The Opened Letter. Lindsay O'Neill

       Chapter 2

       Mapping the Epistolary World

      In a letter written in 1697, John Perceval’s tutor sent his two young charges on a hypothetical journey around the world to spread the news of the Treaty of Ryswick, which settled the War of the League of Augsburg. Philip Perceval was to go southeast across the British Channel, along the coasts of France, Portugal, and West Africa until he reached the Cape of Good Hope, where, after breakfast and “a short dance with the Hottantots,” he would continue on to the Spice Islands and “bid good morrow to the Japanners.” John however “wou’d never endure the fatigues of so tedious a Voyage since he is so well acquainted with the short cut of the North East passage.” After coasting along the shores of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway he would rent a boat and some wind from the Laplanders to take him to Peking and thence to California by way of the Juan Fernandez Islands. Their tutor ended by reminding the boys that they could easily chart their routes on the “Map of the World hanging by their bedside in Town” if they needed “to revive their Ideas of the country.”¹ This playful exercise was to teach the young gentlemen about their wider world and it was a lesson well learned. While neither Philip nor John ever traveled to China or danced at the Cape of Good Hope, John did receive letters from both locations. From his vantage point in London or Dublin, he kept track of connections who traveled across the vast world described to him by his tutor.

      Exotic locations beyond British shores often surfaced on the margins of Perceval’s epistolary world and often piqued his interest, but he received more letters from locations closer to home: from Bath, Dublin, and Paris. Bringing together these wider connections and those closer to home reveals the true scope and purpose of the epistolary world, as well as the variations within it. It is well known that letters were the product of the need to connect over a distance, but what distances and how they differed remains unclear.² Following letters to their destinations and examining their writers’ motivations for producing them allows us to explore the different experiences letter writers had depending on where they lived and how easy it was for them to shift locations. For besides mapping out this world, this chapter also explores the importance of mobility for these letter writers.³ While most of them would never make it to the Juan Fernandez Islands, few remained at home.

      Looking at exactly where letters originated from produces a basic outline of the shape of the epistolary world of their writers. It was this map of human connections with its hubs and peripheries that defined the world of letter writers rather than national boundaries. However, dots on a map only reveal so much; the composers of these letters experienced and expressed their sense of distance differently depending on their coordinates and their ability to change those coordinates. This map needs to be put into motion and the values of mobility and stability examined. Doing so forces us to look at the British world as a whole: to examine London alongside Lancashire and Dublin alongside Virginia.⁴ It reminds us that for the British elite one’s geographic origin mattered, but one’s ability to maintain social connections in urban centers mattered more. For these letter writers it was mobility, or lack thereof, that determined the nature of their network, not just the specific place where they resided.

      Centers and Peripheries

      At the top or bottom of their letters correspondents usually noted where they composed their letters. This was a rather new development. Neither the Paston letters of the fifteenth century nor the letters written by the Hastings family early in the seventeenth century note the location of origin on a separate line. However, by the eighteenth century it was becoming increasingly important to let your correspondent know where you were. It helped ground the letters in space and provided receivers with an idea of where to send their response. This new habit allows us to map where letters were coming from, which produces a map of the geographic makeup of these writers’ epistolary worlds (Figures 4–6).⁵ These maps show the number of letters sent from specific locations as noted on the letters examined: on over 2,000 letters the correspondents had scrawled their location as London, 229 had placed Paris next to the date on their letters, and sixteen had noted that they wrote from Spanish Town, Jamaica. Every map of an epistolary network would look subtly different from these, since these maps reflect the lives of these specific correspondents. For example, the concentration of letters in county Munster in Ireland is due to John Perceval’s estates near Cork. However, by layering the networks of twelve correspondents on each other, the concentrations that they produce reflect the general geographic proclivities of most British letter writers of their social status during the period.

      The maps these letters create reveals a British world centered and embedded in England with numerous anchors on the European continent, deep ties to the North American colonies, and a smattering of connections throughout the rest of the globe. The majority of letters, 85 percent to be exact, hailed from the British Isles themselves (Figure 4). These letters deeply bespeckle the south of England and cluster around urban centers like Bristol and Bath, with an especially dense showing around London. The letters then climb their way north, clustering in places like Lancaster, and then finding their way over the border into Scotland. Westward the letters make their way to Ireland, especially to Dublin and Munster, where over a quarter of the letters originated since the group of correspondents examined had strong ties to that isle. Moving in the other direction, across the English Channel, we find that another 10 percent of the letters came from the European continent (Figure 5). These letters hailed from multiple European countries: Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the Papal States, and even Russia, but they cluster around the Low Countries and France. Fewer letters, only 5 percent, came from beyond Europe, but as we will see in many ways these links were stronger than many closer to home (Figure 6). Writers penned most of these distant letters, 79 percent, from the North American colonies, and almost 90 percent of the letters sent from beyond Europe arrived from British-ruled colonies or outposts of British trading companies. This epistolary world reached across the globe, but as the maps reveal it had its own centers and peripheries.

      These letters cluster around urban centers. About 30 percent of all the letters examined originated from cities of over 100,000 inhabitants and 40 percent from cities of over 40,000.⁶ Europe as a whole was not becoming increasingly urbanized during this period, but the nature of that urbanization was changing. Urban inhabitants were living in larger cities and those cities were increasingly located in the north of Europe with London, Paris, and the Dutch Randstad leading the way.⁷ The distribution of letters reflects this shift. The