Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (review)

Despite Jürgen Habermas's well-known characterization of the eighteenth century as "the century of the letter" and the existence of numerous scholarly works examining the cultural impact of popular epistolary fiction in both Great Britain and the United States, the letter-writing manual itself has generally been ignored by both historians and literary critics. In Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820, Eve Bannet examines the evolution of these forgotten bestsellers as they traveled from London to Scotland and British America throughout the long eighteenth century. The book's title aptly reflects her overarching argument that letter writing sustained the British Empire in both practical and ideological ways, and that the malleable letter manual, which "disseminat[ed] a single standard language, method and culture of polite communication" (x), is the forgotten skeleton that articulated a complex transatlantic social body. Perhaps the greatest strength of the book is that while Bannet offers compelling evidence for this claim, she consciously and consistently refuses a Foucauldian narrative of "enforced uniformity and inexorable standardization" (xi) and instead elucidates the ideological shifts that can be found in the successive new editions and adaptations of the eighteenth century's most popular letter manuals.

Central to Bannet's research is the seemingly obvious but often overlooked (or avoided) issue of how letters were understood in their eighteenth-century contexts. Although scholars in multiple disciplines routinely delve into archived correspondence and employ it as "evidence" for a variety of arguments, Bannet's work implicitly suggests that such readings are suspect unless they proceed from an awareness of epistolary practices and the manuals that generated them. She coins the term "letteracy" to "designate the collection of different skills, values, and kinds of knowledge beyond mere literacy that were involved in achieving competency in the writing, reading, and interpreting of letters" (xvii). The book explores how these skills established and maintained the norms of polite communication that rendered correspondence comprehensible throughout the Atlantic world.

Empire of Letters is divided into three parts. Part 1 (chapters 1–2) is the section most narrowly concerned with letteracy, focusing on how letter manuals addressed issues of literacy, language, readership, and the construction of correspondence in Britain. Chapter 2, "Manual Architechtonics," deserves special attention, largely because it functions as a primer for understanding the taxonomy of eighteenth-century letter writing. Although this chapter contributes to the larger ideological argument of the book, it could be usefully applied by scholars in other fields. Bannet outlines how letters were classified and constructed according to function (i.e., business, advice, commendation, counsel, complaint, etc.), persuasively arguing that unless a letter is placed within this taxonomic context, it is likely to be misinterpreted by twenty-first-century readers. "[W]ithout knowing what had to be said in each class of letter, and how," she writes, "convention can easily be mistaken for sincerity, or repetition for originality" (58). Bannet illustrates this point with a fascinating reading of letters sent from Pope and Bolingbroke to Dean Swift, who had been banished in Ireland (83–89). The letters, although filled with many acceptable epistolary expressions of goodwill, are received by Swift as indications of a lack of true friendship because of what they fail to include, namely a willingness to be of service (87). Swift's sharp understanding of epistolary practices prevented him from a misreading to which modern scholars might easily fall victim. Letter manuals also dictated style, established the commonplaces of polite expression, and published guidelines for capitalization, punctuation, and pronunciation, all of which must be weighed when handling eighteenth-century letters.

While part 1 focuses on letter manuals in Britain, part 2 (chapters 3–5) is explicitly transatlantic and traces the migration of a few of the most popular manuals from London to Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and Glasgow. Bannet meticulously untangles a potentially confusing sequence of editions, adaptations, and compilations, identifying the subtle ideological shifts that occurred as letter manuals...