"The Ceremonial of Letter for Letter": William Cowper and the Tempo of Epistolary Exchange

After long silence, I begin again.

—William Cowper to William Unwin, 3 July 1786¹

According to Howard Anderson and Irvin Ehrenpreis, "The composition of informal letters" in eighteenth-century Britain "depends on the possibility of a frequent, candid exchange between writers who trust each other. Replies may not always be sent, but the likely chance of an early reply seems a necessary ingredient in the attitude of the true epistolary author."² The exchange of what are here called "informal" letters, then, supposes a give-and-take, a transaction that is "likely," but cannot quite be counted on. "Replies may not always be sent," or indeed, if sent, may not always arrive, whether on time or at all. Nonetheless, any reply, in its timing or its tone—even in its suppression, or its absence—is measured against a commonly held expectation of its likelihood.

I would like in what follows to develop these summary remarks on expectation and its possible unsettling towards a fuller account of the tempo of epistolary exchange, in relation, primarily, to the letters of William Cowper. What might Cowper's habits, representations, and experiences of letter writing suggest about the progress of a correspondence across time? How might correspondence be sustained or supported; regulated or made punctual; interrupted, dilated, or arrested? In the course of this essay, I am going to outline three different but interlinked ways of thinking about time and interval in letter writing. The first is framed by Anderson and Ehrenpreis, who link "the likely chance of an early reply" to the development in the eighteenth century of "a convenient, reliable postal service." The second is identified by Cowper as "the proper moment," the time by which social expectation dictates one ought to respond (3:115). From expectation, both mechanical and ceremonial, I move finally to a less-regulated period: the interval in which a letter writer waits, often uncertainly, for a reply that may or may not come. To begin with, though, I want to comment a little more on the coordinates of my inquiry. Here, and indeed throughout the essay, my remarks on interval are informed by Pierre Bourdieu's work on gift exchange, and Maurice Blanchot's on conversation.

Progress in Time

"At the same time they invoke and extol their own occasion and particularities," writes Alan McKenzie, "most letters develop and extend a correspondence already under way."³ The history of Cowper's correspondence shows, to be sure, that some letters are launched from a standing start. Cowper sometimes greets letters from persons unknown with a frisson of pleasure; at other times, he calls them "impertinencies" (3:5; 4:410-11). When approaching people he has never met before, he is careful to make plain what acquaintances they had in common (see 2:173, 2:571). To send a compliment in the absence of "personal connexion," as he is well aware, risks the charge of self-interested "venture" (2:311). In the beginning, it seems, should be correspondence.

"A Letter is Written," relays Cowper, "as a Conversation is maintained, or a Journey perform'd, not by preconcerted, or premeditated Means, . . . but merely by maintaining a Progress, and resolving as a Postillion does, having once Set out, never to Stop 'till we reach the appointed End" (1:374). Implicated in this letter of August 1780 to William Unwin is not purely progress, but progress in time. This temporal dimension might be overlooked. According to McKenzie,

The fact that each letter in a continuing correspondence was separated from other letters in that correspondence by several weeks, months, or years may well be lost on those who read straight through one of the multivolume sets in which most correspondences now reach their readers. This foreshortening is inevitable but distorting, as one of the burdens a letter carries is that of contracting or accounting for the interval between it and its predecessor.

(4)

Letter-writing manuals too might mislead. Clare Brant notes their "lack of interest in correspondence; they much preferred single or single exchanges of letters to runs of...