Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa by James How (review)

311 own study to include ‘‘Richardson’s extensive newspaper printing and his official Parliamentary printing,’’ and by increasing five-score the number of printer ornaments traced to Richardson’s press, Mr. Maslen manages to identify some 10,000 pieces printed during a career spanning forty-one years, from 1720 to 1761. Many of these—roughly 7,000—are issues of the various newspapers Richardson printed between 1723 and 1746; they have been and continue to be mined for clues as to Richardson’s notoriously obscure political sympathies. But there is much more here. Mr. Maslen shows, for instance, that Richardson began printing issues of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1744, some nine years prior to the date suggested by Sale—a gem of a find for scholars interested in the two novels Richardson wrote during these years. The 1,000 private and local bills ‘‘laid before the House of Commons’’ which Richardson printed during his long career, as Mr. Maslen notes, may well have provided the ‘‘nascent novelist’’ a window to upper-class behavior. And while we have long known that Richardson quotes from Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) in The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum (1734), we now learn that he printed editions of Locke’s religious manifesto in 1731 and 1736. On the other hand, Mr. Maslen has so thoroughly qualified the tendency of literary scholars to see ‘‘the printer only through the author’’ that the prospect of finding in the products of Richardson’s press interpretive keys to his novels has become even more fraught with difficulty . To Sale’s comforting notion that Richardson’s printing record reveals his own personal biases as a thinker and writer, Mr. Maslen responds with ‘‘a different sense of probabilities,’’ ones rooted far less in Richardson’s intellectual preferences, far more in his keen business sensibilities and in his ties to the standard printing practices of his day. Indeed , while literary scholars will benefit immensely from Mr. Maslen’s painstaking work, the best fruit of his labors is a full account of what Richardson was doing when he was not writing novels— that is, what Richardson was of necessity doing most of the time. To understand Richardson’s press, Mr. Maslen shows, is to understand a great deal not only about a master printer who became a great novelist, but about eighteenth -century print culture generally. His book includes a thoroughly researched Introduction, fully documented lists of books, parliamentary bills, and newspapers printed by Richardson, and an annotated reproduction of 518 of the 526 ornaments used by his press. Closer proofreading would have been useful— the Introduction contains at least 10 rather egregious typos. Nevertheless, Mr. Maslen’s book will enjoy a degree of longevity worthy of the book it replaces—typos be damned. E. Derek Taylor Longwood University JAMES HOW. Epistolary Spaces: English Letter Writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. 214. $89.95. Mr. How offers us a useful new term in letter writing, ‘‘epistolary space,’’ which means ‘‘spaces of connection, providing permanent and seemingly unbreakable links between people and places. . . . epistolary spaces are ‘public’ spaces within which supposedly ‘private’ writings travel—at once imaginary and 312 real.’’ This new epistolary space was the direct result of the establishment of a new and reliable postal system, an invention that itself actively provoked new forms of behavior: specifically, writers chose new content for their letters; new forms of ‘‘connectivity’’ were established for all letter writers, no matter their social status; a new informality and lack of urgency defined the style of letters ; and new epistolary spaces connected letter writers to their rapidly growing capital city of London. Dorothy Osborne’s letters to Sir William Temple, a clandestine correspondence (1652 and 1654), enabled the prolonged courtship of the daughter of the last royalist to remain fighting for Charles I. Osborne chose not to use the new postal system, for fear of having her letters intercepted by Cromwell’s intelligence gatherers. Moreover, Osborne did not want her letters coming under the watchful eyes of her male relatives. This indicates the circumscribed but permeable boundaries of Osborne’s epistolary space...