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Part of
Exploring Language and Society with Big Data: Parliamentary discourse across time and space
Edited by Minna Korhonen, Haidee Kotze and Jukka Tyrkkö
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 111] 2023
► pp. 17–53

Chapter 1
Speech in the British Hansard

| University of Glasgow

This chapter provides a detailed textual and linguistic history of Hansard, the records of debates of the British parliament from 1803 to the present, on which the Hansard Corpus is based. It analyses how parliamentary speech is recorded and presented across that period, examining the changes in direct and indirect speech types arising from commercial factors, pressure from parliament, editorial practice, and the availability and quality of source material. The chapter concludes with a breakdown, for each period of Hansard’s history, of what the data for that period does and does not represent.

Keywords: speech reporting, history of Hansard, direct and indirect speech, editorial practice
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.“Tolerably well”: Reporting before Hansard
  • 3.Thomas Curson Hansard, Hansard, and the Hansard Corpus
  • 4.“Fidelity is the first and indispensable requisite”
  • 5.“Bound for the bona fides”: The Hansards and the Parliamentary Debates, 1803–1888
  • 6.Hansard without the Hansards: The chaotic Authorised Edition, 1889 to 1908
  • 7.‘Something like literary shape’: The Official Report, 1909 to present
  • 8.Conclusion: Hansard for eternity, Hansard for linguists
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.111.01ale
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