Social networks, kinship networks, intellectual networks, religious networks, and business networks: according to historians, the early modern world was bursting with networks. But the textures and purposes of these networks differed. Inspired by approaches and theories emanating from sociology, and by the attractiveness of the unexamined term itself, historians have examined networks in two ways. For social historians, networks explain the texture of local society. They underpinned early modern life in total and could point to social polarization or explain political upheaval.35 Other historians use the word network to explain how groups of individuals coalesced around an idea, belief, or interest.36 These networks could feed off larger social networks, but their creation was independent of them. All individuals were members of a larger social network, not everyone belonged to or needed voluntary networks of interest. They were more fragile, changeable, and geographically vast than their larger cousins.
Scholars rarely acknowledge that these two kinds of networks functioned simultaneously. Those studying networks of interest make reference to the importance of personal connections to flesh out how these networks functioned, but scholars usually leave the deeply entangled nature of the two unexplored. Historians of larger social networks note the influence of religious identities on community relations and fret over the institutionalization of networks of social action and support, but they rarely touch on the interplay between the two.37 In this book I bring these two kinds of networks together to see exactly how they worked together and against each other. This is necessary because both were in the process of being transformed. Social networks strained to cover a larger geographic world and networks of interest were multiplying and becoming more institutionalized. Looking at the two in tandem reveals how this world worked. It allows the emphasis on formation, functioning, and geographic breadth found in studies of networks of interest to become entangled with the assertion that networks defined the structure of everyday life located in studies of social networks. My use of the word network embraces both broad social networks and networks of interest. They worked together, not separately. But I keep an ear cocked for their differences and allow them to surface when necessary. The networks sustained and used by these letter writers were vast webs of personal connection that laid dormant until mobilized for action.
The early modern British world was a networking society, not a society with networks. Webs of connection were not static entities, but active and changeable organisms. This is where social network analysis becomes useful once again. With it we can visually reconstitute these different networks and explain how they functioned, worked together, and changed. It emphasizes their different shapes and sizes, their interlinked nature, and their dynamic existence. The static image of the network as a web needs to be picked apart, analyzed, and set in motion.
The British elite navigated, with varying degrees of success, their changing world by weaving, nurturing, and playing on these networks. No longer did their centers of power sit solely in the localities and the Court; they recognized that they now inhabited a more polycentric urban world that obliged them to move between different social centers.38 Now they converged at coffeehouses, at Parliament, at clubs, and at assemblies in both London and other urban destinations before retreating to their estates. To function socially, politically, and financially, they had to maintain links with individuals in these constantly shifting centers. The nature of these links also altered as formal ties to clubs and societies and distant business partners made networks based on shared interests more necessary. The world of the British elite was widening geographically. All the letter writers examined had acquaintances, friends, family members, and interests spread across the wider British world. Members of such a society needed fine-tuned and flexible webs to play upon. But the growth and integration of the British world and the increased mobility of its elite made maintaining these networks challenging. In the pen, and the letters they produced, many Britons found an answer.
As the British elite became a networking society, they also became a nation of letter writers, a phenomenon a number of historians have recently recognized. Indeed, analysis of letter writing practices has experienced a renaissance recently. Letters, as objects of study, first attracted literary scholars in the 1980s. For these authors, the growing popularity of the familiar letter helped explain the emergence of the novel, the rise of the individual self, and the divide between the private and public world.39 Letters revealed the interior lives of their writers, who were usually members of the British elite. Recently the field has shifted away from the relationship of the letter to the self and toward its participatory role in navigating social relationships and negotiating social power. Scholars have emphasized the growing use of letters by the middling and laboring classes and the role such letters had in their lives and in the functioning of the British world.40 Others have turned to the need for and use of letters by those separated by the Atlantic Ocean.41 Though networks themselves never hold center stage in these works, they make brief appearances.42 We are shown how letters supported and complicated family ties, held businesses together, and provided a way for coreligionists to stay in touch.43 But the way these links came together and functioned within larger networks is not central to their arguments, and hence the networking propensity of letters and the different types of networks they supported is never fully examined.
Yet networking was often the purpose of a letter. In fact, nowhere is the union, importance, and negotiation between social networks and networks of interest seen more clearly than in the letters the British wrote during the period. These networks, formed by letters, came together to create a space of social negotiation that linked local, informal, and face-to-face realms of interaction with the more centralized, institutionalized, and interest-driven forms that were emerging. It was this world of personal networks, tentatively held together by letters, that is my focus. Concentrating on and explicating this realm provides a profitable way to examine a society portrayed as straddling the gap between the premodern and modern world. Rather than accepting the sense of transformation implied by the word “modern,” which allows for the pronouncement of large—if ill-defined—statements about change, I focus on the interplay of the new and the old. Letter writing and the growth of networks and related institutions can point to the emergence of a more “modern” world. Letters helped cultivate the individual self, spurred a growth in literacy, and laid the foundation for the growth of the post office, which itself gestures to governmental centralization and control.44 But seeing letters as the sinews of networks reminds us that they nurtured communal ties as much as a sense of individual identity and that they tied together informal networks that stood outside state or institutional control. The prevalence of these personal networks reflects a world where the sense of the public sphere was not yet fully formed, where smaller publics, formed of individuals with similar interests, were beginning to surface.45 An examination of networks blurs the borders between the modern and the premodern worlds, between public and private spheres.
Networks, as a whole, gesture to a more informal and decentralized world centered on people rather than institutions. Seeing their prominence during this period emphasizes the continued importance that informal modes of social organization had as the geographic complexion, social functioning, and means of information distribution and control altered. Tracing these multiple, mutable, and vibrant networks reveals how members of the far-flung British elite succeeded and failed in navigating the changes that were slowly transforming their geographic and social worlds. And it was their letters that provided them with the sails to set forth on these rough waters.
Writers and Their Letters
The eighteenth century was awash in letters. They survive in their original form with broken seals testifying to their perusal, they come to us as meticulous copies recorded in well-cared-for letter books, and as scribbled drafts hastily inserted into small well-worn notebooks. The letters of some individuals survive in bulk, while those of others have been mangled by time, leaving only tantalizing glimpses of an active epistolary life. It is in larger sets of letters, particularly in those kept in letter books, where networks speak to the historian most loudly, especially in collections where personal correspondence sits next to business correspondence and letters of an intellectual bent nestle next to those detailing the working of an estate. Then, if a diary holds court nearby, the network produced by letters can speak to that formed through face-to-face interaction. These