In the nineteenth century the development of international and maritime trade led to a considerable increase in the production and consumption of English textbooks for both native and foreign novices in the business world. Correspondence has been a privileged way to conduct business transactions since the Middle Ages. Indeed, by the fifteenth century letter writing has become part of the daily life of the professional and merchant classes (Richardson 1985). In the nineteenth century, letter writing was still the most important means of communicating over a distance and the only way to maintain business relations in international commerce. Because of this many practical course books specifically intended for the traders’ community consisted of model letters. The main purpose of this contribution is to analyse a set of manuals from the latter half of the nineteenth century, which focus on letter writing, from a pedagogic perspective. Letters form an interesting text type since they reflect the social and functional relations between sender and addressee to a high degree (Gollancz 1999: 149). The five guides under scrutiny in this paper are, in fact, a valuable source of information on the textual construction of the international trader’s social role and on how epistolary business relations were negotiated in the late nineteenth century (Del Lungo Camiciotti 2006a, 2006b). In this paper the focus is on the pedagogic aspects of practical courses and specifically on the teaching of the words and phrases of commerce; their relevance to the