The Opened Letter. Lindsay O'Neill
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Название: The Opened Letter
Автор: Lindsay O'Neill
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Историческая литература
Серия: The Early Modern Americas
isbn: 9780812290189
isbn:
While letters were passed among trusted friends and networks, there were certainly places letters should not go. When a letter strayed from a trusted circle, senders worried.159 Nicholas Blundell once recorded in his diary, “Lady Dowager Webbs Letter was given to a Rong hand by mistake and made great uneasiness.”160 This incident must have caused Blundell great consternation because usually he filled his diary only with his daily activities, not his reflections on such happenings. The way the British sealed their letters reveals the careful manner in which they guarded their privacy and from whom. Writers only sent unsealed letters to known and trusted correspondents; once trusted eyes viewed them, careful hands sealed them. On multiple occasions writers reminded their correspondents to seal enclosed letters before they sent them on. They insisted, “after you have read it pray clap a little wax to it” or “clap a Bit of Wax to the Seal.”161 Even if the letter was not going by the post it was important that it arrive sealed.162 Usually, this emphasis on sealing stemmed from letter writers’ suspicion of the Post Office, but it was also a way to keep out all prying eyes, which could be found outside the Post Office as well as in it.
Authors usually displayed mortification if their letters drifted from these trusted networks without their consent, especially if they landed in the hands of a printer. Scholars have noted that unlike on the Continent, the printing of letter collections and personal letters was infrequent in England until the later seventeenth century, with a few notable exceptions.163 Even in the eighteenth century the publishing of personal letters could be a risky endeavor. Alexander Pope took Edmund Curll to court for publishing his letters. However, it was probably Pope himself who anonymously sent the letters to Curll so that in retaliation he could publish his “true” letters.164 Such worries caused one correspondent to declare: “God forbid that any more Papers belonging to either of you especially such sacred Papers as your familiar Letters should fall into the Hands of Knaves and Fools.”165 The overwhelming fear was that letters could land in unknown hands. The public reading of personal letters would, in the words of one correspondent, “expose me to the misconstruction of many, the malice of some and the censure perhaps of the whole world.”166 Passing letters among known correspondents was acceptable; they knew how to interpret them, but unknown hands did not share the same skills and could cause the writer grief. Thus, while letters were communal objects, that community did not include the world at large. In many ways, this reflects Michael Warner’s view of the public world before the construction of the public sphere in the later eighteenth century, where political debate occurred ideally in private and was founded on a trust in the hierarchical order of society.167 In this world, authority was more personal and anonymity frowned upon. This view of the political realm reinforces the valuation of these personal networks; the world that mattered was small and personal.
Letters flowed through personal networks and sending them through these trusted webs solidified those networks. Scholars have recently placed more emphasis on the importance of the personal as a concept that softens the harsh division between private and public worlds.168 Investigating letters, and the networks through which they circulated, reaffirms this need. Rather than examining the growth of the public or private sphere, it is more beneficial to think about the importance of smaller personal networks. The personal, with its more flexible lines of inclusion and exclusion, echoes the functioning of networks, which were neither private nor public. It was these personal networks that made the postal system work. The Post Office could not deliver letters on its own; Britons depended on their established personal networks to send and receive their letters. Allowing these networks to surface and examining how they functioned serves as a reminder that while the establishment of governmentally run systems, like the Post Office, changed the way Britons sent letters, they still relied on older modes of interaction to serve new needs. Like the Countess of Huntingdon, they knew a carrier and a careful hand were as trustworthy as the post.
Chapter 2
Mapping the Epistolary World
In a letter written in 1697, John Perceval’s tutor sent his two young charges on a hypothetical journey around the world to spread the news of the Treaty of Ryswick, which settled the War of the League of Augsburg. Philip Perceval was to go southeast across the British Channel, along the coasts of France, Portugal, and West Africa until he reached the Cape of Good Hope, where, after breakfast and “a short dance with the Hottantots,” he would continue on to the Spice Islands and “bid good morrow to the Japanners.” John however “wou’d never endure the fatigues of so tedious a Voyage since he is so well acquainted with the short cut of the North East passage.” After coasting along the shores of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway he would rent a boat and some wind from the Laplanders to take him to Peking and thence to California by way of the Juan Fernandez Islands. Their tutor ended by reminding the boys that they could easily chart their routes on the “Map of the World hanging by their bedside in Town” if they needed “to revive their Ideas of the country.”1 This playful exercise was to teach the young gentlemen about their wider world and it was a lesson well learned. While neither Philip nor John ever traveled to China or danced at the Cape of Good Hope, John did receive letters from both locations. From his vantage point in London or Dublin, he kept track of connections who traveled across the vast world described to him by his tutor.
Exotic locations beyond British shores often surfaced on the margins of Perceval’s epistolary world and often piqued his interest, but he received more letters from locations closer to home: from Bath, Dublin, and Paris. Bringing together these wider connections and those closer to home reveals the true scope and purpose of the epistolary world, as well as the variations within it. It is well known that letters were the product of the need to connect over a distance, but what distances and how they differed remains unclear.2 Following letters to their destinations and examining their writers’ motivations for producing them allows us to explore the different experiences letter writers had depending on where they lived and how easy it was for them to shift locations. For besides mapping out this world, this chapter also explores the importance of mobility for these letter writers.3 While most of them would never make it to the Juan Fernandez Islands, few remained at home.
Looking at exactly where letters originated from produces a basic outline of the shape of the epistolary world of their writers. It was this map of human connections with its hubs and peripheries that defined the world of letter writers rather than national boundaries. However, dots on a map only reveal so much; the composers of these letters experienced and expressed their sense of distance differently depending on their coordinates and their ability to change those coordinates. This map needs to be put into motion and the values of mobility and stability examined. Doing so forces us to look at the British world as a whole: to examine London alongside Lancashire and Dublin alongside Virginia.4 It reminds us that for the British elite one’s geographic origin mattered, but one’s ability to maintain social connections in urban centers mattered more. For these letter writers it was mobility, or lack thereof, that determined the nature of their network, not just the specific place where they resided.
Centers and Peripheries
At the top or bottom of their letters correspondents usually noted where they composed their letters. This was a rather new development. Neither the Paston letters of the fifteenth century nor the letters written by the Hastings family early in the seventeenth century note the location of origin on a separate line. However, by the eighteenth century it was becoming increasingly important to let your correspondent know where you were. It helped ground the letters in space and provided receivers СКАЧАТЬ