“An Active and Large Correspondence”
Rich material, social, and intellectual links made up a scientific correspondence. Naturalists identified a correspondence as the sum of these links. More than just an exchange of one or two letters, a correspondence was a fruitful relationship that persisted over time. As early as 1643 Samuel Hartlib, in a pamphlet addressed to Parliament, called for a “Correspondencie for the advancement of the Protestant Cause.”6 In the late 1690s Edward Lhuyd’s star had risen high enough that he received an offer of “correspondence” from August Quirinus Rivinus in Leipzig, who offered to give him news of German fossil discoveries.7 Their exchange was to be founded on material, not just intellectual, exchange: the Leipzig naturalist opened his offer with a gift of “3 or 4 books and some Formd Stones.”8 Though he was concerned that Rivinus had not behaved well by John Ray, Lhuyd accepted the offer; given the opportunities opened by such an exchange, it was worth navigating potential social difficulties, including the possibility that a correspondent would not deal frankly or fairly with one. Like this one, a correspondence could be between two people, but more often it referred to the sum of interactions between many people linked to one another through the exchange of letters. Elsewhere, Lhuyd referred to John Woodward’s “boast” of a “correspondence with five hundred persons … beyond the seas.”9
An “active and large correspondence” was a necessity, both for the gathering and production of knowledge that went into books and for selling those books. Martin Lister, for example, relied heavily on a broad correspondence to send him material—specimens as well as information—for his landmark Historiae conchyliorum, a multivolume natural history of shelled animals (including mollusks and gastropods) published between 1685 and 1692. Correspondents, including Hans Sloane, Edward Lhuyd, John Ray, Samuel Dale, and Thomas Townes, the latter a physician posted in the Caribbean, sent him species from across Britain and the British Atlantic world.10 Success in print too required an extensive correspondence. Henry Oldenburg ran into trouble when he contracted to print the Philosophical Transactions with an Oxford printer who had an insufficient correspondence. Richard Davies took over the job from Royal Society printers John Martyn and James Allestrey when plague closed London printing shops in 1665. But in his first go, Davies sold only three hundred of one thousand copies printed. Oldenburg’s profit was based on sales, so a failure to sell seven hundred issues represented a serious loss.11 A chastened Oldenburg wrote, “If he not be a man of an active and large correspondence, I had done much better, never to have committed it to him.”12 The possession of an “active and large correspondence” was crucial for booksellers and others seeking to move books because print was distributed through the social links of correspondence.
In some ways, as Lhuyd, Oldenburg, and Lister’s experiences demonstrate, the correspondence was akin to our “social network.” But it was not identical to it. Neither can “correspondence” or “the correspondence” be simplified down to one thing (of course neither can the social network; the term has many different valences). There was “a correspondence,” in the sense of letters passed back and forth primarily between two persons; there was a bookseller’s commercial correspondence, the “active and large correspondence” described by Oldenburg; and there was the naturalist’s correspondence, the connections from which he collected information. The correspondence could encompass both weak and strong ties, as described by David S. Lux and Harold J. Cook.13 Weaker ties might predominate more with international correspondence or with commercial correspondence.
However, the connections that made up the British correspondence were tighter and more personal, differentiating it from some (though not all) modern-day social networking and the broader early modern international scientific correspondence, of which it was, in some sense, a subset. It depended more on face-to-face interaction and the frequent exchange of long letters. The elite class was smaller and more compressed, and naturalists and antiquaries played multiple roles within it. In addition they were gentry, clergy, nobility, and advisers to the monarch and his ministers. For example, John Aubrey, Samuel Pepys, and John Evelyn had intimate audiences with Charles II and his advisers; Pepys, as a naval administrator, met with them regularly. Others played leading roles in their counties. Additionally for British naturalists, scholarly correspondence was at least sometimes “commercial” correspondence, in the sense that naturalists gathered information, financed books, and exchanged specimens for money through their correspondence.
Among British naturalists, face-to-face interaction was usually the basis for correspondence. That is, correspondence began between two or more people who knew each other, initially at least, through local, face-to-face relationships. “Weak ties” were still important for the communication of topographical knowledge of Britain, especially when it came to information exchange between the metropolitan center and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. Yet even these kinds of ties often got their start when Scottish, Irish, and Welsh naturalists traveled to London, Oxford, and Cambridge and then met in person. The Aberdeen naturalist George Garden opened his first letter to Henry Oldenburg by fondly recalling their meeting in London the summer before: “I am very sensible,” Garden wrote, “of the great civility, wherewith you were pleased to entertain Master Scougall and me, when we waited on you last Summer; and shall be ready on all occasions to give you that account you then desired of things philosophical that may occur here, to promote that noble design you have in hand.” Garden went on to give an account of a man with something “peculiar in his temper, that inclines him to imitate unawares all the gestures and motions of those with whom he converseth,” whom he and Oldenburg had discussed when they first met.14
Naturalists regarded correspondence as a poor substitute for direct interaction, especially when it came to establishing a relationship. Introducing oneself by letter to someone whom one had not met in person was generally regarded as rude. In 1676 John Aubrey recommended to Robert Plot that he consult with Sir Jonas Moore on some matter. Plot, however, begged off: “As for S{i}r Jonas Moore’s assistanse in my affaire,” he wrote to Aubrey, “as I doubt not but it will be very considerable, so I take it as a very great Honour that He will bee pleased to afford it me: but to write to Him in my owne behalfe, especially being altogether unknown to Him too, I must confesse I have not the confidense: I must therefore only begg of you, that you would be pleased to preserve some memory of me in Him till opportunity shall give me leave to waite on Him in London which I hope may be within a little time.”15 It was preferable to approach a potential patron first in person rather than through a letter, though an intermediary might make one known, or “preserve some memory of” one in the person one sought to meet, before that meeting took place.
Despite this preference for face-to-face relationships, gentlemen “personally unknown” to each other could be united through correspondence, after a fashion. Correspondents distinguished, though, between personal acquaintances made face-to-face and those made through letters. Robert Plot and John Ray corresponded in 1691, yet in a letter to Edward Lhuyd, Ray disclaimed acquaintance with Plot’s character, writing in response to Lhuyd’s negative report, “He is a Gentlema{n} personally unknown to me.”16 Because he so trusted Lhuyd’s “judgmt & Charity” (and because Lhuyd’s judgment confirmed Ray’s experience), Ray was inclined to trust Lhuyd’s estimation of Plot, which was generally negative. (To his former assistant curator, Plot was a tight-fisted, grasping creature, eager for preferment but stingy toward those below him.) Letters between two gentlemen personally unknown to each other might be transmitted by a third person acquainted with both parties. Sometimes this occurred even when two people ran in the same circles but were perhaps not great friends. For example, in February and March 1680/81 Aubrey funneled multiple requests for stacks of Robert Plot’s natural history queries through Edward Tyson, who acted at the time as Plot’s informant on the goings-on of the London scientific virtuosi.17
Correspondence was also a means of creating or maintaining “virtual” face-to-face presence. Writing to Lhuyd in the fall of 1692, John Ray noted, “I presume Mr Aubrey is by this time returned to London, though I have not as yet received any notice