The Opened Letter. Lindsay O'Neill

and his wife often wrote letters together to John Perceval and his wife. Many conclude with Dering stating, “I leave my Letter open for my Wife to give an Account of her self.”¹⁴⁶ The Derings and the Percevals were a deeply interconnected family. Daniel was John’s cousin and his wife was John’s wife’s sister and the couple often lived with the Percevals. Thus, it seems natural that they would share communal letters.

      Often correspondents simply assumed that an acquaintance’s letter would stand in for their own. It was understood that close friends, family members, and other trusted eyes had access to letters. Writers would ask a correspondent to assure an acquaintance that they did not send them a letter because they knew they had access to the other letter.¹⁴⁷ Dering often took this route and put off writing to Perceval when he knew his wife had written either of the Percevals a long letter.¹⁴⁸ Perceval’s other cousin assumed that one letter to the family was sufficient. She told Perceval, “I thought reading one letter at a time from one so dull as my self was a sufficient penance for the whole Family.”¹⁴⁹ Letters were communal possessions of certain circles, especially family circles, and a letter to one was seen as a letter to all. Thus sending them by members of this circle only seemed natural and often extended the conversation.

      Letters circulated beyond the family fireside as well; receivers mailed them to others who might be interested in their contents. Writers often mention returning letters composed by others and forwarding amusing or intriguing letters to other correspondents.¹⁵⁰ Peter Collinson sent Hans Sloane a letter “from a Curious Gentleman at Plymouth” as a present.¹⁵¹ While such exchanges were an accepted practice they did cause problems, especially when receivers forgot to return letters. Collinson had to remind Sloane to return his letter from a Russian doctor on crabs’ eyes because “I must write to the Doctor answer.”¹⁵² He needed the letter by his side to compose the correct response. Sloane returned the letter with thanks and enclosed a letter for the doctor.¹⁵³ Collinson inserted this reminder not because of unauthorized sharing, but because of the logistics of sharing. In fact, such an exchange increased Sloane’s own network since he added his own reply and let Collinson deliver it.

      There were limits to letter circulation, however, and letter passing was more prevalent within certain networks. Identifying these networks pinpoints what groups letter writers trusted and what networks they depended upon. The three that surface most prominently are family networks, estate networks, and intellectual networks. One of the main purposes of this book is to explore the functioning and interaction of these webs of connection. Family members were quite casual about passing each other’s letters around and about depending on a letter to one to account for the whole. They often lived together, socialized together, and sympathized together, so the bonds of affection, duty, and support were strong. The result of this close proximity, economic and social dependence, and affection was trust. Letters could be passed among family members and be sent by family members because they could be trusted to put letters into careful hands.

      Members of the British elite had long trusted and utilized family networks, but as the circulation of letters suggests other networks were rising in importance during this period. Landlords, their agents, and their tenants often circulated letters among themselves as well. These correspondents did not inherently trust one another, but letter circulation helped create trust or at least the appearance of transparency. It also made the business of running an estate from afar function more smoothly. The same held true for absentee colonial plantation owners. The only way the increasing number of absentee landlords could keep in touch with their estates, whether they were in Ireland or Virginia, was through letters from their agents. Enclosing and passing letters helped landlords and agents stay on the same page in estate affairs: Perceval wanted to be sure that his agents in Ireland knew exactly what he wrote to his tenants so the tenants could not take advantage of the agent.¹⁵⁴ Agents would often show tenants their landlord’s letters to prove they were not twisting his words and tenants often insisted that landlords saw their original letters, not just the agent’s interpretation of them. As Perceval’s slightly aggrieved agent wrote to him regarding a tenant’s letter, “he desires me to forward the orginall thinking I suppose that no extract cou’d do his request justice.”¹⁵⁵ The letters sent, passed, and enclosed by landlords, agents, and tenants illustrate the trust, strained but extant, between them: tenants had to believe that agents would pass on letters and landlords had to trust that agents would give them a fair picture of affairs on their land, a belief that was often tried by untrusting tenants. While estate letters circulated in a different fashion and for a different reason than family letters, there was a sense that such passing was allowable because the extent of circulation was known and letters could help this strained community function.

      The practice of exchanging letters was even more common among members of intellectual networks like the Royal Society who, to promote their scholarly interests, were constantly circulating each other’s letters. Together two members might peruse a single letter by another member and then send it on to a third.¹⁵⁶ At times they even lost track of who had seen a letter it had been passed around so much.¹⁵⁷ This kind of exchange would reach its fullest extent with the publication of Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society, which drew on letters sent to the Society. Scholars had to depend on one another’s knowledge and this sense of trust extended beyond experiments to include a more personal kind of trust: a belief that other scholars would treat letters, and the information in them, honorably.¹⁵⁸ The exchange of letters by the intellectual elite of Europe was not a new phenomenon, but it altered during the eighteenth century as intellectual thought became tied to the growth of clubs and societies, which changed the way ideas flowed and information circulated.

      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