The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British World by Lindsay O’Neill (review)

In recent years, a number of important scholarly works about letters and letter writing during the early modern period have appeared. The literature about early modern networks of one form or another—business, social, or personal—has also grown substantially. In The Opened Letter, O’Neill brings together these two literatures in innovative ways by demonstrating how and why letters and letter writing became central to the maintenance and vitality of various kinds of networks in the British world during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Scholars have long stressed the dynamism of Britain and Britons during the early modern period, pointing to such socioeconomic expressions as the transformation of agriculture, commercialization, urbanization, and the expansion of external trade, as well as such political developments as the consolidation and modernization of the nation-state and the establishment of the rudiments of empire. Broader and tighter communications networks were vital to these developments. Although a number of innovations in transportation and communications—the public post, packet shipping, the rise of newspapers, etc.—created the possibility of long-distance networks, they alone were insufficient to make such networks function effectively as the world in which face-to-face communications overwhelmingly predominated began to fade away.

According to O’Neill, correspondence of various kinds—personal, familial, business, intellectual, and organizational—established (or reaffirmed) the trust, the rhythms, and the routines that members of networks desired once they no longer were able to interact on a face-to-face basis. O’Neill seeks to establish her case through a systematic analysis of more than 10,000 letters written—and, importantly, delivered, read, and often redistributed—between the late seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century. The letters that she studied were written by a small number of elites—six writers primarily—for whom rich troves exist. Social-science historians will immediately suspect selection bias, but, despite the fact that no efforts at formal randomization were made (or potential problems even acknowledged), there seems little reason to believe that the letters chosen and the conclusions derived from them are unrepresentative of the British elite whom O’Neill targeted for analysis. Indeed, the group of writers is sufficiently diverse, and O’Neill sufficiently meticulous, to inspire confidence in her principal findings.

What are these findings? First and foremost, that letters and letter writing, as suggested above, provided the social lubricants necessary to make networks work in a changing world that was not yet “modern” but no longer “traditional.” Moreover, unlike a number of earlier writers who viewed the growing popularity of letters and letter writing in the early eighteenth century as evidence of the rise of the “individual self and the widening gulf between the private and public worlds (7), O’Neill interprets this development in a more nuanced way.¹ To her, letters, particularly familiar letters, helped a great deal in the navigation of social relationships, serving as “the sinews of networks”: As such, they “nurtured communal ties as much as a sense of individual identity” and “tied together informal networks that stood outside state or institutional control” (8). In a world where “the public sphere was not yet fully formed,” letters thus enabled private networks of “smaller publics” to develop, even to flourish (8).

The above discussion merely hints at the riches inside O’Neill’s deeply researched, well-argued, and crisply written book, which includes both a rigorous textual analysis of letters and an impressive mapping of epistolary networks. The Opened Letter makes important contributions to several fields and subfields, and, like many of the letters that O’Neill analyzes, will find a wide readership.