Studies in British and American Epistolary Culture

The belletristic and formalist studies of literary letters and epistolary fiction that dominated the last century have given way to a new generation of scholarship on eighteenth-century British and American letter writing.¹ This newer scholarship is more concerned with cultural practices and with the roles letters played in society and in peoples’ lives, more interested in nonelite and female letter writers, and more cognizant of the centrality of letters to eighteenth-century social, political, literary, economic, national, and transnational life. It is also more aware that letters were not the transparent “window in the bosom” we once thought them, but a conventional and coded form with a long history, whose dissemination through the social hierarchy and across the Atlantic depended, among other things, on the dramatic development and extension of postal services and on the diffusion of education and information about letter writing. Though preceded, as well as accompanied, by important new work on the Renaissance and seventeenth-century letter, this redirection of interest in eighteenth-century epistolography can conveniently be dated from the publication of four outstanding essay collections, which were edited by Rebecca Earle, Wil Verhoeven, Amanda Gilroy, David Barton, and Nigel Hall, ca. 2000.² The years 2006 to 2009, especially, have produced a veritable garland of flowers and rich soil for further work.

Susan Whyman’s new book, The Pen and the People (2009), takes us back to basics, and in more than one productive sense. Having uncovered, through years of painstaking research, large numbers of manuscript archives in the north of England containing family letters originating in the lower and middling ranks, Whyman uses her discovery that even the humblest people in provincial towns and rural areas were writing letters, to challenge the low assessments of lower-class literacy offered by conventional “statistical studies” (106). She makes the important point that people in the lower ranks often acquired writing as well as reading skills informally, from a literate villager turned teacher, from “makeshift places of instruction that do not appear in lists of licensed schools,” through” intermittent teaching paid for by groups of parents” (107), or through the transmission within families of the requisite skills. Homemade copybooks in which learners copied and recopied characters, words, and sentences to practice their writing were preserved in many of the family archives that Whyman studied—no doubt because, like finely stitched samplers, fine writing was viewed as a praiseworthy artistic accomplishment. Whyman describes such copybooks as “foundational documents for epistolary literacy, and sometimes economic success” (86)—one had to able to write, before one could write a letter.

Whyman stringently and repeatedly denies that anyone ever used a letter manual to learn letter writing conventions or to hone epistolary skills; she insists that one learned these by osmosis or through parental supervision. There is certainly truth in this: there were letters everywhere in print and...