“A graphic system which leads its own linguistic life”?

Traditional accounts of the history of English spelling are primarily based on printed texts. According to them, English orthography developed from great diversity in Late Middle English to modern standard spelling by 1800. Studies have also revealed a split between public and private spelling practices. This paper charts the history of epistolary spelling in Early Modern English using the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. We counter potential editorial interference in the corpus by two methods. First, we focus on frequent variables; and second, we use smaller, manuscript-based resources to verify our findings. The results reveal, for the first time, long-term trends in the history of English private spelling.