Infrastructure, Material Culture, and Agency

“Am I skilled enough for the modern world?” Konstantin Dierks uses this question to focus his broad-ranging investigation of epistolary culture, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Pennsylvania, 2009). An American and British middle class, he argues, defined itself not through cosmopolitan consumption, but through a documentary culture. Correspondents worked to access a capitalist and colonial infrastructure by qualifying themselves as writers and receivers of letters. Explicating a geographically and socially broad archive of letters, the book engages enquiries in material culture, history of the book, Atlantic culture, Early American history and culture, and the history of communication. Dierks argues that middle-class letter writers imagined and built their sense of agency, of what was “in my power,” through letter writing. At the same time, “it was letter writing that helped confine certain kinds of people inside their own privilege and blind them to their own power” (8).

Developing a historical trajectory over the long eighteenth century, In My Power presents case studies of writers struggling to write, deliver, and receive letters. In the seventeenth century, royal envoy Edward Randolph had difficulty delivering imperial decrees in the colonies, and pharmaceutical trader Joseph Cruttenden heard from clients and suppliers only annually. Over the turn of the century, administrators built an imperial infrastructure that could make delivery more frequent and consistent, while business people developed conventions, systems, and material objects that would make letters effective: “men of business worked to develop a faith in procedure as well as in people, in reliability as well as trust” (53). Henry Laurens, slave trader and plantation owner, was able by the 1740s to rely on written conventions and social institutions that circulated economic information and facilitated economic exchange. Immigrant and migrant families, separated by boundaries between communication systems as well as colonies, struggled to find the resources required for writing and delivering letters to their absent loved ones. William Goddard, American newspaper publisher, “triggered the revolutionary overthrow of the imperial postal system in the colonies . . . [and] prompted the articulation of a new political ideology of communications” (189).

Impressive in each case is Dierks’s attention to the historical specificity of the challenges the writer faced. Individual frustrations, anxieties, and triumphs emerge as elements of a larger, regional and Atlantic, impersonal and structural, change. Dierks shifts his focus from a particular indentured servant’s letter to something as abstract as “commercial modernity” without oversimplifying either one. For instance, he quotes Emelia Hunter, who asks in a 1754 letter to Elizabeth Sprigg, “Don’t you think I have wrote you a very long Letter, but I know you won’t think it tedious, Expecially when I tell you I constantly fall into this (what shall I call it) way, when I am corresponding with one I think so much my friend as my Dr [dear] Mrs. Sprigg” (161). Dierks sees such a comment as a characteristic move of letter writers developing a culture around and through correspondence. By commenting upon her letter itself, and its symbolic relation to their friendship, Hunter helps herself and her friend conceptualize their identities, actions, and relations. By linking such close readings to a larger argument, Dierks resituates consumer and material culture, often discussed in relation to refinement and cosmopolitanism, in relation to bourgeois modernity. Without ever mentioning Blackberries or iPads, he presents paper, inkstands, penknives, pocketbooks, and seals as items that recognizably convey status while getting work done. His reading of the gendered consumption of all these items provides illuminating context for eighteenth-century portraiture and literature, as well as for the objects themselves.

Hunter and Sprigg, Dierks tells us, lived 100 miles apart. Along with their access to paper and to conventions for describing female friendship, they had access to an infrastructure that got their letters to each other. Packet boats, roads, post houses, schools, and registry offices served to organize and facilitate the work people did with their writing tools. “No matter how innovative its origins or fundamental its importance, infrastructure tends over time to become invisible in the human landscape as well as in the historical record” (27). This phenomenon makes...