Letters written in the past often are regarded as personal documents by present-day readers: one person writing informally to one other person, with an expectation of privacy. This model of letter writing is fairly far from the reality of letter writing in the Revolutionary era.
Given the realities of travel and communication in early America, letters were an essential way of sharing important news that today might be communicated by telephone, television, text message, or other medium. People wrote letters to keep in touch with friends and family who were at a distance, either temporarily or permanently, to exchange important business news or conduct business, to address the government, to seek advice or information, even to start friendships or courtships.
Because of the importance and ubiquity of letter writing, letters were often shared. (If a person wanted the recipient of a letter to keep something private, he or she would need to say so explicitly in the letter.) Letters might be read aloud to a group of friends or family or passed along to other readers. Letters were not read and immediately discarded; they were often saved for years, read and reread, quoted from or copied. Given the importance of letters, writers usually composed them carefully. Manuals teaching principles of letter writing and offering models for letters written for specific purposes were published in England and in the United States.
As important as letter writing was in the period before telegraphs and telephones, it should come as no surprise that people were interested in reading the letters of well-known figures or of people whose lives or letters were considered worthy of imitation. In addition to the collections of real letters that were read as both entertaining and educational, writers began to take advantage of the form of the letter collection to create fictional works, often supposedly authored by a foreign traveler, as a way to comment on contemporary society. Advice books were also often written in the form of a series of letters to a young person. Finally, as anyone who has read eighteenth-century novels knows, the letter collection became a standard way of presenting a fictional account.
Letters have special characteristics as a kind of literature. Because they are addressed by one person to another, letters presumably give readers access to a person’s honest feelings and opinions (although sometimes, especially in fiction, readers might be expected to see that a particular correspondent has a reason to be less than honest with a particular letter recipient). In addition, because readers of printed letter collections are, in effect, reading over the shoulder of the “real” recipient, there is a sense of being let in on a private document.
Letter-writing manuals, collections of letters by prominent British men and women, epistolary novels such as those of Samuel Richardson, and travel letters were all popular reading throughout the eighteenth century. As with the publication of domestically produced novels, Americans began publishing their own letters in greater numbers in the decades after the revolution.
The letters of the era that are best known today, those of John and Abigail Adams, were not published until later in the nineteenth century. In 1780, in what constituted a review of a collection of letters by Lord Chesterfield, Mercy Otis Warren wrote a letter to her son praising Chesterfield’s style but deploring his morals; the letter was printed in several newspapers. Warren’s letter is typical of those written to be reprinted, since it was didactic and, therefore, presumably worth the attention of other readers besides her own son.
Similar reasons justified the publication of letters by religious women, such as Familiar Letters, Written by Mrs. Sarah Osborn, and Miss Susanna Anthony, late of Newport, Rhode-Island (1807). Posthumous publication of women’s letters was not uncommon, since during their lifetimes women of the upper classes presumably would have been too modest to have their letters published. This was the case for Martha Laurens Ramsay, whose letters were published by her husband as Memoirs of the Life of Martha Laurens Ramsay (1811). Ramsay’s letters include discussions of her religious struggles and letters of advice to her son, both presumably educational, to readers who might apply what they learned about life from Ramsay to their own religious lives or their own parenting.
Other notable collections of letters include James Kirke Paulding’s Letters from the South (1817) and George Tucker’s Letters from Virginia (1816); the second of these purported to have been written by a Frenchman traveling through the South, and both satirize the social pretensions of the Virginia middle class and the newly rich. Traces of the influence of the collection of letters can be seen not only in the epistolary form of many novels but also in works such as Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Franklin’s Autobiography (1793), and Ann Eliza Bleecker’s The History of Maria Kittle (1797), where letters become the pretense under which a long continuous narrative is recounted.
Eve Tavor Bannet’s Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (2005) reviews the popular self-help books that taught English and Anglo-American people how to write letters and describes techniques of secret writing used in private correspondence.
In Correspondence and American Literature, 1787–1865 (2004), Elizabeth Hewitt traces correspondence in relationship to American literature. In the early chapters, she traces the relationship of various theories of correspondence in relationship to Federalist and Democratic-Republican visions of representative government.
For a discussion of letter writing in the United States that pays special attention to the generic conventions as well as studying particular writers of letters (including an excellent discussion of John and Abigail Adams), see William Merrill Decker’s Epistolary Practices (1998).
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- Students interested in epistolary fiction may wish to read some nonfictional letters in order to compare the tone and style of those letters to the fictionally created letters.
- Although it may seem that the writer of a letter is revealing his or her “true” self, like any other kind of writing, the speaker of a letter is a persona created by the author, whether consciously or unconsciously, for the audience he or she is addressing. In addition, since Revolutionary-era writers knew that others might read their letters, they surely kept in mind that the image they projected in their letters might reach people they did not anticipate. So in looking at any letter or collection of letters, we can and should analyze the persona the writer has constructed.
- Letter writing was one genre in which women participated in numbers rivaling those of men. Comparing female and male writers, do you see similarities or differences? What versions of femininity and masculinity do writers of letters embody in their writing personae?
- Some of the most significant texts of the Revolutionary era use epistolarity in an unusual way. Consider part 1 of Franklin’s Autobiography or Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798), both of which begin as letters but then continue as long narratives. Why might Franklin or Brown have chosen to frame his works as letters even though he did not make use of multiple correspondents or even multiple letters?
- How does the Revolutionary-era culture of the letter compare to contemporary culture’s use of e-mail, the Internet, and text messaging? Some critics feel that new technologies have reproduced the characteristics of letter-writing culture. Can you see differences?
Categories: Epistolary Novels, Literature
Analysis of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela 
Analysis of Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister 
Analysis of Samuel Richardson’s The History of Sir Charles Grandison 
Analysis of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
You must be logged in to post a comment.