Reconsidering the Public Letter in Epistolary Theory: The Case of Samuel Bowles (1865)

From the plains of Kansas to Salt Lake City, through the Rocky Mountains, to the Pacific Coast and the Pacific Northwest, publisher Samuel Bowles wrote a series of letters to the readers of his Massachusetts newspaper, the Springfield Republican, at the close of the Civil War. Bowles and his companions were joining a growing number of journalists seeking to entertain and educate their readers with scenes of adventure in the West. But this was no typical holiday. Traveling with the speaker of the US House of Representatives, Schuyler Colfax, as well as two other distinguished journalists from the Chicago Tribune and the New York Tribune, and with the blessing of the recently martyred president, the group, Bowles later wrote, was intent on using its journalistic platforms to generate informed public interest in the West, to encourage economic development and investment, and to address escalating public issues such as national policy toward Mormons, Native Americans, and the transcontinental railroad (Bowles, Across the Continent vii).¹

From a textual perspective, Bowles’s letters were not simply the stuff of journalism—objective reports on the local economy, manufacturing, or mining, perhaps, from an anonymous or objective correspondent. Instead, these letters were markedly epistolary, addressed to a mass readership yet engaging in purposeful ways the rhetorical structures and functionalities of personal correspondence to convey a multifaceted narrative of the trip. So, while Bowles indeed reported on politics and economic development, he also described his meals and companions, his plans for the day, and his longing for home. The result is a text that can be classified neither as strict reportage nor as strictly personal correspondence. Instead, these public newspaper letters occupy an uncharted literary territory that stretches the boundaries of what we may consider epistolary writing. This is not to say that all letters printed in the newspaper can be considered epistolary in the strict sense, but it is to say that some public newspaper letters, with Bowles’s letters providing a rich example, do indeed adopt structures and functionalities that scholars expect of private correspondence in ways that can be identified and theorized. In particular, this study proposes an initial theoretical map of this literary terrain, a form which may be called epistolary journalism. It will focus on constitutional elements of the form, the creation of a familiar author within a journalistic milieu, and the ways in which the theoretical scaffolding of private correspondence also fits around this form. To illustrate its claims, this study will examine the thirty-two letters Bowles published during his 1865 trip, collected later that year in the volume, Across the Continent.²

Literature Review and Points of Departure

Studies of epistolary writing have focused primarily on epistolary fictions and private letters. Prominent among studies of epistolary fiction is Janet Gurkin Altman’s Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form, in which Altman explores textual structures and functionality that transcend the fiction/non-fiction divide, including several “scales of polarity” related to the letter as text. These scales allow Altman to consider letters through a variety of paradigms: the letter as distance-breaker and distance-maker; the privacy of the writer as it is exposed to a public vis-à-vis the audience of a reader; textual or cognitive continuums of I/you, here/there, and now/then; the potential of each letter to embody both a continuation and discontinuation within a chain of dialogue; and so on (186–87). Although differently systematized by other critics, these scales present a useful rubric through which to approach not only fictional letters, as in epistolary fictions, but also epistolary journalism, which demonstrates a fidelity to these models. Additional studies of epistolary fictions are offered by Linda S. Kauffman in two works, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions and Special Delivery: Epistolary Modes in Modern Fiction. Discourses of Desire explores the ideas of inter-textual referentiality and evolution within the epistolary genre and searches for commonalities among disparate epistolary texts. Kauffman’s Special Delivery expands on ideas introduced in her first book but focuses on defamiliarization of the epistolary mode. In particular, Kauffman...