John Perceval, who became Sir John Perceval in 1691 at the tender age of eight and Viscount Perceval at the not so tender age of forty before assuming the mantle of the Earl of Egmont at the advanced age of fifty, liked to keep track of his letters. This Irish peer, born in county Cork, spent most of his life in England becoming deeply involved in the politics of both kingdoms and in the religious reformation of the British world as a whole. However, it was on English soil that he began to record his correspondence and keep a diary. When he died, he left behind eight letter books filled with his personal correspondence beginning in the year 1697, when he was a fourteen-year-old baronet, and lasting until 1731, when he was a thirty-seven-year-old viscount.46 Sheltered between the covers of his letter books rest myriad voices. Some of the letters he composed himself, but most are letters written to him. He, or his personal secretary, copied these letters into a blank book in a neat hand, leaving a wide margin on the left side, and then proceeded to add elaborate indexes to most of the volumes. Perceval—it seems it must be him since many comments are made in the first person—then added a number of annotations, perhaps at a later date, to some of the letters, which noted the station acquaintances had achieved or passed judgment on their characters. (For example, Lord Dungannon was “a brave man in his person but a sot.”)47 The personal letter books end abruptly in 1731. He left the transcription of the last letter, which is from his son, unfinished, even though plenty of space remained in the book. He made no comment on why he stopped recording his personal letters and perhaps he did not; perhaps they have simply been lost. Or maybe he got caught up in keeping his diary, of which fifteen years survive from 1730 until 1745.48 But he certainly did not stop keeping track of his letters for he also bundled up his estate correspondence into thirty-seven books stretching from 1699, when he was sixteen, until a few days before his death at sixty-five on 1 May 1748.49 Most of the letters are actually the originals, put in chronological order, numbered, and even at times indexed. Many of them are from his agents in Ireland, although he also included a number of his own letters and those from tenants, friends, and acquaintances. Perceval’s letters obviously spoke to him in diverse and treasured ways.
Figure 1. This rather humdrum letter from George Jennings to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, penned in 1729, reveals the way letter writers set up their letters and how they were sent. Jennings folded the paper in half and wrote his letter on the top page, being sure to date the letter, note whence it came, leave a respectful distance between the salutation and body of the letter, and to carefully separate his wife’s “duty” to the countess from the main text. Then he folded the sides of the letter to make an envelope, carefully addressed it (being sure to note it would go “by Darby Bag” once it arrived in London), and sealed it. The Post Office then left its mark by adding its postmarks.
George Jennings to Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon, 8 November 1729, HEH HA 7799.
This item is reproduced by permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Few were as careful with their letters as John Perceval, but most correspondents examined attempted to keep track of their letters. William Byrd I, born in London in 1652, kept at least one letter book.50 In 1684, when he was thirty-two and had resided in Virginia for at least fourteen years, Byrd took one of his Uncle Stegge’s old account books, turned it around, and began recording his letters in it. Like Perceval he added annotations on bills and the health of correspondents, yet the book is nothing like the neat recording of letters seen in Perceval’s letter books. Byrd jammed these transcribed letters together as though making the most out of the space as possible. Perhaps the short supply of such booklets in Virginia forced him to do so, but this book also hints at a man with little time on his hands, of which only a small amount could be spent neatly recording his correspondence. But while many of the letters he scrawled into his letter book detailed his business affairs, Byrd also included letters to friends and family. Recording these letters mattered too. He prospered in Virginia, the fur and tobacco trades filled his coffers, and he became a member of the governor’s council (even accepting the post of acting governor at the end of his life), but he would return to the country of his birth only twice after his arrival in Virginia and this made letters his main form of communication with relatives left behind. This letter book, which spans only seven years of his life, from 1684 to 1691, accounts for over 80 percent of his surviving epistolary production. The rest of Byrd’s correspondence surfaces in other collections of letters and consists mostly of official government epistles and letters of an intellectual bent that his acquaintances kept.
While the surviving letters of William Byrd I emit a sense of hurried business, those of his son sound like a man reaping the benefits of his father’s labors and using them to increase his family’s standing. William Byrd II was born in 1674 near the falls of the James River in Virginia, though he spent the majority of his early years in England. Before he settled permanently on his plantation, Westover, on the banks of the James River in 1726, he had spent only a shade over ten of his fifty-two years in his native land. When he entered his early thirties he prepared his first surviving letter book and diary. In the end, three of his diaries would survive, covering about twelve years of his life off and on between 1709, when he was thirty-five, and 1741, when he was sixty-seven.51 Byrd the younger’s first surviving letter book dates from the same period as his first surviving diary. This book held deeply personal letters: notes to friends who were far away and epistles that would remind him of successful and unsuccessful courtships.52 Rather than detailing when he received his letters and who they were sent to, as Perceval did, he left them undated and at times referred to his correspondents by their nom de plumes such as “Vigilante” for the vigilant father of a marriage prospect or “Charmante” for a prospective bride. He kept more traditional letter books, like his father’s, holding business and personal letters, but the surviving ones date only from his later years after his permanent return to the colonies. These, however, survive until 1741, a few years before his death in 1744.53 Additional letter books easily could have been lost over the centuries, or perhaps it was only his arrival in Virginia that prompted his epistolary recordings. As the editor of his letters has found, bits and pieces of his correspondence surface in other locations as well; in his commonplace book, in the letter books and letter collections of friends and acquaintances, in government collections, and he himself appears to have saved a number of autograph letters.54
Unlike the Byrds or John Perceval, Hans Sloane, their occasional correspondent and an Irishman of Scots ancestry, who became Sir Hans Sloane in 1716, either did not keep a letter book or it has not survived. As longtime secretary of the Royal Society, however, he was a man who knew how to write and record letters. The British Library holds reams of letters to him, arranged neatly in chronological order.55 That the British Museum bought this collection on Sloane’s death in 1753 suggests that he kept these letters himself; although how he kept them or organized them is left unclear. The surviving letters date from his early twenties when he was finishing up his medical studies in London, Paris, and Montpellier in the early 1680s, follow him through his travels in the West Indies between 1687 and 1689, and hold the letters he received from the time he was made the secretary of the Royal Society in 1693 through his long tenure as the president of that august body from 1727 to 1741. Unlike the epistles in the letter books spoken of earlier, these are autograph letters where the process of writing, the art of folding and spacing, and sometimes the mode of delivery (if a postmark survives) are evident.
Some, like Hans Sloane’s acquaintance, correspondent, and fellow Royal Society member Peter Collinson, placed their letters in more personal