The Opened Letter
Описание книги
By the early eighteenth century, the rapid expansion of the British empire had created a technological problem: communication and networking became increasingly vital yet harder to maintain. As colonial possessions and populations grew and more individuals moved around the globe, Britons both at home and abroad required a constant and reliable means of communication to conduct business, plumb intellectual concerns, discuss family matters, run distant estates, and exchange news. As face-to-face communication became more intermittent, men and women across the early modern British world relied on letters. In The Opened Letter , historian Lindsay O'Neill explores the importance and impact of networking via letter-writing among the members of the elite from England, Ireland, and the colonies. Combining extensive archival research with social network digital technology, The Opened Letter captures the dynamic associations that created a vibrant, expansive, and elaborate web of communication. The author examined more than 10,000 letters produced by such figures as Virginia planters William Byrd I and his son William Byrd II; the Anglo-Irish nobleman John Perceval; the newly minted Duke of Chandos, James Brydges, and his wife Cassandra Brydges; and Sir Hans Sloane, the president of the Royal Society, and his colleague Peter Collinson. She also mined letters from the likes of Nicholas Blundell, a Catholic member of the Lancashire gentry, and James Eliot, a London merchant and ardent Quaker. The Opened Letter reassembles and presents the vital individual and interlocking epistolary webs constructed by disparate groups of letter writers. These early social networks illuminate the structural, social, and geographic workings of the British world as the nation was becoming a dominant global power.
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The Opened Letter
Peter C. Mancall, Series Editor
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The voices of Nicholas Blundell, Cassandra and James Brydges, Peter Collinson, Hans Sloane, William Byrd (father and son), and John Perceval reverberate through this book. But theirs are not the only letters that speak. Many of these collections included incoming letters, which allow the voices of their correspondents to come through loud and clear. Friends and relatives, like philosopher George Berkeley, Perceval’s great friend, and John Custis, Byrd the younger’s brother-in-law, become as familiar as the main correspondents. The pen of Margaret Ray, the wife of one of Sloane’s good friends, scratches loudly, as do those of Lady Petre, Peter Collinson’s patron, and Helena le Grand, Perceval’s witty cousin. We hear from those who were not members of the British elite, as the voices of John Perceval’s tenants, James Brydges’s employees, and William Byrd (I & II)’s factors and ship captains echo through their letters. Within these sets of correspondence vibrant, expansive, and elaborate networks hum with life.
The letters these writers preserved provide the raw materials to reconstruct the networks they nurtured. The form in which letters survived helps and complicates this process. Perceval, the two Byrds, James and Cassandra Brydges, and Blundell all kept letter books. These individuals chose to transcribe and retain these sets of letters. Their books tell the story of their businesses, financial affairs, government posts, and personal lives that they wished or needed to keep. Within them lay traces of their chosen networks. John Perceval, William Byrd, II, James Brydges, and Nicholas Blundell also kept diaries, which often provide a glimpse of their local networks and place their letter writing activities in a larger context. But correspondents did not place all their letters into letter books. Autograph letters, like those that make up the bulk of Sloane’s correspondence, might speak with less authority about the favored networks of their writers, but they whisper important secrets about how they wrote and sent their letters. Autograph letters often contain a scribbled address, a postmark, or a disintegrating seal that still clings to the paper. The vast letter collection of the earls of Huntingdon holds many of these broken seals and scrawled addresses. The letters of the earls, their families, and those connected to them survive in bulk and usually in autograph form from the late fifteenth century into the late nineteenth century. The early letters of this family, from 1600 through the later seventeenth century, reveal the placement of seals, the wording of early addresses, and how and when their writers turned to the postal system after its introduction.66 These autograph letters sing in a way their copied siblings cannot. They show the material reality of these letters. You can measure how much space the writers left between their salutations and the bodies of their letters, you can see where writers placed their postscripts, and you can evaluate the neatness of their hands. Their addresses and postmarks suggest how letter writers sent their epistles. Both kinds of letters, those enshrined in letter books and those surviving in their original state, have a place in this work for both, in complementary ways, reveal the workings of the epistolary world.
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