning fires. A corpus assisted analysis of women’s letters during the 1857-58 Indian uprisings

A paucity of studies has focused on propaganda in mid 1800s, as the term was mostly linked to education and public opinion formation in a positive sense whilst its pejorative meaning was acquired from WWI onwards. However, during the 1857-58 uprisings in India, the press published a number of letters written home from the colony which fanned fires against the Indians within the Victorian public. This study analyses a small corpus of private letters written by women during the Indian uprisings and published in the British press (WOPLEPIU). At the time, women were stereotyped as domestic creatures, helpless victims of Indian aggression, incapable of developing personal views whereas their letters include personal evaluations and may be considered as a form of propaganda. The methodology adopted is a mixed one. It starts with a corpus-driven approach followed by a corpus assisted discourse analysis of chosen key words and their clusters to analyse quantitatively and qualitatively their recurring phraseology. The findings indicate that women’s letters provide not only factual details but also personal perspectives, thus challenging the stereotyped role of Victorian women while their letters were used for propagandistic reasons.