The Opened Letter. Lindsay O'Neill

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      Each chapter of this book looks at letters and the networks they formed from a slightly different angle to flesh out the shape and workings of their senders’ wider networks. I begin with a moment of change: the permanent opening of the postal service to the public. From that moment forward, letter writers no longer needed to depend on carriers or traveling acquaintances to send their epistles. They had the post and the stamp to prove it. However, the introduction of more institutional forms of organization, like the postal system, did not supplant older forms of epistolary exchange, but rather expanded their use. This made new kinds of networks more valuable. Personal postal networks mattered as much as the Post Office.

      Chapter 2 analyzes where letter writers sent their epistles and how letter writers thought about and experienced epistolary distance. Mapping out the extent of the British world as seen through these letter collections shifts our focus away from a purely British or Atlantic viewpoint and allows us to see this world as correspondents did, unbounded by artificial boundaries. But not all distances were equal. A letter writer’s connections to London differed from those to Paris or Virginia. And these writers rarely sat still. Both their mobility and how they thought about the distances they traversed determined how they used their networks.

      Chapter 3 picks apart these networks. Social network analysis reveals that these webs contained two types of connection: a constant core of linkages and ephemeral edges. The British elite juggled multiple networks that required different forms of maintenance and altered over time. These epistolary networks were not set, unchanging, and limited, but living, moving, and mutable. They also had borders. Gender and social position affected the way individuals made use of these webs of connection. But once they had the ability to produce letters, individuals found they depended on these informal networks to keep their more dispersed and mobile worlds working.

      Chapter 4 examines the words within letters. The more familiar letter of the eighteenth century made it easier to maintain distant links than the formal courtly letters of the seventeenth. However, focusing too much on the language in which writers composed their letters distracts from the elements that really built up a sense of connection and community. Many Britons distrusted the authenticity of affectionate language, and thus it was the small additions to letters that emphasized communal connections, networked ties, and time-honored forms of community maintenance that firmly anchored a correspondent to a wider network.

      Chapter 5 turns to the new kinds of networks gaining strength and importance during the period: contractual and institutional networks. These networks of interest were products of formalized relationships, which often relied on communication through letters. Letters between landlords and their agents, merchants and their factors, and government officials differed from the more informal networks embedded in the vast social networks previously examined. Additionally, emerging social, religious, and intellectual societies relied on letters and the networks they formed. Both contractual and institutional forms of organization signal a more formalized and professionalized world, but these new kinds of networks relied on older ideas of connection and rested on more informal networks.

      My final chapter turns to what happened when the newspaper challenged letters’ near monopoly on spreading news at a distance. The blossoming of the newspaper press may have changed the way letter writers included news in their epistles, but it did not alter their importance as a form of news distribution. Like the expansion of the postal system, the growth of the newspaper press made informal networks more important. Through letters individuals could use news to nurture social bonds, establish the truth of news reports the newspapers placed in doubt, and become members of virtual coffeehouses. Examining the way news flowed through letters brings together many of the themes of this book, from the continuing importance of informal networks in the face of new institutions to the effect of the widening British world on society.

      By the eighteenth century the letter had become part of everyday life for most Britons. They wrote them in their closets, their pantries, their galleries, and behind their counters during business.⁶⁷ They sent them by the post and by friends and they read them in groups and alone. These fragile, but increasingly numerous, bits of paper crisscrossed the widening British world and provided a way for the British elite to extend and monitor the fluid social networks on which their livelihoods depended. These networks provide a clear picture of the way the British elite dealt with a changing geographic and social world. Peter Collinson used his letters to convey his intimate thoughts and to make his world turn. He was not alone.