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Introduction. Speaking Letters

The letters Peter Collinson received spoke to him. For this London merchant and ardent botanist, letters held more than inked words on a page. They contained the voices of his friends and acquaintances, and when he cracked open the seal of a letter, they escaped and filled the room. As he wrote to his fellow botanist John Bartram in Pennsylvania in 1762, “I am here all alone and yet I have the Company of my Friends with Mee. This will be no paradox when I tell thee on the Table lays their Speaking Letters in that Silent Language which Conveys their most intimate thoughts to my Mind.”¹ Simply by dipping his quill into his ink, Collinson joined a conversation. He might address Bartram first, but his letter responded to and created other conversations. He urged Bartram to go read the letter he had sent to Benjamin Franklin about mysterious animal skeletons found near the Ohio River and he passed on thanks to Bartram’s wife for her postscript. While he may have not realized it at the time, Collinson was doing more than carrying on an extended conversation with his friends and associates. He, and the scores of letter writers like him, used their pens to maintain and extend the social networks that were increasingly tying together the wider British world.

The letters Collinson read and penned with such joy reveal how one eager correspondent used his letters to maintain relationships with individuals across the wider British world. But he was only one man, and the meaning of his epistolary efforts only comes into focus when his letters are considered alongside those of his contemporaries, for Collinson was not the only one who listened to letters. They spoke to men and women across the early modern British world. By the eighteenth century, members of the elite from England, Ireland, Scotland, and the colonies needed letters like never before. They used them to conduct business, plumb intellectual concerns, discuss family matters, run distant estates, exchange news, and ask for advancement. Changing social, economic, and geographic circumstances made face-to-face communication more intermittent and sparse at the same time that personal networks of support and exchange became more critical to the navigation of their world. The answer lay in letters. The scribbled notes scattered across their tables were the threads of the social networks they needed to survive.

Individual sets of correspondence reveal the personal passions of their creators, but when set beside, and intertwined with, the letters of multiple correspondents—when a few hundred letters become a few thousand—larger patterns of dependence and exchange surface. Then letters truly begin to speak, and they whisper of the need for large, elaborate, and multipurpose networks. This book analyzes such networks, and the letters that created them, at the critical period between the establishment of a permanent national postal system in 1660, which provided many Britons with a new and more constant way to keep in touch, and the flourishing of the newspaper press in the middle of the eighteenth century, which gave the British another way to monitor their world. More specifically, I reassemble and listen to the hum of a number of individual and interlocking epistolary networks constructed by a disparate group of letter writers whose collective efforts illuminate the structure and workings of the British world socially, geographically, and communicatively at a time when the nation was becoming a dominant world power. It was during this period that the British elite truly became a networking society.

Networks in the Early Modern World

The way Britons thought about the word “network” was shifting subtly. When John Hawkins published The ENGLISH School-Master Compleated in 1692, he included the word “network” in his “Tables of Common English Words,” right after the term “neighbour.”² But while “neighbour” or “neighbourliness” possessed great social resonance during the period, the word “network” did not.³ Neither Peter Collinson nor any of the other letter writers examined here used the term. In the early modern world it commonly referred to crosshatched pieces of metal or wood, or to loosely woven pieces of clothing. The hero of Richard Head’s novel The English Rogue referred to an acquaintance’s dilapidated cloak as “that Network garment of yours.”⁴ His friend then asserted, “I wish it were a Net, for then I might employ my self by fishing.”⁵ These networks were intricate or worn creations that could also be useful. Some works of net caught fish and others ensnared. Arachne’s “cunning network,” an author argued, “still intangles Art (like flies).”⁶ By the early eighteenth century, though, networks commonly helped British intellectuals describe the systems that pumped life through organisms. It was the “curious and wonderful Network of Veins” within man that transported one physician with admiration.⁷ These networks of veins brought movement to networks. They were no longer just cunning and useful objects; blood and life now circulated through them. When early modern figures envisioned networks, they saw threads loosely woven together, gossamer spiders’ webs, and they were beginning to see them as intricate systems of circulation.

However, no early modern figure invoked the word to describe groups of interconnected people.⁸ Individuals made networks; they did not participate in them. Instead these letter writers had friends. As a young John Perceval declared, “Other things are but the luxerys of life, our friends are the necessarys.”⁹ They were necessary for their affection, for their conversation, and most importantly for the actions they could take on one’s behalf. Letter writers often referred to friends in the plural. It was not a single friend that Perceval saw as necessary, but a host of friends. Peter Collinson enjoyed reading Bartram’s single letter, but he was truly happy when he could scatter his multiple letters across his counter and enjoy “the Company of my friends.” In his letters, William Byrd I of Virginia referred to “all our friends” eighteen times.¹⁰ His letters sought to connect and weave together his different threads of friendship. For another correspondent, friends formed a strong tree with deep roots and vast branches. When a friend died he decried the loss of “a branch lopt off from the tree of friendship, which I have long cultivated.”¹¹ But isolated trees these were not. One could mobilize and use the friends of others. When one of Peter Collinson’s correspondents discovered that his friends had failed to repay the “so many hundred obligations” they owed Collinson, he swore “never to molest you with any more of my recommendations.”¹² This grafting of friendship failed. Others, however, took root and allowed branches to intertwine, as in old growth forests, producing a canopy of friendship.

These early modern invocations of friendship do not stray far from modern definitions of networks. For one mid-twentieth-century sociologist, the term network encapsulated the idea that “each person has a number of friends, and these friends have their own friends; some of any one person’s friends know each other, others do not.”¹³ The distance between the terms is not vast, and the meanings are similar. So, while anachronistic, the word network encapsulates the ways letter writers envisioned their social worlds. It focuses attention on the links between individuals, rather than on the individuals themselves and keeps such historically weighted terms as “friendship,” “neighbourliness,” and “community” in the background.¹⁴ Those living in the early modern world strategically used these terms, and while I acknowledge and investigate their complex uses, I do not want them to dominate the discussion since they isolate rather than bring together what was actually occurring. As scholars have insisted, words such as “community” are difficult.¹⁵ They bring in their wake layers of historiographic argument and, more important, a nostalgia that complicates historical inquiry.

The term “network” is not new to scholars, but it remains messy and vague.¹⁶ Historians rarely interrogate its meaning, which has disguised the networking practices of the British during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Digging into the vagueness of the term and tracing how historians have employed it pushes to the surface a vast constellation of networks of different sizes, shapes, and purposes. It is that array of networks, their role, and the place of the letter in nurturing them that is the subject of this book.

Networks first became an important word for historians in the second half of the twentieth century. By this time the term commonly evoked a set of relations between individuals, but the use of the term remained metaphorical.¹⁷ Unhappy with this state of affairs, early modern social historians, influenced by sociologists, attempted to employ the term more precisely and use it analytically.¹⁸ As one sociologist described it in 1969, social network analysis was to provide “non-quantitative mathematical ways of rigorously stating the implications entailed in a set of relationships among a number of persons.”¹⁹ Rigor and mathematical tools were the hopes of the day. Early modern social historians saw in this approach a method through which, using parish and other records, they could reconstruct, to the degree possible, the nature and structure of past communities.²⁰ Networks, for these historians, were webs of social support that undergirded the functioning of local societies. They were an especially useful way to describe kinship relations and it was their interior nature, their tight knit or loose structure, that provoked discussion.²¹ Networks emerge here as constant structures deeply tied to a single location.²² They provided the underlying hum of society.

While social historians drifted away from networks and began to focus on how early modern peoples thought about and spoke about social relationships, networks as analytical tools were not dead.²³ Historians of science and knowledge in general and scholars of ethnic and religious diasporas found networks useful. But their networks were different from those outlined by social historians. These networks were more fluid, more fragile, and more geographically expansive. They were the product of a shared belief, need, or interest. They became more important at specific points in time. The multiplication of religious identities in the Reformation, for example, pushed networks into action. With religious upheaval, persecution, and proselytizing zeal came exile and migration, which could separate individuals from secular networks of support and scatter them geographically.²⁴ Historians of religious networks, however, rarely consider the type of networks their adherents formed in their struggles.

Historians of science are more aware of the nature of their subjects’ networks. A growing interest in the social processes of knowledge creation and the influence of actor network theory, developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Michel Callon, inspired these scholars to look more deeply at networks.²⁵ These webs of connection did not determine the structure of individual lives or help an isolated community united through belief survive; rather, they processed information and artifacts. These historians focused on how their singular networks functioned. While interested in the interior nature of networks like social historians, the quality of the links, strong or weak, between networks also drew them.²⁶ It was these links that could help explicate the formation of knowledge and the workings of the larger intellectual world. Tracing networks also allowed them to highlight the geographic breadth of the world of knowledge. For these scholars networks were fragile, unanchored to place, and supplemental to deeply embedded social networks.²⁷

The creators of both intellectual and religious networks demonstrated a disregard for national boundaries and a celebration of geographic mobility that this project emphasizes.²⁸ Networks allow us to follow people rather than institutions or states.²⁹ This concentration on people and lack of concern regarding national boundaries has drawn Atlantic historians to networks. For example, Bernard Bailyn has noted, when mapping out the concepts and contours of Atlantic history, that “there were Atlantic networks everywhere—economic, religious, social, cultural.”³⁰ Migration, forced and voluntary, often made networks, old and new, necessary.³¹ Atlantic historians have traced a number of these social and religious networks, but historians of economic networks, especially those involving trade, have scrutinized the term most intensely.³² For David Hancock, decentralized networks played an especially vital role in trade during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.³³ Like intellectual and religious networks, business networks were fragile, changeable, and engaged only obliquely with dense social networks. And, as scholars of the Atlantic world are beginning to see, such networks were rarely contained within the Atlantic.³⁴

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 are the letter collections I focused on in this project since they allow the networks of their creators to emerge the most strongly. Additionally, since this is a book about networks and distance, I also chose letter writers who were scattered across the British world and who had written to each other. I then paired them with a number of writers who had little connection to them. This way ties between networks surface, but are balanced by those who are unconnected. Most of these writers were members of the British upper classes because it is their letters and diaries that survive in bulk and it was they who needed to maintain these vast long distance networks. However, the best way to introduce these letter writers is by looking at their relationships with their letters.

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 spaces. While the British Library holds two bound volumes of letters sent to Peter Collinson, many of his surviving letters were lovingly inserted into his commonplace book nestled between maps of North Carolina, records of venison received, and newspaper clippings.⁵⁶ His commonplace books appear to include pieces from throughout his adult life. The earliest piece dates from 1726 when he was in his early thirties and the last from the year of his death in 1768. Like the other correspondents, the letters of this Quaker cloth merchant and botanist also surface in the collections of others. William Byrd II, kept a number of Collinson’s autograph letters detailing, he wrote on one letter, “the management of vines.”⁵⁷

James Brydges, who wrote to Hans Sloane and moved in the same circles as John Perceval, was born to the eighth Baron Chandos in 1674 and would become Earl of Carnarvon in 1714 and the first Duke of Chandos in 1719. Brydges was also a man who kept track of his correspondence. He finished the last of fifty-seven volumes of outgoing letters in 1744, the year he died at age seventy.⁵⁸ Between 1700 and 1712 he had also kept fourteen volumes of incoming letters.⁵⁹ He had begun these letter books when he was appointed paymaster of the queen’s troops in his early thirties, but keeping a written record of his life was not new to him. Years before, he had kept a journal of his social rounds in London.⁶⁰ Writing letters and cultivating acquaintances helped Brydges organize his business and social world. Collecting art and the musical talents of men like Handel, who lived at Brydges’s estate of Cannons for a number of years, were also ways Brydges attempted to signal his arrival in the upper ranks of the aristocracy. His estate of Cannons, so brilliant when it was finished in 1724 that Daniel Defoe declared “a pen can but ill describe it, the pencil not much better,” was his almost overwrought declaration of social status.⁶¹ However, Cannons was dismantled and demolished a few years after his death and it is his letters that remain.

The letters of Brydges’s second wife, Cassandra, do not survive in the same bulk as her husband’s correspondence, but she too kept letter books.⁶² Cassandra Willoughby was born in 1670 to an eminent naturalist (in fact her tutor John Ray was Hans Sloane’s great friend) and the daughter of a governor of the East India Company (her mother’s second husband would be Sir Josiah Child, an influential governor of the East India Company). Cassandra dedicated her early years to the running of her brother’s estate in west Nottingham, where she pulled together her first short letter book of seventeen pages that held letters from the mid-1690s to the early years of the eighteenth century.⁶³ These were outgoing letters she composed to other people; meaning that she either kept drafts she later added to her book or copied these into the book before she sent them off. It was also around this time that she began to keep a travel diary that recorded, beginning in 1695, the places she went on one side and the occurrences that blessed or befell those in her social orbit on the other. She continued to keep this travel diary for four years after her marriage to her cousin James Brydges in 1713 at the age of forty-three. Her marriage also saw her picking up the pen to begin another letter book she would keep until her death in 1735.⁶⁴ Like those in her previous letter book these were outgoing letters she seems to have copied down to keep track of her world.

Far away in Lancashire, Nicholas Blundell also kept a letter book of outgoing letters. In 1669, Blundell had been born into a long-standing Catholic recusant family in the north of England and spent time in his youth in Flanders being educated at the Jesuit college of St. Omer. This was one of the few times he would leave the embrace of his estate in Little Crosby (the other was when he went into voluntary exile in Flanders for a year after the failed Jacobite Rising of 1715). To a degree, his world was substantially different from that of the others discussed here. He was less mobile and less interested in the wider social world of London. Unlike many of these letter writers, his path would not cross theirs over the years, but like them he recorded his letters. In his early thirties he found himself the head of the family when his father died in 1702. It was at this time that he picked up a pen and began keeping both a letter book and diary.⁶⁵ He kept the diary almost daily until 1728 and recorded his letters less consistently until 1731. The diary reflects the daily life of a member of the English gentry who was deeply involved in the workings of his estate. His letter book shows a member of the English gentry reaching out beyond that local world to correspondents in, among other locations, London and the Chesapeake.

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.

The lives of these correspondents also illuminate the way figures from the periphery of the British world positioned themselves. All these correspondents lived on the margins, geographically or socially, of the British elite and were relatively mobile. John Perceval, born in Ireland, spent much of his life trying and failing to gain an English title. Hans Sloane’s father was a Scot; Sloane himself was born in Ireland and died in England. Sloane’s father was a land agent for an earl and Sloane’s daughter the mother of one. Peter Collinson was an English merchant whose interest in botany led him to share his enthusiasm with members of the British aristocracy and Pennsylvania farmers. The two William Byrds both ended their lives in Virginia, but both maintained connections to those in England until their deaths. James Brydges and Cassandra Willoughby, both English born and bred, had deep connections to powerful trading interests. In fact, James Brydges spent some time in his youth in Constantinople, where his father was the British ambassador thanks to his family ties with the Levant Company. This mobile son of a mere baron would strive to see himself crowned “Princely” Chandos. Cassandra too fought to find a place. She gained power through the management of an estate as a young woman and continued to use those skills by marrying her cousin and becoming mistress of Cannons. Nicholas Blundell did not long for an estate like Cannons. He was happy with the calm rhythms of Little Crosby, but through his letters he too found himself embedded in a larger world that crossed the Atlantic and the English Channel. These figures varied in their possession of and desire for a place of power in society. However, they show how figures from the social and geographic peripheries of the British world were finding their way to its center. It was their letters, and the networks they extended, that allowed them entrance.

Each chapter of this book looks at letters and the networks they formed from a slightly different angle to flesh out the shape and workings of their senders’ wider networks. I begin with a moment of change: the permanent opening of the postal service to the public. From that moment forward, letter writers no longer needed to depend on carriers or traveling acquaintances to send their epistles. They had the post and the stamp to prove it. However, the introduction of more institutional forms of organization, like the postal system, did not supplant older forms of epistolary exchange, but rather expanded their use. This made new kinds of networks more valuable. Personal postal networks mattered as much as the Post Office.

Chapter 2 analyzes where letter writers sent their epistles and how letter writers thought about and experienced epistolary distance. Mapping out the extent of the British world as seen through these letter collections shifts our focus away from a purely British or Atlantic viewpoint and allows us to see this world as correspondents did, unbounded by artificial boundaries. But not all distances were equal. A letter writer’s connections to London differed from those to Paris or Virginia. And these writers rarely sat still. Both their mobility and how they thought about the distances they traversed determined how they used their networks.

Chapter 3 picks apart these networks. Social network analysis reveals that these webs contained two types of connection: a constant core of linkages and ephemeral edges. The British elite juggled multiple networks that required different forms of maintenance and altered over time. These epistolary networks were not set, unchanging, and limited, but living, moving, and mutable. They also had borders. Gender and social position affected the way individuals made use of these webs of connection. But once they had the ability to produce letters, individuals found they depended on these informal networks to keep their more dispersed and mobile worlds working.

Chapter 4 examines the words within letters. The more familiar letter of the eighteenth century made it easier to maintain distant links than the formal courtly letters of the seventeenth. However, focusing too much on the language in which writers composed their letters distracts from the elements that really built up a sense of connection and community. Many Britons distrusted the authenticity of affectionate language, and thus it was the small additions to letters that emphasized communal connections, networked ties, and time-honored forms of community maintenance that firmly anchored a correspondent to a wider network.

Chapter 5 turns to the new kinds of networks gaining strength and importance during the period: contractual and institutional networks. These networks of interest were products of formalized relationships, which often relied on communication through letters. Letters between landlords and their agents, merchants and their factors, and government officials differed from the more informal networks embedded in the vast social networks previously examined. Additionally, emerging social, religious, and intellectual societies relied on letters and the networks they formed. Both contractual and institutional forms of organization signal a more formalized and professionalized world, but these new kinds of networks relied on older ideas of connection and rested on more informal networks.

My final chapter turns to what happened when the newspaper challenged letters’ near monopoly on spreading news at a distance. The blossoming of the newspaper press may have changed the way letter writers included news in their epistles, but it did not alter their importance as a form of news distribution. Like the expansion of the postal system, the growth of the newspaper press made informal networks more important. Through letters individuals could use news to nurture social bonds, establish the truth of news reports the newspapers placed in doubt, and become members of virtual coffeehouses. Examining the way news flowed through letters brings together many of the themes of this book, from the continuing importance of informal networks in the face of new institutions to the effect of the widening British world on society.

By the eighteenth century the letter had become part of everyday life for most Britons. They wrote them in their closets, their pantries, their galleries, and behind their counters during business.⁶⁷ They sent them by the post and by friends and they read them in groups and alone. These fragile, but increasingly numerous, bits of paper crisscrossed the widening British world and provided a way for the British elite to extend and monitor the fluid social networks on which their livelihoods depended. These networks provide a clear picture of the way the British elite dealt with a changing geographic and social world. Peter Collinson used his letters to convey his intimate thoughts and to make his world turn. He was not alone.