The Opened Letter
THE EARLY MODERN AMERICAS
Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor
Volumes in the series explore neglected aspects of early modern history in the western hemisphere. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the Atlantic World from 1450 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
The Opened Letter
Networking in the Early Modern British World
LINDSAY O’NEILL
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data O’Neill, Lindsay.
The opened letter : networking in the early modern British world / Lindsay O’Neill.—1st ed.
p. cm. — (Early modern Americas)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4648-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Letter writing—Social aspects—Great Britain—History—17th century. 2. Letter writing—Social aspects—Great Britain—History—18th century. 3. English letters—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. English letters—Great Britain—History—18th century. 5. Social networks—Great Britain—History—17th century. 6. Social networks—Great Britain—History—18th century. I. Title. II. Series: Early modern Americas.
BJ2101.O54 2015
302.2′244—dc23
2014013141
For my parents
Contents
Introduction. Speaking Letters
Chapter 1. The Perils of the Post Office
Chapter 2. Mapping the Epistolary World
Chapter 3. Networking in the Epistolary World
Chapter 4. Nurturing the Epistolary World
Chapter 5. New Networks and Letters Less Familiar
Chapter 6. Stirring News and the Role of the Letter
Introduction. Speaking Letters
The letters Peter Collinson received spoke to him. For this London merchant and ardent botanist, letters held more than inked words on a page. They contained the voices of his friends and acquaintances, and when he cracked open the seal of a letter, they escaped and filled the room. As he wrote to his fellow botanist John Bartram in Pennsylvania in 1762, “I am here all alone and yet I have the Company of my Friends with Mee. This will be no paradox when I tell thee on the Table lays their Speaking Letters in that Silent Language which Conveys their most intimate thoughts to my Mind.”1 Simply by dipping his quill into his ink, Collinson joined a conversation. He might address Bartram first, but his letter responded to and created other conversations. He urged Bartram to go read the letter he had sent to Benjamin Franklin about mysterious animal skeletons found near the Ohio River and he passed on thanks to Bartram’s wife for her postscript. While he may have not realized it at the time, Collinson was doing more than carrying on an extended conversation with his friends and associates. He, and the scores of letter writers like him, used their pens to maintain and extend the social networks that were increasingly tying together the wider British world.
The letters Collinson read and penned with such joy reveal how one eager correspondent used his letters to maintain relationships with individuals across the wider British world. But he was only one man, and the meaning of his epistolary efforts only comes into focus when his letters are considered alongside those of his contemporaries, for Collinson was not the only one who listened to letters. They spoke to men and women across the early modern British world. By the eighteenth century, members of the elite from England, Ireland, Scotland, and the colonies needed letters like never before. They used them to conduct business, plumb intellectual concerns, discuss family matters, run distant estates, exchange news, and ask for advancement. Changing social, economic, and geographic circumstances made face-to-face communication more intermittent and sparse at the same time that personal networks of support and exchange became more critical to the navigation of their world. The answer lay in letters. The scribbled notes scattered across their tables were the threads of the social networks they needed to survive.
Individual sets of correspondence reveal the personal passions of their creators, but when set beside, and intertwined with, the letters of multiple correspondents—when a few hundred letters become a few thousand—larger patterns of dependence and exchange surface. Then letters truly begin to speak, and they whisper of the need for large, elaborate, and multipurpose networks. This book analyzes such networks, and the letters that created them, at the critical period between the establishment of a permanent national postal system in 1660, which provided many Britons with a new and more constant way to keep in touch, and the flourishing of the newspaper press in the middle of the eighteenth century, which gave the British another way to monitor their world. More specifically, I reassemble and listen to the hum of a number of individual and interlocking epistolary networks constructed by a disparate group of letter writers whose collective efforts illuminate the structure and workings of the British world socially, geographically, and communicatively at a time when the nation was becoming a dominant world power. It was during this period that the British elite truly became a networking society.
Networks in the Early Modern World
The way Britons thought about the word “network” was shifting subtly. When John Hawkins published The ENGLISH School-Master Compleated in 1692, he included the word “network” in his “Tables of Common English Words,” right after the term “neighbour.”2 But while “neighbour”