How can materials from a nineteenth-century archive shed light on a concept of "stance," an emerging topic of sociolinguistic research? While "stance" has many intellectual genealogies, its application in sociolinguistics seems to focus mainly on a speaker's acts of self-positioning vis-a-vis interlocutors and objects in discourse, especially in face-to-face interaction. This paper concerns a more distant time and place, and considers how those distances, and the multiple mediations that intervene between the original events and interpretations of them today, might contribute to our ideas about stance. Finally, I reflect on how theories of stance relate to other concepts that have been more prominent in linguistic anthropology: footing and language ideology.

The events in question involve a dispute among missionaries in Onitsha (a town in what is now eastern Nigeria) that erupted in violence in October 1868. A flurry of letters ensued, with much fault-finding, local rushing about, appeals to authorities (mission and Onitshan), and eventual consequences for the mission personnel. The drama's central figure, John Christian Taylor, is known today mainly for his early descriptions of life in Onitsha and his work on Igbo linguistics -- work that contributed, if indirectly, to his troubles in the aftermath of the quarrel.