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“But I wanted to write to you about signs, which in your opinion and mine are matters of so much concern … I think today I will explain the outlines of my classification of signs … to throw all ideas into three classes of Firstness, of Secondness, and of Thirdness … The typical ideas of Firstness are qualities of feeling, or mere appearances … The … idea of Secondness is the experience of effort … one thing acting upon another … I now come to Thirdness … the interpreting thought … something which brings a First into relation to a Second.”

Peirce builds a system of meaning where trichotomy layers over trichotomy. Firstness ⬄ Secondness ⬄ Thirdness; icon ⬄ index ⬄ symbol;^§AS1.1.3 qualisign ⬄ sinsign ⬄ legism, and others, reaching twenty-six sign triads by the time he had come to the end of his letter.¹⁷

Peirce to Welby: “My dear Lady Welby: Please excuse me for writing on this paper, as I find to my surprise that I have run out of everything else except such as is still less fit for writing to you; and it is 3½ A.M. and I am 5 or 6 miles from a stationer’s. I cannot tell you how delighted I was on Saturday last to see your hand-writing on an envelope.”¹⁸

Peirce to Welby: “[The] threefold Definition of a Sign … [might generate] six trichotomies, instead of determining 729 classes of signs, as they would if they were independent, only yield 28 classes; and if, as I strongly opine (not to say almost prove) there are four other trichotomies of the same order of importance, instead of making 59049 classes, these will only come to 66.”¹⁹

Peirce also built visualizations of his system in the form of “Existential Graphs,” which he sent to Welby, by means of which “I desire to aid you … furnishing an icon of thought which in formal respects is of the highest exactitude.”²⁰ When words were only able to represent the system with imprecision, visualization was needed.

Peirce to Welby: “My Dear Lady Victoria: No letter from you, I beg you to believe, could be too long, especially if it has in view the more forcible presentations of our recommendations … I brought along an old number of [the journal] the Monist in order to read an article of yours it contains … I don’t believe I shall ever cross the water again, & shall not have the pleasure of seeing you; but it would be a great delight if I could have a photograph of your ladyship.”²¹ In one of Peirce’s triads, a photograph would be classified as an icon.

Peirce to Welby: “I received your ladyship’s photograph last night & put it on my study mantelpiece among the very small number of those friends I love to look at, and I am sure there will be none that will do more solid good than your bright and good face. The reason I have not written is that my dear wife has been very ill & for five weeks hardly left her bedside & even now that she is up, I am continually worried about her too great energy, besides being myself in a state of nervous fatigue.”²²

The Welby–Peirce correspondence continued until 1911. Welby died in 1912, and Peirce in 1914.

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¹⁰ Charles S. Hardwick, ed., 1977, Semiotics and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 109.

¹¹ Ibid., p. 157.

¹² William Andrew Myers, 1995, “Victoria, Lady Welby (1837–1912),” pp. 1–24 in A History of Women Philosophers, Volume 4, edited by M.E. Waithe, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers; Susan Petrilli, 2015, “Sign, Meaning, and Understanding in Victoria Welby and Charles S. Peirce,” Signs and Society 3(1):71–102.

¹³ Charles S. Hardwick, ed., 1977, Semiotics and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, p. 13.

¹⁴ Ibid., pp. 8–9.

¹⁵ Ibid., pp. 5–6.

¹⁶ Joseph Brent, 1993, Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

¹⁷ Charles S. Hardwick, ed., 1977, Semiotics and Significs: The Correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 22–31.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 66.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 84.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 96

²¹ Ibid., pp. 10–11.

²² Ibid., pp. 16–17.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 24–27. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Charles Sanders Peirce’s “Three Kinds of Interpretant” §AS1.0b