The influence of prescriptivism on nineteenth-century English has been a moot point since the last century, where two extreme positions are noted.Traditional history of the English language handbooks, on the one hand, often consider prescriptivism as a pervasive phenomenon in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, because of a belief that the English language was for some time reluctant to variation and change (Finegan 1998: 545; Anderwald 2014: 13-14).Modern approaches, on the other hand, contend that prescriptivism did not have actual effects on the language of the period, with the assumption that language change was effective as a result of continuous developments from below (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2009: 79).The issue, however, is now taken to be far from this polarization as there is evidence that prescriptivism certainly helped shape nineteenth-century English (and present-day English), even though the influence 'may have been only partially successful, i.e. on only certain text-types, only on written language but not spoken, or only for a certain period, not for others' (Anderwald 2019: 88-89).The nineteenth century was actually the century of prescriptivism as a result of the common awareness of the need for correctness to have access to a higher social scale.This explains the proliferation of grammar books and usage guides throughout the century which, using a normative approach, 'taught readers that social advancement through language was in principle within reach of everyone and could be obtained with the help of proper guidance' (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2009: 3).The number of such publications increased notably from the beginning of the century, reaching its peak towards the second half of the century (Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2008: 4).Importantly enough, this intense rate of publication derived from the creation of a discourse community of grammarians who contributed to the development of homogeneous norms eventually accepted on the grounds of the continuous copying and re-writing of previous sources (Anderwald 2012: 29; also Watts 1999;2008).The effects of prescriptivism on language have been hitherto overestimated in some publications.Therefore it is necessary to investigate the development of individual features to evaluate, if any, the likely relationship between linguistic norms and the rise or decline of a particular form in Late Modern English.The present issue thus stems from Anderwald's proposal now two decades ago to combine historical grammaticographythe study of historical grammar books of English -with historical corpus linguistics as the only means to confirm 'with some confidence which features of language were subject to prescriptive influence, and where prescriptivists' attempt at changing (or preserving) the language had little or no effect' (2014: 1).Anderwald's desideratum implies that a detailed