The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800 (review)

Ms. Whyman is interested not in literary letter writers, but in ordinary people of the middling sort and below, preferably whole families who kept in touch and validated their lives through correspondence. Her first exhibit, Joseph Morton, began writing letters home, and his family began saving them, when he left Scotland in 1765 (for Kendal in the Lake District, where he hoped to find work as a gardener). Ms. Whyman’s whole book demonstrates abundantly how illuminating is the study of such domestic practitioners of “epistolary literacy.” She found many archives from low-status families spanning at least two generations.

The details of her book are delightful: the “beautifully formed round hands of merchant children” and the painstaking single letters that very young learners copied into their printed spelling books. The illustrations here are captivating. It is moving, too, when a recently literate bridle maker writes love letters in which he sheds “ten thousand Tears” and wanders by moonlight whispering “to the Passing Breeze the tender tale.” Ms. Whyman includes some lower gentry who were outsiders: Jane Johnson (whose property-owning husband was curate of Olney in Buckinghamshire) and Anne, Lady Miller (an heiress, albeit bourgeois, whose husband acquired an Irish baronetcy).

Ms. Whyman aims at “a messier, intimate, more realistic” composite account of these “middling-sort individuals.” Anxiety, she finds, is perhaps inevitable in people who lived between a patron class that reminded them of their limitations and a laboring class that reminded them of possible downward mobility.

In saying “letters had a significant impact on the literary world,” Ms. Whyman means that many individuals moved on from letter writing to other composition. Perhaps her most interesting study for Scriblerian readers is Jane Johnson (1706–1759), whose manuscript legacy has been recently acquired by the Bodleian. This family archive includes a commonplace book with comments on Johnson’s reading, her ingenious and creative materials for family schooling (including a story for five- and six-year-olds which is “now considered the first fairy tale written in English for children”), her letters, poetry, prayers, and a “History of Miss Clarissa of Buckinghamshire.” This short fiction, written in October 1749 when Richardson’s Clarissa was still recent, ignores the novel’s plot, but portrays an ideal woman.

Some of Ms. Whyman’s opinions, especially in connection with religion or literature, read oddly. She writes: “It is rare that we have the opportunity to compare writings by people of different faiths.” Literary historians do not belong in this “we.” She distinguishes three groups for case studies—merchants, Dissenters, and writing clerks—which are not distinct at all. While the categories merchant and writing clerks are separate, Dissenters overlap with both other groups: indeed, Ms. Whyman herself quotes Samuel Curwen observing in 1777 that the Dissenters of Manchester include many wealthy merchants.

She ascribes to Congregationalist writers “a distinctive language” full of “[f]earful dichotomies” such as “light and darkness, heights and depths, life and death.” Such dichotomy is characteristic of biblical language and the Book of Common Prayer and other Anglican texts both public and private. (On the other hand, she is probably correct in seeing the Quakers as peculiarly people of the Word. Perhaps no one but a Friend would have thought: “we are as epistles written in one another’s minds.”) When Johnson describes for a friend a vivid dream in which she was “metamorphosed into a spider as big as the full moon,” and then adds that becoming a silkworm instead would have been “a far more fortunate prognostick” for her letter, Ms. Whyman takes the spider as rustic and the silkworm as elite, or the spider as wholesome and the silkworm as corrupt, without considering that the silkworm spins the more durable, useful, and beautiful thread.

While Ms. Whyman’s stylistically varied letter writers are mostly lucid, pithy, and forceful, she herself writes clunkily and banally. Many varieties of friendly, supportive, or consoling human interaction are categorized as building self-worth...