Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres

By Rachael Scarborough King

“King’s pitch for the indebtedness of the genres we know well—the novel, the biography, the magazine piece—to letter writing is stylish and convincing.” —Christina Lupton, author of Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century

In Writing to the World, Rachael Scarborough King examines the shift from manuscript to print media culture in the long eighteenth century. She introduces the concept of the “bridge genre,” which enables such change by transferring existing textual conventions to emerging modes of composition and circulation. She draws on this concept to reveal how four crucial genres that emerged during this time—the newspaper, the periodical, the novel, and the biography—were united by their reliance on letters to accustom readers to these new forms of print media.

King explains that as newspapers, scientific journals, book reviews, and other new genres began to circulate widely, much of their form and content was borrowed from letters, allowing for easier access to these unfamiliar modes of printing and reading texts. Arguing that bridge genres encouraged people to see themselves as connected by networks of communication—as members of what they called “the world” of writing—King combines techniques of genre theory with archival research and literary interpretation, analyzing canonical works such as Addison and Steele’s Spectator, Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey alongside anonymous periodicals and the letters of middle-class housewives.

This original and groundbreaking work in media and literary history offers a model for the process of genre formation. Ultimately, Writing to the World is a sophisticated look at the intersection of print and the public sphere.

“This erudite, sophisticated, beautifully written book is a major achievement.” —Thomas Keymer, author of Poetics of the Pillory

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9781421425498

Book preview

Writing to the World

Writing to the World

Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres

RACHAEL SCARBOROUGH KING

© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2018

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For Ady, my best correspondent

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Circulating News: Letters in Manuscript and Print, 1665–1695

2 Questions and Answers: Epistolary Exchange and the Early Periodical Press

3 Open Letters: Personal Politics in the Epistolary Novel

4 A New World: Biographical Writing and Epistolary Evidence

5 Leaving the World: The Decline of the Epistolary Novel from Burney to Austen

Postscript

Notes

Bibliographical Essay

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book took shape through the kinds of collaborative, multidimensional correspondences that form its subject. It began as a doctoral dissertation under a trio of irreplaceable advisors. Clifford Siskin was and remains an extraordinary mentor: generous of time and advice, enthusiastic, demanding, and responsive. Lisa Gitelman is one of the most incisive readers I know, and Mary Poovey set (and modeled) a new standard of work. My interests in letters and media originated in seminars at New York University with Paula McDowell, Gabrielle Starr, John Guillory, and Patricia Crain, and I am also grateful to Deidre Lynch for her feedback toward the end of graduate school.

The welcoming and supportive environment of the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has allowed this project to evolve from dissertation to book. My eighteenth-centuryist colleagues, William Warner, E. Cook, and David Marshall, along with the other members of the Early Modern Center, have helped make UCSB an intellectual home. Heather Blurton, Brian Donnelly, Andrew Griffin, and Swati Rana have provided advice, encouragement, and much laughter, and I have enjoyed many conversations with Bethany Wong about letters, novels, and careers. At UCSB, Mona Damluji and Jia-Ching Chen have shared the delights and challenges of academic life with babies.

The archival research for this project would not have been possible without the generosity of many institutions, including the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Council for Media & Culture, the Lewis Walpole Library, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at UCLA, the Huntington Library, Lincoln College, Oxford, and the NYU Department of English and American Literature. I am particularly grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, which both forged my identity as a book historian and taught me how to really read a book. I thank Michael Suarez and Donna Sy for their presence and support in matters both professional and personal.

One of the true joys of studying eighteenth-century literature is an intellectual community made up of wits, skeptics, and sociable salonnières. Seth Rudy, Collin Jennings, Andrew Bricker, and John Easterbrook are valued readers, collaborators, and drinking buddies. I was lucky to follow Seth and Yohei Igarashi as graduate assistants on the Re:Enlightenment Project, whose intellectual commitments have given my work a wider meaning. Portions of chapters 2 and 5 originally appeared in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture and Eighteenth-Century Fiction, respectively, and I am grateful for permission to reuse them here. I am also truly appreciative of the engaged, thoughtful comments I received from the two anonymous readers at Johns Hopkins University Press. Matt McAdam has been a dynamic correspondent and editor since a first series of Twitter messages several years ago, and Catherine Goldstead has provided able guidance and assistance.

My friends and family have been enthusiastic supporters of my academic life since I first decided to quit journalism and try the more stable path of graduate school. I am truly thankful for the unwavering love and encouragement of my sister, Lucy King, and mother, Clare King. My father, David King, was the first in the family to earn a PhD. Four academic in-laws—Zori Barkan, Pamela Smith, Diana Kormos-Buchwald, and Jed Buchwald—have been important sounding boards. With Ciel Hunter, Jillian Wein Riley, Sim Kimmel, Davida Schiff, and Shirley Wong I have built networks of care and communication that cross space and time.

I would not be the person, scholar, friend, teacher, parent, partner, or correspondent that I am without Ady Barkan. His absolute belief in me and his constant ability to read and talk more make him my most important collaborator 13 years after a periodical—the Columbia Spectator—first brought us together. Our joint project, Carl, gestated for a shorter time than this one but has already proven far more exciting and original. They are my world.

Writing to the World

Introduction

The titans of eighteenth-century print could not avoid corresponding with their readers. As consumers confronted the boom in new print genres that characterized the period—from the newspaper and periodical essay to the scientific journal, book review, biography, and the era’s most controversial new type, the novel—they drafted handwritten responses to writers, printers, characters, and authorial figures. In his 1705 preface to A Review of the Affairs of France, Daniel Defoe protested that Receiving or Answering Letters of Doubts, Difficulties, Cases and Questions had not been his intention in starting the periodical, and I could be heartily Glad, the Reader of this Paper would excuse me from it yet,—But I see it cannot be, and the World will have it done.¹ Joseph Addison boasted of his Multitude of Correspondents in the Spectator but scolded those who fill their Letters with private Scandal, declaring, it is not my Design to be a Publisher of Intreagues and Cuckoldoms, or to bring little infamous Stories out of their present lurking Holes into broad Day-light.² And 40 years later, Samuel Johnson as Mr. Rambler noted, I look upon every letter, whether it contains encomiums or reproaches, as an equal attestation of rising credit.³ Such epistolary interactions were fostered by the works themselves, which depended on the genre of the letter to come into being, to structure their texts, to format their pages, and to circulate to readers. Defoe’s Review included the Mercure Scandale section in which he answered readers’ queries; in Tatler No. 7 Richard Steele claimed that without epistolary assistance he had not a Month’s Wit more and proposed to leave it in the Choice of my Gentle Readers, whether I shall hear from them, or they hear no more from me.⁴ For these pioneering periodicalists, soliciting, receiving, publishing, and responding to reader letters was an essential feature of print authorship.

The reflections of Defoe, Addison, Steele, and Johnson offer a window into the changes roiling the eighteenth-century media landscape, in which an ever-growing number of emerging printed forms considered their own relationship to existing modes of communication—in particular, to the handwritten letter. Individually and jointly, these authors were addressing a question at the heart of this investigation: How do genres of writing transform during periods of major technological and media shift? This book tracks the relationship of genre to medium, asking how the arrival and spread of new media—the material forms in which texts are transmitted—enable and even necessitate the development of new genres—the conceptual categories that readers and authors use to denominate varieties of writing. I will return to my understanding of genre and medium below. Here I proceed from the observation that new genres proliferate at moments of media change, from the eighteenth-century takeoff in print that brought us newspapers, periodicals, novels, and biographies, to our contemporary digital turn, which so far has seen the email, the blog, the text message, the tweet, the web series, the meme, and the Wikipedia article. In order to explain this phenomenon, I propose the concept of the bridge genre, a genre that facilitates change by providing writers and readers with paths across shifting media landscapes. Bridge genres connect old and new media: they transfer existing textual conventions to emerging modes of composition and circulation, a function that provides stability and continuity during what are otherwise times of fluctuation and reordering. They exhibit a set of features that remain recognizable in different material incarnations, extending these features into fresh arenas. Both adaptable and accessible in nature, bridge genres allow readers and writers to engage new media, experiment with current ones, and modify their expectations of the forms in which they encounter literature.

At specific historical moments, particular genres take on the task of bridging. That is, as a shift in media takes place, certain genres prove especially useful in helping make sense of that shift. Fifteenth-century incunables reproduced the format, page layout, and content of existing Biblical and classical manuscripts. In the early modern period, sermons drew on oral traditions to initiate a range of new religio-political printed texts. And today, many journalists continue to employ print standards of length and scope for articles that appear online, although the digital medium is starting to change those standards—and to affect the features of printed newspapers. In this book, I focus on the long eighteenth century, a period in many ways analogous to the present when readers and writers engaged in an extensive debate about the tendencies and effects of a new medium: print. While the printing press had existed since the fifteenth century, its status changed in the late 1600s and early 1700s. With an increase in the overall quantity of print in circulation and development of cheap ephemera, the material conditions of the print marketplace transformed, and the century would see an efflorescence of new genres. Dror Wahrman has named this the era of Print 2.0, arguing that the transition to periodical publication, in a field now dominated by newspapers and magazines, meant that "print was new in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries."⁵ This market also expanded at an exponential pace as the century advanced.⁶ But these were not seamless or self-evident changes, and many bemoaned the new media regime where every Man thinks what he lists, speaks what he thinks, writes what he speaks, and prints what he writes . . . carried on by a kind of frantick Figgary.⁷ Adrian Johns has shown that anonymity, piracy, and plagiarism were major concerns for readers and writers of print, and the first book reputed to have been printed without any errors did not appear until 1760.⁸ The naturalization of print involved ongoing and protracted negotiations, as authors and consumers compared the new medium with the earlier ones of speech and manuscript.

At this transitional moment, I argue, the primary bridge genre was the letter, whose ubiquity from interpersonal postal networks to printed letter collections reflected a special salience. Epistolary writing connected manuscript and print forms of communication; many of the period’s foremost innovations in genre emerged through the incorporation of letters, while at the same time letter writing expanded and diversified as a communicative practice. The personal letter was the common factor enabling a host of distinctively modern printed genres to come into being and appeal to readers; it undergirded the literary experiments that pervaded eighteenth-century print culture. Letters in the period were able to transition between handwriting and printing, orienting readers within the new media landscape by offering interpretive guideposts. I draw together four of these new kinds of print to show how they constitute a complex of epistolary interconnections: each emerged via the bridging function of the letter. Newspapers relied on letters from foreign correspondents for content; periodicals initiated interactions with readers in the form of letters to the editor; biographical lives used letters as documentary evidence; and novels deployed them to transmit unfolding narratives. The appearance in print of the letter—the flexible layout signaling the transmission of information and sentiment from one correspondent to another—connected these developing genres at the same time as each one’s emphasis upon varying epistolary features allowed for increasing differentiation and diversification. Beginning in the seventeenth century and accelerating in the eighteenth, the ancient genre of the letter took on a new central function: to help readers familiar with this everyday scribal practice understand and interact with the many new ways to consume printed commodities.

Scholars have long accepted the epistolary origins of the novel, seeing the novelistic letter as a means to convey private experience and individual subjectivity.⁹ But the letter played a different role in early newspapers, periodical essays, and biographies—a fact that should also help us rethink its contributions to the developing novel genre. All four of these genres initially featured the extensive use of printed letters typically laid out in a standard format from salutation to subscription, while they also made frequent reference to their own dependence upon postal networks to gather copy, to interact with readers and contributors, to substantiate their claims, and to circulate to consumers. This book does not offer another interpretation of the rise of the novel, but rather positions the novel genre as part of a larger literary-historical transition wherein the print medium was able to permeate textual production by continually connecting to handwriting in the form of the personal letter. Letters were at hand: they were mentally and physically available tools for smoothing the transition from existing to emerging media. Authors and printers experimenting with new genres relied on pre-existing understandings of how to read and write letters, which stressed an ongoing interaction between writer and reader, a direct source of firsthand knowledge, a self-reflexive attention to the procedures of written communication, and an address to a specific reader or group of readers. The presence of fictional and authentic letters made new media accessible to new readers and writers, who adapted to the prominence of print by placing it in the context of handwritten interpersonal communication.

Letters and Posts

The eighteenth-century incorporation of letters into printed texts both brought manuscript conventions into the scope of print circulation and reworked those conventions in ways that had a lasting impact on theories of communication and correspondence. Jürgen Habermas has called the eighteenth century the century of the letter, recognizing the importance of letters but miscategorizing them as solely private documents where the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity.¹⁰ Instead, across a wide array of genres letters were quasi-public texts; the individual, private missive developed over the course of the century as one of many epistolary varieties. The manuscript personal letter was a social communication that could range over commercial, political, informational, and sentimental functions. Thus the genre of the letter—a shorthand encompassing epistolary formatting on the page as well as the actual letters that supported the creation and distribution of texts—could sustain new kinds of print in a variety of factual and fictional contexts. There were a number of structural and systemic reasons why letters should become especially important during the long eighteenth century. The letter was a classical genre, a fact reinforced by its continuing presence in standard pedagogy via the Latin epistles of Cicero and Seneca. Letters were potent symbols of the communicative process itself, embodying both the possibilities and problems of transferring thought and feeling in physical form: sending a letter made it possible to communicate over distance, but also created the conditions for loss, interception, or misinterpretation.¹¹ Letters could contain an almost unlimited variety of content within a relatively short, bounded space, making them adaptable conduits. As Johnson wrote of this species of composition, none is of more various or frequent use, through the whole subordination of human life.¹²

For the educated elite, the letter was culturally available: it was an obvious form of personal and professional interaction, and epistolary circles formed the foundation of many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary and scientific communities. Lisa Jardine writes, "those who passed through early modern English classrooms . . . regarded the familiar letter as a highly crafted form of communication, which could act as an intermediary between separated individuals linked by bonds of shared feeling and an emerging trans-European intellectual ideal of humanitas."¹³ But in the early modern period, this Ciceronian view clashed with a range of pragmatic functions for the letter, and printed vernacular examples were rare; at the start of the seventeenth century, no individual’s letters had been published as a stand-alone collection in English, despite many such volumes in French and Italian.¹⁴ As state postal systems were established in the mid- to late seventeenth century, the scope of the letter’s influence metastasized. The development of a postal system meant that the mail, which previously had been restricted to government agents and private couriers, was now theoretically open to anyone able to pay the price of admission. In some places, such as London, that price was as low as a penny. This shift gradually allowed letters to filter through the social spectrum and to become almost subconscious facts of life. As letter writing transitioned from educational training to everyday activity, the established letter genre became a tool for facilitating the rise of print.

The letter thus offers a crucial case study for re-examining the manuscript-print relationship from the Restoration through the start of the Victorian period, an unusual periodization that I argue constituted a postal era beginning with the establishment of a state postal system and ending with the major postal reforms of 1839–40. One of the claims of this book is that tracing a genre network—following the unexpected connections between diverse forms that a bridge genre like the letter creates—rather than relying on a predetermined literary period can reveal patterns and influences that would otherwise be obscured.¹⁵ In the postal era, the reigning paradigm of communication was the letter. In both material and metaphorical terms, it underlay and elucidated the new kinds of print that were transforming the media landscape. The act of transmitting a message from one entity to another, whether in speech or writing, was usefully encapsulated by the process of composing, addressing, sending, and receiving letters—which were often described as transcribed speech. As John Tavernier wrote in the introduction to his epistolary manual The Entertaining Correspondent, letters materialize our ideas, and make ’em as lasting as the ink and paper, their vehicles, offering a sixth sense. He continued: Letter-writing is but a sort of literary conversation, and that you write to the person absent, in the manner you would speak to him, if present.¹⁶ Or, as the author of The Lady’s Preceptor added, letters are Emanations of ourselves, by which we do, as it were, talk and act in several Places at a time.¹⁷ Like the digital network today, in the postal era the genre of the letter served as a metonym for spoken and written interaction in an increasingly mediated world.

This symbolic status was one reason that the letter became the primary bridge genre of the period. Letters were able to act as framing devices for communication across media. While scholars often assume that by the early eighteenth century print culture had replaced scribal circulation as the dominant media system, following the network of printed letters reveals an ongoing negotiation between manuscript and print centuries after the invention of the press.¹⁸ As Christina Lupton notes, acceptance of a new medium can coexist with a high level of critical consciousness about its presence.¹⁹ Letters had a usefully in-between media status that gave them great flexibility: they were meant to be the nearest transcription of oral conversation that writing could approximate, while at the same time their literary pedigree demonstrated that they were premeditated, rule-bound constructions. Tavernier highlighted these complications when he wrote that there is no obtaining a natural, easy stile, and a graceful manner . . . but by practice; custom overcomes many difficulties.²⁰ A natural mode of letter writing was the result of study and circumspection. Letters self-reflexively bridged speech, manuscript, and print; manuscript letters presented themselves as a silent art of speaking,²¹ while printed works made reference to handwriting and paper folds in attempting to mimic the manuscript medium. This multimodal status made the letter a useful genre for a literary sphere in which the hierarchical boundaries between media of publication were still under construction.

Early modern and long-eighteenth-century letters thus belie binary distinctions between manuscript and print and, correspondingly, between the contemporary categories of letter and novel, private and public, and feminine and masculine that are often thought to map onto each medium. Edward Villiers Rippingille’s 1819 painting The Post Office displays the communal, multimedia activity of receiving mail: the arrival of the post gathers men and women, young and old, rich and poor—even, it appears, literate and illiterate—around the provincial post office (figure I.1). The townspeople stand in groups reading letters as well as the newspapers that have traveled from London via the stagecoach, whose bugle-blowing post boy announces its departure for the next stop on the route. The mail engenders a range of emotions in the figures, from excitement, to elation, to curiosity, to despondency, to despair. As the painting makes clear, in the postal era readers and writers did not assume that letters had a special relationship to privacy or the domestic sphere; they were written in the presence of others who gave vocal input or added notes, and they were read aloud upon receipt.²² James Daybell identifies in the letter genre a high degree of inter-textuality between oral, print and manuscript media: letters written to be read aloud were scribally recorded or memorised for later transcription; printed correspondence was written out by hand and copied into miscellanies or notebooks; manuscript copies were published by printers.²³ Personal letters frequently enclosed printed materials such as newspapers, and many printed documents left room for handwritten additions or mailing addresses. The fact that many letters circulated within epistolary communities meant there were no hard-and-fast lines between published and unpublished; as Gary Schneider argues, the boundaries between actual and imaginary letters, between print letters transferred from manuscript and those calculated for the press, are often blurry ones.²⁴ Writers could have little expectation of secrecy while a letter was in transit since correspondence, especially during periods of war or political upheaval, was subject to detention and surveillance by government officials. Even the king was not immune: during the Civil War the Parliamentary tactic of publishing purloined letters culminated in the 1645 printing of a self-contradictory packet from Charles I, given the title The Kings Cabinet Opened.²⁵ The idea of the manuscript letter as the archetypal private genre is a later—late eighteenth- to mid-nineteenth-century—construction that has been retroactively applied to earlier letter-writing norms.

Figure I.1. Edward Villiers Rippingille, The Post Office, 1819, oil on canvas, Leeds Museums and Galleries, Lotherton Hall, UK/Bridgeman Images.

This dynamic becomes evident if we trace representative moments of bridging in the period. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, public political debate was frequently conducted in epistolary form; as Hugh Blair, professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at the University of Edinburgh, wrote in 1783, There is no subject whatever, on which one may not convey his thoughts to the Public in the form of a Letter.²⁶ The period saw the emergence and standardization of the letter pamphlet, a genre that put political, as well as religious and scientific, opinions into the context of a missive between two correspondents, with the conventional title A Letter from a Gentleman in Town to His Friend in the Country. Most pamphlets, however, offered some variation on this standard, providing points of reference for the reader: A Letter from a Whig Gentleman in Town to His Friend in the Country (1712), Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London (1754), A Letter from Phocion to the Considerate Citizens of New-York, on the Politics of the Day (1784, by Alexander Hamilton). The English Short Title Catalogue records more than 6,500 variations on the title, comprising book, newspaper, and pamphlet formats, between 1650 and 1800.²⁷ Because of their ephemeral and apparently disingenuous nature—we tend to assume that these are not real letters—the genre has often been either dismissed or ignored, seen as evidence of a still-forming public sphere or an example of proto-epistolary fiction. But if we look carefully at the work of the letter in these pamphlets, their epistolary nature becomes more noteworthy. In fact, it becomes clear that the value of invoking letters was not primarily to trick readers into believing the texts were authentic or to disguise the author’s true identity but rather to guide readers on how to interpret this new kind of factious, ephemeral print.

The authors of epistolary pamphlets not only used a basic epistolary form but also incorporated features of personal letters into their texts, in particular discussing the processes of postal communication that allowed the printed work to appear. Most pamphlets began with a description of the other letters to which the authors were responding, following the typical opening of an eighteenth-century epistle. With the concept of the news still new, the letter pamphlets enacted for readers the procedures by which information could be circulated, debated, and verified. The author of A Letter from a Gentleman in Philadelphia to His Friend in the Country (1742) began, Sir, I received yours; in which you inform me the following Opinions are positively asserted and industriously propagated among you, going on to outline the technical details for an upcoming vote.²⁸ A Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to His Friend in Town (1732) opened, I thank you for the Paper you were so good to send me, upon the Dangerous Consequences of long Parliaments and Assemblies.²⁹ And A Letter from a Gentleman in New-York, to His Friend in London (1733) provided the path of the letter: "Sir, I received Your Letter by way of Boston; You tell me you have seen the Votes of our Assembly.³⁰ Casting the publication in the form of a letter led authors to explicitly discuss the transmission routes of news items and to provide their sources of verification. It also implied ongoing communication, just part of which was making its way into print; writers thus used epistolarity to display their participation in a news network. Although only some pamphlets maintained epistolary form throughout the text, they used the parameters of discussion—the sender and recipient"—to help readers interpret the information.

In an expanding news marketplace in which authors almost never signed their works, epistolary pamphlets laid claim to transparency and eyewitness knowledge, even if these claims were often unverifiable. However, many of the pamphlets actually were intercepted or repurposed letters, rather than fictional ones; this possibility meant that readers saw the pamphlets as lying on a continuum with personal letters rather than as fundamentally different from them. Michael Warner has argued that such pamphlets, particularly in the American revolutionary context, used the generic pose of correspondence to draw a contrast between the privacy of manuscript and the publicity of print, the proper medium of the public sphere.³¹ In his view, the pamphlets deny rather than activate the properties of manuscript communication. But the frequency of this form of political discourse implies a larger purpose for the bridge genre of the letter, whose open-ended flexibility allowed a variety of content to be contained within a manageable length of text. The letter showed the intersection of manuscript and print and the interpenetration of public and private in the arena of news: readers saw that important topics could be profitably discussed by two nobodies, anonymous figures loosely assigned to social roles. Epistolary pamphlets enabled participation as the letter encoded the expectation of response, which often materialized with follow-up letters disputing or confirming the original’s assertions. They offered a point of entry into a diversifying realm of political news reporting, providing longer explanations and more context than the short, dry paragraphs that appeared in newspapers. And they showed how a central purpose of letter writing, the communication of news, could continue and expand in print. By pulling some of the visual, material elements of letter writing into the realm of print—the address, the opening Sir and closing signature, the approximate length and page layout—letters familiarized the new medium, priming readers to interpret it in terms of the mixed public-private epistolary communities with which they were already acquainted.

Even at the end of the eighteenth century, this intuitive knowledge of epistolarity was still in play. Edmund Burke, for example, relied on the genre when he subtitled his Reflections on the Revolution in France a Letter intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Paris. Burke noted that his Reflections had their origin in a correspondence, although the result had far exceeded the measure of a letter. However, he continued, having thrown down his first thoughts in the form of a letter, and indeed, when he sat down to write, having intended it for a private letter, he found it difficult to change the form of address, when his sentiments had grown into a greater extent, and had received another direction.³² Later in the work he claimed the freedom of epistolary intercourse to explain the style of writing.³³ Burke, like the earlier pamphlet writers, relied on readers’ implicit understandings of how to read and write letters to frame his treatise, in which he used a private letter to criticize the public correspondence of the London-based Revolution Society with the French National Assembly. Over time, the letter pamphlet formed the basis for longer works of politics and news, as individual letters were collected into volumes and then treatises that, like Burke’s, continued to have a vestigial epistolary orientation. The letter transferred features already implicit in manuscript epistles, such as the assumptions that letters were a primary source of news, that such news had been vetted, and that information should be tailored to local communities, into the print medium. By initially connecting old and new media, therefore, the bridge genre allows for the development of increasingly divergent texts that take advantage of the changed possibilities the new medium affords. The concept of bridging shows the linked movement of genre and medium: once users are accustomed to these new forms, they are able to experiment and diversify, forging new genres that no longer make active reference to old media. The bridge establishes a groundwork for generic innovation by facilitating media shift.

Terminology

As this discussion will already have demonstrated, my argument relies on nuanced understandings of a number of concepts that have become central to literary and media studies in recent years. In particular, one of the goals of this work is to clarify the relationship between two terms fundamental to a materially attentive literary analysis: genre and medium. This book helps to recover a prehistory of these terms, showing how the use of the letter genre across manuscript and print media helped people make sense of changing literary conditions. In my treatment of them, genre and medium are not contrasts corresponding to content and format, respectively; rather, they reinforce and inform one another. Genre is the more capacious term; as Mikhail Bakhtin argues, genres are the great heroes of language and literature, whose ‘trends’ and ‘schools’ are but second- or third-rank protagonists.³⁴ Ralph Cohen notes that genres are defined not in isolation but in relation to one another, and medium—the material form of transmission—is a key element of those categorizations: When an oral society is replaced by a literate one, the reasons for generic classification undergo change.³⁵ I define a genre as a category of communication that identifies a cluster of textual characteristics and conventions; in Lisa Gitelman’s phrasing, it is a mode of recognition that finds sites and segments of coherence within the discursive field.³⁶ Genre enables, structures, and limns reading, writing, and criticism through both descriptive and prescriptive channels, locating a text within its literary-historical context. This does not mean that genre categories are static; they are always expanding and shrinking, always relocating in relation to other genres, always defining themselves against adjacent ones. Genres preemptively offer guides to interpretation and pragmatically class associated conventions, at once providing stability and allowing for modification. No single feature will define a genre, and no text will display all of the features that a genre contains.

A theoretical model of genre does not simply name formal features or stylistic traits but also and more broadly shows how genres work to shape the processes of reading and writing. By calling the letter a genre rather than a related term such as form or mode, I emphasize what it can do rather than attempting an a priori definition of what it is. Gerard Genette distinguishes between genre and mode by noting that the latter is a kind of enunciation relating to style and/or meter: genres are properly literary categories, whereas modes are categories that belong to linguistics. . . . Modes and themes, intersecting, jointly include and determine genres.³⁷ The linguistic category of mode is an element of genre; so is form, which I do not see as a synonym. Form, while historically contingent, is a property of the text, one related to the arrangement of words on the page or screen, and in this context is a literary category tied to the disciplinary practice of close reading.³⁸ More broadly, Sandra Macpherson defines form as nothing more—and nothing less—than the shape matter (whether a poem or a tree) takes.³⁹ Literary form gives material shape to words. Form and genre may be difficult to tease apart because in some cases a genre’s most prominent feature is its form, as is almost the case with the letter—Johnson, for example, contended that a letter has no peculiarity but its form. But he qualified this seemingly definitive statement, noting, "As letters are written on all subjects, in all states of mind, they cannot be properly reduced to settled rules, or