They also used their correspondence to spark and frame further conversations. With an extensive correspondence, a naturalist could multiply his presence by gaining access to other people’s connections, which might be very distant from him in geographical or social terms (or both). Edward Lhuyd disseminated the printed proposals for his study of British languages, natural history, and antiquities through his correspondence, asking that his friends personally distribute proposals among their acquaintances, both in face-to-face meetings and in their correspondence. To Martin Lister, he wrote, “I’ll send you more papers to morrow, but I would have them onely put into such hands as are proper. For my Paper is not calculated for a bookseller’s shop, nor to lye in a Coffee; because people that understand not the matter, will think it unreasonable.”19 Because the project was so large (in the end there were almost two hundred subscribers distributed across Wales and England), Lhuyd was unable to seek out and talk with each and every potential supporter; however, he still felt it important that proposals be disseminated via personal contacts. If encountered by the general run of customers in a coffee shop or a bookstore, his project might be misunderstood and its chances for success damaged. Working through individuals, one was surer of approaching someone who would already be kindly disposed to the undertaking. Lhuyd’s associate could appropriately frame it and its value (both to the individual subscriber and to the larger community of the learned) in a conversation or a letter. In this case building financial support for the project was as much about limiting the wrong kinds of conversations, such as the mocking and dismissive kind one often saw in coffee shops, as it was about fostering the right kinds.
Lhuyd’s example also suggests that when seeking support for a project, naturalists worked through textual and conversational channels simultaneously. This may have been particularly important when working through intermediaries, as they might forget or misstate the details of a project. The presence of the printed or written text had the potential to communicate the original author’s meaning more clearly and accurately. But it would not do for potential patrons to encounter the text unless it was appropriately framed in a conversation or a letter: establishing the right social context for the reading of a text was just as important as clearly conveying information in that text.
Going Postal
The material foundation of “an active and large correspondence” was the government-run postal system. This system, which allowed naturalists to send and receive letters in a regular and timely manner and with reasonable confidence that they would arrive at their destinations, developed over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.20 Although the royal post was established early in the reign of Henry VIII, it was primarily designed to carry official correspondence until 1635, when Charles I opened the royal mailbags to private communications. Under Henry VIII postal routes were laid along major thoroughfares, such as the road from London to Dover, with horses and riders ready at intervals to relay the mail.21 The precise routes that were laid fluctuated, however, with the needs of the Crown; posts along the road to Ireland were more carefully staffed during times of political trouble and rebellion, for example.22 The royal mail sometimes carried private letters, especially toward the end of the sixteenth century, but official correspondence was always prioritized.23 Private postal services were established as well; for example, English merchants organized the Merchant Adventurers post in the mid-sixteenth century. London immigrant or “Stranger” communities organized their own posts for communication with friends and associates on the Continent.24 Much letter carrying, however, went on according to no organized system, as servants, family members, private carriers, and even travelers headed in the right direction would be pressed into service to deliver letters. There was no unified postal system to which all had access. Correspondence could easily miscarry and be opened by someone other than the intended recipient(s), for good or for ill. Correspondents carefully crafted the missives they sent through this insecure, patchwork system with these expectations in mind. Individuals relied on personal relationships to secure delivery of letters: the name and identity of the individual letter carrier—say, a trusted servant—could be an important guarantor of a letter’s transmission and, to its recipient, its authenticity.25
Although none of these issues was eliminated by Charles I’s reforms, conditions for sending and receiving correspondence within Britain did become increasingly uniform. As a means of private communication, mail became somewhat more accessible, more trusted, and more impersonal. Posts were laid according to regular, well-maintained routes from London to the north and west, and they ran all day and all night. Spurs led off the main roads to connect provincial towns.26 Although the speed of the post continued to vary somewhat, depending on the weather, the quality of the horses kept at each postal station along the route, and the diligence of individual postmasters, round trip from London to Edinburgh was supposed to be six days.27 The carriage of foreign letters was assimilated into the national post by a 1657 act of Parliament that also incorporated Ireland into the British postal system.28 By the late seventeenth century the British post was a wellestablished royal bureaucracy, a valuable state monopoly.
On a practical level, how did an individual send and receive letters? What kind of knowledge did one need? At the very least, in order for a letter to reach a correspondent, one had to know where to send it. This may seem a trivial thing; after all, in the twenty-first-century world we have a multitude of options for communicating across distances: we can send a letter, an e-mail, a fax, or a telegram; we can pick up the phone or dial through our personal computer to reach a friend on her land line, mobile phone, or computer. In early modern Britain, by contrast, in order to communicate with someone, one had to know his or her physical location or at the very least where that person received letters (which might not always be a home). In the days before public directory listings, phone books, or Google searches, the only way to get an address was to ask someone, either the person directly or someone who knew that person. The act of communication entailed a minimum degree of acquaintance with the recipient of one’s letter. No seventeenth-century letter was directed to “the resident” or “current occupant” of a house.
Compared to their twenty-first-century counterparts, the addresses on seventeenth-century letters varied wildly. They only sometimes included street names. There were no street numbers; in cities and towns lodgings or businesses were identified by the signs hanging outside buildings (and a sign did not necessarily bear any intrinsic connection to the trade carried on inside the building—for example, booksellers Abel Swall and Awnsham Churchill operated shops under the signs of the unicorn and the black swan, respectively).29 In the country an address might simply be the name of an estate or a house. After the Restoration even London coffeehouses served as points for sending and receiving mail (though no one guaranteed the privacy of letters sent and received therefrom).30 John Aubrey variously received letters addressed “For John Aubrey Esq fellow of the Royall Society, to be left with Mr Bridgeman, at Mr Gregorys in Linco{l}ns Inne fields, next dore to little Turne Style the Diall house / London” (all that in one address); “These to John Aubrey Esqr at Mr White’s house Chymist in Holywell Parish in Oxford”; and “To his verie lovinge friende Mr John Awbrey at his fathers howse in Broad-chalke close to / WILTSHIRE. Leave these at the holly Lambe in {Sarum}.”31 According to the latter, the letter was to be left at the “holly Lambe,” a public house in Salisbury (with the city referred to in the address by its Latin name). Rather than using numbers, such addresses defined the recipients’ locations in reference to local establishments and landmarks and the people who lived in and owned those places. Not even Aubrey’s name was stable but rather fluctuated from Aubrey to Awbrey and back again depending on his correspondent’s whim. Letter carriers were expected to have, or acquire, a minimum degree of personal knowledge about the people sending and receiving letters. Who took the letters at the inn at the sign of the Holy Lamb in Salisbury? Where in Holywell Parish, an area of Oxford just west of the Bodleian Library and Ashmolean Museum buildings, did Mr White, the chemist, keep his shop? Restoration letter carriers needed to know these things.
Correspondents were not particularly surprised when letters failed to reach their destinations.