Making the Middle Class: One Letter at a Time

Perhaps no image from the eighteenth century better captures Britons' romantic perception of their empire than Benjamin West's portrayal of the death of General James Wolfe at the Battle of Quebec in 1759. Completed in 1771, The Death of General Wolfe depicts the hero as a Christ-like figure who willingly gave his life for the cause of building Britain's powerful empire. West's painting reminded Britons throughout the Atlantic that it was war and sacrifice, above all else, that created their magnificent empire. Furthermore, West's depiction of a Native American in awe of the general's death suggests that the actions of Britons striving, self-consciously, to construct their empire legitimated their power over others. Actions, not words, built the mighty British Empire and justified the subjugation of others. ¹

Konstantin Dierks' In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America, paints an altogether different picture of power and empire in the eighteenth century. Rather than being a self-conscious creation, white Britons and then Americans unconsciously constructed empires that unknowingly denied power to others. And they did so, not so much by fighting (and dying) on battlefields. Instead, Dierks focuses on the seemingly innocuous task of letter writing to show how it "fostered a new manner of power inequality in the Atlantic world: an 'epistolary divide'" (p. 284). White middle-class Britons—male and female, young and old—were able to accumulate power, while inadvertently denying such powers to African Americans and Native Americans. Even worse, letter writing was viewed as a "utilitarian function" and not as "an instrument of social power, authority, or transformation"—like slavery for instance—enabling white Britons to consume power without "competition or conflict, or even recognition" (pp. 283-84).

The crux of Dierks' complex thesis centers on the "prescriptive force of letter writing," whereby "writers of letters defined the meanings of communication and expression, of personal identity and agency, and of social order and change" (p. 5). Dierks differs from both literary scholars, who argue that the letter motif was a reactionary process by which Britons gave narrative meaning to their ever-changing world, and from historians, who typically view letters as simply "windows into historical experience" (p. xiii). Instead, he contends that the ability to write a letter gave agency to individuals, empowering them to determine their lives and livelihoods at a time of massive geographical and economic expansion, and of corresponding uncertainty in the British Atlantic. "Letters did not reveal—they made history in the eighteenth century" (p. xiii).

Dierks' claim that a middle-class identity was fashioned through the action of writing letters confounds previous notions of class formation in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic. More often viewed in Marxist terms as a collective response to the political and economic struggle over the means of production, Dierks instead sees the formation of a middle-class identity as individualistic, nonpoliticized, and, in many ways, unintentional. The process of writing letters reflected a personal agency to improve one's social, cultural, and economic standing in society. Yet, as a result of rapid economic expansion and corresponding communications infrastructure growth, such personal agency ultimately achieved larger, collective social and cultural ends. According to Dierks, the middle-class that emerged in the eighteenth century assumed political and economic power, but did so without the overt struggles often inherent in class formation.

Dierks discusses these topics in the context of several themes familiar to British, American, and Atlantic historians: commerce, migration, consumerism, war, and revolution. In doing so, however, he sacrifices a coherent narrative for what reads more like a collection of individual essays. He begins first by arguing that the British Empire was constructed through a communications and commercial revolution at the turn of the eighteenth century. Motivated by what he calls an "economic ideology of communications," Englishmen began to realize that their country's commercial success was predicated upon an organized communications network, or postal...