Eve Tavor Bannet
Before 1820, letters were the only available technology for distance communication. Consequently, all the everyday written communication and record keeping of life – administrative, diplomatic, military, institutional, commercial, professional, social, familial, and personal – took letter‐form, as did much of the printed matter in newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, biographies, miscellanies, histories, travel literature, and fiction that was designed for a physically removed and anonymous public. Along with sermons, letters were therefore early modern people’s most ubiquitous, versatile, and familiar genre. Many of our letter‐writing habits and conventions date from this period; indeed, bank checks still take rudimentary letter form: place, date, superscription (to), text (“pay …”), signature. But that does not mean that early American people read, wrote, considered, and used letters precisely as we do now.
Epistles were a classical genre allied to the oration; but Renaissance humanists popularized them by redefining letters as “silent speech,” and correspondence as “conversation” (Goldberg 1990: 177, 278). This rapidly became a commonplace: letters reproduced in portable written form the principal features of conversational speech. Issuing at a particular time and place on a particular occasion, each letter was a speech‐act addressed by one person to another or to several others, whose character/s, social standing, relation to oneself, interests, feelings, and tastes had to be taken into account in selecting, shaping, and presenting what was said. Like conversational speech too, each letter utterance was provisional and incomplete: it represented what a person said in medias res, while life and conversations moved on; it often related back, implicitly or explicitly, to previous written or oral communications, and invited future written or oral responses. There were as many kinds of letter as there were kinds of speech act: letters of invitation, compliment, congratulation, condolence, and thanks; letters of advice, command, reproach, and business; letters of news containing information, arguments, anecdotes, and/or descriptions of places, events, and people; and mixed letters containing two or more of the above. There were also appropriate and inappropriate things to say in each kind of letter, for like polite conversational speech, letters had their conventions: one did not fill a letter of condolence with jokes and news of balls and flirtations, for example (Bannet 2005). But letters were versatile too. They could address any subject in any manner, as conversation could; and, from the early eighteenth century, people were encouraged to write their personal letters colloquially, just as they would speak. Besides making letters easier for the unlearned to write and understand, this facilitated the widespread practice of reading letters aloud in public venues such as law courts or political assemblies, and in domestic settings, to one’s family and friends. Treating correspondence as written conversation that was flanked on either side by speech inserted letters seamlessly into what was still, for most people, a predominantly oral world.
Recent trends in scholarship have favored the study of early American letters as a complex and highly developed genre of manuscript and printed writing and as a widespread cultural practice, rather than only as a source of authentic, historical, eyewitness accounts. Early Americanists were the first to fully cross the lines that modernity drew between print, manuscript, and speech; between material, intellectual, and performance cultures; and between canonical and popular writing – and early modern letters straddled all these lines. Early Americanists have also challenged the exceptionalist, proto‐nationalist, and ultimately isolationist paradigm of early American literature which long dominated the field through more pluralistic, transatlantic, and hemispheric approaches which connect early America to Europe, Africa, and other societies in the New World. Since early Americans corresponded quite profusely with people in different parts of Europe and the Americas, as well as with people in the 13 colonies or states, these approaches are relevant to letters too. Together, these two trends have produced important new work on the roles that letters played in diverse areas of early American life: in connecting isolated seventeenth‐century settlements (Grandjean 2015); in the transatlantic interdependence of Puritans and other religious groups (Bremer 1994); in Atlantic and hemispheric mercantile transactions that depended on credit and trust (Dierks 2009; Ditz 1999; Hancock 1995); in the construction of an early American elite (Dierks 2009; Shields 1997); in early American literary coteries and scribal culture (Bannet 2005; McMahon 2012; Shields 1997); in the interactions of “Atlantic families,” whose members were scattered throughout the Atlantic world (Pearsall 2008); in the friendships of early American women (McMahon 2012; Schweitzer 2006); in immigrants’ letters home (De Wolfe 1997; Imbarrato 2006); and in the agency exercised by converted Africans and Native Americans (Brooks 2006; Gaul 2014; Wyss 2012).
This is a genre in which primary early American material abounds. In accordance with the trend for studying letter writing as a widespread cultural practice, the cache of original manuscript letters now available in print and (increasingly) online has been expanded beyond the papers of founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Laurens, or Samuel Curwen to the correspondences of founding mothers such as Mercy Otis Warren, Abigail Adams, or Eliza Pinckney. Efforts have also been made to publish the letters of non‐elite groups, such as the Irish (Miller 2003), immigrants (De Wolfe 1997; Imbarrato 2006), Indians (Brooks 2006; Gaul 2014), and women (most notably in a new database, North American Women’s Letters and Diaries). Original early American letters can also be found in Early Encounters in America, a database, and are sometimes printed in the journals of local historical societies. Nevertheless, large numbers of early American letters remain buried in manuscript archives on the eastern seaboard and across the Atlantic world.
Early American letters also frequently found their way into eighteenth‐century British and American periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, and printed books. Those published in America are accessible in online databases, such as America’s Historical Periodicals, America’s Historical Newspapers, and Early American Imprints. Sabin Americana is a good source for contemporary books of travel letters, such as those of John Smith, William Eddis, or William Bartram. A significant proportion of the new American‐authored novels published during the early national period also took epistolary form. They include what has been called the first American novel, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789), as well as The Algerine Spy in Philadelphia (1787), Enos Hitchock’s Memoirs of the Bloomington Family (1790), Jeremy Belknap’s The Foresters, an American Tale (1792), An American Lady’s The Helpless Orphan (1793), Fidelity Rewarded (1796), Samuel Relf’s Infidelity (1797), Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797) and The Boarding School (1798), Lady from New York’s The Fortunate Discovery (1798), John Davis’s The Original Letters of Ferdinand and Elisabeth (1798), Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), Clara Howard (1801), and Jane Talbot (1801), Sukey Vickery’s Emily Hamilton (1803), Martha Read’s Margaretta (1807), and Leonora Sansay’s Secret History (1808). Only some of these novels appear in modern print editions, but eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century editions of all may be found online in Early American Imprints.
The three parts of this chapter are devoted successively to handwritten letters, printed letters, and epistolary novels. This last section relates epistolary novels to the wider culture of letters, with the help of Hannah Webster Foster’s easily accessible and frequently taught epistolary novel, The Coquette (1797).
At the beginning of English settlements in America, letters were primarily used to conduct the business of monarchs, courtiers, government officials, church ministers, scholars, and merchants. Exploration and colonization, administration and diplomacy, churches and missions, commerce, trade, and war – all depended on letters to carry information, intelligence, and orders or requests back and forth. Letters continued to be used for purposes of government, commerce, scholarship, and religion throughout our period. Among the nobility and gentry, as well as among educated professionals, men and some women also wrote “familiar letters” to family, friends, and acquaintance to maintain the familial and social networks on which they depended for patronage, and for material and moral support. But as England got into the business of empire at the end of the seventeenth century, the practice of letter writing began to spread down the social hierarchy, beyond the political, social, and economic elite, to include the middling and lower ranks, such as shopkeepers, artisans, servants, mariners, and non‐elite women.
This democratization of letter writing evolved more slowly in colonial America than in Britain. Britain needed the letter‐writing skills of growing numbers of clerks, secretaries, customs officers, government officials, soldiers, sailors, factors, commercial “Writers,” estate agents, plantation managers, and other members of the middling and lower ranks to make her expanding commercial empire work. Acquisition by women, apprentices, and servants of letter‐writing skills also helped “Atlantic families,” as described in Sarah M.S. Pearsall’s (2008) book of the same name, whose members were temporarily or permanently dispersed in different parts of Britain, North America, and/or the Caribbean, to continue to function as useful family networks. Early Americans recognized the importance of disseminating letter‐writing skills too. Along with sermons, almanacs, and primers, letter manuals, which showed the unlearned how to compose, present, and use letters, were among the first British texts to be adapted to American purposes and published in the port cities of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York (Bannet 2005). But among early Americans, letter writing soon became part of what Richard Bushman (1992) called “the refinement of America”: those who achieved wealth and status in the New World through land, commerce, or one of the professions sought to distinguish themselves from others and figure as what contemporaries described as an “aristocracy,” by adopting the manners, style, trappings, and “polite” letter‐writing practices of genteel Europeans. Letters and letter‐books (where writers kept copies of the letters they sent) of prominent British‐American families were carefully preserved and ultimately donated to historical societies or libraries. Those of artisans, journeymen, indentured servants, Africans, and Native Americans did not necessarily survive and are harder to find. Nevertheless, recent scholarship has shown that, by the 1760s, more non‐elite white Americans and some converted Africans and Native Americans were using letters too.
Democratization of letter writing depended not only on the dissemination of literacy and skills, but also on the construction of an infra‐structure capable of carrying anyone’s mail from place to place, especially in England, where only governments and elites could afford to send letters by a servant or messenger. England began to establish a public postal system within the British Isles in 1660 and built major highways connecting London to provincial cities soon after. But early America lacked an efficient and fully functional inter‐ and intra‐colonial postal service until just before the Revolution in 1776 (Fuller 1972; Robinson 1948). Though successive governments in London appointed postmasters general for the American colonies to build and run a rudimentary inland postal system, they were more interested in providing for transatlantic communication by water than in overcoming the obstacles presented inland by America’s vast distances and difficult terrain (Dierks 2009; Robinson 1948). Until the middle of the eighteenth century, this was not a matter of much urgency to Americans either. The earliest settlers had used Indian paths and Indian carriers or servants and traveling acquaintances to carry letters between isolated settlements (Grandjean 2015). And early Americans continued to send their letters by servants, family members, acquaintances, or passing travelers when they could, rather than through the post, because postage was expensive and because letters sent through the post were likely to be intercepted and read by the authorities. This could get people into serious political and legal trouble.
Considered as a technology for distance communication and as an instrument of government and trade, manuscript letters helped to shape colonial culture in numerous ways. Take, for instance, that curious combination of dependence and autonomy that characterized American settlements from the first. Letters traveling across the ocean in ships were early Americans’ principal links to the English joint‐stock companies and co‐religionists – and later to the Board of Trade and Plantations, merchants, and lobbying agents in London – on whom settlers depended, individually and collectively, for supplies and support, just as they were the Sovereign’s, the British government’s, and British merchants’ principal means of instructing the governors, customs officers, and commercial factors they sent out. Letters traveled more easily and efficiently by water than over bad or non‐existent roads, and merchant vessels carrying mail were soon plying their way back and forth across the Atlantic. Consequently, American colonies tended to develop separately and distinctly not only because they were settled by different cultural groups and on different principles, but also because they were more regularly connected to Britain than to each other. But sailing ships were slow and unreliable. Relying on winds and the Gulf Stream and obliged to circumnavigate the Atlantic, they took between six weeks and three months to travel from London to New York; there were seasons when they could not sail; they sank in storms and gales; and they threw letters overboard when they were attacked. Letters from London therefore arrived in American port cities many months after an American letter was sent – if they arrived at all – bearing answers or instructions that were often inadequate, misjudged, or superseded by events. This meant that political leaders on the spot had to act autonomously meanwhile creating realities in their provinces that Whitehall later sought to countermand. Settlers too acted autonomously to create realities on the ground that did not accord with London’s posted policies, for instance when they appropriated prohibited Indian lands or ignored the Navigation Acts by trading directly with the Spanish or the French (“smuggling”). But then, as Benjamin Franklin (1766) reminded Parliament, governing America “only at the expense of a little pen, ink and paper” meant that the “usual way of requisition” was to send a circular letter to America “reciting the occasion and recommending it to the colonies to grant such aids as became their loyalty, and were suitable to their abilities” (3, 14). Though addressing Parliament’s efforts to tax America just before the Revolution, he was making a larger point: governing from London by letter meant depending on the consent and goodwill of recipients in the colonies, who might comply if they could. The same held in reverse. When they wanted to press British authorities to act in their favor, early Americans traveled to London in person if they could, and used letters to mobilize friends or agents in London to speak and act for them, if they couldn’t.
Government by letter, together with the enormous distances in the Americas themselves, meant that early American leaders, from John Winslow and Increase Mather to Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, had to do much of their political and personal business by letter, whether at home or abroad. This gave rise to an important and distinctive branch of early American epistolography which I will call “mixed political letters.” Here political news and information was combined in varying proportions with personal, commercial, social, and/or family business. The letters of early American political leaders took this mixed form because the clergymen, planters, merchants, and professionals who rose to public office and became the political elite during the colonial and early national periods adapted the kind of letters they were accustomed to write in these everyday capacities to their new official, political roles. Early modern people often wrote what letter manuals called “mixed letters” because they generally worked, corresponded with, and depended upon people they knew personally – members of their families (close and distant blood relations, relatives by marriages), erstwhile members of their households (apprentices, journeymen, agents, or factors), and patrons or friends, often in the same line of work, who were willing to “serve” them. Their letters were therefore designed not only to conduct whatever commercial, clerical, professional, or plantation business had occasioned them, but also to maintain or activate the underlying personal relationship which sustained the working relationship, by corresponding about family and mutual acquaintance, exchanging ideas or confidences, requesting or performing personal favors, and/or sharing political news, information, and gossip (“intelligence”). When the same men wrote letters in their official or political capacities, political business obviously prevailed; but they often continued to keep up their personal relationships with one another by conversing on personal, social, or family matters, exchanging ideas, and/or performing or requesting favors. They also continued to use their other familial and social, commercial, clerical or professional epistolary networks to glean political news and intelligence from afar. Consequently, we have a variety of beautifully written mixed political letters in the collections of historical societies and in the Papers of the Founding Fathers, not only to, from, and among political leaders, but also to and from women in their epistolary networks, such as Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Mercy Otis Warren, and Abigail Adams, whose family and sociable letters also “served” their correspondents by reporting political events, describing what was happening in their locality, and commenting upon political, social, and economic situations. Sharing news and intelligence which could be useful to one’s addressee/s was also a valued way of serving commercial correspondents, family, and friends. It made a letter worthy of its recipient’s perusal, and capable of being read aloud and discussed with company; correspondents apologized when they had no information to impart. Consequently, news and intelligence often traveled faster through epistolary networks than via newspapers or official channels.
The need to preserve and maintain supportive personal relationships across long distances with people one had not seen and might not see for years or ever again also affected early American letters in other ways. On the one hand, as Toby Ditz (1999) and Sarah Pearsall (2008) showed, early Americans used a variety of rhetorical devices in their mercantile and familial letters to present themselves as honest, credible, and sincere in order to preserve their credit with their correspondents; and they dwelled on sentiments of friendship, intimacy, or emotional proximity to keep the attachment alive. But on the other hand, they frequently wrote with the greatest caution, in the knowledge that their letters were likely to be intercepted by the “secret office,” first of the British and later of the American post office, and that penalties ranging from hanging to tarring and feathering awaited those judged politically incorrect. Letter writers sometimes resorted to ciphers, codes, and encryptions to evade prying eyes; particularly hard to detect now are codes based on shifting signifiers (e.g. “Fitch & Jones of Charleston ordered a bushel of corn” to mean: “General Lee wants a bushel of muskets”) (Bannet 2005). Letter writers sometimes mentioned the constraints they were under that prevented them from saying more. More often, they hinted at what they could not say. They almost always described how their letter would travel and/or by whom it would be carried to signal to correspondents how much or little they felt able to say. The upshot, however, is that handwritten early American letters are seldom as open and transparent as they labored to seem.
The spread of letter writing down the social hierarchy was accompanied by the emergence of letters as a ubiquitous print genre.
Letters played significant roles in the new field of journalism. Both in Britain and early America, newsletters preceded newspapers. Initially copied and customized by scribes and later printed in italic to imitate handwriting, commercial newsletters pretended to be personal letters that a gentleman in town, who had heard the latest national and international news, was writing to his friend in the country. In newspapers and periodicals, where they continued to loom large, letters took a variety of forms: letters to the editor, in which readers conversed with him and other letter writers about what they had read; embedded letters from foreign “correspondents” supplying intelligence from abroad; translations of classical letters by Cicero or Pliny; historical letters such as Ann Boleyn’s last letter to Henry VIII before her execution; and travel letters, such as one of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy letters. Pamphlets likewise often took the form of open letters to the public on political, social, religious, philosophical, scientific, and economic topics.
Periodical studies is still in its inception. But it is already clear that printed letters traveled quite rapidly from place to place within Britain, within early America, and across the Atlantic (as did essays, short stories, poems, and paragraphs of news) because provincial British printers and early American printers assembled their own newspapers and periodicals (and later, magazines) by selectively reprinting material from other newspapers and periodicals or magazines and adding new, locally produced items of their own. This was one way in which Cato’s Letters (1720–1723) traveled throughout the Atlantic world. Written by Irishman John Trenchard and Scotsman Thomas Gordon, these letters, which championed political and civil liberties against the corrupt English oligarchy, were initially published serially in the London Journal and later collected together in a book. Reprinted in America throughout the century in most of the 13 colonies, individually in periodicals as well as together in book form, Cato’s Letters became a key influence on the Revolutionary generation (Mulford 2012: 79–80).
Early American printers also published American‐authored letters in their periodicals and magazines. The most prized of these today are Benjamin Franklin’s satirical “Silence Dogood Letters” (1722) in the New England Courant. American‐authored epistolary pamphlets flourished, too. Religious controversies were conducted in print throughout the eighteenth century via open letters between contending ministers who addressed each other while the reading public looked on. But political epistolary pamphlets began to proliferate only in the run‐up to the Revolution. These may be represented here by John Dickinson’s Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies (1767) and, more ambiguously, by John Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782).
Print is sometimes said to depersonalize the writing it disseminates; and Jürgen Habermas famously argued that the political and ideological debates regularly conducted in the public prints demonstrate the exemplary freedom and openness of the eighteenth‐century British public sphere. But the letters in periodicals and epistolary pamphlets tell a different story. Like the eidolons or fictional personae who appeared in print as the authors of periodicals (“Mr. Spectator,” “Constantia”), the writers of printed letters generally hid behind fictional names (Philanthropos, Clarinda, Cato) and/or fictional personae (Silence Dogood, a Farmer in Pennsylvania, James, the American Farmer) to make it harder for the authorities to find and prosecute them for contradicting the party in power or criticizing the great. Writing as Silence Dogood, Benjamin escaped the prison sentence to which his brother, James Franklin, was condemned for printing and publishing the Courant. Using fictional names or personae certainly depersonalized real authors in the sense that it erased their actual identities. This meant that one writer could write multiple letters over different names; and that several writers could (and did) assume the same print persona. But personations, and the names given to characterize them, reasserted the presence in print of determinate, even quirky, personhood, to cater to the deeply ingrained eighteenth‐century conviction that to read writing in general, and letters in particular, was to read the words and hear the voice of a person who was directly addressing you, whose character you could come to know. At the same time, the harlequin parade across the public prints of masquerading authors and fictional personae bore witness to the danger, in the eighteenth‐century public sphere, of taking liberties with one’s betters and of speaking with too much openness. One might add that, in a feedback loop between handwritten and printed letters whose origin is still obscure, some people signed their personal sociable or family letters with names borrowed from history or romance, instead of with their own. For instance, Mercy Otis Warren and Abigail Adams signed themselves Marcia (wife of Regulus, a Roman famous for his constancy and fortitude) and Portia (wife of Brutus, who killed the tyrant, Caesar). In this regard, printed and handwritten letters both commingled the imaginary and symbolic with the real, inhabiting borderlands between fact and fiction that the novel also made its own.
In Britain, letters also flourished in printed books: volumes of travel letters, biographies in the form of Lives and Letters, volumes of miscellaneous or collected letters, conduct books in epistolary form, verse epistles, epistolary histories, and letters from the dead to the living. Some of this British material was reprinted in early America, where it was often taken up successively by printers in different provinces or states. Among the most influential of these reprints during the early national period were the Earl of Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son (1775ff.), Hester Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind (1783ff.), John Bennett’s Letters to a Young Lady (1791ff.), Helena Maria Williams’s Letters on the Revolution in France (1792ff.), and Anne Seward’s Monody on Major Andre, to which are added Letters addressed to her by Major Andre in the Year 1769 (1781ff.). But this kind of material was more often imported by booksellers and libraries than reprinted in America, a practice that continued well into the nineteenth century and gave early American readers access to the fashionable books that their counterparts in the Old World enjoyed. Americans increasingly produced their own writing in these genres – for instance, Philarites’ Letters from the Living to the Dead (1750), The American Traveler (1770), Benjamin Franklin’s Reflections on Courtship and Marriage in two Letters to a Friend (1793), John Witherspoon’s A Series of Letters on Education (1797), and Memoirs of the Life of the late Charles Lee, Esq, … to which are added … Letters to and from many distinguished Characters both in Europe and America (1792). American political polemics also sometimes took the form of publishing the real letters of political actors. Sometimes, this was done to unmask and embarrass public officials, as in the case of Copies of Letters sent to Great Britain by His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson, the Hon. Andrew Oliver and several other persons (1773). Sometimes it was done to promote support for Congress’s decisions by informing the public of what its representatives had done or suffered behind closed doors, as in the case of Letters of Major General Lee to the Right Hon Earl Percy and Major General Burgoyne, with the Answers (1775) or John Adams’s Twenty‐Six Letters upon Interesting Subjects respecting the Revolution in America, written in Holland in the Year 1780 (1786). Sometimes real personal letters were published to restore a public official’s bruised reputation, as in the case of John Jay’s Letters, being the whole of the Correspondence between the Hon. John Jay Esq and Mr. Lewis Littlepage, a young man whom Mr. Jay, when in Spain, patronized and took into his family (1786).
Books of letters in this second group fell on a spectrum from genuine letters, that someone had once written to someone else, to letters written only for publication, with most books of letters falling somewhere in between. Some letters written for publication were fictional in the sense that they only pretended to have originated in real letters, and so successfully done that one is not always sure. Chapone’s Letters on the Improvement of the Mind were “Addressed to a Young Lady” who we are told was her niece; there was a Hester Chapone, but was there ever a niece? “Mrs Peddle” entitled her work Rudiments of Taste in Seven Letters from a Mother to her Daughter (London, 1759; Philadelphia, 1790), but was this the pseudonym for a mother or a man?
Most printed letters that had originated in the real letters of real people also fell somewhere between the genuine and the fictive because attitudes to letters were governed by a pragmatics of reuse. Correspondents themselves kept letters selectively for rereading or reuse; Benjamin Franklin, for instance, kept pedestrian letters from one “Courtney Melmoth” (pseudonym for Samuel Jackson Pratt, an English novelist who briefly wrote political pamphlets for him) to record for future reference the individuals to whom Melmoth had introduced him and who Melmoth’s connections in Paris were. Letter writers also tried to shape their posthumous reputations by selectively burning their letters and letter‐books before their deaths. If they did not do this themselves, their descendants often did. Mercy Otis Warren went one better: she rewrote and had clean handwritten copies made of the letters she wished to preserve for posterity. As if that weren’t enough, before being published, original manuscript letters (those selected or those which survived) were almost invariably revised by their authors, by his/her descendants, or by successive editors to accommodate them to readerships, uses, and times or circumstances different from those envisioned by the writer when the letters were originally written. Once correctors, editors, and/or authors had revised manuscript letters by correcting their grammar, punctuation, and spelling; by amending their language or updating their style; by adding entirely new paragraphs or letters; by eliminating passages or whole letters embarrassing to the writer or his/her friends; and/or by reordering the sequence of letters to control their sense, “genuine” published letters no longer reflected their manuscript sources in any simple or direct way. Even more far‐reaching alterations also occurred when letters were reused. Crèvecoeur, for instance, reworked his Letters from an American Farmer (1782) to publish them in France, by adding, eliminating, and changing letters to substantially alter the political and ideological import of the work; Leonora Sansay not only reused her genuine letters to Aaron Burr as the foundation for her epistolary novel, Secret History; she or someone else transposed whole chunks of letters from the Secret History into another novel, Zelica, the Creole (1821). It is therefore unwise to assume that printed letters, even by real, historical people, are authentic in the sense that they reproduce what those people thought and wrote as they originally thought and wrote it to give us direct access to who and what those people really were.
Like other popular eighteenth‐century novels, epistolary fiction told of seductions, abductions, elopements, and rapes, of incest and adulterous affairs, of domestic violence and financial depredations occurring in genteel families as they impacted a virtuous and suffering heroine or led to her downfall. But epistolary novels used letters supposedly written by the people involved to lend immediacy and authenticity to the scandalous secrets of private life they revealed. Epistolary novels usually consisted of one or more correspondences, in which character‐narrators recount pieces of a story to a friend as they occur, and in which subsequent discussions among correspondents provide diverse ideological and psychological perspectives on what is going on. The story could also be told one‐sided, either by presenting the letters of only one of the characters concerned, or by embedding the whole narrative in a single, lengthy letter from a character‐narrator to a silent addressee. There were several good reasons for early Americans – who began publishing American novels only in the late 1780s, a century after novels had swept Britain, two centuries after they had swept France – to choose to tell stories “in a series of letters.”
The first and most obvious was that letters were already so familiar, even to readers with limited formal education. Even Americans who did not often receive letters themselves were likely to have listened to others reading letters they had received to their company, and to have participated in the discussion that normally followed. As we saw, American readers also regularly encountered real and imaginary letters in newspapers, periodicals, and magazines, as well as in all manner of printed books. Readers who were fond of novels were equally familiar with epistolary fiction. Because so many eighteenth‐century British and European novels took epistolary form, American readers who borrowed imported novels from circulating libraries or bought them from bookstores already knew how epistolary fiction worked. These were advantages for early American authors who were competing with imported novels in a new nation with a relatively small market for books, where printers, each catering to their own localities, needed to reach as many potential customers as possible to cover their costs.
Another good reason for American novelists to choose an epistolary form was that by the late 1780s, letters were well grounded in American social life. American novelists could draw on the epistolary styles and practices of diverse mixed‐gender social networks: those of “refined” America which adopted the manners, trappings, and sociable letter‐writing practices of polite Europeans; those of literary coteries or salons, whose members shared talk of books and ideas and practiced a form of scribal publication by exchanging their own poems or prose writings in manuscript form; and those of political networks, where correspondents were allied by shared personal, social, and political interests. Sociable letter‐writing practices also extended beyond these elite circles when, after the Revolution, daughters of the middling sort joined daughters of the elite in boarding schools and Young Ladies’ Academies which taught the rhetorical rules and generic conventions of written compositions and required girls to practice and display their accomplishments as writers and readers of essays and letters. A dyadic or small group version of literary coteries, based on sincere and intimate sentimental friendships and involving the sharing of letters and journals, then grew up in a segment of the “middling” sort – the aspiring offspring of artisans, small farmers, tradesmen, and lesser professionals (Knott 2009). By the late 1780s, then, fictional letters could credibly reflect the epistolary practices of early national social groups and thus add to the realism of early American novels which often claimed to be “founded on fact.”
A final reason to write epistolary novels in this sentimental age was that personal letters already possessed a strong, sentimental charge. Personal handwritten letters were emotionally charged because (as Renaissance humanists put it in another much‐repeated commonplace) letters “make the absent present” (Goldberg 1990: 61). Once inscribed in letters which could be carried from place to place, the words of absent lovers, family, or friends could be heard as if they were present, whenever their words were read. Touching the paper they had touched, seeing the characters they had blotted, reading their words with their familiar cadences and intonations recounting their thoughts and experiences set a beloved person before the mind’s eye. As Virginian William Fitzhugh put it in a letter of 1687, correspondence with his friend supplied “a continued Communication and Society, which I as really enjoy, whilst I am reading your most endearing Letters, or answering them, as if happily present with you” (Brown 1989: 66). Or as Samuel Richardson, author of the epistolary novel Clarissa, said in a personal letter to Sophia Westcomb, “your letters bring you before me in Person” (Carroll 1964: 65). Letters embodied a magical property of writing itself: “ideal presence supplies the want of real presence; and in idea we perceive persons acting and suffering precisely as in an original survey” (Kames 1765: 85) At once material and mental, real and imagined, letters from absent people whom one loved and missed were “favors” that evoked feelings of pleasure and pain, proximity and loss, gratitude and anxiety (letters could be delayed, withheld, go astray, or cease with the life of the writer) quite apart from whatever passions or sentiments were expressed or aroused by the messages they contained. Epistolary novels played to readers’ everyday belief that to read a letter was to read the words, and hear the voice, of a physically absent person who was addressing one as if they were present again. They animated the imagination that brought that person “before me in Person” and tapped into the habit of listening to other peoples’ correspondences as letters came and went. Epistolary novelists took pains to describe the material features of their fictional letters (appearance of the handwriting, paper, blots, evidence of tears etc.); the circumstances, difficulties or delays in writing, reading, sending, awaiting, or receiving them; and what characters felt as they did so, less perhaps to appropriate scribal culture for print than to invite readers to relate to fictional printed letters as they would to real handwritten ones.
As we saw, early Americans invariably wrote in the same manuscript and print genres as their British counterparts, even after Independence. Twentieth‐century critics found this troubling: they complained that imitating British periodicals and novels made early American writers derivative and second rate, and detracted from the uniqueness and specificity of the American experience. But as Judith Sargent Murray (1992) pointed out in 1798, in this period, “every modern scribbler” was a “gleaner” (17). British, French, American, Spanish, and German writers all imitated each other, especially where genres were concerned. This is what made them intelligible to readers within and across national boundaries. For genres function like so many grammars: they consist of formal and thematic conventions which organize texts, as grammar organizes sentences, to make them readily comprehensible. Classical genres like tragedy, comedy, and epic had their grammars, just as newer popular genres like periodicals and epistolary novels did. The fact that epistolary novels were being written all over fashionable Europe between the seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries does not mean that early American authors did not originate or adapt generic conventions to address uniquely American characters and concerns. This is worth emphasizing. I will therefore conclude by using Hannah Webster Foster’s (2013) frequently taught epistolary novel, The Coquette (1797), to illustrate this point, as well as others made in this chapter.
Published anonymously in Boston by “a Lady of Massachusetts,” The Coquette was “a Novel; Founded on Fact,” as its title page states. The facts had been reported by the Salem Mercury in 1788, in an item that was picked up and reprinted in other newspapers throughout New England: a mysterious but quiet, and obviously respectable and well‐educated lady, who had checked in to the Bell Tavern in Danvers near Boston, telling the landlord that her husband would soon join her, had died there in childbirth, all alone. When the lady was discovered to have been Elizabeth Whitman of Hartford, Connecticut – the unmarried, 37‐year‐old daughter of a minister, who had been engaged to a minister, now deceased, and was courted by another minister thereafter – the case became a scandal that everyone gossiped about. In print, moralists presented Whitman as an awful warning of the fate awaiting fallen women; and in sermons, ministers condemned her all the more harshly because she was one of their own (Davidson 2004: 221ff.).
The Coquette was a sentimental novel that differed from European novels both in style and in its treatment of the passions. From The Portuguese Letters (tr. 1678) and Aphra Behn’s Love Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister (1684) through Eliza Haywood’s popular novellas of the 1720s and 1730s, Rousseau’s Eloise, and Goethe’s Werther, to Mary Hays’s Emma Courtney and Eliza Fenwick’s Secrecy, the letters in sentimental novels were, by convention, what Marta Kvande (2013) calls “expressive.” Novelists used every resource of imagery and rhetoric to enable characters to enact their emotions and/or “frustrated desires” on the page, in order to make them vividly present to readers; indeed, ministers and moralists complained that such novels were dangerous because, in so doing, they aroused readers’ passions to fever pitch. But this was not how ordinary letter writers normally wrote what Kvande terms their “utilitarian” letters, or their personal ones (240, 241). Foster departed from the expressive literary convention by using imagery sparingly and choosing a simple, plain, reticent style which more closely resembled ordinary letters and ordinary speech. Eliza recounts successive encounters with her suitors, records her mother’s or her friends’ verbal reactions and her responses as they occurred, and states her thoughts about her situation, in the everyday English that any reasonably educated American might use when telling a friend what was happening in her life and what she thought about it. Rather than dramatically enacting her emotions in purple prose, Eliza names them: she desires gaiety; she is depressed or melancholic; Sanford appeals to her fancy, Boyer to her judgment. While silent physical symptoms (lassitude, tears, retiring to bed) are permitted, there are no letters in which Eliza expresses her passions for Sanford either before or during their affair; and after discovering that she is with child, she largely falls silent. Except for “scraps of her writing, containing miscellaneous reflections on her situation, the death of her babe, and the absence of her friends,” some “written before, some after her confinement” (127), found at the inn after her death and two letters to her mother and to her friend Julia expressing her penitence and regret, Eliza’s state at the end is characterized from the outside by her friends. But, perhaps paradoxically, Eliza is all the more recognizable, her fate all the more moving, for the simplicity and reticence of the letters in which her story is told. Less is more.
If Foster had “privileged access to Whitman or her friends” through family connections, as many supposed (Foster 2013: xiii), her departures from Whitman’s character and epistolary style also tend toward simplification. As Bryan Waterman (2011) observes, Whitman’s few surviving letters to her married friend, Joel Barlow, “oscillate between flirtatious performance and self‐conscious, collaborative literary production and criticism” and “hardly concern themselves with events at all” (544). Stylistically, Whitman’s letters consisted of intimate emotional apostrophes to Barlow, informal, rambling, associative prose, signatures as “Your Fond and Faithful Wife” and references to the woman Barlow eventually married as his “second wife” (Foster 2013: 273, 277, 278). These letters are more than just “flirtatious.” They suggest that, like Aaron Burr’s “Leonora” or Gilbert Imlay’s Wollstonecraft, Whitman was one of many contemporary single, educated, and accomplished women who chose to preserve their freedom and autonomy by eschewing the inevitable subordination and confinement of marriage in favor of more egalitarian, long‐term, extramarital relationships with single or married men who shared their literary and/or intellectual interests (Lyons 2006: 237–308). Foster also ignored the fact that Whitman was a poet who had more elevated taste in reading than romances and was capable of serving as Barlow’s literary sounding board (Waterman 2011: 545). In the novel, Boyer’s correspondent, Selby, reports that Eliza “discovers a fund of useful knowledge, and extensive reading, which render her particularly entertaining” (37); but this is rarely evident in her letters or in those of her female correspondents. They write letters, instead, in a style marked by “elegance […] conciseness and perspicuity” as well as by “frankness, simplicity and sincerity,” which is “open to every capacity […] ornamental to every station” (Foster 2013: 233, 150). Together with elimination of Whitman’s learning, this had the effect both of universalizing Eliza into an Anywoman and making her fictional letters “open” and intelligible to people of “every capacity.”
At the same time, for devoted novel readers and the better educated, Foster inserted a series of rapid allusions to other British and early American novels they would have known, as indications of what novels her novel could be compared to. As Daniel Couch (2014) observes, those “scraps of her writing” found after her death linked Eliza to a moment in Richardson’s Clarissa after the rape when the heroine expresses her feelings on torn fragments of paper, too distraught and close to madness to frame a whole letter or coherent thought. Unlike Clarissa’s, Eliza’s “scraps” are “repressed from the text, withheld by her friends” (686). The allusion to Clarissa economically does all the necessary work: it evokes, without directly representing, Eliza’s violently disturbed state of mind. Though fragments and scraps may symbolize the torn and conflicted state of Eliza’s psyche from the beginning of the novel, Julia’s description of them points in a different direction. As “reflections” that are “calculated to sooth and comfort the minds of mourning connections” (127), Eliza’s scraps show that her “reflections” have already led her to moderate her passions and articulate elevated moral and religious sentiments calculated to be acceptable to her mother and friends, like those which she conveyed in the letters of penitence to Julia and her mother that we have already read; they do not need repeating. Other rapid allusions compare Sanford to Lovelace, Clarissa’s villainous aristocratic seducer, and to “Chesterfieldians” like Sedley in Samuel Jackson Pratt’s The Pupil of Pleasure (1776; Boston, 1780) who turn the hypocrisy intrinsic to politeness into an art of manipulation and deception, make a sport of seducing innocent women, and commit adultery with impunity.
The allusion to Lovelace invited readers to notice that Foster structured her novel like Clarissa, as separate correspondences between male and female friends, adding (as Richardson had) some extra letters, for instance, between Eliza and her mother, or at the end, among concerned friends. Like Richardson too, Foster used Sanford’s correspondence with his friend, Charles Deighton, to reveal to readers what her heroine does not know about his rakish tactics and motives. But Foster also used these separate correspondences, together with differences of opinion among the women, to raise questions about proper feminine epistolary etiquette. The letters among the female correspondents create and sustain a community of women based on sympathy and mutual aid and concern. But it is a female community governed by new epistolary rules, promoted by conservative feminists, which prohibited ladies from corresponding with men not related to them and demanded that wives permit the care of their immediate family to supplant correspondence with their erstwhile female friends. Mrs. Richman justifies not “pay[ing] that attention to former associates which we may wish” by arguing that centering their “benevolence” in their own family made women “more beneficial to the public” (20). Eliza, by contrast, calls this idea of marriage “the tomb of friendship”; and “circumscribing” themselves in this way prevents Eliza’s married or engaged female friends from personally coming to her aid (19–20, 20). Eliza also rejects “censure” of “epistolary communication between the sexes” as an “unjust” retreat from that heterosexual “friendly and social intercourse” which “softened” and polished men (37, 38). When raising the issue with Boyer, she intimates that in this period before “separate spheres,” conservative rules for female correspondence threatened the openness and heterosociality of what Lucia McMahon (2012) calls “the Social Family Circle” (78) as much as it threatened women’s ability to “balance marriage with conscious sisterly relations” (Cott 1977: 193). But Sanford’s only note to Eliza precedes and heralds her fall, suggesting that epistolary communication between the sexes may be a greater danger still.
Eliza’s marital choice, between a sententious and somewhat self‐righteous New England minister and a fashionable Anglicized American gentleman, also linked The Coquette to “The Story of Margaretta” in Murray’s The Gleaner and a host of other popular early American tales of constancy such as Fidelity Rewarded (1796) or The History of Constantius and Pulchera (1794), where the heroine’s preference for the poor but honest American suitor who represents traditional manners and republican values is presented as the correct, patriotic, republican act (Bannet 2014). But Foster localized and complicated this familiar story. As a working clergyman with intellectual interests and limited means, who needs a serious, steady, and conversable wife, Boyer is a member of “a class of society” which has “domestic enjoyment” particularly “at command” (33). This was a class that once dominated New England politically and socially, a class that had constituted the bedrock of the early American intelligentsia and that in Hartford and Boston was still holding out against new, secular and Enlightenment influences. By contrast, as a “Chesterfieldian,” Sanford represents the new breed of Americans who were learning to conduct themselves as gentlemen from the conduct books based on Lord Chesterfield’s Letters to his Son that dominated the American market. Sanford illustrates the effects of obeying Chesterfieldian injunctions such as “We must like the chameleon put on the hue of the persons we wish to be well with”; “Rather to flatter a person’s vanity than otherwise”; and “Find out, if possible their foible, their governing passion, or their particular merit; take them on their weak side, and you will generally succeed” (Trusler 1798: 93, 56). A “mere Proteus” who “can assume any shape that will best suit my purpose” (18), Sanford uses flattery and Eliza’s “weak side” – her horror of confinement, her hankering for affluence, and her “desire to shine in the gay circle of fashionable amusements” – to separate her from Boyer and bend her to his will (22). Sanford is thus associated with genteel forms of sociality, borrowed from England, which formed part of what Clare Lyons (2006) calls America’s “Pleasure Culture” (237–308), while Boyer is associated with virtuous, rational, and Christian forms of sociality centered in domesticity. Exemplified in the novel at the Richmans’ and at Mrs. Wharton’s, these consist largely of suppers at home with a few select friends, who together enjoy “the feast of reason and the flow of soul” and “that social converse which is the true zest of life in which […] none but virtuous minds can participate” (20, 24).
Since women took the rank and standing of their husbands, Eliza’s choice between suitors was a choice between incompatible ways of life. It was also a choice faced by early national society during the 1790s when efforts were being made to “secure the Republic” by promoting the Cult of Domesticity and Republican Motherhood, and by suppressing extramarital relationships, especially among educated, genteel women, who remained single in larger numbers than any other group, together with the “Pleasure Culture” and the dissipations it entailed (Lyons 2006: 288, 292ff.). Eliza debates the freedom of women in the new nation, and in the family which was considered its fundamental building block, with correspondents like Mrs. Richman and Lucy Freeman who exemplify and defend the cult of domesticity as the right form for that “republican virtue on which national consolidation is forged” (Hewitt 2004: 28). However, they have found congenial secular marital partners. They have not had to confront the choice in the stark form in which it presents itself to Eliza, who feels wholly unqualified to act as a clergyman’s wife; who recognizes that neither suitor, and neither way of life, is sufficient on its own; and who is condemned as a coquette by other characters in the novel because (like New England) she cannot quite bring herself to choose. These and other questions raised by the characters’ differences and debates remain unsettled at the story’s end, because the conclusion to which the plot and Eliza’s untimely end leads – that the wages of sin are death – is undermined by the novel’s multi‐perspective epistolary form.
The multi‐perspective epistolary novel – the novel consisting of multiple correspondences in which correspondents provide diverse ideological and psychological perspectives on what is going on – was designed to generate conversation among readers, or among auditors listening to someone reading it aloud as they worked. Competing perspectives left readers or auditors free to discuss the issues or debate whose part to take and provided them with entertainment beyond the novel itself by giving them something to talk about. An epistolary novelist with a didactic purpose had to present rival perspectives convincingly not only to generate conversation, but also because, as Shaftesbury (1974) had observed in 1710, “if real gentlemen [or ladies] seduced and made erroneous in their religion or philosophy, discover not the least feature of their real faces in your descriptions, they will hardly be apt to think themselves refuted” (296). But the more convincingly an epistolary novel rendered characters’ conflicting perspectives, the less control the novelist exercised over how it was read. The weight of female opinion in The Coquette is on the side of “domesticating” women by drawing them away from the “enervating sloth and inaction” produced by the Pleasure Culture and returning them to domestic work and “the study of household good” (138). Only Eliza holds out – and pays the ultimate price. But readers, well into the nineteenth century, who visited Elizabeth’s grave and the inn where she had died and made her a cult figure second only to Charlotte Temple, took Eliza’s part. Twentieth‐century feminist scholarship has likewise been divided between those who interpret the novel through the community of domesticated women, and those who champion Eliza for defying it. But then, the epistolary novels that live on are those that continue to generate the liveliest conversations and debates.
Letters in all the categories discussed in this chapter – handwritten letters, printed letters, and letters in epistolary novels – can be considered from multiple perspectives too. As we saw, letters can be studied as early American writing and as transatlantic genres; as shaping early American life, and as shaped by it; in relation to formal rules and conventions, and in relation to the devices used by early American merchants, families, friends, and religious communities to maintain relationships across temporal and geographical distances; as open communications that were shared with company and friends, and as forms of secret writing; as describing facts and events, and as embellishing and fictionalizing them; as stand‐alone entities and as part of a series or correspondence. The list goes on. But this only means that productive conversations about early American letters as cultural practices and historical artifacts have only just begun.
See also: chapter 11 (travel writings in early america, 1680–1820); chapter 17 (gender, sex, and seduction in early american literature); chapter 19 (early american evangelical print culture); chapter 27 (charles brockden brown and the novel in the 1790s).