Letters and the Body, 1700–1830

This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and

bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women’s
and men’s letters written from and to Britain, North America, Europe,
India and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite.
In eleven chapters, scholars from various disciplines draw on different meth­
odological approaches that include close readings of single letters, social histor­
ical analyses of large corpora and a material culture approach to the object of
the letter. This research includes personal letters exchanged among family and
friends, formal correspondence and letters that were incorporated into pub­
lished forewords and appendices, journals and memoirs. Part I explores the
letter as a substitute for the absent body, the imagined physical encounters and
performances envisaged by letter writers and the means through which these
imagined sensations were conveyed. Part II examines the letter as a material
object that served as a conduit for descriptions of the material body and as an
instrument for embodied encounters. Part III focuses on how correspondents
purposefully used their bodies in letters as a means to create intimacy, to
generate social networks and build a ‘body politic’.
This interdisciplinary volume centred around letters will be of interest to
scholars and students in a variety of fields including eighteenth-century studies,
cultural history and literature.

Sarah Goldsmith is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She

researches the histories of masculinity, bodies and travel. Her first monograph
was Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour (2020).
She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker and consulted on the V&A’s
2022 Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear exhibition.

Sheryllynne Haggerty is Honorary Research Fellow at WISE, University of

Hull. She has published extensively on the economy and networks of the
eighteenth-century British Atlantic, including ‘Merely for Money’? Business
Culture in the British Atlantic 1750–1815 (2012) and Ordinary People,
Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica, 1756 (2023).
Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham.
She has published extensively on the history of gender, masculinity, sexuality, the
home and material culture, including The Little Republic: Masculinity and
Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012) and The Imposteress
Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England (2020).
Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies
Series Editors: Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton

The long eighteenth century sits as a pivotal point between the early-
modern and modern worlds. By actively encouraging an international focus
for the series over all, both in terms of wide-ranging geographical topics and
authorial locations, the series aims to feature cutting-edge research from
established and recent scholars, and capitalize on the breadth of themes and
topics that new approaches to research in the period reveal. This series
provides a forum for recent and established historians to present new
research and explore fresh approaches to culture and society in the long
eighteenth century. As a crucial period of transition, the period saw devel­
opments that shaped perceptions of the place of the individual and the col­
lective in the construction of the modern world. Eighteenth-Century
Cultures and Societies is a series that is globally ambitious in scope and
broad in its desire to publish cutting-edge research that takes an innovative,
multi-vocal and increasingly holistic approach to the period. The series will
be particularly sensitive to questions of gender and class, but aims to
embrace and explore a variety of fresh approaches and methodologies.

Enlightened Nightscapes
Critical Essays on the Long Eighteenth-Century Night
Edited by Pamela F. Phillips

Gender, Mediation and Popular Education in Venice (1760–1830)

Susan Dalton

Letters and the Body, 1700–1830

Writing and Embodiment
Edited by Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty and Karen Harvey

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/Routledge-Studies-in-Eighteenth-Century-Cultures-and-Societies/book-
series/RSECCS
Letters and the Body,
1700–1830
Writing and Embodiment

Edited by
Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty
and Karen Harvey
Designed cover image: ‘One Peep Was Enough’, F. Bacon after H. Richter
(1832). Wellcome Collection: 37057i, https://wellcomecollection.org/
works/pjjxazgs
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne
Haggerty and Karen Harvey; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty and Karen Harvey to
be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors
for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording,
or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.

ISBN: 978-0-367-46151-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-51557-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-02725-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256

Typeset in Sabon
by Taylor & Francis Books
Contents

List of figures ix
Acknowledgments x
List of contributors xi

Introduction 1
SARAH GOLDSMITH, SHERYLLYNNE HAGGERTY AND KAREN HARVEY

PART I
Imagined bodies and imagining touch 15
1 Absent bodies? Gouty brethren and sensitive hearts in William
Constable’s letters from the Grand Tour 1769–1771 17
RACHEL FELDBERG

2 Imagining youth: Epistolary representations of the eighteenth-

century adolescent and youthful body 40
SARAH GOLDSMITH

3 Touch me if you can: Paper bodies in letters to and from the

eighteenth-century French Caribbean 64
ANNIKA RAAPKE

PART II
Material bodies/material letters 83
4 Sympathy in practice: Eighteenth-century letters and the
material body 85
KAREN HARVEY

5 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’: Pain, play and the material
text in Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella 103
ABIGAIL WILLIAMS
viii Contents
6 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration in British women’s
letters from India 122
ONNI GUST

7 ‘A thousand kisses’: Postscript, appendices and desire in The

Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley, Late of Drury Lane Theatre
(1787) 142
FRITH TAYLOR

PART III
Bodies deployed 167
8 I ‘never had the happeness of Receivin one Letter from You’:
Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 169
SHERYLLYNNE HAGGERTY

9 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 191

STEVEN KING

10 Labouring bodies: Work animals and hack writers in Oliver

Goldsmith’s letters 212
TAYLIN NELSON

11 Sons of Liberty: Epistolary bodies and the early American

Revolution 236
NATHAN PERL-ROSENTHAL

Bibliography 256
Index 266
Figures

1.1 Jean-Etienne Liotard, William Constable, 1770, pastel on

parchment. 29
1.2 Anton von Maron, William and Winifred Constable depicted as
Marcius Porcius Cato and his wife Marcia, 1773, oil on canvas. 33
2.1 Lord Henry Spencer, Charles, the Earl of Dalkeith, 1792, ink
sketch on paper, included in Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of
Buccleuch’s 3 July 1792 letter to Elizabeth, Duchess of
Buccleuch. 51
2.2 Pompeo Batoni, George Legge, Viscount Lewisham, 1778, oil on
canvas 127 cm � 100 cm (P000048). 56
5.1 Letter 41, Add. MS. 4804, fol. 55v. 116
5.2 Letter 44, Add. MS. 4804, fol. 60v. 117
8.1 Page one of Joseph Fraizer’s letter to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5
Oct 1756. 176
8.2 Page two of Joseph Fraizer’s letter to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5
Oct 1756. 177
8.3 Envelope of Joseph Fraizer’s letter to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5
Oct 1756. 178
Acknowledgments

This book originated as the ‘Epistolary Bodies: Letters and Bodies in the
Eighteenth Century’ conference held at the University of Leicester in May 2019
as part of the Midlands Eighteenth Century Research Network. The editors
wish to thank all those who participated and attended, as well as the Economic
History Society, the Royal Historical Society and the Leverhulme Trust for
their generous support of that event. The editors and contributors to the book
have since benefitted considerably from the expertise of many scholars who
have read the work, and to whom we are grateful. We particularly wish to
thank the series editors, Elaine Chalus and Deborah Simonton, and the staff at
Routledge, for their valued support in bringing the book to its final form.
Contributors

Rachel Feldberg is a PhD student at the Centre for Eighteenth Century Stu­
dies, University of York. Her research explores middling women’s
engagement with the production, and transmission of natural knowledge
and is supported by the White Rose College of Arts & Humanities Doc­
toral Training Partnership funded by the AHRC. She studied history at
Cambridge, was a Paul Mellon Fellow at Yale (1978–1979) and has MAs
from the Universities of Leeds and York. Before returning to academia
she spent four decades as a theatre director, writer, curator and arts
producer including sixteen years as Director of the North’s leading lit­
erature festival. A trustee of The Lawrence Sterne Trust, other work
includes Mr Brown’s Directions (2016) a play animating archive records
of Capability Brown’s visits to East Yorkshire; Flying (2003), BBC Radio
4 afternoon play and the libretto for The Landau Papers (2000) a cham­
ber opera based on the life of German Jewish musicologist Anneliese
Landau in 1930s Berlin.
Sarah Goldsmith is a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh.
Prior to this, she undertook her PhD at the University of York, and held
a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Leicester. She
has several publications on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, including
her first monograph, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century
Grand Tour (University of London Press, 2020), which was shortlisted
for the RHS’s 2021 Whitfield Prize. Her current research explores inter­
disciplinary approaches to the history of the eighteenth, nineteenth and
early twentieth-century male bodies. She is an AHRC/BBC 2018 New
Generation Thinker and a historical consultant for the V&A’s 2022
Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear exhibition.
Onni Gust is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notting­
ham. Their research examines ideas of belonging in the British Empire
during the ‘long’ eighteenth century, with a focus on the relationships
between Britain and India. Building on ‘New Imperial’ history, they bring
insights from feminist, queer and post-colonial theory to think histori­
cally about identity formation in relationship to imperial space, and
xii List of contributors
particularly the role of racism, sexism and ableism in constructing narra­
tives of belonging and humanity. Their book, Unhomely Empire: Whiteness
and Belonging from the Scottish Enlightenment to Liberal Imperialism is
forthcoming with Bloomsbury.
Sheryllynne Haggerty is Honorary Research Fellow at the Wilberforce Institute
for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull. Her
research focuses on the eighteenth-century British-Atlantic world. Her mono­
graphs to date include The British-Atlantic Trading Community 1760–1810:
Men, Women, and the Distribution of Goods (Brill Press, 2006) and ‘Merely
for Money’? Business Culture in the British-Atlantic, 1750–1815 (Liverpool
University Press, 2012). She has also published many interdisciplinary articles
on social network analysis in journals including Enterprise & Society, Slavery
& Abolition and Business History. Her latest project is the AHRC-funded
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica,
1756 (McGill Queens University Press, 2023).
Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Bir­
mingham. Her research focuses on gender and the body in eighteenth-
century Britain. Her books include Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century:
Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge University Press,
2004), The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eight­
eenth-Century Britain (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Imposteress
Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford Uni­
versity Press, 2020). She has also edited several books, including History and
Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources,
second edition (Routledge, 2018). Her current projects include edited
volumes on beauty in the eighteenth century and on the material body in
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Karen also directs the Lever­
hulme-funded project ‘Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in
British Letters c.1680–1820’ (https://socialbodies.bham.ac.uk/), which has
produced a publicly available dataset of eighteenth-century letters.
Steven King is Professor of Economic and Social History at Nottingham
Trent University. He has published widely on the interrelated histories of
the family, health, demography and poverty and across the period from
the 1650s to the present. Recent books include Sickness, Medical Welfare
and the English Poor 1750–1834 (Manchester, 2018), Disability Matters
(with C. Beardmore and G. Monks; Cambridge, 2018), Family Life in Brit­
ain, 1650–1910 (with C. Beardmore and C. Dobbing; Basingstoke, 2019) and
Writing the Lives of the English Poor 1750s to 1830s (Montréal, 2019). The
latter book won the British Academy’s 2019 Townsend Prize. He is cur­
rently completing an AHRC grant (‘In Their Own Write’) which is aimed at
producing a history of the New Poor Law from below.
Taylin Nelson is an English and Environmental Humanities doctoral student
at Rice University. She completed an MA at King’s College London in
 List of contributors xiii
Eighteenth-Century Studies and a BA at Arizona State University in
English Literature. Her current dissertation project explores human-
animal encounters in eighteenth-century literary and natural history texts
under the supervision of Drs Betty Joseph and Tim Morton. She serves as
research assistant for Drs David O’Shaughnessy and Michael Griffin on
their edited collection of the corpus of Goldsmith’s works. She is a
Hobby fellow at the literary journal SEL, Studies in English Literature
1500–1900 and often publishes with BSECS “Criticks.”
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal is a historian of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-
century Atlantic world at the University of Southern California. He
focuses on the political and cultural history of Europe and the Amer­
icas in the age of revolution. He received his PhD in history from
Columbia University in 2011, with a dissertation on epistolarity and
revolutionary organizing, and published a first book on a different topic
in 2015: Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution
(Belknap/Harvard). His second book, Generation Revolution: Political
Lives in a Revolutionary Age, 1760–1825, forthcoming from Basic Books
in 2024, shows how changing patterns of cultural practice in the Atlantic
world gave shape to parallel political revolutions in North America,
South America and Europe.
Annika Raapke is visiting lecturer at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. She
specialises in the history of the eighteenth-century French Caribbean,
currently researching pacotille trade across the Caribbean colonies. Until
2020, she worked in the Prize Papers Project carried out at the National
Archives in Kew and the University of Oldenburg; her first monograph,
the German translation of her English-language PhD on bodies in Prize
Papers letters from the French Caribbean, was published in 2019 under
the title ‘Dieses verfluchte Land’: Europäische Körper in Brieferzählungen
aus der Karibik, 1744–1826. Her other publications address questions of
gender, emotions and family, food, health and illness in the colonial
Caribbean context, as well as methodological considerations such as
practice theory.
Frith Taylor is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London. Her
research into eighteenth-century life writing examines representations of
domesticity in queer households in Britain from 1755–1840. The project
looks at the writing of Charlotte Charke, Sophia Baddeley, Anne Lister,
and Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby (the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’). It
is interested in the material concerns of female-run households of the
long eighteenth century and the impact of property ownership, class,
luxury, economic agency and sex work. The project is also concerned
with the ways in which constructions of gender identity, degeneracy,
criminality, sexuality, pleasure and desire intersect with ideas of home
and homemaking.
xiv List of contributors
Abigail Williams is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University
of Oxford, and Lord White Fellow in English at St Peter’s College, Oxford.
She is the author of Poetry and the Creation of a Whig Literary Culture
(Oxford University Press, 2005) and The Social Life of Books: Reading
Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (Yale, 2017), and editor of
Jonathan Swift’s The Journal to Stella: Letters to Esther Johnson and
Rebecca Dingley, 1710–1713 (Cambridge University Press, 2013). She also
led the Leverhulme-funded Digital Miscellanies Index, an online database of
the contents of 1500 poetic miscellanies (http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org).
She is currently completing Reading Wrong (to be published with Princeton
University Press), a study of eighteenth-century misreading.
Introduction
Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty and
Karen Harvey

During the eighteenth century, British society witnessed a dramatic expansion in

letter-writing across all social ranks of society. These letters helped transform the
world. They forged mercantile networks that powered economic change. They
exchanged knowledge that constituted a range of enlightenments. They built
systems of governance that underpinned empires. Importantly, they allowed
friends, family and lovers to maintain relationships and express emotions in a
globalising world. In all these ways, letters were used as tools that sought to tri­
umph over distance and absence. Whether the separation between people was
short-lived, long-term or permanent, letters stood in for their authors, however
far apart. They conveyed in words and object what, in other circumstances,
might have been conveyed face to face. Motivated by the very absence of the
body, letters nonetheless brought people together, often by bringing the body to
the fore. This volume explores the multi-faceted relationships between letters
and bodies in the long eighteenth century.
Letters and the Body centres on the single theme of the body, exploring
not just how the body was a principal feature of this creation of eighteenth-
century corporate identities and interpersonal relationships, but also how
letters ‘co-produced social bodies’.1 The letters discussed in this book also
represent the extensive range of letters in printed and manuscript form
available from this period. Written by women and men of different social
orders, they include single, one-off surviving letters that give only a small
glimpse into a person’s life, and long series of correspondence written over
many years. They include ‘familiar’ and intimate letters exchanged among
family and friends, more formal correspondence, and letters that were
incorporated into forewords, appendices, journals and memoirs. With con­
tributions from scholars working in different fields and disciplines, the volume
takes a number of different methodological approaches: literary close readings
of single letters, social historical analyses of very large datasets and a material
culture approach to the object of the letter. This range of letters and approa­
ches allows us to extend existing scholarship on eighteenth-century letters in a
number of directions.
Previous studies of eighteenth-century letters have mostly drawn on the
correspondence of known literary and intellectual figures to trace the
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-1
2 Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty and Karen Harvey
Enlightenment’s ‘Republic of Letters’ and the rise of epistolary literature.2
These valuable studies often focussed on letters that were printed during the
eighteenth century, including the important and extensive genre of letter-
writing manuals and, in doing so, have depicted an eighteenth-century ?cul­
ture of letters that was quite elitist in nature.3 More recent work has focus­
sed on identifying how widespread the practice of letter-writing actually was,
shifting attention from elite, literary or published letters to the middling sort
and the poor. These studies have shown that letters were written by the full
range of eighteenth-century social strata. For example, Susan Whyman’s The
Pen and the People (2009) demonstrates the ‘democratization’ of letter-writing
culture in eighteenth-century England, while Steven King’s landmark Writing
the Lives of the English Poor (2019) draws on thousands of letters written by
paupers to English parish vestries.4 The chapters in this volume develop this
work with studies of the ‘unlettered’ letters of the poor, labouring or lower
ranks (Haggerty, King and Raapke) as well as a broadly defined middling sort
(Harvey and Perl-Rosenthal).5 Consideration is also given to the gentry and
aristocracy (Goldsmith and Feldberg), women in Empire (Gust) as well as to
published authors and their letters (Williams, Nelson and Taylor). It is clear
that many of these letter-writers were shaped by established epistolary con­
ventions and/or tried to situate themselves within the ‘Republic of Letters’, but
the principal focus is not on the ‘great’ literary letter-writer but rather the cul­
ture of quotidian letters created by a very broad range of eighteenth-century
women and men.

Corporeality, health and illness

Indeed, letter-writing was and remains ‘one of the most pervasive literate
activities in human society’.6 Quotidian epistolary practices were the cruci­
ble of eighteenth-century personal and corporate identities, whether of
family, friendship, polity or empire. Leonie Hannan and others have, for
instance, revealed how letter exchanges between women fostered their
learning and education as well as creating supportive ‘communities of intel­
lectual exchange’.7 Scholarship on the Atlantic world has demonstrated the
fundamental importance of letters with particular clarity. Lindsay O’Neill
for example, demonstrates that the form and conventions of the letter
enabled the processes of networking amongst elites in the British Atlantic,
while Konstantin Dierks envisions letter-writing as a site and practice for
the forging of a new form of self that also enabled the growth of the British
Empire.8 Separated by conflict and commerce, the Atlantic families and
friends examined by Sarah Pearsall were nonetheless brought together in the
space of familiarity generated through letters.9 Looking East, Mary Louise
Pratt has shown how letters were used to shape, form and justify ideas of
empire.10 This volume further develops these themes by considering the role
played by correspondence within a wide range of individual and collective
identities and communities, ranging from couples and families to parishes
 Introduction 3
and associational political groups. Focusing on letters from Britain and the
British-Atlantic world, from continental Europe, the British and French
Caribbean, North America and India, its chapters demonstrate in new ways
the visceral power of letters, a power that derived from their embodied
nature. These sources are not just written documents or ‘texts’ to be read:
they constituted the material threads that held disparate people together
and served as instruments of politics which made a material difference to
people’s lives; they did not only represent or serve as a proxy for their
authors, but also became material extensions of the person, family, community
or polity.
In this way Letters and the Body extends upon and deepens a scholarship
that has steadily recognised the importance of the body in letter-writing.
This recognition has taken several forms. Firstly, scholars have been inter­
ested in the letter as a material object. James Daybell’s pioneering study
argues that the early-modern manuscript letter can only be understood by
paying attention to its material characteristics and ‘social materiality’; that
is, the social, cultural and material contexts in which letters were produced,
disseminated and consumed.11 Such elements ‘generated additional meanings
through corporeal extensions’ that are absent from the written text.12 This
line of analysis has in turn led to a second line of enquiry: a consideration of
the material body as scholars have explored letter-writing as an embodied
practice. Exploring how a consideration of the letter’s material context leads
to the material body in the context of eighteenth-century courtship letters,
Sally Holloway observes that letters were viewed as ‘embodiments of the
absent sender’, to be touched and smelt in order to conjure up the absent
correspondent.13 Correspondents themselves often incorporated descriptions
of the physical self in the act of writing and reading to aid in this conjuring.
O’Neill highlights how Atlantic letter-writers included descriptions of the
hands that wrote and received the letter to create ‘a more immediate bond’
with recipients.14 Similar practices are repeatedly identified and explored in
this collection. Williams, for example, finds ‘an acute self-awareness of the
ways the letter can substitute for the body and create a form of textual
intimacy’ in Jonathan Swift’s letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley,
as he reminded the women of the ‘bodily circumstances’ in which he
wrote.15 King explores how paupers’ rhetoric in the letters they sent to
parish overseers was used to remind them of their connections to, and place
within, the parish, even when physically absent. The accounts of bodies
exchanged in the familiar letters discussed in Harvey’s chapter evidently
generated ‘a material effect on the bodies of the recipient’.16
Indeed, letters have long been utilised as important sources of information by
historians investigating the eighteenth-century body. Historians of medicine
have explored patient–practitioner correspondence, and the conventions and
knowledge expressed within.17 Yet the epistolary conventions of enquiring
after correspondents’ health and exchanging confidences on this topic renders
many eighteenth-century letters rich repositories of information about illness,
4 Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty and Karen Harvey
health and the body.18 As Dierks notes, the standard practice of opening a letter
with discussions of health constitutes ‘the intertwining of health and letter
together standing in for “self”’.19 In this collection, Harvey argues that this
process should not be discounted as merely formulaic; instead, it provided the
principal framework for ‘the expression and experience of an embodied feeling
of sympathy’, reassuring friends and family that they were engaged in an
‘epistolary conversation: that the intended listener had heard and had recog­
nised the speaker’s experiences’.20 As such, the material object of the letter did
not simply arise ‘out of existing bonds’ but created them as well.21 Letter-wri­
ters of all rank could, at times, utilise this convention and its implications of
reciprocal trust in very calculated ways. For example, the most ‘fashionable’
illness for the elite man was gout, which could be extremely debilitating, and it
was a common and occasionally dominant theme in correspondence.22 Feld­
berg demonstrates how the gentleman William Constable’s ‘uncharacter­
istically frank’ epistolary account of illness used his gout as a ‘form of currency’
to establish a relationship with the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.23 Dis­
cussing a much lower social group, King explores how paupers similarly used
graphic accounts of ‘severe bodily indisposition’ as a ‘rhetorical and strategic
instrument’ to prove themselves worthy of parish aid.24 Even sailors in the
Caribbean knew to follow these epistolary conventions regarding health, as
Haggerty shows.
However, health was but one focus in using the body in eighteenth-cen­
tury correspondence. In Raapke’s analysis of French-Atlantic letter-writers,
it is touch, rather than health, that takes precedence. Her chapter details
numerous hugs, kisses, caresses, embraces and slaps that were sent as ‘paper
representatives of [the writer’s] touching and sensing bodies’.25 Perl-Rosen­
thal explores how the embodied practice of signing letters with a ‘series of
individual names rather than a collective moniker’ was a way for the Sons of
Liberty to assert themselves as an ‘ad hoc association of autonomous gen­
tlemen’ rather than a quasi-official network.26 Alongside individual sig­
natures, ‘hands’ repeatedly featured as a metonym for their shared status of
gentlemanly but hardworking respectable artisans, tradesmen and mer­
chants. Letters sent during the Grand Tour reveal yet another way in which
the body was documented. Goldsmith shows how tutors and parents docu­
mented ‘real and imagined physical changes’ to absent young men’s youthful
bodies by referring to observable measures of growth, as such as height,
weight, facial hair and voice.27 In this context, references to the body were
not undertaken to inspire trust or intimacy, but rather in an effort to
monitor and control a desired outcome. Letter-writers would even make use
of bodies that were not theirs, nor even human. Nelson explores how Oliver
Goldsmith ‘wittily co-opted the affectionate and sometimes biting animal
metaphors that friends and foes used to mock him’ to illustrate the parallels
between the embodied labour of horses, dogs and monkeys, and the exploi­
tation of the struggling hack-writer within the eighteenth-century literary
marketplace.28
 Introduction 5
Alongside providing a deeper understanding of how the letter was used
to convey physical touches, sensations and bodily information, this collec­
tion also builds upon a third area of scholarship that explores the under­
lying purposes, meanings and identities that were constructed within
letters. Clare Brant has argued that eighteenth-century letters should ‘be
taken as emanations of the self’ that structured people’s social identities.29
Similarly, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook states that letters became ‘an
emblem of the private … intimately identified with the body, especially a
female body, and the somatic terrain of the emotions, as well as with the
thematic material of love, marriage, and the family’.30 For both scholars,
modern notions of self were developed through the epistolary form, and
many of the chapters in this collection engage this theme. They consider
how the body was consciously used in letters to assert a wide range of
identities relating to social standing, religion, gender, age, nationality,
race, and sexuality. They also explore how those identities in turn shaped
experiences, understandings of, and, subsequently, epistolary references, to
the body. Of the many aspects of identity examined in the following
chapters, the impact of gender is particularly clear. It shapes the different
accounts of illness and the body in the letters and ‘Daily Record’ produced
by the brother and sister William and Winifred Constable, discussed here
by Feldberg, and underpins the content and form of Jonathan Swift’s inti­
mate exposures and sexual innuendo in his extraordinary letters to his two
female friends, Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley, explored in Wil­
liams’s chapter. Not all identities were stable or conformist, though. As
Taylor demonstrates, eighteenth-century normative ideas about gender
were deployed but also subverted in Elizabeth Steele’s curation of the let­
ters of Lord Melbourne to his mistress, Sophia Baddeley, and with whom
Steele herself had a relationship with queer romantic elements. Melborne’s
misspelt, poorly written and highly emotional letters to Baddeley were
used by Steele to unman him, painting him as an infantile, unreliable and
ridiculous lover.31
Rank also exerted considerable power over the content and form of let­
ters. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the body became most prominent in letters
dealing with ill health and physical frailty. Suffering, pain and loss were
sometimes acutely felt and minutely described in these letters. This is per­
haps particularly true in those letters written by individuals in positions of
social and financial precarity, such as Oliver Goldsmith in Nelson’s chapter,
and by members of the lower orders discussed by Haggerty and King. Such
letters offer ‘vanishingly rare’ perspectives in which the fraught con­
sequences of having a body that cannot labour are made starkly clear.32 In
this volume, the more desperate epistolary accounts of pain and illness are
lacking in those letters written by more prosperous middling sort, gentry
and aristocracy. The muscled bodies and healthy appetites of the young
male landed elite (as well as the aspirations of their parents for their sons’
physical development) explored by Goldsmith, for example, exemplify their
6 Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty and Karen Harvey
social privilege. In letters from the more secure and prosperous, then, dis­
comfort, pain and the possibility of death were described from positions of
relative security. And this context meant that such letter-writers might
experience and explore illness in other ways. This much is clear in Feld­
berg’s argument that Winifred Constable’s conscientious, objective and daily
records of her brother William’s illnesses enabled William to ignore his
‘corporeal state’ in his correspondence and to present versions of his ‘alter­
native self’ in his letters written during their travels and search for a cure.33
Letter-writers represented their corporate selves as much as their individual
selves, though, when writing as part of their rank (in Goldsmith, for exam­
ple) or ‘a “white”, British community of readers’, as explored by Gust.34
Williams observes how Jonathan Swift explored and experienced the bodily
illnesses of Queen Anne, his patron and the Lord Treasurer, Robert Harley,
and himself by creating a ‘seemingly symbiotic relationship’ between them
and ‘the political health of the nation’.35 In a slightly different but none­
theless important way, Perl-Rosenthal’s gentlemen also used their letters to
form an association which aimed to maintain the political health and vigour
of the North American colonies.
In addition to the political body, this volume also explores a distinct
epistolary discourse on the youthful body, shaped by factors of gender, age
and western, white and elite notions of the beautiful ideal.36 When separated
from younger family, older family members demonstrated a close interest in
how their youthful and adolescent bodies were developing, both physically
and mentally. Both Haggerty and Raapke note that parents and older
brothers sent personal advice and career guidance across the Atlantic, at
times even reaching out to correct posture, brush teeth and withhold affec­
tionate kisses from children who displeased them. Goldsmith explores how
parents whose heirs were abroad on the Grand Tour detailed their expec­
tations regarding the physical attributes they hoped their sons might achieve.
Their letters and the responses they received give insight into ‘the impor­
tance and standards of youthful male physicality and beauty in this
period’.37 Further afield, Britain’s encounters with colonialism and exploi­
tation only reinforced a Western sense of superiority, and the colonial
‘other’ as ‘lesser’.38 Gust argues that British women’s letters from India and
their perception of the bodies they saw abroad were shaped by western
ideals of feminine beauty and developing colonial racial science. Concerns
over the relationship between climate, morals and physical appearances
found expression in fears that exposure to Anglo-Indian women and India’s
‘exhausting’ climate would result in the swift decline of a young ‘European’
woman’s body and behaviour, transforming her ‘light and pliant form’ into
a ‘shapeless swol’n squalid figure’.39 Taylor’s analysis of Steele’s efforts to
reclaim the courtesan-actress Sophia Baddeley’s virtue, by emphasising her
whiteness, modesty, ‘unstudied freshness and natural beauty’, reminds us
that inner and outer beauty could be also be supposedly corrupted much
nearer to home.40
 Introduction 7
Distance, otherness, absence and feeling
In considering letters from a wide range of places, this volume is a study of the
global letter. As correspondents in the eighteenth century lived and wrote in a
rapidly expanding global world, they sent their letters across increasingly vast
distances. This was especially true of those who travelled to colonial spaces,
where the sense of distance, difference and ‘otherness’ was magnified. This is
clearly observable in letters. Letter-writers were keenly aware of the vast phy­
sical distances between them and their correspondents. This found expression
in repeated concerns over a fraught postal networks of packet ships and letter-
bags that could easily fail, resulting in worrying epistolary silence, and con­
tinual fears that ‘friends had forgotten them’.41 Raapke’s exploration of letters
from family, friends and lovers sent to and from the French Caribbean and
Haggerty’s consideration of letters from British sailors writing home from
Jamaica at a time of war both show that such concerns could only really be
assuaged by replies that affirmed that ‘the depth of their affection had not been
altered by time and distance’.42 Their chapters demonstrate that letters were
not just vital in holding together empire and trade, but also valued as a pro­
foundly important, if problematic, way of holding families together.43 Many of
the chapters in this volume use letters that represent only one side of the epis­
tolary conversation; they nevertheless demonstrate that letters were a vital
medium for keeping those apart in touch when the body was far away and in
unfamiliar or strange environments.
Another element magnified for those in colonial spaces was a sense of the
body as out of place. This became particularly pertinent for those writing
from the ‘torrid zone’, an ‘othered’ place where the body’s humours (blood,
phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) could be unbalanced.44 British and
French letter-writers from the Caribbean were at pains to describe how the
topics exposed their bodies to fevers and changes that had to be survived,
even as their bodies and behaviours acclimatised. As noted earlier, Gust’s
chapter also explores how British women’s letters from India were char­
acterised by similar fears of change. Part of a much wider colonial and racial
discourse on ‘bodily adaptability and the relationship between constitution,
climate and character’, these letters ‘drew on colonial race science in order to
configure the meaning of bodily difference’ during their travels in India.45 As
this suggests, eighteenth-century Europeans lived in a global world in which
their identity was shaped by interactions and encounters with bodies that were
deemed ‘other’, whether it be the Irish or French Catholic, the exotic Near
Eastern, the ‘yellow’ Chinese or the ‘dusky’ African.46 Epistolary commentaries
about health and bodily appearance in a torrid environment were therefore part
of an emerging justification of colonialism and exploitation that reinforced a
Western sense of superiority, and positioned the colonial ‘other’ as ‘lesser’.47
Distance, and therefore the absence of a correspondent and their body,
was a factor that necessitated and shaped letter-writing, and yet other
chapters show that a sense of absence cannot simply be measured by miles
8 Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty and Karen Harvey
alone. Even within the British Empire, as shown by Perl-Rosenthal, the ‘Sons
of Liberty’ used letters to create a closeness that belied the stark differences and
physical distances between the various North American colonies, all to forge
resistance to the Stamp Act. King’s chapter shows that a lack of financial and
physical means meant that the distance between Manchester and Kirkby
Lonsdale could be as insurmountable as crossing an ocean. Harvey’s account of
the importance of letters in creating intimacy and sympathy between courting
couples, friends and families separated by relatively short distances indicates
that eighteenth-century women and men all turned to the same set of epistolary
tools to combat absence and distance.
The predominance of feeling, and particularly of sympathetic feeling, is a
striking feature of many of the letters discussed in this book. The eighteenth
century witnessed major transformations in the expression of feeling and
emotions. In particular, the development of medical knowledge of nervous
physiology put greater emphasis on the body’s susceptibility to external sti­
muli and the impact of this on how the person felt. A person’s susceptibility
to the arousal of feelings became a marker of their sensitivity to the world
around them and to the people in it. In Western Enlightenment medicine
and philosophy, as well as in eighteenth-century culture more broadly, finer
feelings were a badge of one’s sensibility.48 As Harvey demonstrates, the
letters of eighteenth-century men and women were a principal space in
which the practices of sympathy were developed, expressed and enacted.
Such practices united lovers, family and friends of the middling sort in
England. Similarly, Perl-Rosenthal identifies sympathy as a key lexicon of
the gentlemen of the Sons of Liberty. For this intimately bound yet informal
group, ‘[t]o feel sympathy was to experience the other in oneself’.49 Impor­
tantly, as Raapke and Haggerty highlight, sympathy was not an exclusively
cultured or elite experience, and powerful expressions of loving feeling con­
nected both rich and poor across the Atlantic Ocean. Profoundly, one of the
primary functions of these letters was simply to send love. Yet while the
authentic emotion in these letters appears palpable, Taylor demonstrates
how easily an epistolary declaration of love could also be – or be made to
appear – no more than hollow words. In all these cases, feelings of sym­
pathy, love and connectedness were expressed and experienced through the
letter as embodied. In this way, as in many others, writing and reading let­
ters enlisted the material body.

Bodies and letters

The volume is organised around three overarching themes. In Part I, ‘Ima­
gined Bodies and Imagining Touch’, the theme is imagination. Three chap­
ters explore the letter as a substitute for the absent body, the imagined
physical encounters and performances so often envisaged by letter-writers
and the means through which these imagined sensations were conveyed and
received. Feldberg exposes just how much could be concealed and
 Introduction 9
reimagined in letters. In Winifred Constable’s diary, she tracked her broth­
er’s ill health with determined and almost forensic attention. In contrast,
William Constable’s own letters, written as he and his sister travelled toge­
ther abroad in search of a cure for his gout, occluded his poor health and
reimagined his body as healthy and robust. In Goldsmith’s analysis of Brit­
ish Grand Tour letters, imagined sight and imagined bodies played a critical
role, as parents and guardians sought to imagine the physical developments
that were taking place in their adolescent sons during lengthy times of
absence. Aware of the upright, perfect, manly body that was supposed to
come into being, sons and tutors dutifully responded to such imaginings by
attempting to describe, capture and quantify the changes taking place,
alongside trying to pre-empt any disappointments. Finally, Raapke’s chapter
on letters sent to and from the French Caribbean powerfully shows how
correspondents filled their letters with a variety of imagined physical touches
— affectionate, chastising and even violent — and sometimes withheld
paper touches as a form of punishment, or an expression of love denied. In
this way, writers’ absence from their readers was temporarily suspended in a
shared act of sensory imagination.
In Part II, ‘Material Bodies/Material Letters’, four chapters explore the
letter as a material object that served as a conduit for descriptions of the
material body and as an instrument for embodied encounters. It is an
inherent feature of letters that ‘correspondents are dematerialized’ and thus
readers are urged ‘to reconstitute them imaginatively’.50 Letters were some­
times the only way to communicate bodily experiences and feelings to
others, and they were used by others to reassemble those bodily experiences
by others. The material features of the letter and the body were here
imperative. In descriptions of the body in British middling sort familiar let­
ters from the period 1680–1820, Harvey identifies the sympathetic expres­
sions and practices which were in turn felt to have a material effect on the
bodies of the readers. The physical body of the letter-writer is foregrounded
in Williams’s chapter on Swift, whose letters to Johnson and Dingley not
only contain vivid and intimate descriptions of his ailments and physical
location, but were also shaped materially by his body: in frequency, layout
and hand. Swift even wrote terms phonetically to mimic childish and affec­
tionate speech, to bring him into their room. The material contexts of letters
are brought to the fore in the chapters by Gust and Taylor. The published
and unpublished letters of British women travellers to India were pro­
foundly shaped by the geography of colonial empire, contemporary Eur­
opean ideas about climate and human variety, and the women’s interactions
with people whose complexions and cultures were very different from their
own. Though they did not simply reproduce dominant or emerging ideas of
‘race’ in any systematic form, Gust argues that these women did employ
evaluative ideas of human difference partly to chime with their readers’
expectations. The material transition of a set of letters from personal
manuscript to public print is the focus of Taylor’s chapter. The deployment
10 Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty and Karen Harvey
of the letters by Steele as an appendix to her memoir of Baddeley presents
that relationship as literally secondary to the one between Steele and Bad­
deley, while the inclusion of Melbourne’s paltry excuses and poor writing
undermine his supposedly more manly, elite character. Standing in for his
person, the printed traces of his private manuscript letters are his public
downfall.
In Part III, ‘Bodies Deployed’, the focus is on how correspondents pur­
posefully used their bodies in their letters. This included discussions around
ill health, frailty and wellbeing as a means to create and maintain intimacy
and sympathy, and adopting rhetoric which anchored and legitimised the
writers’ place in society, and particularly in relation to the recipient of the
letter. Haggerty’s chapter uses letters sent home from Jamaica by sailors
during the Seven Years’ War. She demonstrates that even for the relatively
poor and uneducated, letters were an important way in which family and
friends were exhorted not to forget their absent loved ones. These letters
were also used by individuals to build and maintain loving relationships in
the context of the particularities of the Jamaican household, as well as to
reassure in the context of horrendous experiences and high death rates of
sailors in the ‘torrid’ Caribbean. King analyses pauper letters written to
overseers of the poor in Kirkby Lonsdale (Westmorland) to show how deftly
the poor used language to access poor relief from afar. The poor wrote their
bodies into their letters as rhetorical and strategic instruments. Vivid
descriptions of indisposition, fragility, misfortune, nakedness and decay
were used to show how the writers were deserving of relief under the Old
Poor Law, and to spur the overseers into action. Nelson’s chapter con­
centrates on Oliver Goldsmith’s formative years as a writer. Using Gold­
smith’s private correspondence and his serialised epistolary narrative,
Nelson explores the ways in which he deployed the rhetoric of work animals
to stress the hard labour of hack writers (a term originating from the
labouring ‘hackney’ horse). Goldsmith’s detractors may have thought his
analogies of his body as a working animal apt, given that he was described
as short with a coarse and vulgar countenance, but this led them to seriously
underestimate his intelligence and wit. Perl-Rosenthal reads closely the per­
sonal correspondence of the ‘Sons of Liberty’ during the Stamp Act Crisis in
the North American colonies. He argues that this was a new type of letter
deployed to stress the correspondents’ bodily presence and sympathetic
connection with each other. In the short term these letters did indeed pro­
vide a ‘body politic’ and were highly effective in bringing together men from
very different and divided colonies. Ultimately, however, their consciously
fashioned network of individual like-minded gentlemen proved illusory and
their venture failed. The power of letters could be considerable, but it had
its limitations.
In letters written by individuals from all levels of society and exchanged
within Britain, across Europe and the colonies, the body was a principal
focus. An imaginative device for those distant and dispersed, the body was
 Introduction 11
also a prompt for embodied and material encounters between correspon­
dents. In both ways, the body was deployed in public and private relation­
ships of tenderness, love, fellowship and power.

Notes
1 Karen Harvey, ‘Epochs of Embodiment: Sex and the Material Body in the
Eighteenth Century’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42:4 (2019), 464.
2 See for example, Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of
the French Enlightenment (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994);
Susan Dalton, Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting the Public and
Private Spheres (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Anne Goldgar,
Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–
1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995); L. W. B. Brockliss, Calvert’s
Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Stanford University’s ongoing Mapping
the Republic of Letters project (http://republicofletters.stanford.edu). Elizabeth
Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Cen­
tury Republic of Letters (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Joe
Bray, The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (Abingdon: Rou­
tledge, 2003).
3 Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006); Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and
Transatlantic Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005).
4 Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Steven King, Writing the Lives of the
English Poor, 1750s to 1830s (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).
5 Both Raapke and Haggerty use letters from the Prize Papers, part of the High
Court of Admiralty Papers at the National Archives, UK. These letters are being
digitised as part of a large project, see www.prizepapers.de/database, accessed 25
Jan 2020.
6 David Barton and Nigel Hall, ‘Introduction’, in Barton and Hall (eds), Letter
Writing as a Social Practice (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 2000), 1.
7 Leonie Hannan, Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in
Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 13. For
ongoing research into the importance of women’s correspondence, see the
Unlocking Mary Hamilton’s Papers project (www.projects.alc.manchester.ac.
uk/maryhamiltonpapers/about/).
8 Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British
World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Konstantin
Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America
(Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). See also Susan Clair
Imbarrato, Sarah Gray Cary, From Boston to Grenada: Shifting Fortunes of an
American Family, 1764–1826 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2018); David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Inte­
gration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
9 Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth
Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19–23, and Part I.
10 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 1998).
12 Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne Haggerty and Karen Harvey
11 James Daybell, The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Let­
ters and the Culture and Practice of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635 (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), 10–11. For ongoing digital projects exploring the materiality
of seventeenth-century letters, see the Signed, Sealed, Undelivered (http://brienne.
org/unlockedbriennearchive) and Unlocking History projects (http://letterlocking.
org/about).
12 Daybell, The Material Letter, 13.

13 Sally Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions,

and Material Culture (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2019), 68.

14 O’Neill, The Opened Letter, 118.
15 Williams, Chapter 5, this volume.
16 Harvey, Chapter 4, this volume.
17 See, for example, Séverine Pilloud and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, ‘The Inti­
mate Experience of the Body in the Eighteenth Century: Between Interiority and
Exteriority’, Medical History, 47 (2003), 451–472; Wayne Wild, Medicine by
Post: The Changing Voice of Illness in Eighteenth-Century British Consultation
Letters and Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).
18 Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern
Europe (Basingstoke: Springer, 2011); Susan M. Fitzmaurice, The Familial Letter
in Early Modern English: A Pragmatic Approach (Amsterdam: John Benjamin,
2002), 11, 20, 22.
19 Dierks, In My Power,107.
20 Harvey, Chapter 4, this volume.
21 Ibid.
22 Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1998).
23 Feldberg, Chapter 1, this volume.
24 King, Chapter 9, this volume.
25 Raapke, Chapter 3, this volume.
26 Perl-Rosenthal, Chapter 11, this volume.
27 Goldsmith, Chapter 2, this volume.
28 Nelson, Chapter 10, this volume.
29 Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters, 332–33.
30 Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eight­
eenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press,
1996), 6. See also Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter Wri­
ters, 1600–1945 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999).
31 Taylor, Chapter 7, this volume.
32 King, Chapter 9, this volume.
33 Feldberg, Chapter 1, this volume.
34 Gust, Chapter 6, this volume.
35 Williams, Chapter 5, this volume.
36 For discussions of eighteenth-century British ideals of physical beauty see David
M. Turner, ‘The Body Beautiful’, in Carole Reeves (ed.), A Culture History of
the Human Body in the Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010),
113–32. This does not mean that older correspondences were uninterested in
discussing their physical appearance. See for example, Amanda Vickery, ‘Mutton
Dressed as Lamb? Fashioning Age in Georgian England’, Journal of British Stu­
dies, 52:4 (2013): 858–86.
37 Goldsmith, Chapter 2, this volume.
38 David Arnold, ‘Introduction’, in David Arnold (ed.), Warm Climates and Wes­
tern Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900 (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1996), 1–19.
39 Quoted in Gust, Chapter 6, this volume.
 Introduction 13
40 Taylor, Chapter 7, this volume.
41 Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1948); Haggerty, Chapter 8, this volume.
42 Haggerty, Chapter 8, this volume.
43 Dierks, In My Power; Pearsall, Atlantic Families.
44 Lisa Wynne Smith, ‘The Body Embarrassed? Rethinking the Leaky Male Body in
Eighteenth-Century England and France’, Gender & History, 23:1 (2010): 6–46, 26.
45 Gust, Chapter 6, this volume.
46 Pratt, Imperial Eyes.
47 Arnold, ‘Introduction’.
48 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth
Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
49 Perl-Rosenthal, Chapter 11, this volume.
50 Clare Brant, ‘“I Will Carry You with Me on the Wings of Immagination”: Aerial
Letters and Eighteenth-Century Ballooning’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 35:1 (2011),
171.
Part I

Imagined bodies and

imagining touch
1 Absent bodies?
Gouty brethren and sensitive hearts in
William Constable’s letters from the Grand
Tour 1769–1771
Rachel Feldberg

Very Sick this morning, with great difficulty in breathing got down Stairs and
into his Landau, set off for London on his Road to Liège.
– Winifred Constable, ‘Daily Record of Illness of “My Brother”’,
22 November 17691

Late in 1769 William Constable (1721–1791), a wealthy, enlightened Catho­

lic with a large estate in East Yorkshire, left his heated stove garden and
plans for a grandiose stable block and set off for the English Hospital in
Liège in the company of his devoted sister Winifred.2 They were chasing a
new cure for his gout. Winifred had been running her older brother’s
household at Burton Constable for twenty years, and even before they left
for Europe she turned her meticulous eye to documenting every aspect of his
symptoms, treatment and their effects in her ‘Daily Record of Illness of “My
Brother”’.3 While there is a plethora of well-established work exploring
eighteenth-century patients’ descriptions of their illness and bodily symp­
toms, and similarly extensive literature documenting letters from the Grand
Tour, older travellers journeying for their health have been less-well studied,
despite a long convention of British doctors sending patients to the Con­
tinent for a change of scene and climate.4 Research in this area is scattered
and fragmentary, limited to comments in work on other topics (for example
Richard Bates’s study of Spa, the Belgian health resort) or references in
individual biographies.5 There is little that explores older travellers’ sense of
embodiment: the tangible expressions of their conception of mind, body and
soul. This chapter aims to address that lack by examining the Constables’
letters and representations of corporeality, as they journeyed first to Liège,
on through France (where they had a notable encounter with Jean-Jacques
Rousseau) and then to Italy before returning to Yorkshire in June 1771.6
Scholars working on embodiment have long considered the relative
importance of religion, relationships, age and gender in shaping expressions
of the body.7 William and Winifred Constable offer sometimes surprising
positions in relation to their representations of body and mind, which sug­
gest that understandings of gender, inflected by Catholicism, played an
important role in shaping his letters and her ‘Daily Record’. Their journey
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-3
18 Rachel Feldberg
centred on William’s health, and yet, despite his long-standing and well
documented illness, and in contrast to some other male letter-writers (such
as Jonathan Swift, discussed by Williams in this volume), references to his
body are conspicuously absent from his correspondence, although con­
tinually present in Winifred’s observations. This chapter examines what
William chose to reveal and conceal in the light of Michael Stolberg’s con­
tention that ‘what patients consider worthy of sharing and what not pro­
vides critical information about their subjective, culturally framed
expression and understanding of the body and its disease.’8 It argues that
William’s letters created a complex and contested picture of illness and
health and that, even in absence, his body was constantly manifested in a
variety of forms.
To determine how and why this trope operated the chapter sets the
handful of William’s surviving letters to his half-brother Marmaduke and
friends John and Anne Morritt in Yorkshire, as well as his eight formal
exchanges with Rousseau in May 1770 and an impassioned missive to the
philosopher five months later, alongside Winifred’s objective ‘Daily Record’
and two distinctive portraits. One is a pastel of William in dress ‘à la
Rousseau’ by Jean-Etienne Liotard, the other a large oil painting by Anton
von Maron depicting William in the guise of the Roman Stoic Cato the
Younger, grasping a letter from Caesar, with Winifred beside him as his
wife.9 Juxtaposing these sources makes it possible to tease out a number of
competing and contradictory narratives, interrogate gaps and omissions, and
explore how they informed William’s articulation of self and sense of mas­
culinity. In its manifestation of bodily lack, his correspondence offers a
complex case study of one man’s experience of embodiment as he navigated
his physical and mental dis/comfort.

An experimental journey
William’s debilitating gout was first mentioned in 1766 in a letter from his
apothecary John Johnston: ‘I rejoice you got so soon rid of the Gout but
fear it will make longer Visits if love of learned Ease be too much
indulged.’10 The first half of the eighteenth century had seen a significant
increase in gout sufferers, which Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau have argued
may have been a result of increasing consumerism and the consequent
availability of protein-rich diets.11 Johnston implied that William’s illness
was a direct result of his sedentary intellectual pursuits and certainly Wil­
liam, by various accounts, including his portrait four years later by Liotard,
a pastellist known for his faithful representations, was corpulent. He had by
his own confession to Sir Horace Mann, the British representative to the
Grand Dukes of Tuscany in Florence, enjoyed a ‘long course’ in ‘high life …
in which he believes he brought upon himself the most cruel gout any man
could be subject to’.12 Self-accusation relating to youthful dissolution was a
well-worn explanation for male illness.13 In maturity, William appeared to
 Absent bodies? 19
regret his former indolent habits and his focus turned to moderation and
self-improvement, principles which would shape the ongoing representation
of his illness. As Johnston predicted, William’s gout soon returned in more
virulent form, and in June 1767 John Dunn, who dealt with the family’s
affairs, alerted the Constable’s steward that ‘a gouty chair sets out for
Burton next Monday’s Waggon’.14 This was followed in December 1768 by
an invoice from Thomas Chippendale for ‘A Wallnut Gouty Chair’ and ‘A
Wallnut Gouty stool to join to ditto’, expensive items at £10 and £3 8s.
respectively.15 Gout had become part of William’s everyday life as he took
on the trappings and furniture familiar to men of his age and class, for
whom it was the disease of the rich, a badge of honour for the aristocracy.16
The early 1770s saw a proliferation of gout treatments, some challenging the
established doctrine of gout as incurable, or even, desirable, since gout was
held to have prophylactic properties which held other diseases at bay.17
However, rather than simply accept William’s condition, the siblings who
were used to empirical practice as a result of their distinctive education,
explored prospective remedies.
From the age of sixteen, William had studied at the English College in
Douai, a Jesuit centre for English recusants.18 Douai’s exacting academic
timetable boasted a wide-ranging curriculum from classical texts, meta­
physics and logic, to astronomy and Newtonian physics. William left in
January 1739, almost certainly feeling his interest in practical science would
be better served elsewhere.19 He concluded five years in France with lessons
in ‘experiments’ with a Dr Molyneux near Paris.20 The result was a lifelong
fascination with empirical investigation which led him to conduct astro­
nomical, biological and electrical experiments at Burton Constable, corre­
spond with the Catholic priest and scientist, John Turbeville Needham and,
in later years, become a member of the Royal Society.21 Meanwhile,
Winifred had attended the Bar Convent in York which offered a compre­
hensive programme of learning for young women who also assisted the nuns
in tending the sick.22 Winifred grew up in a family where engaging with
science and medicine was an everyday occurrence. Her father, Cuthbert,
studied medicine at Douai, and as J. A. R. Bickford identifies, the family
provided expansive medical treatment for their servants.23 In December
1768, at her own or William’s instigation, Winifred began what constituted
a series of clinical observations in her ‘Daily Record’.24 She tracked Wil­
liam’s sleep, the nature of his urine and stools, and the outcomes his treat­
ment provoked. Winifred (and potentially William’s) understanding of his
illness was rooted in a traditional humoral model, which followed Galen in
ascribing illness to an imbalance in the patient’s phlegm, blood, yellow or
black bile.25 Gout was viewed as, ‘the dropping of a humour upon a joint
and accounted for in terms of a dyscrasia (disorder) in the system’.26 The
imbalance could be addressed by driving out bad humours via purgatives
and glysters, hence Winifred’s detailed reporting of the sweating, vomiting
and voiding, which would discharge her brother’s condition.27 But the
20 Rachel Feldberg
layout of her ‘Daily Record’ suggests she was also familiar with con­
temporary thinking on the importance of patient observation which, in the
absence of physical examination, was a key source of medical information.28
Francis Clifton’s The State of Physick Ancient and Modern (1732), for
example, emphasised the value of standardised clinical recording and inclu­
ded categories to guide daily annotation, many of which are echoed in
Winifred’s observations.29
In November 1769, the siblings moved from trialling remedies to search­
ing for the cure most physicians believed unattainable. William heard about
a new treatment offered by Dr Le Fevre, a French Jesuit and, ever the
empiricist, decided to go to Europe ‘to inquire into his remedy and practice’,
together with Winifred and John Johnston, a local apothecary whom Wil­
liam contracted as his private physician.30 While they were in Europe, Le
Fevre’s ‘Specific for the Gout’ was documented by the Reverend Edmund
Marshall in his Candid and Impartial State of the Evidence (published in
February/March 1770).31 By the Autumn it had become the subject of a
fierce pamphlet war, and claims and counter-claims were still being trum­
peted in the pages of the 1771 London Magazine and the Critical Review as
the Constables journeyed home.32 However, within four days of arrival in
Liège, satisfied by what he saw and heard, William began treatment.33 Le
Fevre’s regime, as Edmund Marshall’s pamphlet noted, involved a daily
teaspoon of white powder for ten days, followed by twenty day’s respite
before repeating the procedure twice more.34 William underwent his course
between December 1769 and February 1770 and on its conclusion Le Fevre
assured him that, although gout might return, it would be less painful and
attacks shorter. Positive progress would be attended by sweating, and after
eighteen to twenty-two months his condition might disappear.35

In ‘cure’
Le Fevre’s assurance was a watershed moment for the Constables. Hence­
forward, William regarded himself as ‘in cure’ and almost certainly used the
term to Horace Mann in October 1770, a description Mann passed on to
Walpole.36 But given that William’s health was his express purpose in tra­
velling to Europe, it is surprising that his lively letters home made almost no
mention of the treatment he had travelled so far to undergo, or the dis­
comfort he endured. This reticence was despite convention dictating that
letters began with enquires about the recipient’s health, and frequently, a
description of the author’s symptoms and complaints.37 Exchanging con­
fidences built relationships, and the more intimate the bond, the more likely
the flow of medical details.38 William’s disinclination might simply have
typified a male reluctance to provide florid descriptions of pain or distress,
and a desire to demonstrate the stoicism and ‘virtue of self-control’ that
Sarah Goldsmith has identified as playing ‘an important role in the culture
of illness’ among men.39 But physical illness appears to have been an
 Absent bodies? 21
exception to this convention for older men, and scholars have noted their
propensity to share details of medical conditions.40 Part of the explanation
may lie in William’s choice of particular registers in family communication,
as against more public letters to friends. As Susan Whyman has demon­
strated, important changes in letter-writing during the eighteenth century,
tended towards a lessening of formality, particularly in familial missives.41
There is no doubt that age, gender, rank and kinship played some part in
William’s correspondence; his letters to Rousseau were freighted with flat­
tery and self-abasement, with the niceties of margins and a spacious layout.
In contrast his letters to his half-brother Marmaduke (‘Duke’), twenty-two
years his junior, with whom he shared a common faith and interest in sci­
ence, were jocular and informal. Beginning ‘Dear Duke!’ they filled every
inch of the page in a confident, fast-moving hand with a mixture of amusing
observations and insights into the countries they passed through. But if
unwilling to discuss his health on paper, William seemed happy to expound
his trial of Le Fevre’s treatment in person. His correspondence with Rous­
seau suggests they explored arthritis, gout and possible remedies on first
meeting in Lyon and Horace Mann was sufficiently briefed to pass on details
of William’s experience in Liège to Walpole.42 In both instances, William’s
focus was on the treatment and its efficacy, rather than his bodily feelings or
emotional response. William’s apparent epistolary silence on the subject of
his health, was thus both significant and deliberate, and the remainder of
this chapter teases out potential reasons for his reluctance.
The dis/eased body was entirely absent in correspondence with his friends
John and Anne Morritt and there were just three fleeting mentions of health,
his own and other people’s, to his half-brother Marmaduke. These glimpses
offer an important insight into William’s perception of mind, body and self.
The first, in May 1770, concerned someone else. In an informal, wide-ran­
ging letter, William told Marmaduke that Lord Holland, with whom the
Constables were sharing a house in Lyon, was in ‘a wretched condition,
Paralytic, unable to stand, his speech affected and all that’.43 This reference
to Holland’s ‘wretched’ state was the only instance where William ascribed
any adjective to physical illness. In doing so, William established himself as
a figure of health, poised to pity his unfortunate fellow guest, rather than an
invalid confined to his bedchamber. Later in the same letter William turned
to a rare assessment of his own condition. Three months after the conclu­
sion of Le Fevre’s treatment he reported as one man of science to another,
that a part of his body was recovering, ‘my limbs continue to mend’. He
was able to eat and drink freely and within the last few days had begun to
sweat ‘most immoderately Contrary to my natural Habit’.44 These were
outcomes that he and Marmaduke would have interpreted as positive, since
as Hannah Newton points out, recovery from illness in this period involved
both the ending of disease and the regaining of strength.45 Matching his
progress to Le Fevre’s template, William concluded: ‘this Effect of the med­
icine was predicted’.46 There can be little doubt that at this juncture,
22 Rachel Feldberg
William believed the cure was working. However, his swift optimism
diverged from Winifred’s more systematic records as she calibrated her
observations, quantifying present events against her brother’s previous
attacks, in search of an ongoing narrative of improvement.47 William, by
contrast, in his focus on the production and meaning of bodily fluids in his
communication with Marmaduke, emphasised his belief in the success of Le
Fevre’s remedy, and, by implication, substantiated his good judgement in
undertaking the experiment.

An alternate self
If William’s letters home sought to present a picture of improving health,
they also constructed an ‘alternate’ self. His correspondence became a tool
to refashion his identity, crafting an impression of energetic activity which
omitted all mention of physical limitation. In an image which invited his
readers to reimagine his resilience, William emphasised how various vicissi­
tudes of the journey to Lyon (broken axles, stoppages for carriage repairs)
which exhausted his party had not affected him.48 He explained in a letter to
Marmaduke in May 1770: ‘We are all well, tho somewhat fatigued on our
arrival from Rough Roads, a Long Journey & bad Lodgings, that is, all
Except myself.’49 Similarly in Rome in February 1771, rather than describe
his progress to Marmaduke, William’s letter detailed a busy round of
engagements from which his recovery could be inferred: ‘the morning till 12
to myself, then My Byres & Antiquity & Pictures & Sculptures till four or
Later. after Dinner, Dress, Crowds, Conversation, Cards. Concerts.’50
However, his optimism must be set against the counter-narrative of Wini­
fred’s ‘Daily Record’. During the same few weeks, she described how Wil­
liam was at a crowded Lent Carnival entertainment when ‘He was seized
with a violent pain in his Kidneys with great difficulty got from the Mas­
querade and into Bed.’51 For Winifred, William was a passive figure ‘seized’
with sudden illness and the trajectory of his improvement was constantly
disrupted. In the eighteen months they were away Winifred identified just
fifteen days when her brother was ‘perfectly well’, frequently noting he was
confined to bed, experiencing long episodes of loose stools, or finding it hard
to walk.52
On occasion, William’s letters, whatever their textual absences, could of
themselves function as symptoms of disorder and disease. There are pas­
sages written with a breathless, heightened intensity, which suggest the
potent side-effects of the remedies he relied on and the possible origin of
some of his medical woes. In a continuation of his letter to Marmaduke
from Rome he burst out: ‘I have been made hurried, wanted something
entertaining. Crowds of ideas & and of things; know not where to begin.’53
The words trip over themselves and it seems his mind was racing, swept up
in a whirlwind which belied his fragile body. Perhaps it was his use of var­
ious preparations which underlay the vivid language he employed, when, for
 Absent bodies? 23
example, he told Marmaduke that the Pope was: ‘smoaky and Resolute’
with ‘nothing of Kniffy Knaffy-ness about him’, a surprisingly irreverent
description from a Catholic.54 It is clear from Winifred’s ‘Daily Record’ that
William took a number of medicines, among them Warner’s anodyne elixir,
which included six drams of opium.55 In January 1769 Winifred recorded
William taking seven drops. By June he was taking thirty.56 Many of his
ongoing symptoms – disturbed sleep, vomiting, nausea, pains throughout
the body, constipation leading to piles (side effects Warner acknowledged) –
were consistent with regular opiate doses.57 It seems likely that William was
sometimes spurred to write by the euphoric sense of wellbeing the Elixir
engendered, and at others sank into a debilitated nervous stupor as the
remedy wore off.
Meanwhile, Winifred’s conscientious recording offered William the
opportunity to set his body, a central focus for both siblings, aside. There
was no need for him to expend time and ink describing how he felt when
empirical evidence would answer any query. With his limbs and organs
relegated to the domestic and intimate under his sister’s objective eye, his
corporeal state both observed and lived, was removed from the epistolary
sphere and he could focus his limited energy on activities of the mind and
consideration of the proper role of feelings. But this public rhetoric of resi­
lience was entangled with the messy, shifting concept of his masculinity, as
his articulation of self slid between a number of possibilities, depending on
his mood and the recipient of his correspondence. In a letter to John and
Anne Morritt in June 1770 (which may also have reached Marmaduke),
William played with epicene language: ‘as a traveller must trouble you with
nothing expected by all us Maceronis’.58 He nudged at the idea of the fash­
ionable young men of the Grand Tour, who encapsulated dangerous mate­
rial excess in their eccentricity, gender ambiguity and notions of effeminacy,
in antipathy to his own stance as a man of science.59 But he was on dan­
gerous ground; in England, Catholics were often derided as effeminate, and
many elite men feared dependency and felt emasculated in the domestic
space of the sick room.60 While Winifred’s self-fashioning as his devoted
sister was applauded and legitimised by her faith as an expression of love
and duty, William exhibited a sense of deep unease about his masculinity.
The Constables’ journey to Europe came at a significant moment of
instability in relation to sentiment and male identity. William was caught on
the cusp, as he sought to balance his pre-disposition for feeling with a fear
of weakness and excess, his desire for self-control against a need for emo­
tional expression. To many in the bon ton he was both singular and eccen­
tric. At the age of forty-nine he had not managed to secure a wife (William’s
engagement was broken off by his prospective father-in-law in 1755), was no
longer enthused by polite sociability, and lacked the stamina to follow
fashionable energetic pursuits like fox-hunting favoured by the Yorkshire
landed elite.61 Musing on the suitability of his half-brother Marmaduke as a
possible spouse, Lady Traquair, a fellow recusant, avowed: ‘very Bookish
24 Rachel Feldberg
loves retirement … a great Phylosipher is fond of talking like one of
Books … his best friends allow he has an odd turn’.62 Many of Lady Tra­
quair’s reservations could as well have applied to William, who regarded
knowledge and polite sociability as incompatible. In 1769 he told John
Turbeville Needham that he had lived for many years ‘in the Great World,
where manners and le bon Ton are acquired but no knowledge’ and he was
only too aware of the ‘mutual contempt between the scholar and the man of
the world’ that Oliver Goldsmith identified in The Present State of Polite
Learning (1759).63 But in Italy there was space for William to carve out a
new identity, as Goldsmith described: ‘placed in a middle station between
the world and the cell’, he might become in Goldsmith’s words: ‘a man of
taste’.64 In Horace Mann’s eyes William was ‘a very sensible man … a man
of learning and an intimate friend of Lord Granby’, his masculinity resting
on his restrained deportment, self-representation as an intellectual and
excellent connections.65 It seems William, and others who met him in
Europe, did not experience him as constrained by illness, his wealth sweep­
ing away practical barriers with servants to carry him up and down stairs,
custom-made wheeled chairs and the constant attendance of his private
doctor. Horace Mann mentioned gout in connection with William only in
the sense of William taking active steps to relieve his condition and made no
reference to him as an invalid, despite William being unwell both before and
after their encounter.66

‘50 Gouty Brethren’ and a public forum

Given his conversations with Mann about the success of Le Fevre’s treat­
ment, it might appear strange that when offered an opportunity to con­
tribute to a developing medical discourse in a public forum, William held
back. In February/March 1770 Edmund Marshall published his Candid and
Impartial State of the Evidence of a Very Great Probability, that there Is
Discovered by Monsieur Le Fevre … a Specific for the Gout. It was swiftly
embroiled in controversy when the bookseller George Kearsley printed a
forceful rebuttal, The Very Great Improbability of Le Fevre’s Cure.67 In it
he poured scorn on a ‘Dr Johnston’ in Liège with an English gentleman who
had sent a ‘private letter’ to England recommending Le Fevre ‘which fell into
our hands’.68 There is no doubt this was John Johnston the ‘physician’ tra­
velling with William and that William authorised the letter and smoothed its
path, with the result that Le Fevre was summoned to England.69 In retalia­
tion Edmund Marshall circulated a call for evidence from the fifty ‘gouty
brethren’ who had undertaken Le Fevre’s treatment.70 As enthusiastic as
William might have been in principle, he remained silent. Despite his evident
interest in the efficacy of the process, he was not among the thirty-one
respondents whose letters were appended to Marshall’s second pamphlet
sometime after July 1771.71 At the moment when his correspondence could
have contributed to a public debate concerning a regimen he enthusiastically
 Absent bodies? 25
advocated in private, he took no part. William’s silence can be read in a
number of ways. It seems unlikely Marshall’s appeal failed to reach him,
since at the pertinent moment (November 1770–March 1771) he was in
Naples, and then Rome, where there were strong postal connections with
England. It may be that, aware of the ire heaped on Dr Johnston and con­
scious that his letter might be intercepted, he had no inclination to put
himself directly in the firing line. The Irish writer William Chaigneau, a
fellow gout sufferer and contributor to Marshall’s appendix, believed Wil­
liam had given up, or was too ill to write, reporting from Dublin that he
was ‘sorry to hear from other quarters that Mr Constable [has] been lately
severely handled.’72 It was true that William was unwell throughout their
time in Naples. When the Constables arrived in Rome on 29 January
Winifred recalled ‘My Brother was never one day while there wth [sic]out
a Cough a Loosness or Vomittings’, but his latest bout of gout in late
November had only lasted a few days, and ‘his Limbs … were less flushed
than any former Fitt of the gout’, suggesting they both remained optimistic
about the possibility of a cure.73 It may be that William did not respond to
Marshall because he only wrote, indeed physically could only write, when
he was well. The ‘Fitt’ in November affected his wrists, collarbone and
back and the episode in late September to October both hands, his right
arm and elbow.74 But when Winifred reported on 10 October that the gout
had eased and he was ‘perfectly well’ he began drafting a letter to Rous­
seau the following day.75 As soon as William was able to resume corre­
spondence he was eager to do so. Thus the principal cause of his failure to
reply to Marshall does not appear to have been lack of opportunity, or
that he no longer believed in the treatment, or was embarrassed by being
involved in what in some quarters was being derided as a regime led by a
‘quack’.76 It seems he was as unwilling to describe his symptoms in public
as he was in his private, and reluctant to reveal his bodily truths to a wide
audience.

An intercourse of minds
But if William avoided the very public forum of Edmund Marshall’s
pamphlet war and deliberately constructed a picture of health and resilience
in letters home, he seized a surprising opportunity for disclosure of both
bodily and emotional weakness in his epistolary relationship with Jean-Jac­
ques Rousseau, whom he met in Lyon in May 1770. Many travellers sought
an introduction and acquaintances warned William that Rousseau was
unlikely to respond favourably.77 However, a series of brief notes marked
their growing friendship over fifteen days from 12 May, when William
wrote asking permission to visit, to around 27 May, when the Constables
left for Geneva.78 From a tentative request for a single meeting, William
progressed to introducing Winifred, meeting Rousseau’s companion Thérèse
and attending the first production of his melodrama Pygmalion (for which
26 Rachel Feldberg
the philosopher found them tickets and escorted them personally), suggest­
ing that Rousseau (who, as his biographer Maurice Cranston identifies, was
suffering from paranoia) found the Constables’ company engaging.79 Five
months later William wrote a heartfelt letter from Florence, disclosing great
distress over his affection for Winifred’s maid, Hannah. It was a startling
trajectory from formal to intimate in the space of just eight exchanges.
However, from 1741 onwards, long before they met in person, William’s
library boasted a number of books by Rousseau, including Émile, his germ­
inal work on education, and a 1763 edition of his Oeuvres (with marginalia)
published at the optimum time to have incorporated both the Social Con­
tract and Political Economy.80 As William explained, Winifred had also read
several of Rousseau’s major works.81 The Constables had thus been reading
and reflecting on Rousseau’s writing for three decades, and their meeting
offered William a chance to move from his expectation as a reader to his
experience as interlocutor.
From his first approach to Rousseau in a performative letter laced with
flattery and convention, William was uncharacteristically frank about his
illness, perhaps because he chose to use his gout as a form of currency to
explain his presence, citing how ‘an overpowering gout has compelled me
to leave my friends, my retreat and my dearest studies to seek health and
sunshine.’82 The letter introduced William’s ‘retreat’ from the metropolis
to the rural simplicity of the countryside, consciously mirroring Rous­
seau’s own rhetoric and underlining William’s familiarity with the cor­
rupting influence of society on Man’s innate freedom and goodness so
central to Rousseau’s thinking.83 It put clear water between William and
the idle young men of the Grand Tour and established him as a scholar,
‘compelled’ against his will to leave his books and solitude by illness. Four
years later William used similar rhetoric in a letter of supplication to Lord
Rockingham, seeking to secure his good offices to enable William’s speedy
marriage to Catherine Langdale so they could journey to Bath: ‘The phy­
sicians, my Lord! Have ordered me to Bath for a complaint in my stomach
and as soon as possible.’84 These public admissions of helplessness in the
face of illness and the demands of physicians were an effective technique,
which elicited positive results in both instances. Carefully handled, Wil­
liam’s ill health was a useful tool to justify and excuse his petitions, while
marking him out as a gentleman and a worthy and submissive recipient of
Rousseau’s favour.
When William eventually met Rousseau face-to-face on or around 14 May
1770, he was captivated. As he wrote to Marmaduke: ‘he seems to me in
Conversation, the simplest & most Candid of men’. He noted with satis­
faction Rousseau’s openness to intimacy without pretence or pretension and
embraced the opportunity for intellectual exploration. ‘[I] Conversed with
him with openness upon such subjects as Come home to men’, subjects
which can be reconstructed from their later correspondence as a common
interest in botany and mutual ill health.85 Following William’s opening salvo
 Absent bodies? 27
revealing his gout, he wasted no time in recommending possible remedies.
Writing on 16 May to express his sorrow on hearing that Rousseau was ill,
he enclosed ‘the articles on the subject of Arthritis which have attracted the
Doctor in England’, an allusion to Dr Le Fevre’s visit to London taking
place at that very moment, despite the fact that William’s search for curative
practice flew in the face of Rousseau’s aversion to physicians.86 For while
Rousseau posited that a debilitated body had a direct effect on the mind,
draining it of energy, he maintained that pain served a purpose in building a
resilient soul. As he expressed in Émile: ‘I know not … of what malady we
are cured by the physicians, … if they cure the body of pain, they deprive
the soul of fortitude.’ 87 It was a sentiment William echoed in his intro­
ductory letter, explaining it was the acquisition of knowledge, gleaned
from volumes in his library by Voltaire and Rousseau himself, which
guided his thinking: ‘The works of the great geniuses … have so often
sustained me in moments of pain and distress … helped me so much in
strengthening my soul against all events.’88 In this performative missive
William emphasised how it was to reading (rather than prayer or divine
intercession) that he turned in moments of physical or mental pain, hoping
to bolster his soul, the source of his resilience. Rousseau’s own remedy
was temperance and exercise rather than physic or physicians, but William
ignored the potential contradiction in his eagerness to proffer advice. In the
process he strengthened his credentials as a man of science, offering Rousseau
a unique gift: valuable first-hand information on the efficacy of Le Fevre’s
treatment.
Their friendship was not, however, simply a matter of convergent inter­
est. William saw strands in Rousseau’s thinking that illuminated dilemmas
in his own life. He reflected in a letter to the Morritts that, ‘Conversation
with him was an intercourse of thoughts. But alas! All his Great, his Good,
superior abilities & qualities only render him less fit for this world’s coarse
happyness.’89 While acknowledging the rarefied excitement of their discus­
sions (and by implication his own intellectual standing), William identified
the crux of Rousseau’s difficulties: ‘Disinterested & independent, his fail­
ings … arise from too tender, too warm a mind, endorsed with too Great a
share of sensibility’.90 William’s concern that Rousseau’s mind was danger­
ously close to excess, suggests that he conceptualised an acceptable level of
feeling and recognised an imbalance in himself. He perceived a contradiction
between the stoicism he admired and the sentimentalism he feared he fell
into, but took consolation in his perception of Rousseau as someone with
the ability to accommodate both positions. Rousseau’s works, William
wrote, ‘are published in all shapes. Some leaving out this part, some another
but all agreeing that what remains is Philosophy, Morality, the knowledge
of the human heart superior to any & every writer of the age’.91 Christopher
Brooke argues that Rousseau strove to bring together ‘an extraordinary
synthesis of Epicurean, Augustinian, and Stoic argumentative currents’.92
William held volumes representing all these authorities in his collection,
28 Rachel Feldberg
suggesting he too was attempting to reconcile his sensibility with stoicism
and that Rousseau’s critical negotiation offered reassurance.93

William ‘à la Rousseau’
Meeting Rousseau and winning his approbation had great significance for
William, endorsing and supporting his decision to forsake the polite world,
and his admiration shaped the nature of their correspondence. What began as
courteous flattery became a much more personal engagement. In the dialogic
preface to his hugely popular epistolary novel, Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloise
(1761), Rousseau’s ‘man of letters’ pointed out that a ‘sensible’ (rather than
over-sensitive) man ‘who should retire with his family into the country and
become his own farmer, might enjoy more rational feeling, than in the midst
of the amusements of a great city’.94 It was a proposal touching on aspects of
stoic simplicity which reinforced William’s own behaviour. Just before he left
for Europe he had foreshadowed similar rhetoric in a letter to John Turbeville
Needham, which might have been drafted with Rousseau in mind. William
explained that after many years in society, ‘I retired to my country Seat’
where, ‘my Employments are Reading and Reflecting … My amusements …
Agriculture, Gardening, Botany’.95 The affinity William felt for Rousseau’s
championing of nature, free-will, self-improvement and feeling in the face of
society’s artificial constraints was encapsulated before he left Lyon, not in a
letter, but rather in a portrait in pastels commissioned from Jean-Etienne
Liotard in May 1770 (Figure 1.1).
Just as William’s letters echoed Rousseau’s rhetoric, Liotard’s portrait
unmistakably mirrors the habitual ‘Armenian’ dress with which, as Maurice
Cranston notes, Rousseau had so excited the crowd when he arrived in
London in 1766.96 Liotard, who was regarded as the best pastellist in
Europe, had spent years in Constantinople and it was not unusual for him
to draw sitters in turbans or long robes.97 William is depicted in a dis­
tinctive light blue Armenian style coat with fur trimmings and deep fur hat.
The Scottish artist Allan Ramsay portrayed Rousseau in a similar gown and
hat in a portrait commissioned by David Hume, and it is likely William
heard about the picture long before he encountered Rousseau in Lyon.98 In
an age of printed multiples there was another compelling reason why Wil­
liam was almost certainly familiar with Ramsay’s image, or the well-known
engraving by Cathelin (based on a pastel by Maurice Quentin de La Tour)
which also showed Rousseau in a long robe.99 Copies of both likenesses
formed the frontispiece of various versions of the 1764 Esprit, maximes, et
princips de M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of which, carrying his own
bookplate, was listed in William’s library.100 The similarity between the
Cathelin engraving and Liotard’s pastel of William is striking. With this
portrait, William, who two years earlier had bought up the trappings of a
wealthy gout sufferer, now ‘became’ Rousseau, the man of simplicity and
feeling and the object of his admiration.101
 Absent bodies? 29

Figure 1.1 Jean-Etienne Liotard, William Constable, 1770, pastel on parchment.

Leeds Museums and Galleries/The Burton Constable Foundation. Image reproduced
by kind permission of the Burton Constable Foundation.

Sensitive hearts
In October 1770 five months after their parting in Lyon, William wrote his
final and most intimate letter to Rousseau. It had a very different tone and
foregrounded his breaking heart rather than swollen limbs. In a long con­
fessional narrative, which abandoned much of the formality of their pre­
vious correspondence, he wrote from Florence admitting to a confluence of
30 Rachel Feldberg
bodily illness and misery. While William might not have been willing to
detail his bodily experience, the pain in his heart was acknowledged as a
very real source of discomfort: ‘I have been ill my Friend, too, the Great
Heat in Lombardy upset us very much. And I had since a cruel attack of
gout. And another misfortune happen [sic] to me the kind of which sensitive
hearts are exposed.’102 For William, Rousseau’s knowledge of the human
heart was central to his attraction. He was the ideal recipient of writing
which foregrounded sensibility and here, for the only time in his extant
correspondence, William laid bare his feelings (which he envisioned as
located in his heart) convinced that confiding in Rousseau would both win
plaudits and ameliorate his suffering. In a phrase echoing the Jesuit ‘state of
consolation’ in which the subject, turning themselves towards God, experi­
ences peace, William admitted, ‘it is a consolation to open my heart and to
open it [to] the Philosopher of Mankind’.103 William may have been emu­
lating the emotional rhetoric of The Confessions, which perhaps they dis­
cussed in Lyon, since Rousseau was in the midst of completing the
manuscript, but the purpose of confession was familiar to them both.
Rousseau, who espoused religious tolerance, converted to Catholicism at
sixteen and briefly studied for the priesthood before re-joining the Calvinist
Church.104 Similarly, while William may have rejected Catholic rigour, his
experience at Douai appears to have inculcated a deeply embedded Jesuit
practice of ‘retreat’, ‘consolation’ and ‘contemplation’, and habits of scho­
larship which remained with him.105 On his deathbed William maintained
he believed ‘nothing’, but his everyday life was immersed in a wide Catholic
network; the siblings attended church in Europe, he maintained a priest and
eventually married a fellow Catholic.106
From the outset, William’s confessional letter mobilised their mutual
bond of ill health, echoing the intimacy forged through the discussion of
ailments within the context of sentimental culture in the letters examined by
Harvey in this volume. He, like Rousseau, had been unwell, and he inferred
they shared a malady of ‘sensitive hearts’ which made them vulnerable to
strong feelings. Hannah, his sister’s servant, for whom he had conceived
great affection, had left under a cloud to marry a footman she had known
for just a few weeks. Hannah was, he explained, ‘a woman of spirit and
feelings above her station, true friend, faithful. Disinterested, dear to my
heart, who was not my mistress because I knew her firmly attached by gra­
titude and friendship.’107 The relationship was transgressive, but William
elevated Hannah’s social status by referencing her refined feelings. He char­
acterised her as ‘disinterested’, a word he previously employed to describe
Rousseau; ‘faithful’, an epithet harnessed in singing Winifred’s praise; and
his ‘true friend’, bracketing her with Marmaduke, Winifred, John Morritt
and Rousseau himself. He acknowledged he had lavished ‘continual and
assiduous and most tender marks of friendship’ on her, but was at pains to
explain that, unlike many master-servant relationships, he had not seduced
her, and she was not his mistress; their relationship, it appears, had been a
 Absent bodies? 31
meeting of minds rather than flesh. Indeed, he seemed eager to demonstrate
108

virtuous self-denial to Rousseau.

Despite William’s protestations, Hannah had deceived both William and
Winifred. William wrote: ‘an unfortunate passion seized her at the age of 34
for a footman aged 25. … Three months ago she became gloomy, her
ingratitude and what she told me since seemed to her unbearable and at the
end she tried to destroy herself’.109 The popular image of a physically virile
footman, twenty-three years younger than William, would have offered an
unspoken contrast to William’s unreliable body.110 Faced with temptation,
passion ‘seized her’. Hannah was in the grip of Rousseau’s ‘amour propre’
described in Émile as ‘the hateful and irascible [passions]’ which arise from
‘self-interest’.111 William implied that Hannah’s attempted suicide had degra­
ded her, her passions had tipped her into imbalance and in the succeeding
sentence, William’s tone changed. His sense of self-preservation – Rousseau’s
‘amour de soi’, an ordered and controlled self-love to which, in Émile, he
attributed the ‘gentle and affectionate passions’ – stepped in.112 As William
justified to Rousseau, ‘The poor girl abased herself too much, she had to be
left to her own fate’.113 William’s decision reflected a triumph of self-will over
sentiment, his mind taking over when his too sensitive heart was exposed.
Nevertheless, he was left in emotional turmoil:

I have been really affected by the matter … In my early youth foolish

and ardent I hardly had any sensibility but the feelings that may be I
started to adopt became part of my character, … Since then continuous
attachments of love and friendship have weaken [sic] me too much and
now I am a thousand times unhappy when other men would feel
nothing.114

In acknowledging the strength of his emotions, rather than celebrate his re­
incarnation as a man of feeling, William revealed an underlying concern that
his whole self (mind and physical state) has been weakened by the episode.
The body, Rousseau determined in Émile, ‘should be rigorous, to act in
obedience to the mind. The sensual patterns all lodge in effeminate bodies’;
this was what William feared.115 He announced his solution in a paragraph
drafted to meet Rousseau’s approval, which reinstated his physical presence:

My last and only resource in [is?] the contempt of life … I never feel so
Great, so Tall, so above the world … as when absolute master of
myself with Hope and without fear I dare to determine my retreat at
such hour of my convenience.116

After his broken engagement in 1755, William retreated to his Yorkshire

estate. Now he heralded a rejection of feeling and a confident return to the
reasoned study and reflection advocated by the Stoics, central to Jesuit
thinking and, in its retreat from the evils of society, endorsed by Rousseau.
32 Rachel Feldberg
It was a position he consolidated over the succeeding months when, before
returning to England, he gave his letter substance by commissioning a large
double portrait by the fashionable artist Anton von Maron, depicting him­
self as the Roman Senator, Cato the Younger, with Winifred beside him as
Cato’s wife, Marcia.?

William as the virtuous Cato

Von Maron’s painting (Figure 1.2) represents a deliberate and relatively unusual
act of self-fashioning. It is the only known full length image of William and
suggests a new confidence in his bodily state and philosophical determination.
By dint of its enormous size (244 cm height � 144.5 cm width), it is a very public
statement and, as an analysis of fifty-nine other von Maron portraits demon­
strates, an unusual image for the artist.117 Von Maron’s history paintings reg­
ularly depict classical scenes and many of his portraits include indications of
antiquity, but here his subjects are in Roman dress and the marble building to
William’s left suggests an active senate house, rather than ruined decay. Por­
traiture necessitated a level of negotiation between patron and painter and this
image, so unlike the standard commemoration of Grand Tour exploits, sug­
gests that William had significant agency in its genesis.118 He chose to be por­
trayed with his sister in a newly fashionable image of marital affection, at the
centre of a nexus bringing together history painting and philosophical por­
traiture which foregrounded an eloquent and resonant stoical figure.119 While it
was unusual to represent a brother and sister as a married couple this was a
deliberately allegorical image, staged as if it were a piece of theatre with Cato
readily identifiable in mid-eighteenth-century discourse both from Plutarch’s
Lives and the work of Cicero, which William owned, as well as from Joseph
Addison’s popular play Cato, The Tragedy which detailed his final days.120
Cato was regarded as an incorruptible model of virtue, self-discipline and
simplicity, who committed suicide rather than accede to tyranny.121
This is, however, a portrait with multiple contradictions. As husband,
magistrate, senator, orator and acclaimed soldier, Cato represented everything
William was not. Von Maron’s work reinstated William’s masculinity and
enabled him to try on the unfamiliar roles of military and civic accomplishment
from which as a Catholic he was barred. Much like William’s letters, the image
both suggests and conceals his limited physical energy. William is seated where
in a double portrait most men would stand; but there is no attempt to conceal
the lack of musculature in his upper body. He holds Caesar’s note, the contents
tantalisingly glimpsed, like the teasing insights his correspondence affords, but
rather than look with authority towards the audience, he turns back to his
sister. She stands beside her husband-brother, a commanding figure in the
middle of the frame, in flowing classical drapery. Ostensibly this is an image of
Cato, but it places his ‘wife’, centre stage. Rather than a portrait of William,
the picture can thus be read as a tribute to Winifred, its function reconfigured
to praise the sister who, as William assured Rousseau, ‘attached herself to my
 Absent bodies? 33

Figure 1.2 Anton von Maron, William and Winifred Constable depicted as Marcius
Porcius Cato and his wife Marcia, 1773, oil on canvas.
Leeds Museums and Galleries/The Burton Constable Foundation. Image reproduced
by kind permission of the Burton Constable Foundation.
34 Rachel Feldberg
Destiny … with a Fidelity, Constance and Love which have no example’.122
The strength of their bond is the focus of the piece, their mutual gaze creating
an unexpected performance of sibling affection at the heart of an apparently
stoical image. Under other circumstances this might be regarded as a repre­
sentation of barely disguised incest, but by the later eighteenth century, as
Linda W. Rozenstein identifies, strong sibling ties which saw siblings reliant
on each other for lifelong companionship were an increasing phenomenon
and viewed with approbation.123 William’s attachment to Hannah and the
lack of any other corroborating evidence suggests that, rather than any illicit
liaison, this was a determined attempt to replace the image of a man known
to have been disappointed in love with one which manifested an enviably
harmonious relationship with his sister. It was a synthesis of self-command
and feeling precipitated by William’s encounter and correspondence with
Rousseau.

Conclusion
Despite its apparent epistolary absence, William’s gout, his fragile body and
his anxiety over its representation dominated the Constable’s trip to Europe.
Omnipresent in Winifred’s ‘Daily Record’, it was also reflected in the form
and tone, if not the text, of her brother’s letters, which acted as a palimpsest
simultaneously revealing and concealing his corporeal presence. However, it
was not William’s bodily symptoms but emotional distress which he
believed threatened to overwhelm him and his expression of embodiment in
his letters home was shaped by concerns relating to this and his masculinity.
He oscillated between self-controlled stoical acceptance and a fear of over­
whelming sensibility. He constantly renegotiated his image: at one moment
the man of feeling inhabiting Rousseau’s Armenian costume and then, fol­
lowing his tangle with hurtful emotion, a redoubtable soldier and man of
principle masquerading in Roman dress. The siblings’ travels afforded Wil­
liam the opportunity to explore new and different identities, both through
his correspondence, which by omission created an alternative active other,
and his portraits, which allowed him to occupy the aspirational roles he
gestured towards in his letters. Thus in the course of their journey he
became by turn active connoisseur, recovering patient, incorruptible stoic,
husband, Rousseau himself and a simple scholar.
Winifred’s clinical recording and scrupulous documentation obviated any
need for William to pay detailed attention to his symptoms or include them
in his correspondence. Instead, feeling that his gout was ‘in cure’, he focus­
sed on a search for knowledge and self-improvement, omitting all mention
of the days he spent confined to his bedchamber. Reassured by Rousseau’s
ability to reconcile feeling and self-command, William drew on the agency
of his correspondence and the visual images he had commissioned to re­
fashion himself as a ‘man of learning’ and taste, and returned from Europe
intent on becoming ‘absolute master’ of himself.124
 Absent bodies? 35
Notes
1 East Riding Records Office (ERRO): DDCC/150/274, Winifred Constable,
‘Daily Record of Illness of ‘My Brother”’, 22 Nov 1769.
2 Suzanne Moss, ‘Cultivating Curiosities: Plants as Collections in the Eighteenth-
century’ (unpublished PhD Thesis, University of York, Dec 2018), 63.
3 ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’.
4 See, for example, Roy Porter, Patients and Practitioners (Cambridge: Cam­
bridge University Press, 2009); Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, Patient’s Pro­
gress: Doctors and Doctoring in Eighteenth-century England (Oxford: Polity,
1989); Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early
Modern Europe (Basingstoke: Springer, 2011); James T. Boulton and T. O.
McLoughlin, News from Abroad: Letters Written by British Travellers on the
Grand Tour, 1728–71 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). I am
indebted to Sarah Goldsmith for allowing me access to her unpublished thesis,
‘Danger, Risk-taking and Masculinity on the British Grand Tour to the
European Continent c. 1730–1780’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of
York, September 2015).
5 Richard Bates, ‘The Petit Tour to Spa, 1763–1787’, in Rosemary Sweet,
Gerrit Verhoeven and Sarah Goldsmith (eds), Beyond the Grand Tour
Northern Metropolises and Early Modern Travel Behaviour (London: Rou­
tledge, 2013), 127–146. See also Brian Dolan on women travelling for their
health in Ladies of the Grand Tour (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 129–
161; Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth
Century (Stroud: History Press, 2018), 193–197; and Rosemary Sweet, Cities
and the Grand Tour, The British in Italy c.1690–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
6 For their itinerary see ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’;
ERRO: DDCC/153/20A/10, Travel Accounts, Nov 1769–Jun 1771.
7 See Karen Harvey, ‘Epochs of Embodiment: Men, Women and the Material
Body’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42:4 (2019), 455–469, 458, 465,
466; Alexandra Shepard, ‘Gender, the Body and Sexuality’, in Keith Wrightson
(ed.), A Social History of England, 1500–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­
versity Press, 2017), 330.
8 Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, 16.
9 William Constable by Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702–1789) Lyon, May 1770. The
Burton Constable Foundation (BCF); Portrait of William and Winifred Con­
stable depicted as Marcius Porcius Cato and his wife Marcia (1773) by Anton
Maron (1733–1808). Leeds Museums and Galleries/BCF.
10 ERRO: DDCC/145/5, John Johnston to William Constable, 28 Apr 1766.
11 Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady (New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 2000), 49.
12 Horace Mann to Horace Walpole, 27 Oct 1770, The Yale Edition of Horace
Walpole’s Correspondence, Vol. 23: Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with
Sir Horace Mann, ed. W. S. Lewis, Warren Hunting Smith, George L. Lam and
Edwine M. Martz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 244.
13 Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, 17.
14 ERRO: DDCC/2/52, John Dunn to John Raines, 9 Jun 1768. For a discussion
of ‘gouty chairs’ designed for gout sufferers, some with mechanised wheels see
David M. Turner, Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physi­
cal Impairment (New York: Routledge, 2012), 109.
15 ERRO: DDCC/2/77, Invoice from Thomas Chippendale 15 Dec 1768.
16 Porter and Rousseau, The Patrician Malady, 50.
17 Ibid., 52, 53.
36 Rachel Feldberg
18 Leo Gooch, ‘“The Religion for a Gentleman”: The Northern Catholic Gentry
in the Eighteenth-century’, Recusant History, 23:04 (1997), 554.
19 Alexander Lock, Catholicism, Identity and Politics in the Age of Enlight­
enment: The Life and Career of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1745–1810 (Suffolk:
Boydell & Brewer, 2016), 42–43; Jeffrey D. Burson, ‘Introduction: The Culture
of Jesuit Erudition in an Age of Enlightenment’, Journal of Jesuit Studies 6:3
(2019), 405.
20 Gooch, ‘Religion’, 554.
21 Ibid., 560. List of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1660–2019, The Royal Society,
Feb 2020.
22 Kathy J. Wilson, ‘“Training Them Up in Simplicity and Piety”: Catholic
Female Education at the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Diocese of York,
1760–1870’, (unpublished lecture, American Catholic History Association
Annual Meeting, University of Iowa, 2006), 1.
23 Gooch, ‘Religion’, 553; J. A. R. Bickford, ‘The Constables of Burton Constable
1737–1821’, East Yorkshire Histories, 2, 2001, 8.
24 ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’, 28 Dec 1768; Gooch,
‘Religion’, 560.
25 Edward Shorter, ‘Primary Care’, in Roy Porter (ed.), The Cambridge History
of Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 107.
26 Porter and Rousseau, Patrician Malady, 38.
27 Shorter, ‘Primary Care’, 38.
28 Porter and Porter, Patient’s Progress, 74.
29 Francis Clifton, The State of Physick Ancient and Modern Briefly consider’d
with a Plan for the Improvement of it (London: John Nourse, 1732), 175.
30 Lewis et al. (eds), Walpole’s Correspondence, 244; ERRO: DDCC/153/20A/10,
Contract binding John Johnston to accompany William Constable to Foreign
Parts and act as his apothecary and surgeon, 8 Nov 1769.
31 Edmund Marshall, A Candid And Impartial State Of The Evidence Of A Very
Great Probability, That There Is Discovered By Monsieur Le Fevre, A Regular
Physician, Residing And Practising At Liege In Germany, A Specific For The
Gout (Canterbury, 1770).
32 See positive coverage in the London Magazine or Gentleman’s Monthly
Intelligencer, vol. 40 (London, 1771), 322, and searing criticism in The
Critical Review, Or, Annals of Literature, vol. 31 (London: A. Hamilton,
1771), 398.
33 For treatment start date see ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’,
11 Dec 1770.
34 Marshall, Candid, 17, 18; also Mann’s record of his conversation with William
in Naples: Lewis et al. (eds), Walpole’s Correspondence, 244. Le Fevre kept his
recipe secret, but I suggest Colchicum (Autumn Crocus), a potent gout remedy
employed by the Greeks, which Professor Baron Von Stoerk re-introduced to
Austria in 1763 where, tellingly, Le Fevre was practicing. Colchine remains in
clinical use, with a positive long-term prognosis. It is fatal in large doses, hence
the need for a pause between treatments. In the twenty-first century 12 � 5ml
doses, followed by 3 days respite, is the standard prescription. See www.medi
cines.org.uk/emc/product/6415/smpc.
35 Marshall, Candid, 18, 27.

36 Lewis et al. (eds), Walpole’s Correspondence, 243.

37 Susan M. Fitzmaurice, The Familial Letter in Early Modern English: A Pragmatic

Approach (Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 2002), 11, 20, 22.

38 Joan Lane, ‘The Diaries and Correspondence of 18C Patients’, in Patients and
Practitioners, (ed.) Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985),
205–248, 210.
 Absent bodies? 37
39 Goldsmith, Danger, 230; Stolberg, Experiencing Illness, 46.
40 Turner, Disability, 111, 113–116; Horace Walpole wrote at length about his
gout, see Horace Walpole, Letters of Horace Walpole to Horace Mann
(London: Richard Bentley, 1873), vol. 1, 240, 247.
41 Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 4.
42 BCF: William Constable to J.-J. Rousseau, Lyon, 16 May 1770; Lewis et al.
(eds), Walpole’s Correspondence, Mann to Walpole, 244.
43 Bodleian Library: MSS English Letters (BLEL) C: 229 ff.17, William Constable
to Marmaduke Tunstall, Lyon, c.15 [?] May 1770.
44 Ibid.
45 Hannah Newton, Misery to Mirth: Recovery from Illness in Early Modern
England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 231.
46 BLELC: 229 ff.17, Constable to Tunstall, Lyon, 15 [?] May 1770.
47 For the centrality of a narrative of continuing improvement see Goldsmith,
Danger, 246.
48 For a discussion of how letter-writers on the Tour used ‘emotional silence’ as a
means to invoke a sense of their ‘stoicism, courage, and sensibility’, see Sarah
Goldsmith, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour
(London: University of London Press, 2020), 191.
49 BLELC: 229 ff.17, Constable to Tunstall, Lyon, 15 [?] May 1770.
50 BLELC: 229 ff.22–23, William Constable to Marmaduke Tunstall, Rome, 2
Feb–24 Mar 1771.
51 ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’, 11 Feb 1771.
52 ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’, 27, 29 Jul, 17, 24 Nov 1770.
53 BLELC: 229 ff.17, Constable to Tunstall, Rome, between 2 Feb and 24 Mar 1771.
54 Ibid.
55 Ferdinando Warner, A Full and Plain Account of the Gout (London: T Cadell,
1768), 164.
56 ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’, 4 Jan, 8 Jun 1769.
57 Warner, A Full and Plain Account, 172.
58 BLELC: 229 ff.136–138, William Constable to John and Anne Morritt, Italy,
after 27 May 1770.
59 Shearer West, ‘The Darly Macaroni Prints and the Politics of “Private Man”’,
Eighteenth-Century Life, 25:2 (Spring 2001), 170, 174.
60 See Jeremy Gregory, ‘Homo Religiosus: Masculinity and Religion in the Long
Eighteenth Century’, in Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (eds), English
Masculinities 1660–1800 (Edinburgh: Pearson Education, 1999), 110; Newton,
Misery, 198; Turner, Disability, 123.
61 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 97.
62 ‘Character etc. of all the Cat[holic] Gentlemen unmarried in 1767’, Mary
Ravenscroft, 7th Countess of Traquair, 1767, retrieved from www.traquair.co.
uk/diary-mary-ravenscroft/
63 BLEL William Constable to John Turbeville Needham, quoted in Gooch,
‘Religion’, 560. Oliver Goldsmith, ‘The Present State of Polite Learning’, in
The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 1 (London: 1812), 243.
64 Ibid.
65 Lewis et al. (eds), Walpole’s Correspondence, 243, 244.
66 Ibid.; ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’, 20 September–6 Oct
and 13–28 Nov 1770.
67 Marshall, Candid; George Kearsly [sic], A candid and impartial state of the
evidence of the very great improbability that there is discovered by Monsr. le
Fevre, from Liege in Germany, a specific for the gout (London: 1771).
38 Rachel Feldberg
68 Kearsly, Great improbability, 6.
69 Mann describes ‘Johnson’ [sic] sending case studies to William’s friend Lord
Granby and both he and William as ‘advocates for the remedy’. Lewis et al.
(eds), Walpole’s Correspondence, 244.
70 Edmund Marshall, A candid and impartial state of the farther progress of the
gout-medicine, of Doctor Le Fevre, being the evidence of the year 1770, and
part of the year 1771 (London: 1771), 51.
71 Ibid., 71.

72 Ibid., 65.

73 ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’, 29 Jan 1771.

74 For example, ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’, 22, 23 Sep,

17, 18 Nov 1770.

75 ERRO: DDCC/150/274, Constable, ‘Daily Record’, 10 Oct 1770; BCF: Con­
stable to Rousseau, 11 Oct 1770.
76 See the Monthly Review or Literary Journal, Jul to Dec 1771 Volume 45
(London: 1772), 153: ‘we are convinced … that Le Fevre is a quack.’
77 ‘I applied to many to introduce me, all seemded to apreheend his Displeasure’.
BLELC: 229 ff.17, Constable to Tunstall, Lyon, 15 [?] May 1770.
78 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Lyon, 12 May 1770. For substantiation of these dates
see BLELC: 229 ff.17, Constable to Tunstall, Lyon, 15 [?] May 1770, ‘We were
usherd (sic) into Lyons with a shower of snow on the 7th May’; Bills for lodgings
and loading carriage ERRO: DDCC/153/20A/10, Travel Accounts, 27 May 1770.
79 For their developing friendship see BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Lyon, 12,15,19
May 1770; J.-J. Rousseau, to William Constable, Lyon, 19, 23, May 1770. See
also Maurice Cranston, The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and
Adversity (London: Allen Lane, 1997), 175.
80 BCF: Burton Constable Combined Library.

81 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Lyon, 19 May 1770.

82 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Lyon, 12 May 1770.

83 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia: or a New System of Education,

vol. 1 (London: T Becket, 1763), 133.

84 ERRO: DDCC/145/7–8, William Constable to Lord Rockingham, Mansfield
Street, 13 Dec 1774.
85 BLELC: 229 ff.17, William Constable to Marmaduke Tunstall, Lyon, 15 [?]
May 1770; BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Lyon, 15 May 1770.
86 Ibid., for mention of Le Fevre’s visit to London.
87 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius, vol. 1, 43.
88 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, 12 May 1770.
89 BLELC: 229 ff.136–138, William Constable to John and Anne Morritt (and
possibly Marmaduke), Italy, after May 27 1770.
90 Ibid.
91 Ibid.
92 Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from
Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 200.
93 BCF: Burton Constable Combined Library.
94 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Eliosa or a series of Original Letters (London: R. Grif­
fiths,1761 2nd edition) xxii/iii.
95 BLEL: Constable to Needham, quoted in Gooch, ‘Religion’, 560.
96 Cranston, Solitary Self, 161.
97 Christopher Baker, ‘Jean-Etienne Liotard: Pastel Pioneer’, RA Magazine, Autumn,
2015. www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/liotard-exhibition-pastel-pioneer.
98 Allan Ramsay, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), 1766, oil on canvas, 74.90 �
64.80 cm, Scottish National Gallery, retrieved from www.nationalgalleries.org/
art-and-artists/5337/jean-jacques-rousseau-1712–1778.
 Absent bodies? 39
99 I am grateful to the art historian and pastels expert Neil Farrafaces, www.pa
stellists.com, for his information on Liotard and images of Rousseau. For the
genesis of these images see Cranston, A Solitary Life, 76.
100 BCF: Burton Constable Combined Library.
101 The Constable family believed William was wearing clothes ‘à la Rousseau’ or
possibly belonging to him: ‘beautifully done in Crayons, Wm. Constable, in the
dress of Rousseau.’ George Paulson. History and Antiquities of the Seignory of
Holderness (Hull: 1891), II/1, 245. cited in Dictionary of Pastellists before 1800,
Neil Jaffares, www.pastellists.com.
102 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Florence, 11 Oct 1770.
103 Ibid.
104 Cranston, Solitary Self, 21.
105 For central tenets of Jesuit doctrine see Saint Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual
Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, trans. Michael Ivens SJ (Gracewing
Publishing, 2004).
106 For William’s death bed see, John Kirk, John Hungerford Pollen and Edwin
Hubert Burton, Biographies of English Catholics in the Eighteenth Century,
1909 (Gregg Publishing, 1968), 57; Gooch, ‘Religion’, 561. The Constables’
Travel Accounts refer to ‘chairs at church’, 20 Mar 1770.
107 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Florence, 11 Oct 1770.
108 Ibid.
109 Ibid.
110 Kristina Straub, Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between
Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-century Britain (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2008), 43.
111 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia: or a New System of Education
vol. II (London: C.H. Baldwin 1783), 120.
112 Ibid. See also Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 201.
113 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Florence, 11 Oct 1770.
114 Ibid.
115 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius, vol. 1, 43.
116 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Florence, 11 Oct 1770.
117 Analysis of 59 von Maron portraits identifies no other sitters in historic cos­
tume in an historic landscape.
118 I am grateful to Richards Johns for his insights on eighteenth-century
portraiture.
119 For marital portraits see Kate Retford, The Art of Domestic Life: Family Por­
traiture in Eighteenth-century England, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in
British Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 51.
120 Christine D. Henderson and Mark E. Yellin, ‘“Those Stubborn Principles”:
From Stoicism to Sociability in Joseph Addison’s Cato’, The Review of Poli­
tics, 76:2 (2014), 223–224, 223; BCF: Burton Constable Combined Library.
121 Ibid., 230.
122 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Lyon, 19 May 1770.
123 Linda W. Rozenstein, ‘Siblings’, in Paula S. Fass (ed.), Encyclopedia of Chil­
dren and Childhood in History and Society (USA: Macmillan Reference, 2004);
see also Leonore Davidoff, Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations,
1780–1920 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2011), 205–215 for a discussion
of the significantly more ambivalent relationship between William and Dorothy
Wordsworth.
124 BCF: Constable to Rousseau, Florence, 11 Oct 1770.
2 Imagining youth
Epistolary representations of the

eighteenth-century adolescent and

youthful body

Sarah Goldsmith

The eighteenth-century Grand Tour is routinely described as a coming-of­

age process within aristocratic culture.1 The Tour’s role in young elite men’s
transition into adulthood is widely acknowledged, but little is known of
how understandings of aging shaped it or what it reveals about the nebulous
transitions between childhood and adulthood. ‘Age’ in the eighteenth cen­
tury primarily referred to one’s position within a life cycle segmented into
different ‘ages of man’.2 This typically included two distinct stages between
child and adult, variously referred to as maturity, puberty, infancy, the age
of discretion or, mostly commonly, adolescence and youth.3 Aspects asso­
ciated with these life stages, particularly education, have attracted extensive
scholarly attention; less consideration has been given to what being an ado­
lescent and youth meant, or the transition between the two.4 This chapter
traces how young elite men on the Grand Tour were perceived to move
through these life stages. In doing so, it explores the central role played by
letters in documenting, assessing and affirming these developments, particu­
larly in relation to the maturing body.
Adolescence and youth were protracted, complex and dynamic life stages,
involving ‘various transformations’ that differed in pace and intensity, and
between gender and social groups.5 Descriptions of these transitions were
full of temporalisations.6 Adolescence was commonly thought to begin
around twelve for girls and fourteen for boys, but the pubescent onset of
menstruation and ejaculation could apparently start anywhere between ten
and twenty.7 The age at which adolescence ended and youth began was
variously set at eighteen, twenty-one or twenty-five, whereas youth could
end at twenty-five, twenty-eight or thirty-five.8 This was because eighteenth-
century society strongly believed that ‘years do not make up our ages, it is
our vigour and temperament that distinguishes them’, and that progression
was contingent on a variety of legal, intellectual, financial, social, sexual and
physical factors.9
As a coming-of-age practice undertaken by young wealthy men in their
teens and twenties, the Grand Tour offers a unique vantage point into this
topic as it pertained to aristocratic and gentry society.10 Its protracted
nature ensured it took place across the transition point between adolescence
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-4
 Imagining youth 41
and youth, and its importance ensured the survival of rich sets of corre­
spondence. As section one explores, analysing letters through the lens of life
cycles reveals that parents and tutors perceived a trajectory of growth from
the upheavals of adolescence to the potential of youth, but not to adulthood
itself. Ideally, time abroad equipped young men to make their mark upon
the world but as youths, they remained on the ‘threshold of adulthood’.11
The maturing process from adolescence to youth to adulthood was
marked by a shifting legal status, intellectual refinement, social graces and a
growing self-control. As sections two and three explore, the maturing body
also held great significance. Elite men were expected to attain a graceful
command over their bodies and appearances appropriate to their innate
superiority and rank. These expectations were reflected in the Grand Tour’s
itineraries, which were used to rigorously train participant’s bodies and to
develop robust physical health.12 The convention of commissioning a por­
trait, often in Rome, further indicates that successful Tours did not just
revolve around celebrating oneself as inheritors and connoisseurs of the
classical past; these portraits were intended to capture appearances at that
coming-of-age moment for future posterity. This much is well known, but
this chapter explores other crucial ways in which the body featured in
Grand Tour correspondence and culture, namely through the physical
developments anticipated as a natural part of maturation.
These bodily changes were even more impactful because the Tour entailed
a period of absence. Separation from home and family had long been valued
as an important prelude to adult life. Late sixteenth-century parish records
show that 60 per cent of people aged 15–24 lived outside their parental
homes.13 As London’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century population swel­
led with youthful migrants, and as practices involving separation – serving
apprenticeships, attending school, academies or university, and/or travelling
on the Grand Tour – became more common, it seems safe to presume that
this proportion continued or even increased.14 Yet even within a wider cul­
ture of formative separation, the Grand Tour was unusual because of the
greater physical distances and lengthier absences involved. Unlike school­
boys and students, Grand Tourists typically went several years without
seeing families. Until the moment of reunion, the substantial alterations
achieved over this time remained unseen and only imagined by those most
invested in the Tour’s outcomes. This in turn had significant ramifications
for attitudes towards, and discussions of, bodily development.
Letters were often intended to keep in mind the body of the absent loved
one, even amongst the working poor, as is evident from the chapters by
Haggerty and Raapke in this volume. Yet the Grand Tour removed young
men for long periods precisely at a time of considerable physical change.
The practice of epistolary correspondence was crucial to managing this
protracted separation and routinely used to overcome the challenge of con­
veying real and imagined physical change. Parents used letters to establish
standards, demand information, and speculatively ruminate on potential
42 Sarah Goldsmith
developments. In return, tutors and Tourists used correspondence to docu­
ment height, weight, voice, hair and strength as observable markers of
growth, to celebrate positive developments and – keenly aware that these
written exchanges would culminate in a flesh and blood encounter – to
prepare parents for potential disappointment.
This deep, sustained interest in the physical development taking place
during a Grand Tour demonstrates that the maturing body was considered a
central feature of elite adolescence and youth. Historians of masculinity
have recently highlighted a growing focus on the attractiveness of men’s
bodies from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.15 At the intersection of the
Tour and eighteenth-century epistolary culture, the body’s importance to
those on the threshold of adulthood becomes even clearer. In using letters to
represent actual and desired bodies, participants of the Grand Tour laid
bare the importance and standards of youthful male physicality and beauty
in this period.

Life cycles and aging on the Grand Tour

A survey of 100 Grand Tours between 1687–1797 shows that 65 per cent of
young men sampled began travelling between the ages of 17 and 20: 32 per
cent were aged 17–18; 22 per cent aged 19; and 11 per cent aged 20.16 Only a
minority set out earlier: 8 per cent aged 14–15; 9 per cent aged 16 – or later;
7 per cent aged 21; 11 per cent aged 22–26. This broadly correlates with
John Locke’s assertion ‘that from Sixteen to One and Twenty … is the
ordinary time of Travel’.17 Locke disliked this convention, complaining that
the Tour took place precisely during ‘the Season of all his Life’ when men
were ‘the least suited to these Improvements’. During this ‘boyling boister­
ous part of Life’ young men were ‘raw and unruly’, thinking ‘it a shame to
be any longer under the Controul and Conduct of another’.18 Locke’s pes­
simism reflected a wider understanding that adolescence was characterised
by inflamed passion, wildness, rebellion, pride and idleness.19 Indeed,
schools, universities, apprenticeships and Tours were supposed to channel
this riotous youthful energy while firmly maintaining the authority of guar­
dians, tutors and trade masters.20
Paradoxically, adolescence was also supposedly an age when reason and
discretion increased. Confirmation, wills, testimonies, agreements to mar­
riage and apprenticeships could be made at fourteen (in some cases, twelve
for girls).21 But these alterations were subject to a cautious wariness. For
example, while fathers and guardians became accountable to fourteen-year­
olds for the management of their property and could even legally end their
responsibilities there, fathers typically arranged longer guardianships
because of ‘the imbecility of judgement in children of the age of 14’.22 Elite
families clearly shared this healthy scepticism and rarely sent early teens
abroad. Even sons travelling during their mid-to-late teens were unambigu­
ously identified as adolescents. This is apparent in early correspondence
 Imagining youth 43
regarding three young men. Lord George Herbert began his Grand Tour in
November 1775, aged sixteen. William and Charles Legge were the second
and third sons of the 2nd earl of Dartmouth and joined in parts of the 1775–
1778 Tour of their older brother, the family’s heir, George Viscount Lewi­
sham. At eighteen, William accompanied Lewisham through France, while
Charles, aged seventeen/eighteen, travelled with him to the Netherlands,
Germany and Austria.
A staple part of Grand Tour correspondence was the tutor’s frequent reports
on his charge’s health, education and progress. These had to strike a difficult
balance of providing honest appraisals, in which stereotypically negative ado­
lescent traits could feature heavily, without offending parents and while
demonstrating that the tutor was doing a good job and that progress was being
made. Many tutors sought for a hopeful tone tempered with a frankness that
named faults. For example, after six months at a military academy in Stras­
bourg, William Coxe finally thought that Herbert ‘had got the better of his
indolence, which I once began to despair of’.23 This optimism proved to be a
false hope, as Herbert’s immaturities continued to cause concern throughout
his travels. When William Legge returned to England in December 1775, his
tutor, David Stevenson, believed his parents would: ‘find him somewhat, tho
not so much improved … he has one of the best Tempers & Dispositions I ever
met in a young man. Had he a little less Indolence in his Composition, he
would be perfect.’24 Rather than indolent, his brother Charles was deemed
‘Rough & intractable’.25 Still, Stevenson did not despair:

I don’t doubt but Charles will take a very high Polish, if I may judge
from the extreme difficulty of bringing on what we have at present. This
circumstance however far from dispiriting rather animates me as I am
persuaded that as soon as the Roughness are worked off we shall dis­
cover a very fine water.26

Stevenson’s ‘diamond in the rough’ analogy affirms that wildness and rebel­
lion were accepted as a natural part of this life stage that would eventually
pass.27 This was not complacency: the Tour was meant to ensure a positive
end to these inevitable changes. Thus, as Tourists neared their twenties, they
were increasingly pressured to outgrow behaviours tolerated during adoles­
cence. When Herbert was seventeen, his father, the 10th earl of Pembroke
hoped ‘that, now he is of a certain age, a certain Parresse or Faineantise, &
all Sulks, or Ill humoured obstinacy have entirely left him. When a boy, he
was, now, & then, attacked by these formidable foes.’28 By the time Herbert
was 19, Pembroke insisted to him:

that you are pleased to be comical as to what you say about your
temper, & humour. You would be a melancholy, terrible creature
indeed, if, at your age, the sight, or manner of this, of that, or t’other
was to affect yr Lordship’s humour. & temper.29
44 Sarah Goldsmith
Sulks and temper tantrums aside, younger Tourists simply lacked life
experience. Dartmouth refused to let a seventeen-year-old Charles and
friend travel home alone from Vienna: ‘two boys by themselves’ would
‘unavoidably run into’ ‘absurdities & little acts of Etourderie [foolish­
ness]’.30 Flattering a twenty-one-year-old Lewisham’s recent status as a legal
adult, Dartmouth explained that he and Stevenson must go too, as the boys
needed ‘the assistance of some person of more experience than themselves’.31
Comparing Charles and William to Lewisham reveals the subtle transition
between adolescence and youth. Lewisham began his Grand Tour in July
1775, aged nineteen, and remained capable of boyishness. Stevenson
exclaimed in a letter from Amsterdam: ‘The Boys [Lewisham, twenty;
Charles, seventeen], in whose Company I write this, are so very healthy &
riotous, that your Lordship will excuse me if I hardly know what I write.’32
Nevertheless, Lewisham’s parents and tutor were inclined to see him as a
mature, well-behaved youth. Significantly, Dartmouth insisted that Ste­
venson was Lewisham’s ‘Friend & companion’, and not that ‘obnoxious
word Gouverneur’.33
Herbert’s evolving relationship with his tutors similarly demonstrates
how age affected the categorisation of companion and governor. Herbert
started his Tour at sixteen clearly accompanied by two governors, Coxe and
Captain John Floyd. Both departed early, so his father arranged for Major
Jean de Seigneux to accompany him through France. Pembroke reassured a
reluctant nineteen-year-old Herbert that Seigneux was not another governor
but rather ‘a friend, & travelling companion’.34 In letters to Floyd and
Coxe, he further explained, ‘At the age of discretion, at which he is arrived,
he can want no Governor’, as ‘He is too old, too much of a Man … & I
hope stands in no need of any’.35 In practice, these older men often held
authority over finances, route and education, but the designation of ‘com­
panion’ enabled youths to assume a semblance of independence.36
Each year, the Dartmouths sent love and prayers to mark Lewisham’s
birthday (3 October).37 Letters written for his twenty-first, however, sharply
focused on adulthood. The attainment of twenty-one marked the legal end
of infancy and of a guardian’s power.38 Dartmouth acknowledged that this
landmark was significant but approximate and even nebulous:

I wonder how you feel upon your arrival at that period, whch the Laws
have determined to be years of discretion. I believe the period is not inju­
diciously fixed upon, as a reasonable medium of the years at wch men may
fairly be judged to be possed of that discretion wch they have affixed to it:
to some I believe, it comes sooner, to others not quite so soon; here &
there one perhaps never has the good fortune to lay hold of it at all.39

Responding to this prompt, Lewisham echoed the idea that ‘age’ was deter­
mined by more than years, noting that despite ‘being arrived at years of
discretion’, his feelings ‘are so very similar to those I experienced before I
 Imagining youth 45
reached that period, that I can hardly persuade myself that it is an Epoch in
the course of my life’.40 Nevertheless, he was moved to ‘reflect a little upon
future plans’: after travelling to Italy and Switzerland, he intended to marry,
become an MP and fulfil his ‘duty in the situation which I shall be placed’.41
Like Dartmouth and Lewisham, Pembroke also began to meditate on
Herbert’s adulthood as he approached twenty-one:

You will be a Parliament man by the time ye return, & soon after
married, I hope, to some Miss, as beautiful as ye please, & as rich as
Croesus. Rub up then, your eloquence, & your vigour, ready primed for
landing upon British ground.42

Despite this pleasing vision of his heir taking society and the marriage mart
by storm, Pembroke was determined that Herbert should not return ‘till you
are nearly of age’.43 Having begun travelling at sixteen, an increasingly dis­
gruntled Herbert had an unusually long wait, but other Tourists also
became impatient as twenty-one loomed. After his twenty-first birthday,
George Bussey Villiers, heir to the earl of Jersey, deliberately played on his
departure from schoolboy status, proclaiming, ‘I shall get a notched Stick, as
Boys do at school before the holidays’ to count down the days.44
Turning twenty-one evidently was a significant milestone: 50 per cent of sam­
pled Tourists returned home just prior to, or during, their twenty-first year,
whereas only 10 per cent returned before. Yet, in keeping with the idea that
youth was a long life-stage, 40 per cent of sampled Tourists travelled into their
mid- and late-twenties.45 Age was not just about chronological years and entry
into adulthood, in particular, was far more complex than attaining one’s major­
ity: marriage, parenthood, management of a household or business, financial and
political independence were all important factors.46 As the vast majority of
Tourists did not fulfil these criteria, they returned as youths, positioned to take
on responsibilities that would eventually complete the transition. This was
accomplished with varying degrees of promptness: of the sampled Tourists who
became MPs, 18.6 per cent had parliamentary seats waiting and 72 per cent
procured one within six years of returning;47 68 per cent married within a decade
of arriving home and, of these, 22 per cent married within one year of their
return, and a further 14 per cent within two.48 Even then, adulthood was
not just conferred by life events, but by possessing maturity, judgement and
an ‘accumulation of experience’.49
A man could therefore be legally mature at twenty-one, but still con­
sidered a youth throughout his twenties. In 1737, while Thomas Pelham,
later 1st Earl of Chichester, was still a child, his father died young. Upon
turning twenty-one in 1749, Pelham received his full inheritance, becoming
head of a junior branch of the Pelham family. His decision to extend his
Tour into his twenty-second year was therefore met with disapproval. In
1750, Captain James Pelham wrote, ‘I am order’d by the Duke of Newcastle
and Mr Pelham to press your coming Home’.50 Simultaneously chastising
46 Sarah Goldsmith
him for youthful immaturities and evading adult responsibilities, the senior
Pelham-Holles evidently expected obedience from what was clearly still a
junior family member.
Lewisham also kept travelling, eventually returning in 1779 aged twenty-
three. On his twenty-second birthday, he reflected ‘the day reminds me I am
growing exceedingly old – the days of dissipation & idleness are now verging to
their end – a seat in Parliament to begin those of business with would be no
unsatisfactory thing’.51 Nevertheless, with no wife, inheritance or seat, there
was no immediate pressure to return and, despite his legal independence,
Lewisham very much remained his parents’ ‘great child beyond the Alps’.52
Stevenson guided him, his father financially supported him, and he typically
followed Dartmouth’s ‘advice’ without protest.53 It is curious, then, that his
parents felt it imperative to immediately position themselves as friends, rather
than authority figures, on his twenty-first birthday.54 Dartmouth wrote:

the honor you do me in making me your Confident, as suffering me to

be your advisor, upon these interesting points. It has always been a
principal object with me to establish myself upon such a footing with
you, that when I should no longer have occasion to exert the authority
of a Parent, I might still enjoy the privileges of a friend; you will therefore
imagine how pleasant it must be to me to receive so convincing a proof of
how well I have succeeded in this object.55

This desire was present in his decision to remind, rather than order, Lewisham to
escort Charles home and to watch his expenditure. Lewisham was encouraged to
remember his family’s immediate needs, as three younger sons at Oxford made
‘considerable calls’ on Dartmouth’s ‘annual Revenue’, and to think of his future
inheritance. His father claimed: ‘I should not like to be obliged to lessen that
Revenue for your sake’ or be ‘a bad steward for you’.56 This approach was
symptomatic of what Henry French and Mark Rothery have identified as a
‘partially articulated impulse’ to develop ‘an independent, active masculinity’ in
sons, while encouraging them to ‘internalize approved values’.57 By writing as if
there had been an alteration in power between them, Dartmouth sought to
recognise Lewisham’s departure from adolescence, and to encourage adult-like
behaviour. Such epistolary exchanges demonstrate how parents deliberately used
correspondence to mark out transitions between life stages. Instructions, orders,
chastisements and subtle alterations in tone were employed to encourage sons to
reflect on their changing status and responsibilities in their replies.

The maturing body on the Grand Tour

Contemporary discourses strongly associated adolescence and youth with
profound physical change. Samuel Johnson, for example, defined adolescence
as ‘that part of life in which the body has not yet reached its full perfections’
and defined puberty by quoting from Francis Bacon:58
 Imagining youth 47
The cause of changing the voice at the years of puberty seemth to be,
for that when much of the moisture of the body, which did before irri­
gate the parts, is drawn down to the spermatical vessels, it leaveth the
body more hot than it was, whence cometh the dilation of the pipes.59

Adolescent and youthful bodies were traditionally thought to be dominated

by red choler. The resulting sanguine temperament accounted for their
impetuous tempers and passions. As the body burnt hotter and drier, blood
converted into spermatic liquids and resulted in menstruation and ejacula­
tion. This instigated other changes. Male bodies developed deeper voices, an
increase in ‘vitall strength’ and hair ‘about the legs and arm-holes’, the
‘secrets’ and face.60 The clearest descriptions of change were published in
the seventeenth century when humoral theories prevailed. As new nervous
theories of the body emerged from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, the
associations with heat, humours and spermatic production ceased, although
the association between manliness, puberty and inner heat lingered.61
Keenly aware that young bodies altered at a remarkable pace during the
Grand Tour, parents and tutors even referred to growing pains. Lady Pem­
broke, for example, blamed sixteen-year-old Herbert’s ague on ‘his having
grown so suddenly & being so thin’, whereas Stevenson attributed an eigh­
teen-year-old William’s lack of ardour to ‘A growing pain in his knee’.62
These references were part of a wider epistolary exchange on health, but
physical development was also discussed beyond this context. In particular,
parents made considerable efforts to track developments from afar, despite
knowing that they would not fully comprehend them until their sons
returned. Some tried to predict certain changes. Pembroke did this when he
sent Herbert a set of razors in June 1778. Herbert was a month shy of his
nineteenth birthday and his father hoped that they had arrived in ‘time
enough to mow his first chin crop’.63 As Alun Withey has explored, clean-
shaven faces denoted polite masculinity but the capacity to produce facial
hair remained a sign of male maturity. Shaving therefore became increas­
ingly imbued with ideals of control and self-mastery.64 By sending Herbert
razors, Pembroke anticipated an important biological development and
encouraged him to start partaking in adult male acts of self-presentation.
Pembroke was less content to guess height and weight. On 1 January
1779, he wrote, ‘Multes & Felices’ to Coxe, but was ‘really angry’ to not
have received Herbert’s nineteenth birthday measurements: ‘it is so easily
done. Do insist on his immediate, & exact compliance, & henceforth on the
very birthday.’65 Demanding annual updates, Pembroke systematically
‘booked’ the measurements of Herbert, himself and Augustus Reebkomp,
his illegitimate son. These enabled him to refer accurately to Herbert’s six­
teen-year-old body measurements several years later.66 Pembroke’s actions
were part of a growing interest in quantifying the human form. Other late­
eighteenth-century families also kept weighing machines and records, as did
coffeehouses, boxing saloons, and even wine merchants.67 Pembroke’s
48 Sarah Goldsmith
instructions to ‘be regular in [measurements] for the future till it strikes 25
at least, & after that in the weight allways’ reflected commonly held
understandings that the body grew throughout youth, not just adolescence.68
The military also measured recruits’ height into their early twenties and
medical authorities noted the milestone ‘Of twenty-five, after which we
grow no more’.69 Moreover, in demanding and compiling precise observa­
tional reports from travellers, Pembroke was essentially adapting epistolary-
based information-gathering practices used by scientific bodies like the
Royal Society to attain empirical knowledge.
Parents sometimes pictured themselves as spectral spectators to their sons’
travels. Dartmouth indulged in one such flight of fancy when Lewisham
arrived in Paris in August 1775:

It is a pleasure to me to accompany you from place to place, & to

observe the delights & surprise with your countenance every now &
then (for I cannot hear your voice) as new objects & new incidents
come in your way … I have you often before my eyes, & am sometimes
at your elbow, when you little think of it.70

As Lewisham had only been abroad for a month, Dartmouth focused on

managing his son’s imagined behaviour. By the time his wife undertook a
similar exercise in November 1776, Lewisham had been abroad for nearly a
year and half and she was much more curious about appearance. In her
letter, Lady Dartmouth wished ‘to have the use of a pair of wings for a little
while’ and to see ‘wher. Or no they wd not carry my as far as Vienna’. She
wanted to ‘take a peep at two personages [Lewisham and Charles] there for
whom I have some esteem’, and ‘see whe.r or no you are fatter or leaner a
German or an Englishman’.71 Lady Pembroke was similarly fascinated to
know what her twenty-year-old son looked like as he prepared to return in
June 1780. Her short letter tremulously imagined a virile, physically strong
and unrecognisable male presence:

My Dear George, Are you really at Ostend? Est-il possible? & I shall
see your face again? I really cannot write about it, for I feel ready to cry
but thinking of it, but perhaps you are grown a violent looking creature
& I shall hardly know you, & not know how to behave to you. O! my
dear George good bye God bless you, & give you a fair & good wind &
no sickness yrs. Affectionately. Eliz: Pem:72

This expectation of unrecognisable alteration had been foregrounded back

in 1777, a few months before their first reunion during a brief visit to
Ostend. Prior to this, Coxe had claimed that a seventeen-year-old Herbert
was already ‘so grown that I am satisfied, was he to pass you in the street,
your Ladyship would hardly know him’.73 These imagined alterations and
reactions have survived, but Lady Dartmouth’s and Lady Pembroke’s actual
 Imagining youth 49
responses to their homecoming son’s bodies have not. As reunions took
place in person, there was often less need to record such occasions, leaving
this element of travel’s afterlife relatively undocumented.
Exceptions occurred when a parent met sons abroad. Here, distance, and
therefore correspondence, continued to play a role. Letters dispatched to
spouses at home reveal that the degree of physical change was acutely felt.
In Berlin in July 1792, the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch reunited with his twenty­
year-old son, Charles, earl of Dalkeith, for the first time in two years. He
instantly wrote a note to his wife, Elizabeth:

Berlin 3 o’clock. I must make great haste to save the Post therefore can
say but little about Charles but that little all good. He is very Tall, very
strong & very healthy – and if they Tell Truth very good in every
respect. I have hardly had time to look him over, and having so much to
say to him, I have as yet said very little … I think Charles a very plea­
sant well looking young man. I shall in my next give you a more accu­
rate description of him, you must be satisfied now in hearing that he is
well.74

Buccleuch’s tone and composition were clearly shaped by immediate cir­

cumstances. Overwhelmed and racing against the clock, he offered a bom­
bardment of rapid, forcible impressions: ‘very Tall, very strong & very
healthy’. Four days later, he wrote a longer, calmer, more clinical account:

I wrote to you the day I arrive here (the 3rd) I had not time to say much
about Charles at that time you will I suppose expect from account of
him now. I shall begin with his person – he measures 5 ft 10 inches.
straight and well made. Broad over the Breast. His Shoulders flat when
he holds up his head. His hands like two Shoulders of Mutton his legs
rather slender for his size his Thighs & legs rather long but not much.
His head well placed. His face not changed in the least his voice much
changed as it appeard to me at first, I cannot say I now think I perceive
much alteration75

In systematically tracing height, posture, proportions and features like torso,

hands, legs, teeth (‘one of his fore teeth looks black. he keeps them in good
order’) and hair (‘his head rather blowsey but he has promised me to have
his hair cut’), Buccleuch undertook an ordered, minute observation of his
son. This, like Pembroke’s insistence on measurements, was directly influ­
enced by scientific practices of observation and reflective of his own rigorous
enlightenment education by Adam Smith.
In addition, Buccleuch was using his objective quantification to process
what had actually changed. Particular attention was paid to Dalkeith’s voice
which had either broken or deepened further. Buccleuch pondered this.
While he initially thought it ‘much change’, ‘I cannot say I now think I
50 Sarah Goldsmith
perceive much alteration’.76 This uncertainty captured a jarring process of
refamiliarisation, as he reconciled memories of the adolescent with the
matured youth before him. Buccleuch was also at pains to convey a wealth
of detail to his wife who continued to imagine these changes while he
enjoyed a reunion. He even took the unusual step of including a sketch of
their son (Figure 2.1) in a concerted effort to fulfil his epistolary duties as a
fond husband and parent. Finally, in concluding that Dalkeith ‘has certainly
improved in many points. still some little trifles remain to be altered which I
think I shall bring about’, Buccleuch was writing a ‘to do’ list of the work
that remained.77
Most reunions were presumably joyful. This was not the case for the
Price family. After four years abroad, Robert Price returned in 1741 aged
twenty-three. Arriving unexpectedly late, he found that his irascible father
was the only member of the household still awake and refusing to unlock
the door:

[He] told the Coachman he would let no body in at such a time of

night: upon that I got out of the Coach, & had a long conversation with
him to prove I was his son, he on one side of the door, & I on the
other: At last my Eloquence seem’d to soften him, & he began to think
that perhaps I might be his son; he then undid about four or five great
iron Bars, unlock’d the door, & left nothing but the great chain, in
order to avoid surprises; But upon opening the door a little, & seeing a
great dirty broadshoulder’d fellow in a great coat with a Coloured red
handkercif about his neck, he was going to shut it again; & if by good
luck he had not cast his eye upon my baggage, I might very probably
have been forced to look for a bed Elsewhere. But seeing so many
strong appearances in my favor, he relented & undid the chain. He
embraced me & told me he was glad to see me, but look’d damn’d sour
upon me for coming at such an hour.78

This was a farcical version of Ulysses’ homecoming. Ulysses’ identity was

proved by his bow and dog; Price was saved by his luggage. Both had been
undone by the dramatic bodily changes wrought while they were away.
Price’s voice was unrecognisable to his father as they talked through the
door and even after beginning ‘to think that perhaps I might be his son’,
Price senior was unprepared to see ‘a great dirty broadshoulder’d fellow’.
His surprised and intimidated response to his grown son’s physique was not
dissimilar to Lady Pembroke’s imaginings forty years later. It is, however,
important to note that his response was reported in yet another type of
Grand Tour correspondence: letters sent by Tourists between peers. Price
was writing to a collection of friends, the Common Room, in Geneva. Their
jocular, playful letters often celebrated their bodies’ sporting and sexual
prowess. As the first to arrive home, Price was interjecting a new, perhaps
unexpected, bodily theme to their discourse.
 Imagining youth 51

Figure 2.1 Lord Henry Spencer, Charles, the Earl of Dalkeith, 1792, ink sketch on
paper, included in Henry Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch’s 3 July 1792 letter
to Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch.
The Buccleuch Archive. Image reproduce by kind permission of the Duke of Buc­
cleuch and Queensberry KT, and Dr Emma Purcell.

These accounts of real and imagined bodies offer insights into the desired
physical qualities for elite young men. Evidently, size was valued in a
manner that went beyond height to incorporate broad shoulders, deep
chests, muscular strength and a latent capacity for dominance and violence.
Lady Pembroke anticipated a ‘violent looking creature’ for a son, while Price
mischievously delighted in his ‘great dirty’ appearance. Buccleuch was
unintimidated by Dalkeith’s broad chest and mutton-like large hands, but
likewise described a rough, powerful physique closer to the Farnese Hercules
than the lithely elegant Apollo Belvedere and the polite bodily ideals often
associated with elite men and the Tour.
Academy-based exercises enabled Tourists to undertake the intensive
bodily cultivation necessary to achieving the polite body.79 This was not
straightforward: these were designed to form a military body, not just a
polite one, while polite bodies could easily become effeminate. Society’s
horrified mockery of this possibility was prominent. In 1743, the fourth part
of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad featured the returning ‘gay’, ‘embroider’d’
and ‘tittering’ Tourist.80 James Burgh warned that a failed Tourist ‘brings
back with him a laced coat, a spoilt constitution, a gibberish of broken French
and Italian, and an awkward imitation of foreign gestures’.81 Parents, tutors and
Tourists shared these hopes and fears. During their time in France, Stevenson
proudly related how, ‘I have aimed at Distinction in [Lewisham’s] Dress with­
out being remarkable or Ridiculous’, and Lewisham boasted, ‘you will certainly
be much surprised if you find me in the Spring as unlicked a Cub as when I left
52 Sarah Goldsmith
England’.82 Dartmouth’s retort confirms that these improvements were about
polite refinement: ‘on the contrary, I fully expect to see you very upright in your
figure, without thrusting out your rump behind, or your chin before, very easy
& gracious in yr motions, very polite & engaging in your manners’.83 Tourists
also playfully engaged with the ‘embroider’d’, ‘tittering’ stereotype. In 1766,
John Holroyd observed that his friends ‘reasonably shou’d expect some Tinsel’
upon his return, and ‘some Airs least it shou’d be maliciously observed that I
have gained nothing by the Grand Tour’.84
These fears and desires primarily focused on dress, mannerisms and move­
ment: aspects of a body’s performance that are distinct from expectations about
a body’s material qualities. In correlating desires for a polite bodily performance
with a desire for slender body types, scholars have often overlooked this. The
ideal eighteenth-century male body is typically identified as the classical Ephebes
and Apollo Belvedere, whose ‘young, slim athleticism’ incorporated polite traits
like gracefulness, poise and agility. The heftier Herculean form is thought to have
only become a popular ideal at the end of the century.85 This accounts for Buc­
cleuch’s 1790s descriptions, but Lady Pembroke’s imagining and Price’s pride in
the 1770s and 1740s occur too early for this shift.
Yet young men and their families clearly desired the Apollo body too and
had no issue with combining elements of both. Buccleuch, for example, appre­
ciatively described Dalkeith’s ‘rather long’, ‘rather slender’ legs.86 Showcased in
stockings and breeches, the leg was, as Karen Harvey has explored, a symbol of
male power, virility and beauty.87 Dalkeith’s legs were further celebrated in
Lord Spencer’s sketch. Buccleuch included this sketch in order to echo his
words and make Dalkeith’s body even more tangible to his mother (Figure 2.1).
Alongside a boxy, powerful torso, it devoted attention to Dalkeith’s ludicrously
elongated legs, encased in fashionable ‘Hugger Breeches’ and shaded to
emphasis thighs and calves. Over twenty years earlier in 1768, a nineteen-year­
old William Robert Fitzgerald, Lord Kildare, boasted about achieving a similar
mix of power and grace in Turin:

My dancing master has been of great service to me, as it is amazing how

much wider I am upon the chest; all my waistcoats are too tight. My
legs are also fine; in short, I believe I shall return a fine, genteel figure! I
do not grow fat, which is a comfort.88

From at least the 1740s, therefore, elite society happily admired and com­
bined aspects of the powerful, intimidating Herculean physique with the
Apollo ideal and a gracefully elegant presentation.?

Beauty, youth and managing expectations

Within aesthetic, theological and scientific theory, the perfect ideal was
masculine. Nevertheless, the most voluble discourses regarding beauty were
directed at women.89 This is evident even in Grand Tour correspondence,
 Imagining youth 53
where curiosity about bodily change was not just directed towards the
Tourist. Lewisham, for example, was one of eight brothers but talked
chiefly about his only sister, Charlotte’s appearance. As Charlotte approa­
ched fourteen, Lewisham supposed she ‘draws every day nearer & nearer to
Perfection’.90 Comments on girls’ attractiveness typically increased as they
turned fourteen, as society anticipated the onset of womanly fertility.91 In
contrast, discussions of male beauty could be muted and even disavowed.
When Lewisham prepared to escort Charles home, his father wrote:

[I] take my leave of you till I see your sweet broad face again. I think I
have never been told, whether I am to find it broader or narrower than
when I saw it last: I don’t much care provided it cover the same upright
mind, that has sometimes peeped thro’ it.92

Despite this, Dartmouth and elite society clearly did attach importance to
male attractiveness, even celebrating seemingly feminine qualities. For
example, the Dartmouths were proud of their sons’ complexions. Lewi­
sham’s ‘Roses & Lilies in full Bloom’ was central to his ‘upward Good
Looks’, and so good that he could ‘furnish’ the whole family ‘without
Detrement to the Original Stock’.93 This praise was identical to compli­
ments paid to young women. In 1764, for example, George Lucy wrote of
Sir Woolstan Dixie’s fourteen-year-old daughter’s countenance, ‘surely never
did the lily and the rose ever so happily meet’.94 Preserving the male Legge
complexion was important. Stevenson felt that ‘[a seventeen-year-old
Charles’] Colour may stand in Need of bleaching’ as he recovered from
jaundice and that Lewisham would be ‘very Clear & handsome’ after a
Swiss summer left him ‘the Colour of the best old Jamaica Mahogany’.95
This final example, however, shows a surprising tolerance for tanned skin
comparable to the dark wood that hailed from the Caribbean plantations
and perhaps even hints at a comparison to the darker tones of enslaved
people. Such comparisons and transformations, however, were evidently
only permissible if the effects were reversible.
Tallness was a desirable trait. Benefiting from regular nutrition through­
out their lives, aristocratic and gentry men grew faster and taller than their
less-nourished peers. Elite fashions capitalised on this by elongating a ‘tall’
body shape, through heels, fitted suits, and carefully cultivated postures and
gesture.96 This physical feature was a point of pride when describing sons.
In 1775, Lady Dartmouth described sixteen-year-old Charles as a ‘rogue’
who ‘has continued to grow ever since you saw him; his height is now 5.
Feet. 9. Inches, he is just as tall as Mr Stillingfleet’.97 In 1777, after his return
from travelling, the eighteen-year-old army officer had enjoy ‘holidays with
us, & is gone back fairly taller than his father.’98 Pembroke invested Her­
bert’s ‘long body’ with a degree of sexual attractiveness, informing him that
he would return to a ‘grand room’ and that he had ‘enlarged a bed big
enough to hold you, & a rich wife too’.99
54 Sarah Goldsmith
At sixteen, Herbert and Charles measured 5ft 7 7/8ins and 5ft 9ins
respectively (according to his father’s records), and presumably continued to
grow.100 Twenty-year-old Dalkeith, whom his father breathlessly described
as ‘very tall’, measured 5ft 10ins. At 5ft 4ins, Villiers was demonstrably
shorter than his peers and regarded this as problematic. In 1754, he wrote to
his mother from Leipzig:

tho’ Numpy thinks I am now a perfect German, I cannot boast of being

of a Teutonic Size; 5f.4inch being my exact perpendicular height, & tho’
that is really what may be called a middling stature, it does not yet
aspire to the six feet Germans, Nay I have sometimes the misfortune of
sitting at Supper next to a Gentleman, an officer in the Dutch Service,
who is I am sure very near seven feet, English measure.101

Despite claiming ‘a middling stature’, Villiers compared himself unfavour­

ably with ‘six feet Germans’ and, having happily signed childhood letters as
‘Your ever Dutifull fairy’, evidently felt that diminutiveness was not
appealing at nineteen.102 His tutor, William Whitehead, confirmed this in
brief warning prior to their return: ‘Colonel Yorke [Ambassador to The
Hague] thinks [Villiers] very much grown, but I still desire your Lordship &
Lady Jersey not to expect much on that head.’103 Whitehead was deliber­
ately attempting to reduce any overly hopeful aspirations that might mar
their reunion. His phrasing is conventional, with the term ‘on that head’
commonly referring to a principal point of discussion or ‘heading’. This
affirms that height and physical development were one of the key ‘headings’
that a tutor was expected to report on. At the same time, this particular
choice of body idiom, not used elsewhere in Whitehead’s letters, might have
been an attempt to infuse some playful humour in the warning.
Excessive tallness was just as unattractive, as the insults targeted at tall
men, emphasising awkward gawkiness, ravenous appetites and ambition,
show.104 These mockeries and concerns were directed at Charles and Her­
bert. Lewisham, for example, teasingly reminded Charles that ‘I have not
forgot his great long, lank figure’, while Pembroke fretted about Herbert
neglecting his exercises.105 This was ‘particularly unlucky for such tall fig­
ures as his’, as ‘the belle jeunesse [beautiful youth], who are tall, lank, &
bony’ need to attend ‘to person, & Grace’.106 This viewing of Herbert’s
tallness as simultaneously lank, bony and a feature of beautiful youth con­
firms Matthew McCormack’s assertion that male height – and male beauty
more generally – was a complex business.107
Weight was a similarly vexed issue. Plumpness indicated prosperity, gen­
erosity and good humour but overweight bodies were unhesitatingly con­
demned as less fertile and symptomatic of foolishness, gluttony and
luxury.108 Given the high value placed on elite self-command and heirs, fat
bodies were therefore a threat.109 Correspondingly, the only positive Tour
references to weight gain related to recoveries from illness. Philip Yorke, for
 Imagining youth 55
example, was relieved ‘to pick up my quota of flesh & strength’ after sur­
viving malaria in Rome.110 Tourists were far more inclined to boast about
weight loss. In 1726, William Bentinck, 1st Count Bentinck informed his
mother that time at the Luneville academy meant, ‘I am at least three good
inches slenderer than you saw me’.111 In Naples in March 1767, Lady Hol­
land praised her nephew, Kildare’s determination: ‘He improved his person,
and takes proper pains not to grow fat, by fencing, walking and riding at
the riding house’. It was, she ruefully reflected, too late for her sons, Stephen
and Charles James Fox, who were already ‘so enormous’.112
Despite Dartmouth’s reassurances that the broadness of Lewisham’s face
was unimportant, concerns about weight subtly persisted throughout their
correspondence. In Paris in January 1776, Lewisham described himself as
‘the great unwieldy subject’ in a pointed attempt to ensure that Dartmouth
did not ‘raise your expectations too high’.113 Six months later, he claimed
that his unabated appetite fitted in well at The Hague:

I assure you that in point of eating I cut no figure at all whilst I was
there, it is astonishing how I was eclipsed, tout le monde s’est bien
gourmand [everyone is very greedy]114

While Lewisham tried to normalise his appetite, Stevenson reported the

mixed success of their efforts to control his weight and eating habits. Time
at Tours and Parisian academies meant he would ‘deliver Ld Lewisham into
your hands as well looking, as possible’, but several days later, he sought to
temper expectation.115

I know you must however expect to find him much reduced by the
Maigre Days, which we have been obliged to observe in this Country …
on the contrary, I think he will return with all his Anbonpoints [sic]
better distributed perhaps, than when he left England … If I deliver him
into yours & Lady Dartmouths Hands as well as he is at this moment I
defy you to reproach me with the outward Man.116

Stevenson phrased his comments very carefully. His reference to ‘Maigre

Days’ – fasting days that were a prominent part of Catholic France –
acknowledged that Lewisham’s parents expected a slimmer, more dis­
ciplined son. By using embonpoints (a complimentary term for plumpness),
Stevenson planted the idea that Lewisham would return still weighty, but
looking well nourished, rather than obese.117
Were Stevenson’s letters accurate, wishful thinking or mere flattery? Fur­
ther conclusions can be drawn from other surviving records of Lewisham’s
body. In 1778, in his twenty-second year, Lewisham sat for his portrait by
Pompeo Batoni (Figure 2.2). The result was a pleasant-looking young man
who is noticeably chubbier than many of Batoni’s depictions of his peers.118
True, others were depicted as bigger. Batoni painted Other Hickman
56 Sarah Goldsmith

Figure 2.2 Pompeo Batoni, George Legge, Viscount Lewisham, 1778, oil on canvas
127 cm � 100 cm (P000048).
Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado. © Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del
Prado.

Windsor, 5th Earl of Plymouth – that ‘fine Fat, round English Lord. Loves
Eat’ – as unapologetically round.119 Nevertheless, Batoni’s depiction of
Lewisham’s double chin and soft belly rucking up his white waistcoat,
alongside Stevenson’s letters, indicate that he returned with a figure that
 Imagining youth 57
would not disgust, but also probably not impress, his family. A letter also
survives from a social equal who was therefore untrammelled by considera­
tions of patronage. In February 1778, Sir William Hamilton, Special Envoy
to the Kingdom of Naples, met Lewisham and immediately set about ful­
filling one of his duties as ambassador: hosting, advising and critically
observing Grand Tourists.120 This duty included writing letters on their
progress to parents and other interested parties. These described social
graces, intellect and character but also remarked, sometimes brutally, on
bodies, too. Asserting to Dartmouth that ‘I will defer telling you exactly
what I think of Ld Lewisham till I have seen more of him’. Hamilton
nevertheless noted, ‘as yet I cannot find the least fault in him except that his
outside is a little too fat’.121
Such frank commentary indicates that male appearances were a topic for
open discussion. The fact that Hamilton prioritised reporting on Lewi­
sham’s body as part of his official duties also speaks clearly to the body’s
importance in a young elite man’s overall development. Finally, it is sig­
nificant that Hamilton’s immediate first impression – emphasised by
emphatic underlining – was directly related to physical shortcomings. This
reaffirms that Lewisham’s weight strayed towards the edges of what was
acceptable or pleasing, but must also be placed alongside another commen­
tary repeatedly voiced in Hamilton, Stevenson and his parents’ letters: that
Lewisham’s morals, manners and behaviour were impeccable. While Lewi­
sham’s body was being moralised, his morality, it seems, trumped a less
than perfect body. Ultimately, chubbiness did not seriously affect Lewi­
sham’s standing within elite society and entry into adulthood. Nevertheless,
the lingering unease and the efforts required in corresponding over this issue
should not be lightly discarded when considering the body’s place in eight­
eenth-century elite masculinity.

Conclusion
Eighteenth-century Grand Tour correspondence was rife with instances of
materiality and embodiment that have not been explored here. In keeping
with themes identified elsewhere in this collection, Tourists and families
fretted about health and sought to transmit bodily interactions through
paper kisses, blushes and embraces. Scrawled handwriting was con­
textualised against illness or writing on the move. Additional hands
appeared as companions inserted messages. This chapter, however, focuses
on how this correspondence offers a unique insight into the relationship
between elite letters and the body of two particular life stages: adolescence
and youth. Examining letters in conjunction with chronological age reveals a
clear trajectory in which young men started travelling as adolescents but
returned as youths. Parents, tutors and sons deliberately used their episto­
lary exchanges to mark moments of transition between these life stages, and
to trace and represent the physical developments taking place.
58 Sarah Goldsmith
The transition from adolescence to youth to adulthood encompassed
numerous changes to legal status, social role, temperament, and intelligence,
but Tour correspondents evinced an enduring interest in the emerging mas­
culine body as defined by height, weight, voice and strength. This emphasis,
as opposed to the focus typical of medical discourses on pubescent changes
to sexual organs and pubic hair, indicates that their interest lay in the
youthful, rather than adolescent, form. As Pembroke’s use of the phrase
belle jeunesse indicates, concepts of youth and beauty were closely related.
Youth was defined as a process of maturation, an ‘act of ripening’ that
would result in ‘completion’ ‘perfected by time’.122 The Tour was, likewise,
perceived as a period of potential from which a matured, and much anticipated,
form would appear.
Letters played a critical role in managing the challenging effects of the
waiting period by offering a written space in which the numerous physical
changes explicitly associated with the maturation process could be traced,
imagined, and managed. For parents in particular, letters enabled them to
voice hopes, fears, and expectations for their children’s physical forms.
Tutors and sons used their letters to fulfil other goals. As the recipients of
the triple blessing of youth, manhood and noble rank, Tourists were evidently
expected to be physically attractive. Yet the vexing reality was that most bodies
did not meet this ideal. Letters were therefore an important tool that helped
sons and tutors meet and manage parental expectations. As such, Grand Tour
correspondence gives evidence of how physical attractiveness played a limited
but persistently present and disquieting role as young elite men stood on the
threshold of adulthood.

Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to my fellow editors and Dr Richard Ansell for their
thoughtful and perceptive comments, and to the Leverhulme Trust, whose Early
Career Research Fellowship funded the research and writing of this chapter.

Notes
1 See Sarah Goldsmith, Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century
Grand Tour (London: University of London Press, 2020), 2–3 for literature on
the Tour as a form of initiation.
2 Helen Yallop, Age and Identity in Eighteenth-Century England (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2015), 24–27.
3 Rachel Butler, ‘Hidden Mysteries and Open Secrets: Negotiating Age in
Seventeenth-and Eighteenth-Century Culture’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Cardiff
University, 2014), 29–40, 75–80, 85–91; Yallop, Age and Identity, 43, 54; Ilana
Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 11.
4 See Katherine Gustafson’s critique in ‘Life Stage Studies and the Eighteenth
Century: Reading Age in Literature’, Literature Compass, 11:8 (2014), 528–30,
532.
 Imagining youth 59
5 Ben-Amos, Adolescence, 8–9.
6 Sarah Toulalan, ‘“Unripe” Bodies: Children and Sex in Early Modern England’,
in K. Fisher and Toulalan (eds), Bodies, Sex and Desire from the Renaissance
to the Present: Genders and Sexualities in History (London: Palgrave Macmil­
lan, 2011), 133.
7 Toulalan, ‘“Unripe” Bodies’, 135–8; Butler, ‘Hidden Mysteries’, ch. 5.
8 Joannes Groeneveld, The Grounds of Physick… (London, 1715), 20; Society of
Gentlemen, A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London,
1754), Vol. 1., 48; ‘Adolescence’, ‘Adolescency’, ‘Pubescent’, in Samuel John­
son, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1755–56), Vol.1.; Henry
St. John Neale, Practical Essays and Remarks on that Species of Consumption
Incident to Youth…(London, 1800), 3; Anon, The Age of Man, Displayed in
Ten Different Stages of Life. (London, [1750]); Anon, The Age and Life of
Man; or a Short Description of his Nature, Rise and Fall, according to the
Twelve Months of the Year… (Newcastle upon Tyne, [1750]).
9 Neale, Practical essays, 31.
10 See Rachel Feldberg, Chapter 1, this volume, for an exploration of how travel
undertaken by older men and women also give insight into their physical
bodies.
11 Henry French and Mark Rothery, ‘“Upon your entry into the world”: mascu­
line values and the threshold of adulthood among landed elites in England
1680–1800’, Social History, 33:4 (2008), 401.
12 See Goldsmith, Masculinity and Danger, chs 3–4.
13 Ben-Amos, Adolescence, 2.
14 See, for example, French and Rothery, Man’s Estate: Landed Gentry Masculi­
nities 1660–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), chs 1–3; Peter
Borsay, ‘Children, Adolescents and Fashionable Urban Society in Eighteenth-
Century England’, in Anja Müller (ed.), Fashioning Childhood in the Eight­
eenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 57–58; Heather Ellis, ‘Foppish
Masculinity, Generational Identity and the University Authorities in Eight­
eenth-Century Oxbridge’, Cultural and Social History, 11:3 (2014): 367–384;
Michéle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the
Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), 52–53; Goldsmith, ‘Nostalgia,
homesickness and emotional formation on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour’,
Cultural and Social History, xv (2018), 333–360; Leanne Calvert, ‘“What a
Wonderful Change Have I Undergone … So Altered in Stature, Knowledge &
Ideas!”: Apprenticeship, Adolescence and Growing Up in Eighteenth- and
Nineteenth-Century Ulster’, Irish Economic and Social History, 45 (2018): 70–
89.
15 See Karen Downing, ‘The Gentleman Boxer: Boxing, Manners, and Masculi­
nity in Eighteenth-Century England’, Men and Masculinities, 12.3 (2010): 328–
352; Karen Harvey, ‘Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in
Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 54:4 (2015): 797–821;
Joanne Begiato, ‘Between Poise and Power: Embodied Manliness in Eighteenth-
and Nineteenth-Century British Culture’, Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 26 (2016): 125–147; Goldsmith, ‘Making the Body Beautiful’, in Karen
Harvey (ed.), A Cultural History of Beauty in the Age of Enlightenment (1700–
1800) (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming); Alun Withey, Concerning Beards:
Facial Hair, Health and Practice in England, 1650–1900 (London: Bloomsbury,
2021). My sincere thanks to Alun for sharing this before publication.
16 Sample from John Ingamell, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in
Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).
17 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (London, 1693), 253.
18 Locke, Education, 254–255.
60 Sarah Goldsmith
19 Ben-Amos, Adolescence, 11–12, 17.
20 See for example Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 93–113 and Ellis, ‘Foppish
Masculinity’, 367–384.
21 Ben-Amos, Adolescence, 30; Borsay, ‘Urban Society’, 54–59; Anna-Christina
Giovanopoulos, ‘The Legal Status of Children in Eighteenth-century England’,
in Müller, Fashioning Childhood, 46–48.
22 Giovanopoulos, ‘Legal Status’, 50.
23 Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre (hereafter WSHC) MS. 2057/F4/27, Rev.
William Coxe, Strasbourg, to Elizabeth Herbert, Lady Pembroke; 17 Mar 1776,
Coxe, Strasbourg, to Lady Pembroke, 7 Mar 1776.
24 Staffordshire Record Office (hereafter SRO), D(W)1778/V/885, David Ste­
venson, Paris, to William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, 11 Dec 1775.
25 SRO, D(W)1778/V/885, Stevenson, Brussels, to Dartmouth; [n.d.] Stevenson,
[no location], to Dartmouth, 8 June 1776.
26 SRO, D(W)1778/V/885, Stevenson, Berlin, to Dartmouth, 18 Aug 1776.
27 Ben-Amos, Adolescence, 18.
28 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/27, Henry Herbert, 10th Earl of Pembroke, Wilton House,
to Coxe, 28 Mar 1777.
29 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/29, Pembroke, Stony Stratford, to George Herbert, later
11th Earl of Pembroke, 21 June 1779.
30 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, Sandwell, to George Legge, Viscount
Lewisham, 16 Dec 1776.
31 Ibid.
32 SRO, D(W)1778/V/885, Stevenson, Amsterdam, to Dartmouth, 10 Jul 1776.
33 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, London, to Lewisham, 3 Jan 1776.
34 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/29, Pembroke, Stony Stratford, to Herbert, 19 Aug 1779.
35 Lord Herbert (ed.), Henry, Elizabeth and George (1734–80): Letters and Diaries
of Henry, Tenth Earl of Pembroke and his Circle (London, 1939), 169.
36 For further discussion of Grand Tour tutors, see María Dolores Sánchez-Jáur­
egui, ‘Educating the Traveler: The Tutors’, in The English Prize: The Capture
of the Westmorland, An Episode of the Grand Tour, ed. Sánchez-Jáuregui and
Scott Wilcox (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), pp. 88–97.
37 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, London, to Lewisham, 3 Oct 1774 [19th
birthday]; Frances Legge, Lady Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 3 Oct 1775
[20th birthday]; Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 28 Sep 1776 [five days
before 21st birthday]; Lady Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 29 Nov 1776
[nearly two months after 21st birthday].
38 Giovanopoulos, ‘Legal Status’, 46.
39 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 28 Sep 1776.
40 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Vienna, to Dartmouth, 10 Nov 1776.
41 Ibid.
42 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/29, Pembroke, Stony Stratford, to Herbert, 30 Sep 1779.
43 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/29, Pembroke, [no location], to Herbert, [Apr] 1779;
Pembroke, Stony Stratford, to Herbert, 24 Sep 1779.
44 London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Acc. 510/250, George Bussey Villiers,
Brussels, to Anne Villiers, Lady Jersey, 7 Aug 1756.
45 Sample from Ingamell, Dictionary as before.
46 See for example, Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic
Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012); Hannah Barker, ‘Soul, Purse and Family: Middling and Lower-Class
Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Manchester’, Social History, 33:1 (2008):
12–35; Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender
Politics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005);
 Imagining youth 61
French and Rothery, Man’s Estate, ch. 4; Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England,
1760–1830: Emotion, Identity and Generation (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012), Chapter Six.
47 Within this, 20.9% got a seat the same year, 16.3% one year after, 13.9% 2
years after, 9.3% three years after, 4.7% four years after.
48 Only 4% married before/during their Tour. 12% remained unmarried.
49 Ben-Amos, Adolescence, 36. See also Müller, ‘Introduction’, in Müller, Fash­
ioning Childhood, 1–12; Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in
Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2014), 31–33.
50 British Library (hereafter BL), Add MS 33087 f. 15, James Pelham, St. James,
to Thomas Pelham, 11 Jul 1749; BL, Add MS 33087 f. 18, Pelham, Broadlands,
to Pelham, 16 Aug 1749.
51 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Geneva, to Lady Dartmouth, 3 Oct 1777.
52 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 30 Sep 1777.
53 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Vienna, to Dartmouth, 26 Jan 1777.
54 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Lady Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 29 Nov
1776.
55 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, London, to Lewisham, 16 Dec 1776.
56 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, London, to Lewisham, 25 Apr 1778.
57 French and Rothery, ‘Upon your entry’, 413, 422.
58 ‘Adolescence’ in Johnson, Dictionary, vol. 1.
59 ‘Puberty’ in Johnson, Dictionary, vol. 2.
60 Toulalan, ‘“Unripe” Bodies’, 136–137; Butler, ‘Hidden Mysteries’, 223.
61 Withey, Concerning Beards, Chapter Three.
62 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/27, Lady Pembroke, Wilton House, to Coxe, 16 Dec
[1775]; SRO, D(W)1778/V/885, Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 11 Dec 1775.
63 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/27, Pembroke, London, to Coxe, 6 Jun 1778.
64 Withey, ‘Shaving and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Journal for
Eighteenth-Century Studies, 36:2 (2013), 234–5.
65 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/27, Pembroke, Wilton House, to Coxe, [1 Jan 1779].
66 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/29, Pembroke, Stony Stratford, to Herbert, 5 Mar 1779.
67 See Lucia Dacome, ‘Living with the Chair: Private Excreta, Collective Health
and Medical Authority in the Eighteenth Century’, History of Science, 39.4
(2001), 467–500.
68 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/29, Pembroke, Wilton House, to Herbert, 19 Aug 1779.
69 Matthew McCormack, ‘Tall Histories: Height and Georgian Masculinities’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (2016), 84; Neale, Practical
Essays, 3.
70 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 14 Aug 1775.
71 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Lady Dartmouth, London, to Lewisham, 29 Nov 1776.
72 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/31, Lady Pembroke, London, to Herbert, 2 Jun [1780].
73 ‘19 Mar 1777, Coxe, Strasbourg, to Lady Pembroke’, in Henry, Elizabeth and
George, 98.
74 Bowhill House, Buccleuch Archive (hereafter BHBA), MSS BS1.19, Henry
Scott, 3rd Duke of Buccleuch, Berlin, to Elizabeth, Duchess of Buccleuch, 3 Jul
1792.
75 BHBA, MSS BS1.19, Buccleuch, Berlin, to Lady Buccleuch, 7 Jul 1792.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid.
78 Norfolk Record Office, WKC 7/46/8, Robert Price, London, to The Bloods, 19
Dec 1741.
79 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, 63; Cohen, ‘“Manners” Make the Man:
Politeness, Chivalry and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750–1830’, Journal
of British Studies, 44 (2005), 313; McCormack, ‘Dance and Drill: Polite
62 Sarah Goldsmith
Accomplishments and Military Masculinities in Georgian Britain’, Cultural and
Social History, 8:3 (2011): 2, 317, 319–20.
80 Alexander Pope, The Dunciad (London, 1742), 20.
81 James Burgh, The Juvenile Citizen of the World (Dublin, 1800), 143.
82 SRO, D(W)1778/V/885, Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 11 Dec 1775; D(W)
1778/V/874, Lewisham, Paris, to Dartmouth, 22 Dec [1775].
83 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 3 Jan 1776.
84 BL, Add. Ms. 34887 f. 185, John Holroyd, Hanover, to Rev Dr Baker, 23 Dec
1765.
85 Begiato, ‘Poise and Power’, 127, 131, 133. See also Downing, ‘Gentleman
Boxer’, 328–352.
86 BHBA, Buccleuch, Berlin, to Lady Buccleuch, 7 Jul 1792.
87 Harvey, ‘Men of Parts’, 186–82.
88 ‘14 May 1768, William Robert Fitzgerald, Lord Kildare, Turin, to Emily,
Duchess of Leinster’, in Lord Kildare’s Grand Tour, 1766–1769, ed. Elizabeth
Fitzgerald (Wilton: Colins Press, 2000), 99.
89 For a discussion of this and the relevant scholarship, see Goldsmith, ‘Body
Beautiful’.
90 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Hanover, Lady Dartmouth, 30 Jul 1776; D
(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Turin, to Dartmouth, 17 Oct 1777.
91 Tim Reinke-Williams, ‘Physical Attractiveness and the Female Life-Cycle in
Seventeenth-Century England’, Cultural and Social History, 15:4 (2018), 470–2;
Borsay, ‘Urban Society’, 55; Toulalan, ‘“Unripe” Bodies’, 35, 137.
92 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 14 Feb 1777.
93 SRO, D(W)1778/V/885, Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 18 May 1777; D(W)
1778/V/886, Stevenson, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 1 Jul 1777. William’s ‘Roses
and Lillies’ were also praised.
94 Quoted in Borsay, ‘Urban Society’, 55; On the lily as feminine, see David M
Turner, ‘The Body Beautiful’, in Carole Reeves (ed.), A Culture History of the
Human Body in the Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010),
115, 119.
95 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, [no location], to Dartmouth, [n.d.]; Ste­
venson, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 10 Sep 1777.
96 McCormack, ‘Tall Histories’, 84, 88–89.
97 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Lady Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 3 Oct 1775.
98 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Lady Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 30 Sep 1777.
99 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/6, George, Lord Herbert’s Grand Tour Journal, 28 Nov
1779; WSHC, MS 2057/F4/29, Pembroke, London, to Herbert, 2–8 Apr 1779.
100 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/27, Pembroke, Wilton House, to Coxe, 1 Jan 1779; SRO,
D(W)1778/V/852, Lady Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 3 Oct 1775.
101 London Metropolitan Archives (hereafter LMA), Acc. 510/240, Villiers, Leip­
zig, to Lady Jersey, 30 Nov 1754.
102 LMA, Acc. 510/235, Villiers, Middleton Park, to Lady Jersey, 27 Jul 1746.
103 LMA, Acc. 510/242, William Whitehead, The Hague, to William Villiers, 3rd
Earl of Jersey, 7 Sep 1756.
104 McCormack, ‘Tall Histories’, 84, 87, 93–4.
105 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Paris, to Dartmouth, 28 Jan 1776.
106 WSHC MS. 2057/F4/27, Pembroke, Wilton House, to Coxe, 1 Jan 1779; MS.
2057/F4/29, Pembroke, London, to Herbert, 20 May 1779.
107 McCormack, ‘Tall histories’, 95.
108 See for example, Naomi Baker, Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early
Modern Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 116–122.
 Imagining youth 63
109 Sarah Toulalan, ‘“To[o] Much Eating Stifles the Child”: Fat Bodies and
Reproduction in Early Modern England’, Historical Research, 87:235 (2014),
65–93; Butler, ‘Hidden Mysteries’, 229.
110 BL Add. Ms. 35378 f. 359, Philip Yorke, The Hague, to Philip Yorke, 2nd Earl
of Hardwicke, 7 Jul 1777.
111 BL, Eg. MS. 1711, William Bentinck, 1st Count Bentinck, Luneville, to Eliza­
beth Bentinck, Countess Dowager of Portland, 5 Aug 1726.
112 ‘18 Mar 1767, Lady Holland, Naples, to Emily, Duchess of Leinster’, in Lord
Kildare’s Grand Tour, 36.
113 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Paris, to Dartmouth, 28 Jan 1776.
114 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, The Hague, to Dartmouth, 27 Jun 1776.
115 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Paris, to Dartmouth, 7 Mar 1776.
116 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Rennes, to Dartmouth, 29 Mar 1776.
117 ‘Embonpoint’, Oxford English Dictionary, retrieved from www.oed.com/view/
Entry/60936?redirectedFrom=embonpoint#eid (accessed 15 Jun 2020).
118 For example, Batoni’s 1758 portrait of Charles Compton, 7 Earl of North­
ampton and his ‘pretty figure’ (Ingamell, Dictionary, 713).
119 Patrick Home, quoted in Ingamell, Dictionary, 778. See John Steegman, ‘Some
English Portraits by Pompeo Batoni’, The Burlington Magazine for Con­
noisseurs, 88:516 (1946): 55–63.
120 Jennifer Mori, ‘Hosting the Grand Tour: Civility, Enlightenment and Culture,
c.1740–1790’, in Mary Hilton and Jill Shefrin (eds), Educating the Child in
Enlightenment Britain: Beliefs, Cultures, Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009),
117–30.
121 SRO, D(W)1778/III/365, Sir William Hamilton, Naples, to Dartmouth, 17 Feb
1777.
122 ‘Maturation’, ‘Mature’, ‘Maturity’ in Johnson, Dictionary, vol. 2.
3 Touch me if you can
Paper bodies in letters to and from the
eighteenth-century French Caribbean
Annika Raapke

The eighteenth century can be an age of many things. Depending on the

perspectives and persuasions of the historian consulted, the eighteenth cen­
tury was an age of enlightenment, of revolutions, of salon culture and
politeness, and of battles.1 However, it was also one of concentrated Eur­
opean expansion and colonialism and of letter-exchange, bringing forth the
so-called ‘Republic of Letters’; part of a general letter-writing boom in many
regions and within many echelons of contemporary European societies.2
These two aspects, as two decades of intense scholarship have proven, are
inseparably linked.3 Europeans travelled to the colonies as merchants, sai­
lors, administrators, clerks and domestics; they settled there as planters or
artisans, or were deployed there as part of a military campaign. They
needed to communicate with their business partners, but also their close
relations and loved ones back home. Keeping in touch was indispensable: it
was vital for economic success and social survival.4 This chapter explores
these key functions of eighteenth-century French transatlantic epistolary
commerce in its most literal sense.
When thousands of miles of water stretched between family members,
spouses, lovers or friends, every possibility of physical contact, of literally
keeping in touch, was eliminated. That did not mean, however, that people
stopped touching each other; on the contrary, letters allowed them to send
paper representatives of their touching and sensing bodies overseas instead.
Probably around 70 per cent of the several thousand personal (meaning not
purely business-related) letters examined in the research underlying this
article mention some kind of touch.5 Maintaining physical proximity was
vital for the French men, women, and children whose movements and
practices contributed to the shaping of that colonial construct which his­
torians call the French Atlantic.6 Physical closeness was important as an
emotional and moral healthcare practice.7 It was also one way of protecting
and preserving one’s bodily integrity, and thus one’s identity as a Frenchman
or woman, in an environment which was often perceived as strange and
potentially harmful to the physical and moral self.8 This chapter explores
the countless hugs, kisses, caresses and other touches which eighteenth-cen­
tury writers between France and the Caribbean colonies included in their
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-5
 Touch me if you can 65
letters, not just the farewell phrases of closure lines, but in the main body of
their letters.9 It is based on the assumption that these touches had to func­
tion as substitutes for the ‘real’, physical touch for their readers, evoking
something I call ‘paper bodies’ and ‘paper touches’. According to Martin
Stuber, Stefan Hächler and Luc Lienhard, a key function of any letter is that
it is a ‘relationship-carrier’.10 Building on this perspective, this chapter
argues that letter-writers chose carefully and strategically whether to employ
paper bodies or not, and how they would shape them, composing written
‘relationship-carriers’ that evoked their own physical bodies.
‘Paper bodies’ means, quite simply, references to the body which writers
included in their letters, and which would recall them to their readers as
sensing, physical presences. Such references might relate to matters of illness
and healthcare, sexuality or food consumption. They might also relate to the
conveying of touches, which will be this chapter’s focus, and varied greatly
in length, many of them consisting of small, repetitive, commonly occurring
phrases based on the standards communicated in letter-writing manuals,
usually conveying greetings or farewells. In recent years, scholars such as
Christina Beckers have highlighted the importance of these standardised
phrases for the history of epistolary emotions. For many letter-writers,
phrases they had acquired from a manual were the only way to commu­
nicate emotional matters; their use could even be a sign of respect because
their writer went to the trouble to learn the appropriate ones for the reci­
pient’s benefit.11 Regarding commonly occurring ‘touch-phrases’, this chap­
ter argues that these paper touches were far more than just perfunctory
expressions thrown in here and there, and were far more than ‘just a nice
touch’. What we know about the context for these paper touches suggests
that they were meaningful. If letters were indeed supposed to be relation­
ship-carriers, then paper bodies could be powerful, effective paper sub­
stitutes for physical connections in long-distance relationships. We can
gauge the force of these paper touches from paying attention not only to the
wording that connected paper touches with bodies, meanings, effects and
power, but also to the specific epistolary situation in which the touch hap­
pened and the contexts in which letter-writers chose to put their lips or arms
to paper. What was the situation which this letter addressed, or in which it
was written? Was it a conflict, a long separation, a happy occasion? The
planning of a joint future? These specific contexts expose the scope and
force of meaning which a touch could have, the shape a paper body could
take.
This chapter investigates how letters, despite their limitations, success­
fully transported these paper bodies in ways which were somehow intelligi­
ble and tangible across immense temporal and spatial distances. It explores
the epistolary spaces that these very different people created and the paper
bodies that moved through them, and it looks at how these letter-writers
were kissing and embracing, loving or threatening each other on paper –
never physically together, yet never fully apart. Methodologically, the letters
66 Annika Raapke
are approached as epistolary narratives, with the chapter combining a
methodological focus on epistolary practices with a sensory history
approach. That means that it will look at references to touches in letters as
physical activities and sensory experiences which had a specific historicity,
defining the way they were carried out and experienced. Even though these
are written references to touch, they were created out of an embodied
practice of writing and receiving letters, one which was situated in a specific
time, place, and culture – in this case, the French colonial Caribbean in a
period of almost constant warfare. The paper touches and the meanings
they took on in any given letter-situation can therefore be approached as
moments of physical, sensory and sensual interaction between faraway
bodies in times of uncertainty.12 This chapter argues that sensory memories,
imagination and a shared practical understanding of epistolary exchange
allowed letter-writers to interact physically in a specific epistolary space in
which a single word could represent a whole body – warts and all. As this
suggests, epistolary bodies and their touches could be unwanted, ugly,
aggressive and intimidating, as well as attractive, charming, loving and
comforting. Their careful creation and use (or non-use) was a potentially
powerful epistolary strategy which could maintain or destabilise hierarchies,
and signal both harmony and discord.

The letters
This chapter is based on a set of around 300 letters written between 1744
and 1803 (selected from a total of several thousand letters) written in, or to,
the eighteenth-century Caribbean, mostly the French Caribbean colonies, by
men and women from a large variety of social backgrounds. As do the let­
ters used in Haggerty’s chapter in this volume, these letters all belong to the
‘Prize Papers’, which are housed at the UK National Archives as part of the
High Court of Admiralty (HCA) collection. This means that these letters
have survived in their original state because the ships on which they were
travelling were intercepted by English capturers – more than 160,000 letters
from around the globe have thus been intercepted in transit, taken off board
and transported to the Admiralty’s archives to be used as evidence in appeal
cases.13
Due to the accident that was their capture, these letters have survived
completely unselected, with the result that the collection contains letters
from men, women and children from almost all social strata. Very often, the
letters do not contain even the most basic information regarding their wri­
ters and intended recipients: dates and names are missing, illegible, or
incomplete; spelling and grammar are erratic and unreliable – sometimes,
even addresses and places of origins are lost. This means that many letters
are somewhat disconnected from their context, rather limiting that which
German historian Reinhart Koselleck called the ‘veto of the source’ –
namely, the possibility to detect historical inconsistencies and falsehoods
 Touch me if you can 67
14
through thorough source critique. While this makes interpretation more
challenging, the sheer quantity of the letters preserved produces enough
historical data to make reliable statements about whether epistolary phe­
nomena were common or unusual. The methodological focus on letter nar­
ratives lessens the need for context even more: the key aspect is how the
letter was composed. If a writer chose to present a certain issue in a specific
way, if they chose one phrase or word over another, this will be regarded
here as a decision which that writer made with a specific intent, and in
anticipation of a certain readership. Nor will the writer’s level of literacy or
education be taken into account, assuming that every writer had an element
of choice in how they selected and presented the contents of their letters.
Christina Beckers’s work has been enlightening in this regard, demonstrating
that even ordinary sailors learned lines from Ovid to quote in their love
letters.15
The cast of letter-writers introduced here includes a sailor, several colo­
nial merchants, two sailor’s wives, a free woman of colour from St. Dom­
ingue residing in France, a colonist’s wife and two or three people of
unknown occupation who resided in the colonies. All wrote in French, yet
with varying degrees of literacy. Many of the letter-writers represented in
the overall source material were semi-literate at best. The letter written by
the sailor François Aubin, for example, contains the phrase, ‘il an par tous
les jour tous les jans de notrenavire on tous us des letre le tousce que les peti
es le grand il an non tous us il a que moiquilnan a pas un’ (every day all the
people from our ship are all having letters they all, that is the small and the
great, they all have had some, it is just me who has not one of them).16 The
spelling, grammar and syntax all indicate a literacy highly influenced by
orality, thus supporting the hypothesis by linguists Marijke van der Waal
and Gijsbert Rutten that letters can be ‘considered to be as close to speech
as non-fictional historical texts can possibly be’.17 This linguistic viewpoint
is especially interesting because it differs from historiographical perspectives
which focus on letters as carefully crafted speech situations which, while
certainly aiming at producing intimacy and trust, were in no way immediate
or spontaneous.18 Indeed, Van der Waal and Rutten quote Edgar W.
Schneider, who argues that a writer, ‘records potential, conceived utterances
by himself which, for lack of the presence of the addressee, need to be
written down rather than said; but he remains in a near-speech mode’.19
They conclude that ‘with their interactive purpose, private letters are clearly
on the side of the language of immediacy, even more so than diaries and
travelogues are’.20
On the one hand, letter-writers like Aubin and their epistolary products
clearly point towards a ‘language of immediacy’ in letters; on the other
hand, it is particularly the less-educated letter-writers whose letters show an
increased level of formulaic language.21 The sailor’s wife Victoire Roux, for
example, used the typical epistolary expression, ‘Je vous fait savoir’ (I let
you know), as a linguistic railing or scaffold in her letter. Almost every new
68 Annika Raapke
phrase, certainly every new thematic passage, began with the expression,
structuring the letter’s content. This phenomenon is very common in the
HCA letters, and it went directly against the French letter-writing ideals of
the period. As early as 1654, Jean Puget de la Serre emphasised in his pro­
grammatic letter-writing manual Sécrétaire de la cour that the letter ‘should
taste of negligence, & not differ in any way from ordinary language’.22
According to de la Serre, a letter’s language had to be simple and easy to
understand, without stylised flourishes: ‘One has to … tell the things as they
go & in the same way one would say them from the mouth.’23
While less formal overall, eighteenth-century French letter-writing culture
still prescribed a certain form – most letters contained a salutation, such as
‘Monsieur’, ‘Cher ami’ or ‘matrèschèremère’, a short introductory passage
addressing questions of health and wellbeing, a long, free middle section and
a courtoisie at the end, in which the writer professed to be the recipient’s
‘très humble &très obeisant serviteur/servante’. In this, French letters were
much closer to the contemporary English epistolary style than they were to the
rather elaborate, rigid form of the German letters of the period.24 Letters
written to children sometimes addressed them with pet names, such as ‘ma
chère petite poule’ (my dear little chicken). During the text of the letter, this
address was often repeated several times. However, in most of the letters, the
address was formal; the more polite, distant address ‘vous’ was used even
among close relations. The use of ‘tu’, the informal address, can be taken as a
sign of intimacy or real friendship, according to Laurence Brockliss.25
French letter-writing culture was dominated by these relatively léger
(light) principles all throughout the eighteenth century, yet many letter-wri­
ters on the lower end of the literacy spectrum required the guidance of for­
mulaic phrases. However, as discussed above, this should not lead to the
assumption that formulaic letters were somehow less ‘authentic’ or less
immediate than the free form, especially if that free form was in itself an
ideal and could thus be artistic and artificial. This was often the case given
the period’s fascination with sensibility and emotive language.26 The ques­
tion of authenticity is problematic in general, suggesting that there is a clear
distinction between something that is immediate, felt, lived, and therefore
‘true’, and something that is pre-shaped, follows social conventions and
rules, and is therefore ‘less true’, if not necessarily untrue.27 This distinction,
however, ignores the fact that even though literacy levels in ancien régime
France rose from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, many letter-writers
simply never learned more than basic forms of epistolary conversation, and
never acquired the confidence required for the composition of free-flowing
epistolary conversations. Artless letter-writing was an art in itself, an art
which many well-educated children of the time had to learn by the sweat of
their brows.28 The often highly changeable and unforeseeable conditions
which characterised the separation of family and friends in the eighteenth-
century Atlantic World, however, meant that people had to resort to writing
letters regardless of how well they had mastered it.
 Touch me if you can 69
A touch of insecurity: epistolary Atlantic Worlds
The fact that all of the letters discussed in this chapter were captured on
their way to France points to another specific circumstance which most of
them share, that they were written and sent in wartime. The letters pre­
sented here were written and sent during the War of the Austrian Succession
(1740–1748), the War of American Independence (1775–1783, with France
entering the conflict in 1778), the War of the First Coalition (1792–1798) and
the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), respectively. Capturing enemy ships and
confiscating every last scrap of paper that could be found on board was a
regular, and exceedingly regulated, practice of warfare in the early modern
period. Since European colonial expansion was a highly belligerent devel­
opment, the eighteenth century saw, if not altogether constant, at least very
frequent conflicts with shifting and varied alliances, which were carried out
practically across the globe.29 Naval warfare, not only in battles but also,
and far more consistently, in captures, was a reality of everyday life for
much of the period. This meant that lines of provision and supply, but also
communication lines, were frequently unstable and unreliable. However,
lines of supply were more efficiently replaced, re-routed and re-drawn (for
example, by means of smuggling, the establishment of networks and meshes
of contact) than everyday, non-political, non-military lines of communica­
tion. Those could be far more unplanned, meandering and spontaneous –
even with, or maybe rather because of, the measures which letter-writers
took to ensure that their letters would reach their destination, such as using
intermediaries or sending duplicata via different routes.30 Even in peacetime,
letters were frequently sent to intermediate addressees, with a request to
send them on to their final destination; many letter-writers had to send let­
ters to people who were moving around (like sailors, for example) or whose
current whereabouts they simply did not know. Wartime aggravated these
situations.
All of this means that an eighteenth-century Atlantic World reconstructed
through the lens of an ‘everyday’ epistolary history, one that looks beyond
or below the level of military, political or administrative communication, is
likely to differ somewhat from that which other historiographies have
described.31 It cannot, for example, boast relatively steady, continuous
‘flows’ between Europe and its colonies, like those which the history of
economics has identified regarding the movement of goods and money.32
Throughout the century, hundreds of thousands of letters had to be com­
posed in situations where the writer had not been able to communicate with
her or his loved ones successfully for months because of the wars, and was
greatly worried about their welfare. However, many letter-writers also
wondered about their own welfare with regard to their counterparts’ silence.
Insecurity had many facets and stretched into various areas of life because
that silence had so many possible explanations: gaps and interruptions in
epistolary exchanges could be due to the logistic challenges of the war, or to
70 Annika Raapke
bad weather. They could also speak of more sinister and fearsome things, of
illness, death and disaster, or of the loss of affection and the rupturing of
ties. Physical touches in letter narratives have to be considered in this con­
text. The languages of affection are often quite physical in themselves –
allowing people to ‘stay in touch’ or to ‘hold on to one another’. Yet those
languages are not without alternatives. In the end, it was every letter-wri­
ter’s choice to put touches to paper or not. Gaps, breaks and interruptions,
fears and insecurity had to be bridged and/or handled through words; but if,
and how, these words became touches was a matter which every letter-
writer had to decide for each specific letter narrative, and in anticipation of
their particular reader(s).
This becomes particularly evident in the study of farewell touches, which
are extremely common in letters between family members, spouses, lovers,
and friends. Especially kisses and hugs were sometimes administered with
insistent vocabulary.33 ‘I kiss you a thousand times’, ‘I kiss you more than a
thousand times’, ‘I kiss you a thousand and another thousand times’, ‘I kiss
you very tenderly’, ‘I embrace you most tenderly’, ‘I embrace you from the
bottom of my heart’, ‘I embrace you from the best of my heart’, ‘I embrace
you with all my heart’: phrases like these, found at the end of thousands of
letters, were certainly used repeatedly and could be treated as formulaic, as
discussed above.34 However, this does not mean that sending loving or
sometimes angry touches was not perceived as the best, surest, most unam­
biguous way of transporting one’s feelings, of maintaining one’s hierarchical
position within a relationship and making sure one remained present while
absent. After all, as Joseph Amato once put it with regard to the history of
touch, touch ‘connects bodies and things and is operative in the interplay of
act and heart’.35 Moreover, even these goodbye kisses and farewell hugs,
which are located somewhere between the courteous and the passionate, are
far from ubiquitous. Writers could choose to just leave them out. Their
purposeful inclusion indicates not empty words but a meaningful sentiment.
Writers could also choose to include touches from others, and might even
emphasise them over their own.
One example is that of a woman by the name of Claudine Goa, a woman
of colour writing to her mother from revolutionary France. In May 1793,
France was at the brink of the terreur and its colony Saint Domingue was in
the throes of its own revolution which shook the foundations of the slavery-
based Atlantic World.36 In this highly unstable and volatile situation, Julie
Chatelard, a free black woman residing in Saint Domingue stopped replying
to the letters which her daughter Claudine Goa sent her from Bordeaux.37
On 28 May, Claudine wrote to Julie yet again, worriedly asking why neither
she, nor Julie’s granddaughter, Claudine’s own little daughter Aurore, had
received an answer to their letters. She then let Aurore speak through her
writing: ‘Your granddaughter reproaches you for your negligence in writing
to her, she has written you two letters without receiving a reply, but she
hopes that, at the first occasion [that presents itself], you will not forget her,
 Touch me if you can 71
38
and she embraces you very tenderly.’ At the end of the letter, Claudine
added her own ‘I embrace you’ as part of the farewell salutation. Aurore’s
embrace, however, was placed in the main body of the epistolary text, and
intensified by a qualifier, with Claudine likely aiming to draw attention to
the embrace that would weigh most with her mother.
While letter-writers would send their own touches, the cases where a
letter-writer chose to convey someone else’s touches are particularly intri­
guing. In the case of Claudine Goa highlighting the embrace of her little
daughter Aurore over her own, more inconspicuously phrased and placed
one, contemporary French letter-writing practices suggest that this was done
in order to strengthen the letter’s impact. In the case of Victoire Roux from
Martinique, however, the situation is rather more puzzling. Between 1778
and 1779, Victoire’s husband Jean-Pierre was in France, possibly as a sailor
or soldier. It seems the spouses Roux did not communicate much by letter,
although the reason why it took Victoire more than six months to send her
news to her husband could just as easily have been the seasonal and war-
related scarcity of ships leaving for France. In any case, when Victoire finally
did write to Jean-Pierre in March 1779, she apparently took the task very
seriously, even attesting at the bottom of the page that she had ‘shown to
uncle at my house that I myself have written the letter’.39 This may have
been because the news she had for him was rather important:

I let you know that I have given birth to two children, a boy and a girl.
I have given birth on the 11 of October. I have given one of them to the
wet-nurse and I breastfeed the other. I let you know that your father &
your mother embrace and kiss you with all their hearts.40

Interestingly, this is the only touch in Victoire’s letter. While she called
herself a ‘faithful wife’ and highlighted her constant prayers for Jean-Pierre’s
health and safety, she herself did not add any embraces or kisses of her own
to those of her parents-in-law. The letter was written six months after the
birth of the twins; we do not know how long Jean-Pierre had been away by
this time – it could be close to one and a half years if he had left directly
after the children’s conception. But since Victoire obviously knew how to
put an embrace into words, and since the letter conventions of the time did
not in any way object to a wife sending embraces and kisses to a husband, it
is clear that she chose not to include them here. While, at first glance, the
absence of a hug seems to suggest a withholding of intimacy, it may actually
be a signal that everything was well between the spouses. The Canadian
colonial Louise Dupont, a sailor’s wife like Victoire who also wrote her
own letters with a similar level of literacy and very similar language, com­
posed four letters to her husband between November 1702 and 1703,
describing her worsening situation in her husband’s absence, and conveying
more and more fury over his abandonment of her and their children. The
first two letters, in which the family was still doing relatively well and she
72 Annika Raapke
was not angry at her husband, do not contain any touches. The two latter
ones, in which she shows herself both desperate and furious, both conclude
with ‘I kiss you a thousand times.’41 Far from necessarily being a sign of
coldness or distance, a lack of touches can signify that the writers saw no
need to either finish on a conciliatory note or to exert emotional pressure.
Writers could choose to include touches either to appease, to coax, or even
to keep conflicts alive by intensifying the pressure to reply.42 A paper body
could be used to keep a threatened relationship alive – which meant it had
to function well.

Kisses, hugs and body parts: the workings of a paper touch

A few words in a letter had to successfully communicate an active, sensing,
touching paper-body, and to recall its existence to the reader. How could
this work? The answer must lie in that specific social space which is created
between the letter-writer and the addressee during a letter exchange. Letters
operate in a specific, temporally and spatially suspended social space of their
own, as Clare Brant and Susan Whyman have argued.43 This social space is
jointly created by writers and readers (who, after all, constantly change
position in a functioning epistolary communication). The description ‘tem­
porally and spatially suspended’ is based on the specific conditions which
shape this epistolary social space. It exists only between the individuals or
whole families involved in the letter exchange, and in the case of transatlantic
letters, these people were prevented from sharing physical space at least for a
few months, if not longer, which meant that they had to factor in the passage of
time between them. When M. Laplace wrote to his mother in Bayonne from
Martinique, he wished her a happy Christmas, musing on how his letter would
probably reach her around that time. The letter is dated 24 June 1778. M.
Laplace thus factored in a whole six months so he could convey his Christmas
wishes to his mother at her own time. That means that any communication
must have had a rather considerable time-lag.
Still, it would have been perfectly acceptable for both parties to keep
referring to news or events which were no longer new, or current, because
letter conversations have a temporality or their own – they are temporally
suspended, especially at these long distances. In an epistolary space which
thus functions according to its own time-space rules, people who do not
share physical proximity can interact in an intimate, close way. They can
refer to and even live in places where they share memories, even though –
due to the temporal lag, or the simple passing of time in absence – these
places may no longer exist, such as a childhood home that was demolished.
Thus, the spatial element is suspended as well. In this epistolary social
space, bodies need not be complete in their representation; they do not have
to ‘look’ like their living, breathing counterparts. In fact, incompleteness, or
a lack of dimensionality, must intrinsically be a part of this epistolary social
space. In view of the necessary limits with which a letter-writer has to deal,
 Touch me if you can 73
the people and things that populate a space in which it is formed and
through letter narratives cannot be as complete and multi-dimensional as
they appear in the flesh.
Therefore, it is perfectly acceptable for an epistolary body to come alive
only through one specific limb or organ, or in one verb like ‘kissing’ or
‘vomiting’, or in a condition such as ‘ill’, or ‘weak’. Regarding the body
parts chosen to appear in letters, it is perhaps not surprising that the body
parts which feature most prominently in letters are arms. Arms were fre­
quently mentioned in anticipation of future touches. ‘I will happily spend
the rest of my days in your arms’, a man from Saint Domingue wrote to his
sister in 1778. A. M. Désinçay in Martinique wrote to his mother, also in
1778, picturing their meeting after his return to France: ‘with what joy will I
enfold you in my arms, and with what happiness will you receive me in
yours … it would be preferable if I could forget you until the moment when
I can throw myself at your neck’.44 In many cases, touches involving arms in
letters were accompanied by positive sentiments, most writers linked them
to feelings of ‘tenderness’ and ‘profoundness’, as well as a joint future. The
latter aspect again highlights the paper body’s significance: it had to – quite
literally – save a place for the absent writer, both in the reader’s emotions
and in their social and economic lives. Yet again, the choice of paper body
depended very much on the epistolary situation, and the hug that was sent
in anticipation of a joint future together was usually sent by someone who
could hope for, but not demand, that their addressees would welcome them
back, such as children writing to parents or siblings writing to one another.
If, on the other hand, the letter-writer was not writing out of a position of
authority, the chosen paper bodies would act quite differently in order to
preserve the hierarchy. This becomes especially apparent in parental letters.

A powerful touch: letters between parents and children

Monsieur Rossignol was very generous in the administration of epistolary
kisses. The letter which he wrote in November 1778 from Martinique to his
three daughters Bénite, Pepette and Pauline, who were living in a boarding
establishment in France while he and the rest of the family were residing in
the Caribbean, contains a sum total of 5,003 kisses.45 Large geographic dis­
tances between parents and children were not unusual in the eighteenth
century, especially within the colonial framework, since many colonial par­
ents (both French and British) sent their children away to receive their edu­
cation in the metropolis.46 Claudia Jarzebowski’s study on childhood and
emotion in early modern Europe has shown that many parents were aware
of the need to make their children understand the need for these separations,
and to make it emotionally bearable through affectionate letters, ‘so the
temporal-spatial distance would not turn into an emotional distance’.47
In the context of this chapter, however, the most interesting touch which
this letter offers is one that is not phrased as a touch at all. Rossignol wrote
74 Annika Raapke
to his eldest daughter, Bénite, and doled out lots of parental guidance to her
and to her ‘sisters whom I kiss a thousand times. Tell them that I am angry
with them because they do not want to stand up straight, that there is
nothing so ugly in a young demoiselle, and that I hope to learn that they
have corrected themselves of this vile blemish’.48 Keeping a strict fatherly
eye on his daughters’ developing female beauty and grace, Rossignol actually
reached out across the Atlantic to correct his girls’ postures. He also gave
them advice on talents they should hone. Bénite, it seemed, had a pretty
singing voice and would therefore receive a singing master to cultivate it. He
also told them:

to take the greatest care of your teeth, and to clean them every day,
because they are the most beautiful ornament a lady can wear. … Your
maman … kisses you as well as your little sisters. Adieu my dear Benite,
be well, I kiss you a thousand times as well as Pepete and Pauline, I am
always your good friend and Papa.49

Rossignol’s letter tempered parental authority, advice and strictness with

fatherly tenderness, thus corresponding very much with the contemporary
ideal. According to Stéphane Minivelle, French cultures of parenting in the
ancien régime had been strongly shaped by the idea that education needed to
curb a child’s naturally bad desires. The publication of Rousseau’s highly
influential work Émile in 1762, which was based on the assumption that
every child is born full of good qualities which a gentler education can foster
and enhance, contributed strongly to a change in parenting culture.50 There
is no doubt that European parenting styles witnessed a shift towards the
more humanist approaches between the seventeenth and eighteenth cen­
turies.51 The firm and the tender touch were supposed to balance each other
out. Rossignol’s letter managed to convey just that. It made his authority
felt without alienating his faraway daughters, whose obedience and com­
pliance with his wishes were, after all, far less easily secured in France than
under his own nose, in the Caribbean. Keeping up relations of authority
and, indeed, power across the Atlantic was a challenge. Maintaining affec­
tionate, emotional relationships that went beyond mere duty was probably
an even greater one.
The basic conditions which a letter as a relationship-carrier faced – the
suspended time – space, the uncertainty, the dangers – further complicated
parenting situations, because interventions like Rossignol’s metaphorical
hand on his daughter’s back could only occur with a severe time-lag. Simi­
larly to Rossignol, who had been informed by his daughters’ educators,
many parents often learned about their children’s intervention-worthy
behaviours from third parties. By the time that information had reached
them, the children’s misbehaviour had already occurred a relatively long
time ago, and any parental reaction would yet again take several months to
reach the child. This situation could take its toll on parental authority.
 Touch me if you can 75
Letters from the Caribbean contain numerous anxious or angry letters by
parents who had felt their authority slip away after a few years of separa­
tion. In these letters, everything, especially the use of touches, was supposed
to re-establish the family power dynamics and bring the wayward child or
children back under parental control.52 One example is that of Louise
Bernard.
Louise Bernard from Saint Domingue had lost her maternal grip on her
son, who was staying en pension with a Mr Reynaud in France. Reynaud
had sent bad reports of the boy to his parents, and conflict had ensued. In
January 1779, Louise Bernard took steps to make sure that the same did not
happen with her daughter, Fillette Magenet. The letter address shows that
Fillette (‘little girl’ or ‘little daughter’) was the girl’s actual name and not a
term of endearment used by her parents, and that she was also being edu­
cated on the Continent. Her letter shows a rather different sort of epistolary
kiss:

I kiss you, my dear Fillette, believe me that if M. Reynaud [the teacher]

is happy with you, so is your father, and then I will never cease to be
your good mother Louise Bernard. Your brother has sent me a letter
which I will not answer … He will not find mercy neither with your
father nor with me until M. Reynaud tells me that he has changed his
ways.53

Louise Bernard’s message was quite similar to Rossignol’s – be good, listen

to your teachers, I send kisses – yet unlike Rossignol’s, Louise Bernard’s
kisses were conditional, their continuance and thus that of parental affection
was directly tied to good behaviour. The letter made that very clear:
‘Depend on it, if you were miserable enough to behave badly towards [the
teachers and caregivers], you would find yourself very quickly abandoned by
your father & by me.’54 If Fillette’s behaviour in France led to unfavourable
reports, she would no longer be recognised by her parents and they would
no longer take care of her. This was no doubt an unpleasant threat for a
young girl living thousands of miles away from home, and apparently not an
empty one, either. Louise Bernard had instructed M. Reynaud to cut off her
son entirely and to provide him no longer with any support. The kiss was
not a friendly one, it was an admonishing kiss that implied a substantial
threat. Fillette’s behaviour had implications for the social, and maybe even
economic position of her entire family. Both Stéphane Minivelle (for the
societal level) and Sarah Pearsall (in the specific context of the Atlantic
family) highlight the importance of a child’s conduct for the preservation or
even promotion of the family’s social standing and status.55 Social standing
and credit-worthiness, for example, were inextricably linked in the ancien
régime, and colonial families often depended financially on credit in the
metropolis. If the children of colonials ran wild in France, it might seriously
endanger their parent’s reputation. Families like the Bernard-Magenets could
76 Annika Raapke
and would not afford an out-of-control son and daughter who could have
damaged their position and credit.
Yet even in the exertion of parental authority, Louise Bernard’s letter, as
harsh as it was, used a touch to bind her daughter and to show her that, if
she complied with her parents’ wishes, she would always have their affec­
tion.56 In fact, none of the cases introduced so far contained a touch that
was intended to hurt. While most letters had the task of connecting, they
could also be written as a means of separation, and quite a few of them
were.57 It is rare though to find a letter specimen which tried to do both,
which tried to tie two people together while simultaneously forcing them
apart in a very violent manner. And yet, epistolary touches could also be
used in this way, as the following section will show.

Love and violence: extreme touches

The anonymous young man in Guadeloupe who put pen to paper in March
1793 was apparently in the grip of a violent rage. In his opinion, the
addressee Mademoiselle Ourtevan, the woman he had hoped to marry, who
was living in France, had betrayed him. He had written her six letters
without receiving an answer. Instead of taking into account the fact that
letter transport was severely hampered at the time by the Revolutionary
Wars, that many letters were captured or simply lost due to the chaos of the
war, he decided that there must be another man in the picture, and that he
would have to confront her with everything he thought he knew about the
situation. The letter starts with complete sentences in relatively neat, if
somewhat rudimentary, writing. The tone is sufficiently polite and rather
affectionate. Then the anonymous writer must have become more and more
agitated because the writing and phrasing become more erratic and the page
increasingly marked with blotches. The letter’s ending is just a jumble of
disjointed insults crawling and sprawling across the page. The writer cursed
Mademoiselle Ourtevan for ‘the indignity of despising me, goodbye you
bitch, goodbye you whore of dogs and cats’.58 He also turned on the
woman’s female relatives or friends, calling a woman named Blondelle a
‘poxed whore and bitch’, another woman by the name of Nanette a ‘life­
wrecker’ and a third, Noelle, a ‘friend of fuckery’ who would also never find
a husband. There is no doubt that, by contemporary standards, this letter is
unpardonable and that the writer must have known it. Both French metro­
politan and French colonial societies were extremely preoccupied with
notions of honour and insult during this period.59 The tirade against
Mademoiselle Ourtevan and her friends, with whom the writer was not
linked by either marriage, engagement or any other family connection, was
therefore nothing but a huge and maybe even a legally actionable insult.
Nothing suggests that the writer’s rage was due to anything other than poor
impulse control – he does not mention suffering from a Caribbean fever,
although fever and/or intoxication cannot be excluded.60
 Touch me if you can 77
What renders this violent passage even more interesting, however, is its
combination with other elements of the letter narrative, especially the way
in which glimpses of remembered, shared bodily closeness between the
author and Mademoiselle Ourtevan weave in and out of the epistolary
insults. ‘Do you remember when you were clutching my arm, we were
walking together just the two of us under the trees, and the song of the birds
was everywhere’, the author wrote, ‘we were sitting together, kissing’. This
memory of a past, tender touch is almost immediately set against a very
violent image – ‘if I could rip out my heart to show it to you, you would see
it is not worthless like yours after wanting to give you my tender hand and
my poor heart you have preferred a man unworthy of being alive’.61 The
specific bodily memories make the epistolary situation altogether more per­
sonal. They also show, in a gross breach of contemporary standards of
epistolary politeness and general social convenience, the lasting and endur­
ing importance which could be attributed to shared physical closeness.62
This could and would be invoked in letters in order to claim loyalty, and/or
to put pressure on the epistolary counterpart.
By recalling the intimacy of the shared walk and the kissing, the author
effectively made a claim on Mademoiselle Ourtevan’s body, a claim that he
considered rightful and indeed, binding.63 In the context of his violent lan­
guage, the familiar contemporary image of ripping out one’s heart to show
it to someone else lost every claim to romanticist theatrics and became
merely brutal. This example opens up another aspect of the epistolary space:
it was one where, potentially, a paper body could act out whatever the
writer wanted. For those who did not consider themselves bound by epis­
tolary courtesy, or were temporarily incapable of adhering to its rules (or
chose not to), letters could become ungoverned spaces of violence in which
paper bodies could be the perpetrators of violent fantasies and carriers of
delusion. This is especially interesting regarding the fact that the anonymous
writer sent this letter from the Caribbean, a space which was, in European
discourse, linked to white men’s loss of inhibition and a penchant for vio­
lence since the beginnings of European colonial expansion, as well as a ten­
dency to take offence.64 His paper body, violent, passionate, and
uninhibited, represented his new colonial existence far more than con­
temporary French standards of behaviour.

Conclusion
Touches are extremely common in eighteenth-century letters, and thus were
also an indispensable part of letter-writing conventions. As this chapter has
shown, touches and paper bodies should be investigated as epistolary stra­
tegies which could be used or left out to convey or enforce messages. Letter-
writers from various backgrounds could and would choose not to include
touches in their letters, while just as great a variety of people decided to
employ the physical touch. Hugs, kisses and other touches lent a sensory
78 Annika Raapke
quality and emotional agency to paper bodies. For this, the respective paper
bodies did not need to be described in great detail, nor did they need to be
complete in any way. Created in and for a purely epistolary space of inter­
action, paper bodies and their touches could function on sparse, basic or
formulaic descriptions, sometimes even a single word, and yet become lived-
in, sensing physical entities for their readers. The touches which these paper
bodies carried out strengthened hierarchical positions and maintained emo­
tional connections when epistolary relationships were impeded by insecure
and dangerous conditions, enabling letter-writers to connect with faraway
loved ones, but also to exert influence and power, even threaten. The final
case presented here, that of the Demoiselle Ourtevan, particularly shows the
potential for violence which epistolary touches could carry across huge geo­
graphic distances. At least in this case, it may have been for the best that
ship’s master Thaurin Hebert steered his ship, the Victoire de Honfleur, into
the arms of British capturers in 1793, thereby effectively ending the letter’s
journey to France. The Demoiselle Ourtevan never got this letter; even though
the writer assured her that he would always hold her mother ‘in high esteem’,
this was probably a good thing. Some touches are better left unread.

Notes
1 See for example Russell F. Weigley, The Age of Battles: The Quest for Decisive
Warfare from Breitenfeld to Waterloo (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press 1994); John O’Neill and Mark D. Greenberg (ed.), Europe in the Age of
Revolution and Enlightenment (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
1987).
2 Laurence Brockliss, ‘Consultation by Letter in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris:
The Medical Practice of Etienne-François Geoffroy’, in Ann La Berge and Mor­
dechai Feingold (eds), French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 79–110, 99; Jennifer Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family
and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2016); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the
French Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
3 Sarah Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Cen­
tury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also Anne M. Powers, A Parcel
of Ribbons: The Letters of an Eighteenth Century Family in London & Jamaica
(London: Lulu, 2012) and Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and
Communication in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2009).
4 Ibid.
5 See Annika Raapke, Dieses verfluchte Land: Europäische Körper in Brief­
erzählungen aus der Karibik, 1744–1826 (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019).
6 Silvia Marzagalli, ‘The French Atlantic World’, in Nicholas Canny and Philip
Morgan (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, c.1450–c.1850
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 235–251; Alan Forrest, The Death of
the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2020).
7 Annika Raapke, ‘The Pain of Senses Escaping: 18th Century Europeans and the
Sensory Challenges of the Caribbean’, in Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite
 Touch me if you can 79
(eds), Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices and Modes of Perception in the
Atlantic World, (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 115–139; Raapke, Dieses verfluchte Land.
8 See, for example, Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the
Early French Caribbean (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005) and Geneviève
Léti, Santé et société esclavagiste à la Martinique (1802–1848) (Paris, Fort de
France: Editions Harmattan, 1998).
9 Marzagalli, ‘French Atlantic World’.
10 Martin Stuber, Stefan Hächler, Luc Lienhard, Hallers Netz, Ein europäischer
Gelehrtenbriefwechsel zur Zeit der Aufklärung (Basel: Schwabe 2005), 10.
11 Christina Beckers, ‘Bridging the Gap: Techniques of Appresentation and Familiar
(izing) Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Transmaritime Family Correspondence’,
in Daniela Hacke, Hannes Ziegler and Claudia Jarzebowski (eds), Matters of
Engagement: Emotions, Identity, and Cultural Contact in the Premodern World
(London: Taylor & Francis, 2020), ebook version, ch. 1.
12 On family in absence in the Prize Papers, see also Beckers, ‘Bridging the Gap’.
13 See Amanda Bevan and Randolph Cock, ‘The High Court of Admiralty Prize
Papers, 1652–1815: Challenges in Improving Access to Older Records’, Archives,
53:137 (2018), 34–58.
14 Reinhart Koselleck, ‘Standortbindung und Zeitlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur historio­
graphischen Erschließung der geschichtlichen Welt’, in Reinhart Koselleck,
Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Jörn Rüsen (eds), Objektivität und Parteilichkeit in der
Geschichtswissenschaft (München: dtv, 1977), 17–46.
15 Beckers, ‘Bridging the Gap’, 35.
16 All translations are the author’s own.
17 Marijke Van der Waal and Gisbert Rutten, ‘Ego-Documents in a Historical-
Sociolinguistic Perspective’, in Van der Waal and Rutten (eds), Touching the
Past: Studies in the historical sociolinguistics of Ego-documents (Amsterdam:
Benjamins, 2013), 1–19, 1, 2.
18 See for example, Pearsall, Atlantic Families; Powers, A Parcel of Ribbons;
Dierks, In My Power.
19 Edgar W. Schneider, ‘Investigating Variation and Change in Written Documents’, in
J. K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill and Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds), The Handbook of
Language Variation and Change (Oxford: Blackwell 2002), here quoted after Van
der Waal/Rutten, Ego-documents in a historical-sociolinguistic perspective, 2.
20 Ibid.

21 See also Chapter 8, this volume.

22 Carmen Furger, Briefsteller. Das Medium ‘Brief’ im 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhun­
dert (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010), 162.
23 Ibid., 163.
24 Ibid.
25 Brockliss, ‘Consultation by Letter’.
26 See for example Christine Roulston, Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in
Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos (Gainesville, FL:
University Press of Florida, 1998), XI.
27 See for example Cynthia Lowenthal, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the
Eighteenth-Century Familiar Letter (Athens, GA: Georgia University Press, 1994),
21.
28 Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Johannes Anderegg (ed.), Schreibe mir
oft! Das Medium Brief von 1750 bis 1803 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2001).
29 It makes sense, for example, to look at the Seven Years’ War under the paradigm
of global warfare/conflict. For a recent microhistorical German-language
80 Annika Raapke
engagement with this perspective, see Marian Füssel, Der Preis des Ruhms:. Eine
Weltgeschichte des Siebenjährigen Krieges (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2019).
30 Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2016).
31 There is a huge amount of scholarship to quote here, but since this is not the
focus of this chapter, I will simply name one classic and influential example:
John McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (eds), The Early Modern Atlantic Econ­
omy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
32 Ibid.
33 Constance Classen, The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch (Chi­
cago, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012); Helen Berry, ‘Lawful Kisses?
Sexual Ambiguity and Platonic Friendship in England c.1660–1720’, in Karen
Harvey (ed.), The Kiss in History (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2005), 62–79.
34 For similar results and points, see example Katie Barclay, Love, Intimacy and
Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2011).
35 Joseph Amato, ‘Thoughts on a Cultural History of Touch. Review Essay’, Fides
et Historia, 46:1 (2014), 76–84, 76.
36 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo
Revolution (New York: Dial Press, 1938); Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux
Antilles françaises (Guadeloupe: Société d’histoire de la Guadeloupe, 1974); John
D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World.
The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press,
2004); Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution
from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990); Jeremy D. Popkin,
You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New
York, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
37 The envelope is addressed to Julie Chatelard, négresselibre.
38 High Court Admiralty, UK The National Archives, (hereafter ‘HCA’) 32/XX,
Claudine Goa, Bordeaux, to her mother Julie Châtelard in St Domingue, 28 May
1793.
39 HCA 30/310, Victoire Roux, Martinique, to her husband Jean Pierre Roux in
Brest, 24 Mar 1779.
40 Ibid.
41 HCA 32/1828/3, Louise Dupont to her husband in France, four letters, 1 Nov
1702, 6 Dec 1702, 25 Apr 1703, 13 Nov 1703.
42 On the use of affection as a means of pressure in these letters, see Annika Raapke,
‘“Well, That Escalated Slowly”: Prekäre Balancen, Konflikt und Eskalation in Brief­
beziehungen zwischen Frankreich und den Karibikkolonien, 1778–1793’, Historische
Anthropologie, 29.2 (2021): 189–208.
43 Whyman, Pen and the People; Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British
Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2006).
44 HCA 30/286, Désinçay, Martinique, to his parents in Paris, 20 Sep 1778.
45 Rossignol’s kisses are included in several sentences, as well as the farewell, and
they are placed in central segments of the letter’s main section. Rossignol thus
clearly invested quite a substantial part of his available writing paper in sending
kisses.
46 On colonial parenting practices, see for example, Francisca Hoyer, Relations of
Absence. Germans in the East Indies and their families, c. 1750–1820 (Uppsala:
Uppsala University Press, 2021), 200 ff; Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss, Sweet Liberty:
The Final Days of Slavery in Martinique (Philadelphia, PA: University of Penn­
sylvania Press, 2009), 75; Palmer, Intimate Bonds, 74 ff.
 Touch me if you can 81
47 Claudia Jarzebowski, Kinder und ihre Lebenswelten in der europäischen Frühen
Neuzeit (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018), 270 ff, 271.
48 HCA 30/305, Rossignol, Saint Domingue, to his three daughters in Tours, 7 Nov
1778.
49 Rossignol to his daughters, 7 Nov 1778.
50 Stephane Minivelle, La famille en France à l’époque moderne (Paris: Armand
Colin, 2010), kindle edition.
51 Joanne Bailey (Begiato), Parenting in England, 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity &
Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jarzebowski, Kinder und
ihre Lebenswelten; Hoyer, Relations of Absence.
52 See Pearsall, Atlantic Families, 124 ff.
53 HCA 30/305, Louise Bernard, Saint Domingue, to her daughter Fillette Magenet
in France, 7 Jan 1779.
54 Ibid.
55 Minivelle, La famille en France; Pearsall, Atlantic Families,124 ff.
56 On the ‘powerful existential effects of being or not being touched’, see Kym
Maclaren, ‘Touching Matters: Embodiments of Intimacy’, Emotion, Space and
Society, 13 (2014), 95–102, 95.
57 Although it is also worth considering whether letters which seem intent on
severing ties were actually a means to create new ties. See Raapke, ‘Well, That
Escalated Slowly’.
58 HCA 30/396, Anonymous man, Guadeloupe, to Demoiselle d’Ourtevan, 02 Mar 1793.
59 Hervé Drévillon, ‘L’âme est à Dieu et l’honneur à nous: Honneur et distinction
de soi dans la société d’Ancien Régime’, Revue historique, 2010/2 (654), 361–95;
Léti, Santé et Société esclavagiste.
60 Annika Raapke, ‘In Gelb! Selbstentwürfe eines Mannes im Fieber’, in Dagmar Freist
(ed.), Diskurse-Körper-Artefakte. HistorischePraxeologie in der Frühneuzeitforschung
(Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015), see also Raapke, Dieses verfluchte Land; Debbie Lee,
‘Yellow Fever and the Slave Trade: Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”’,
English Literary History, 65:3 (1998), 675–700; Trevor Burnard ‘“The Countrie
continues sicklie”: White Mortality in Jamaica, 1655–1780’, Social History of Medi­
cine, 12:1 (1999), 45–72; Léti, Santé et Société Esclavagiste.
61 HCA 30/396, Anonymous to Demoiselle Ourtevan, no date.
62 Furger, Briefsteller.
63 Helen Berry’s ‘Lawful Kisses’ makes interesting similar points about the binding
nature of kisses in seventeenth- century England.
64 Raapke, Dieses verfluchte Land, 134–149.
Part II

Material bodies/material letters

4 Sympathy in practice
Eighteenth-century letters and the

material body

Karen Harvey

David Anderson and Christina Findley’s dance of courtship began in December

1787, following David’s return to Scotland at the conclusion of his career as an
East India Company servant and close friend of Warren Hastings, governor-
general of Bengal until 1785. Visible now through letters which criss-crossed
East Lothian in Scotland, the courtship followed the conventional steps of
men’s assertions and women’s resistance. The thirty-six-year-old David wrote
to her of ‘those Sentiments which I felt most forcibly in my own Breast’;1 to
which the twenty-year-old Christina cautiously replied, ‘I shall be happy &
retain the Friendship you offer, from our short acquaintance, more you cannot
expect from me’.2 But by the new year, whether on the advice of friends and
family or due to the persistence of David, Christina confessed to him, ‘I think I
may break thro’ the rule I had proscribed myself’ and their reciprocal epistolary
courtship got under way.3 Married in August 1788, by now their sympa­
thetic bond was established. With David attending the impeachment trial of
his friend Hastings in London, writing letters became the principal medium
for expressing their feelings. On 3 July 1789, David wrote: ‘my wishes were
compleatly gratified in finding a Kind Letter from You which told me you
were well – There is certainly a Kind of Sympathy betwixt Us.’4
In his eyes, David’s pleasure at hearing of Christina’s good health exem­
plified their sympathetic bond. At this difficult time, David underscored how
they were in touch and in tune. The erotics of their new marriage were
palpable: ‘I cannot longer resist the desire I have of writing to you’, Chris­
tina wrote to David on 17 July, ‘I feel such an itching for my pen’.5 She
closed this letter, ‘I must conclude tho not on account of fatigue – if I don’t
get a Letter tomorrow I shall be horribly out of humour’.6 Just as Christi­
na’s letter to David brought him pleasure, so without a letter from him she
would be unwell, not herself, and ‘horribly out of humour’. Through these
letters they became close, though they were apart. The sympathy that bound
them saw them moving in step with one another. This sympathy was experi­
enced as an intimate harmony, dependent on and sustaining the other’s bodily
health and wellbeing.
Their courtship had passed through formal enquiries and guarded inti­
macy and into palpable longing and urgent desire for the other; now
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-7
86 Karen Harvey
married, they had graduated into open reflection upon their relationship and
on how writing and receiving letters was so important to this. David and
Christina’s letters sit neatly in accounts that have shown the greater freedom
of expression available to men and the formulaic nature of both the stages
and the language of courtship in letters. Love letters created intimacy – they
were not just a way to find out about a prospective spouse or an expression
of love.7 For lovers, letters were ‘treasured possessions and embodiments of
the absent sender’ and ‘a vital means of creating emotional intimacy
between courting couples’.8 Lovers situated the self in the context of a
developing relationship and a mutual sympathy. David and Christina’s
expressions reflect the intensity of the first flush of marriage. Written in the
late 1780s at the highpoint of sensibility – a culture that G. J. Barker-
Benfield characterised as highly (heteronormatively) sexualised – it is little
surprise that their chosen words named and described the intensity of their
feelings so explicitly.9
Love letters between courting or newly married couples may be exemplary
of these processes, but they are not unique. All letters could be love letters.
All letters could generate intimacy.10 The material object of the letter cre­
ated bonds, not simply arose out of existing bonds. This chapter is based on
a selection from over 2,000 letters written by British men and women from a
broadly defined middling-sort and a range of Protestant denominations
between 1670 and 1825; these include letters exchanged between courting
and married couples, as well as between sisters, brothers and friends,
sometimes over several years. Though this corpus of letters contains more
letters by men and more letters dating from after mid-century, the chapter
focuses on a selection chosen from across the period and written by both
men and women. It uses these to develop our understanding of how letters
were used to create fellowship and intimacy amongst people who were
apart, adding to work that highlights factors such as modes of familiarity
and conversation, discourses of classical and Christian friendship, and giving
counsel through the discussion of exemplary lives.11 The chapter discusses
the role that the body played as both the subject and the purpose of letters
in which eighteenth-century men and women created bonds of feeling.
Appropriate epistolary exchange involved enquiry, reporting and response
about the correspondents; this pattern of exchange was expected. As in any
affective interaction, the form, style and content of letters both shaped and
was shaped by the specific relationship of the letter-writer and recipient.12 In
this chapter, though, the focus will be on excavating the principal frame­
work within which the expression and experience of an embodied feeling of
sympathy could operate. Indeed, forging sympathy was arguably the over­
riding purpose of many familiar epistolary relationships. Sympathy itself
involved a complex of physical and emotional aspects, a connection of the
feeling and material body. In picking up the pen, writers sought to move one
another with their words and to confirm to their correspondents that they
too had been moved.
 Sympathy in practice 87
‘[T]he eighteenth century was the age of sympathy’, according to Ryan
Patrick Hanley.13 In the history of philosophy in particular, the concept of
sympathy is at the centre of debates about human nature, society and ethics.
Whether discussed as a ‘mechanical communication of feelings and pas­
sions’, ‘a process of imagination, or of reason, by which we substitute our­
selves for others’, or ‘delight in the happiness and sorrow in the misery of
other people’, the different understandings of sympathy shared the idea that
one person’s pleasure or pain could become part of another person’s plea­
sure or pain.14 The roots of these different versions of sympathy were var­
ious and linked to older ideas of contagion and charity.15 Late-seventeenth­
and eighteenth-century medical theories of human physiology as fundamen­
tally grounded in the nervous system provided a new perspective on how
people were connected to each other and the world around them, directly
shaping the emerging ‘culture of sensibility’.16 Earlier humoral models of the
body saw emotions as physical matter in flux; nervous science lifted the
mind out of the body but nevertheless understood the affections and pas­
sions not only as originating with the sensations and impressions of the
body, but also as having corporeal effects.17 By the later eighteenth century,
the bodies of men and women were things of feeling: ‘vibrant with impres­
sions, emotions and sympathy’, as Roy Porter described it.18
Sympathy’s roots were deeply religious, as well as medical and secular,
and philosophers in the second half of the seventeenth century combined the
Godly and the worldly in their rethinking of the concept.19 Yet in a dis­
orienting eighteenth-century world where strangers increasingly jostled
amongst intimates, Hanley argues, sympathy emerged as an alternative to
‘Christian conceptions of neighbor love’, an other-directed ethical sentiment
‘intended to serve as a substitute for love’.20 Sympathy was regarded as a
prophylactic against self-interest, thought to be on the rise due to urbanisa­
tion, commercialisation, imperialism and colonialism; it was a concept
employed ‘to account for the sorts of connections necessary to maintain
bonds between individuals in an increasingly less homogenised and more
fluid world of diversity and differences’.21
Sympathy might ‘account for’ social bonds, but what accounted for sym­
pathy? According to David Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
and later works, sympathy was a universal human impulse that directed a
person’s ‘passions’ – the sentiments or feelings that drive us – in such a way
that allowed society to exist and to function; the sentimental novelists
Richardson, Sterne and Mackenzie all engaged critically with the implication
that people naturally and universally practised sympathy and that in so
doing produced society.22 A functional explanation of the weight that sym­
pathy acquired in philosophy and social theory might be attenuated by
noting Adam Smith’s comments on the causes of sympathy in The Theory
of Moral Sentiments (1759), another milestone in eighteenth-century writ­
ings on the subject. Sympathy, Smith wrote, referred to ‘our fellow-feeling
with any passion whatever’.23 ‘Mutual sympathy’ was the ‘correspondence’
88 Karen Harvey
or ‘concord’ of emotions between two people.24 In contrast to ‘pity’, which
could be condescending and was driven by a person’s wish not to witness
something unpleasant to themselves, sympathy brought two people together
in a relationship that recognised the other and accorded them equal
respect.25 The egoism of sympathy was a point of considerable debate in the
eighteenth century.26 Yet, as Smith explained, one shared benefit of mutual
sympathy for those two people was the experience of being ‘beloved’: ‘there
is a satisfaction in the consciousness of being beloved, which, to a person of
delicacy and sensibility, is of more importance to happiness, than all the
advantage which he can expect to derive from it’.27 Sympathy made us
social, ethical and loved.
In Smith’s vision, sympathy worked ever more weakly as a person became
more distant, yet it was also intended that sympathy enabled individuals to
overcome difference and build bonds with those outside the intimate and
local circles of family, friends and neighbours.28 Integrating an equitable
recognition of the other, sympathy could bring disparate political entities
together, as well as scattered individuals. For Enlightenment writers such as
Hume, Smith and Ferguson as well as those such as Smollett, Scott, Johnson
and Wordsworth, sympathy was the basis for a developing identity of ‘Brit­
ishness’ in which the Scots and English could share.29 Such connections were
feeling ones. In Sophie de Grouchy’s 1798 translation of the seventh edition of
Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1792) and her accompanying ‘letters’ on
the concept of sympathy, sympathy was a feeling that combined physical sen­
sation with reflection on the self and other.30 By the later eighteenth century,
and particularly in France, this feeling of sympathy was a principal component
of a vision of what held together an ethical civil society.31 In sympathy, both
affective and physical sensations were moral feelings.
At its core, then, sympathy was fellow-feeling which took the form of a
bond based on the recognition of another’s feeling – whether emotional or
physical. Enlightenment theories of sympathy were engaged by con­
temporary sentimental novelists.32 The narrative form of the epistolary
novel in particular was used to extend philosophical understandings of
sympathy, enabling characters to tell and retell – and readers to hear – the
stories of others from the multiple perspectives contained within a corre­
spondence.33 Both this philosophical and literary preoccupation appears to
find its echo in eighteenth-century familiar letters in which men and women
conducted the practices of sympathy. Yet this chapter argues that, in fact,
the reverse was the case. The sympathetic practices observable in everyday
epistolary culture were longstanding and predated Enlightenment philoso­
phy, a culture of late-eighteenth-century sensibility and epistolary fiction by
at least half a century. Nor did the ideals of sympathy replace Christian
customs, but were integrated with them in this Protestant correspondence
dating much earlier than the well-established culture of sympathy visible in
the later eighteenth century. The origins of some of the principal concepts
that underpinned eighteenth-century society were not now-classic key texts
 Sympathy in practice 89
but instead – and appropriately – the quotidian practices of ordinary men
and women as they maintained sociable relations across time and space.
Here we witness the quotidian yet powerful practice of human related-
ness-in-making. This chapter identifies the presence of sympathy in eight­
eenth-century familiar letters through the words and expressions that
articulated a writer’s fellow-feeling with either the good or bad experiences
associated with their correspondent. This might take the form of a hope or
felt happiness that the recipient is well, or that the writer was sorry to hear
of their interlocutor’s bad news. In some cases, letter-writers referred to
‘sympathy’ directly, as did David Anderson in his letter to his new wife, but
this was uncommon. Anderson’s explicit naming of sympathy was perhaps a
reflection of his need to establish firmly this principle, given the early stage
in this relationship; or perhaps his vocabulary reflected a well-developed
late-century culture of sensibility. For most eighteenth-century letter-writers,
though (and certainly in most of the examples in this chapter), it was not
necessary to name sympathy explicitly. This was precisely because sympathy
was made palpable through sympathetic expressions and practices which
themselves had a material effect on the bodies of the recipient. The chapter
explores three areas in turn. First, sympathetic practice performed a critical
role in the creation of bonds between people through letters. Secondly, dis­
cussion of the body was a principal subject over which sympathy was
expressed and through which sympathetic practice was enacted. Finally, as
sympathy itself was experienced in the body, the repeated epistolary prac­
tices of sympathy connected people in material and embodied ways.

Sympathetic practice
In their letters, eighteenth-century men and women together built a culture
of sympathy through a framework of patterns of enquiry, report and
response. In the repeated use of words and phrases that expressly invited
reports of good or bad experiences, and the direct responses to these with
statements of corresponding sentiments, letter-writers recognised the feelings
of their friends and family and brought themselves alongside those feelings
in concord. Across the long eighteenth century, the beginnings and endings
of letters between friends and family were a mechanism for exchanging
news but also established a framework for sympathetic exchange. Some let­
ters traded formulaic expressions of this emotion, but in fact most letter-
writers devised their own personal and singular patterns of sympathetic
expression. During the 1680s, for example, the letters to and from the anti­
quarian Ralph Thoresby are peppered with such initial enquiries about
family and friends’ health. In summer 1681 Thoresby had written to
Katherine Dockwray of his ill health, and her response began by assuring
him not only that ‘I am very sory to reade yt your are not well’, but also
that she ‘will influence all sorts of Physicians for you, whose powerful
remedies’ would make him well. She ended by thanking him for his kind
90 Karen Harvey
letter, which had further ‘brought me ye news of our families health’.34 Men
shared similar exchanges. Thoresby wrote to another, unnamed and male,
correspondent: ‘This comes to inquire of your Health & yr good familys
whose indisposition was a grt trouble to mee.’35 The survival of longer runs
of letters allows us to see how such enquiries were repeated and deployed in
the context of a developing relationship. In her letters to her adult daughter
in London, for example, Dorothy Wright peppered her frequent letters from
Sheffield with a series of phrases that tied her feeling response to the repor­
ted experiences of Catherine: ‘am sorry to hear your brest is so Tender’,36 ‘I
hope this Will Meet you in health’37 and ‘i am but in part happy Till i can
hear a happy avent from you of the Children for you are scarce Ever out of
my Mind for your Dear child is your all’.38 Such comments established the
tenor of this exchange but were more than strategic framing devices. In each
of the three letters Dorothy followed up with, in turn: a plan to secure a
new wet nurse; a lengthy description of her own recent episode of ill-health;
and a discussion of the smallpox currently raging and the pros and cons of
inoculation. The repetition of phrases such as ‘am sorry’ and ‘I hope’
demarcated the epistolary space as a sympathetic one and allowed mean­
ingful and substantive discussion to follow.
That these openings and closings generated a response in a returning
letter assured writers that this was an epistolary conversation: that the
intended listener had heard and had recognised the speaker’s experiences.
The idea of the letter as conversation was ‘a commonplace’ in this period.39
Though in most cases we only have one half of that conversation, the repe­
ated sympathetic responses in such letters indicate that requests and reports
were met from the other side. The letters of the Sheffield merchant Richard
Dalton to his business associates indicated a regular exchange of informa­
tion about health, often that of his wife. He gratefully wrote to his friend
Samuel Mould in 1735, for example: ‘I thank you for your good wishes
towards my Wife she has had a very bad Winter.’40 In rare cases we can
observe both sides of the conversation and see the full pattern. The effusive
letters between husband and wife, John and Rebecca Smith, when separated
due to John’s business are urgent in tone and were exchanged at a high
frequency. John’s plea in March 1726 illustrates this and the way that letters
served as written replacements for spoken exchange and bodily presence:
‘spare a Little time to write to me almost every post I Long very much to
hear from you it will wonderfully oblige me if you will please to do it I
much want your Dear & Sweet Conversation & Company’.41 Some of the
letters from Thomas Ward, the Gray’s Inn clerk of the civil servant Edmund
Herbert, to Agnes Herbert, Edmund’s sister-in-law and sole heir, survive
with Agnes’s draft replies intact. Ward was an overseer of Herbert’s will
and the discussion of property, finance and estate management between he
and Agnes was conducted in a distinctly friendly and sympathetic key. In a
letter of 23 April 1772, Thomas exhorted Agnes to let him know if she
wanted anything, adding the usual phrase, ‘I hope you Mr & Mrs Cooke &
 Sympathy in practice 91
Miss Ann are in good Health.’ In her draft letter, Agnes pinned a mirroring
note to her reply: ‘We are all very glad to hear Mrs. Ward is so well recov­
ered as to go abroad come into ye. Country.’42 Together, this man and
woman, unrelated by blood or marriage, established a pattern of sympa­
thetic conversation.
There was often considerable consistency in the phrases used by indivi­
duals. Working in Cornwall, the thirty-seven-year-old servant Elizabeth
Clift framed her letters to her younger nineteen-year-old brother William in
London in regular ways. She began her letter of 14 May 1794, ‘[t]his comes
with my kind Love to you hoping these few Lines will find you in Good
Health as it Leaves me at Present’, and ended with a hope for his ‘Health
and Prosperity’.43 Her letter of the following January similarly began: ‘This
Comes with my Kind Love to you hoping it will find you in good health as
this Lines me at Present & Bless God for it I was happy to recive your Kind
Letter.’44 The repetition of such sympathetic framing devices might be read
as mechanical expressions of civility. Yet it is significant that letter-writers
did not employ identical conventions and that phrases varied between epis­
tolary conversations. Nor were these phrases copied from letter-writing
manuals. Such guidebooks sometimes included minor requests and reports
after wellbeing in examples of familiar letters, such as ‘I am in good health’,
but sympathetic comments around the body appear in surprisingly few
model letters.45 In genuine familiar letters, the patterns of enquiry, report
and response were situated in a sympathetic framework by personalised
phrases that conveyed fellow feeling.
This practice did not always align with the idealistic visions of those
social theorists who professed sympathy as an equitable response to other
people’s sufferings. In letters, sympathy was customary and idealised but it
was also contingent and sometimes withheld. As with all language and
emotional practice, sympathy could be used strategically at the same time
that it sprang from deeply felt emotions and concerns for friends and
family.46 Some writers reflected openly on their sympathetic practice. Eliza­
beth Hare’s letters to her sister-in-law Ann (married to Elizabeth’s brother,
Thomas), sometimes deployed the openings seen in many familiar letters.
She began one letter, ‘I am sorry to hear that you have got the toothach’,
then quickly moved on to reports of herself and others.47 Sympathetic
expression framed the letter, even if it was rather perfunctory. In another
letter, Elizabeth reflected on the way in which she responded to Ann’s
reports and, on one occasion, admitted to a failure in sympathy: ‘My last
Letter contained too few Civilities but I meant a great deal and tho’ I did
not take notice of your better health yet I do assure you ’tis an agreeable
adition to my small stock of worldly Enjoyments.’48 Regardless of Eliza­
beth’s strategic self-confessions of failures in sympathy, her letters suggest a
close relationship. As she expressed it on one occasion, ‘you know my dear
sister you and I are one’.49 Elizabeth knew that sympathy in letters created
links across time and space that assured friends, family and close relations
92 Karen Harvey
that the connections between them were sustained in spite of distance and
absence. Her letters also reveal clearly how this was a crafted linguistic
practice. Adam Smith saw sympathy as a learned ‘social practice through
which ordinary people encounter[ed] one another in shared spaces’.50 Letters
were the principal device through which people practiced sympathy and
forged mutual sympathetic bonds at a distance. As such, writing letters was
‘an emotional practice’, an embodied, physical and cultural process.51 As a
practice, letters made it evident that relationships themselves were a social
process that were made through and in time.

Sympathetic practice and the body

That the body played an important role in later eighteenth-century letters is
well established. Writers made the body present in different ways, as the
chapter by Raapke in this volume amply demonstrates, using language to
conflate the letter with the body such that a letter would appear to bring the
physical presence of the absent person to his or her correspondent.52 In
certain genres of letter, this device of breathing the writer’s body to life
underwent important transformation. Contemporary letter-narratives (par­
ticularly the epistolary novel) inaugurated what Elizabeth Cook has termed
the ‘modern body-subject … that notion of the self as represented and
bounded by the body’.53 The apparently newly embodied self conveyed in
these new genres was also a powerful vehicle for connectedness through a
feeling of sympathy. Printed fictional letters show that ‘embodied identifi­
cation’ in ‘what we might call the writing of sympathy’ emerged around
1775.54 The manuscript familiar letters used in this chapter show that ful­
some discussions of correspondent’s bodies within a sympathetic framework
were principal components of letters since at least the later seventeenth
century, though. Opening discussions of health in eighteenth-century trans­
atlantic letters could be techniques to establish the self-identity of the
author.55 Yet discussion of health was also about others: a reference to the
body could create ‘a more immediate bond’ between correspondents.56
Health and illness were not only potentially universal topics but were ones
which could – with the right expression – connote intimacy. In eighteenth-
century British familiar letters, it was through discussion of the topics of
bodily health and wellbeing that mutual sympathy was most often expressed
and demonstrated.
As discussed already, men as well as women regularly enquired of each
other’s health even when they were unrelated. The already effusive and open
style of such enquiries by the later seventeenth century is illustrated by
George Howell’s letter of 28 May 1698 to the London solicitor John Raw­
linson. Howell begins by insisting that, ‘to heare that you are perfectly well
would be ye pleasingest news could come to me’. After advising Rawlinson
to partake of sweet country air and exercise, he closes the letter by telling
his friend his strong desire to hear more of his health: ‘I long to know how
 Sympathy in practice 93
you doe.’ This short letter almost wholly concerns Rawlinson’s wellbeing.
57

It is difficult to reconstruct the context for this letter, as it is the only one
that survives between these two men, but its existence is testimony to the
centrality of the body in familiar and sympathetic communication between
men.
The sustained sympathetic conversations that might take place around the
body in letters between male friends or associates are amply illustrated by
the letters that the civil servant Edmund Herbert exchanged with his male
colleagues in the middle of the eighteenth century. In 1749, John Yate wrote
from Edmund’s Northamptonshire home on behalf of various neighbours
asking for financial support. Details of each case and the money required are
flanked by comments such as, ‘I hope this will find you in health as I am, &
thank God at present.’58 Herbert’s sympathetic responses survive in pencil
drafts: ‘The Acct. of yor own good health was very agreeable to me, & ye
Enquiry after mine very obliging, I thank God I enjoy it now, thoh have been
confin’d abt. 3 Weeks, in yt Manr [i.e. manner] I was last Yr.’59 Echoes of
this sympathetic framework, again situated within an explicitly Christian
context of friendship, neighbourliness and love, are found in Herbert’s let­
ters to his friend John Leighton, the Lieutenant Governor of Fort William in
Scotland. Herbert expressed an irrepressible keenness to hear about his friend
and his wife’s wellbeing in October 1754: ‘I can no longer forbear enquiring
after yor. Health & that of Mrs. Leighton. I hope you both enjoy it.’60 John
responded in kind at the start of his returning letter: ‘Mrs Leighton and I are
much obliged to yu for your kind enquiry after our Healths we thank God we
are boat [i.e. both] enjoy it well.’61 He closed the letter with language that
conveyed clearly how their united concern for Edmund overflowed: ‘Dr Sir Mrs
Leighton and I pour in our most Hearty wishes for your good Health and that
you may long enjoye it.’62 Leighton’s wife, Mary, was mentioned in the letters
often, sometimes as the target of Edmund’s sympathy. When John explained
the lateness of one letter with reference to his own headaches and Mary also
being unwell, Edmund’s reply attended to them both, hoping ‘you are both
recovered, & pray to God to keep you in Health’.63 Situating expressions of
sympathy about health and wellbeing in the context of God and faith was
common in many familiar letters.
A feeling connection between correspondents is palpable in these letters,
not least in the frequent expressions of worry over the correspondent’s
health. The letters that the Quaker merchant, John Eliot, wrote to his wife
in the 1760s expressed love and concern in equal measure. Repeatedly he
bemoaned their separation, reported on his own mood and physical state,
and expressed his anxiety about hers. The couple exchanged intimate details
of their sufferings with coughs and colds, as well as their relief at recovery.
A letter John received from Mary in September 1765 was ‘very acceptable’
because he was ‘truly glad to hear thy Cold was better, & that thou wast
otherwise bravely in Health’.64 Such concern was not reserved only for
John’s wife. He wrote similarly of his sister Mariabella’s ‘present ill State of
94 Karen Harvey
Health’ and admitted his ambivalence at having left her in this state: ‘This
brought Uneasiness over my Mind’.65 John’s letters to Mariabella are pre­
dominantly about family health: his, hers, his wife’s, their mother’s, as well
as other people’s. The connection they forged by exchanging information
about the body sometimes edged into what appeared to be a shared experience
of illness. A letter of December 1765 reported that Mary had yet another
cold and presented his household’s experience of the virus as a mirror of
Mariabella’s:

Yesterday we got thine of the 9th with the agreeable account of thy
continuing in pretty good Health, altho’ observing you have not been
free from Colds, which seem to be a common Complaint here. I have
not been free from one since we parted. But my poor Wife has had a
sore time hers.66

John here envisioned a sympathetic shared embodied experience among dis­

parate family members. Assuring him that the concern was mutual, she
wrote of, ‘thy Health, and Prospects of Happiness, which believe me are no
less my Concern than my own’, though she did not expand on her own
health.67 As Clare Brant says of eighteenth-century letters, all bodies were
present in the writing of a letter, not just women’s.68 The letters of Yate,
Leighton, Herbert and John Eliot demonstrate that men expressed sympathetic
bonds around the body very openly, whether those bodies were their own or
those of others.
Women could be equally explicit in their sympathy around the body, at
least in letters to one another. The letters of the sixty-three-year old
Christiana Shuttleworth to her younger friend Ann Hare expose these
women’s repeated exchanges about their health and that of their husbands.
A good portion of their conversation concerns Christiana’s husband, Wil­
liam, who was in declining health. Christiana’s gratitude at Ann’s repeated
sympathetic enquiries was clear: ‘I am very much obliged to you my Dear
Madm for your very Affectionate inquiry and good wishes to my Dear Mr
Shuttleworth for his Recovery an I much wish I was able to send you a
better account of his Health.’69 In response, Christiana closed her letter by
situating Ann Hare’s husband’s (Thomas) health at the centre of both her
own and Ann’s happiness: ‘I hope Capn Hare has saild before this – has had
a good voyage and that you soon will have the pleasure to hear he is well –
wch will make me very happy.’70 Tethering the happiness of both women to
Thomas Hare’s wellbeing, Christiana bound herself with her friend Ann in
mutual sympathy. This sympathetic friendship provided comfort when Wil­
liam died. Ann continued to send Christiana sympathetic enquiries about
her older friend’s health: ‘Your concern for my Stomach Complaint is very
kind’, Christiana wrote in a letter October 1780. As with men, the bond
between these women was expressed through sympathetic enquiry about
health.
 Sympathy in practice 95
The expression of sympathy in letters among family and friends to those
who were married often related to the health and wellbeing of the corre­
spondent’s spouse. The brothers John, Thomas and Jabez Stutterd, Baptists
in the north of England, would frequently exchange concerned words about
their wives. When, in May 1789, Thomas’s wife, Mary, and John’s wife,
Betty, appeared quite dangerously ill, John reported to Thomas that, ‘My
Wife is often not well’, adding, ‘I am very sorry to hear by Hanson that
your Wife is poorly – I ardently wish that her valuable life may be pre­
served – and shall be very glad to hear she is better.’71 Just a few days later
Jabez wrote to John: ‘Am sorry to hear that your Wife is not Well. We are
all pretty Well only I have for several days had severe pain in my Bowels.’72
Weaving together reports of one’s own health with enquiries about each
other’s wives, as Jabez did, was common in these brothers’ letters. Expres­
sions of sympathy bound the brothers together and also reinforced their
investment in each other’s conjugal relationship and therefore in the wider
extended family. The bonds that were created through sympathetic practice
around the body in eighteenth-century letters were extended further than the
correspondents themselves.

The embodied experience of mutual sympathy

Sympathy as a social bond was constructed and affirmed through discussion
of the body. In this way, eighteenth-century letters traded information using
a concept of sympathy that we can see in contemporary social theory, where
the term could mean a limited imaginative act of sorrow at another’s
misfortune, a more significant imaginative leap into their shoes such that
one shared and felt the pain of that other person, or a perfect harmony
between people – as in the case of David Anderson to his wife, Christina,
and Elizabeth Hare to her female friend, Ann.73 Sarah Pearsall has under­
lined how a late-eighteenth-century culture of sensibility combined with
enduring ideas about sympathy to produce a powerful language of embo­
died feeling in the letters of Atlantic families, while Perl-Rosenthal’s
chapter in this volume demonstrates how this could be deployed by poli­
tical communities.74 In the letters used here, physical descriptions of affect
were already an aspect of the epistolary lexicon of sympathy well before
the end of the century. These letters utilised ideas of sympathy that had
long circulated in medicine, where it could describe the communication
between bodily organs on the one hand and between the passions and the
body on the other, whether that was through the arteries, the lymphatic
system, muscle fibres, animal spirits or atoms.75 Sympathy explained both
‘the action of sensation, the coordination of the organs of the body’ and
the ‘“fellow-feeling”’ in a society.76 In letters, too, sympathy was at once
both social and physical because it not only bound people together over the
topic of the body but, because it was itself experienced as an embodied
sensation, it bound people together through their physical bodies.
96 Karen Harvey
That mutual sympathy in letters could be expressed as an embodied
experience was already established in mid-century letter-writing manuals. A
model lover’s letter of 1756 described the many sympathies the writer shared
with their beloved, and hinted at a more corporeal connection: ‘If there be
any Sympathy in our Souls, as there is in our Manners and Humours, I am
sure you must be very much indispos’d; for, all Night long, dreadful Fancies
haunted me, and drove all soft and pleasing Ideas from me.’77 Alongside the
allusion to restless nights, the reference to ‘humours’ reflected an increas­
ingly common idea of a disposition or temperament that sprang from a
person’s individual physical constitution.78 An embodied affinity was raised
in another model letter, this time from a ‘very young Lady’ to a sister she
had never met: ‘They say there is a secret Sympathy between Persons of the
same Blood, and I am sure I feel it, how is it then with you?’79 Whether
through the soul, the spirits or the blood, sympathy involved aligning one’s
own sense of pain and pleasure with that of another person; as the body was
the instrument of all sensation, sympathy was experienced as embodied.
British letter-writers were expressing their embodied experience of sym­
pathy from the very beginning of the eighteenth century. Husbands’ worry
about their wives manifested as pain. William Rawlinson, from a Cumbrian
iron-forging family, conveyed to his wife in 1706 his anguish at waiting to
hear a report of her health, and subsequently his utter relief on receiving the
letter: ‘I was in great pain to hear from thee wch at last I have had, & my
God be praised for it, it has given me oasis; for as thou art above all the
world to me, so to hear of thy welfare is the greatest of comforts.’80 William
expressed ‘the early eighteenth-century inseparability between physical and
emotional suffering’, arising from an understanding of the body and mind in
which all emotions were embodied.81 Mothers’ concerns for their children
could be immobilising. Susanna Wesley, mother of John and Charles, wrote
to her boys in winter 1732, conveying her desire to hear that Charles was
well, but describing how her wish to see him was overpowered by the visc­
eral dread that he should come to harm along the way: ‘that always Terrifies
me’, she wrote, ‘and I am commonly so uneasy for fear ye sd kill yr selves
wth coming so far on Foot that it destroys much of the Pleasure I sd other­
wise have in Conversing wth ye.’82 Her words echoed those of other early­
eighteenth-century letter-writers who used the term ‘easy’ to refer to a
mentally or emotionally challenging situation that would affect one’s physi­
cal state.83 Family members felt for and with one another.
Within close family circles who shared a well-established pattern of
enquiry, report and response, mutual sympathy was experienced as a fun­
damentally embodied experience. The Stutterd brothers became particularly
adept at reporting family news through their thorough and regular system of
letters and enclosed memoranda, mostly concerning health. As the eldest
brother John encouraged Thomas: ‘Hope you, and your dear Wife are well.
Should be glad to hear frequently from you. Could [sic] like to have some parti­
culars respecting your Wedding & an abstract of your daily Memorandum.’84
 Sympathy in practice 97
Their concern and mutual sympathy for one another was conveyed in their
descriptions of bodily responses to one another’s news. On hearing of Thomas’s
loss of one twin in childbirth and the poor health of the other, in July 1780, John
wrote a long and emotional letter to his bereaved brother. John and his wife
Betty had also lost a child, and the letter included several statements of sympathy
and concern (on John’s part as well as other family members). It was framed by
a narrative of how John first learned about the unfolding tragedy. Bad news had
reached them during the confinement and had a powerful impact upon John’s
wife, Betty: ‘It brought my Wife to Tears; especially on hearing of its [the child’s]
Danger. I suppose, in Remembrance of our late lovely Child.’ The couple were
both worried about Thomas’s wife, Grace: ‘Were in deep Concern respecting
your Wife’, John wrote. And it was for Grace that the strongest sympathy is
expressed: ‘Alas! but what has the Mother borne! Poor creature! Hope she is
well.’85 Sadly, their concerns were warranted; Grace did not survive.
Thomas remarried the same year and by spring 1787 his second wife,
Mary, gave birth to their third child. John again wrote to his brother,
Thomas, hoping for good news: ‘shall be glad to hear that your Wife has
been graciously helped through her Weak & afflicted state in Child Bed’.86
Thomas’s memoranda about Mary from the preceding few weeks may have
already reached John: she had delivered after a short labour on 2 March, but
the following day ‘began to be worse’; on 4 March she was ‘very poorly’
and ‘exceedingly ill’ and on 7 March she had ‘a Fever upon her’. Though she
improved by 11 March, the following day she was ‘not so well as Yester­
day’.87 In a subsequent letter, John was careful to allude to the impact these
reports had on him, and thus the depth of his own feeling: ‘Am much
affected with your Account of your Wife’s severe Illness – I hope, by this
Time, she is much better.’88 Thomas was to make a similar demonstration
of feeling following the deaths of John’s still-born baby in October 1789 and
his older son, John, shortly thereafter. ‘We are much affected with the
afflictive circumstances attending your Family & the rest of our kindred on
your side’, Thomas wrote.89 The same embodied fellow feeling was exten­
ded towards the youngest brother, Jabez. John could be ‘moved with Ten­
derness and Sympathy’ on reading of Jabez’s compromised health: ‘Your
Welfare is the Object of my warm desire’, John wrote, ‘I feel with you in the
difficulties of your Situation’.90 These brothers’ expressions of embodied
sympathy underscored their fraternal bond.
Such viscerally experienced sympathy demonstrates how earlier sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century understandings that other people’s misfortune or
ill-health could directly affect the listener continued well into the eighteenth
century.91 The absence of news could cause suffering, too. Travelling away
from home, Thomas Stutterd urged his wife Mary to write him:

I have not yet been favoured with a Line from you. I wish you had not
such a strong aversion to writing. I hope you are all well. If I hear
nothing from you I hear nothing bad, but it would much more
98 Karen Harvey
satisfactory to be assured from you that all is well – a Family is a close
connection. Separation causes tender feelings, hopes & fears respecting
the welfare of the absent parts. I hope you & children are well.92

As Thomas implied, fellow-feeling for one’s family members could cause a

person to become unwell. This was also true in another family of dispersed
brothers, the Black merchant family who exchanged letters across England,
Scotland, Ireland, France and the Caribbean. Writing in 1814, Noah Black
explained to his brother Alexander that his failing to write to their mother
had made her ill: ‘Mama I am sorry to say [h]as been so much alarmed not
receiving any letters from you, fearing that you was prevented by Illness
during that period, that it caused her cough to be very troublesome and
affected her health for several days.’93 Noah was gently but surely encoura­
ging his brother to pick up the pen to his mother: a lack of sympathy was
here reported as causing physical consequences. Yet being emotionally and
physically affected by the pleasure or pain of others was not limited to close
family members. John Stutterd reported to his brother Jabez in 1788, ‘I was
much affected the Sabbath before last on hearing of the Death of Mrs. Betty
Barford / of Walton, near Preston. She was once Betty Windle – She died
soon after she was delivered of a Child – Has left many Children.’94 The
level of detail in John’s report suggests both that Jabez may not have known
this woman and also that if he only knew the details of the case he would be
able to comprehend and perhaps share John’s own response. Friends or
colleagues who were regular correspondents with the brothers also expres­
sed an embodied sympathetic connection with them. George Dyson, an
assistant to Thomas Stutterd who would write to him while Thomas was
away from home, was explicit about the nature of their bond. George
replied to Thomas’s news of travelling in the cold weather with the report:
‘I experienced something of the same being out all the Day & a most
Dreadfull, cold, Snowy, Rainy Day as ever I experienced in travelling: yet I
felt a Satisfaction & united myself with you.’95 These men were physically
apart but by sharing a similar embodied experience they were brought back
together.

Conclusion
In their habitual expressions of sympathy to friends and family, eighteenth-
century letters writers enacted some of the principal ideals of their society.
This was enlightened sensibility and harmonious society in practice. That
they did so under the influence of Enlightenment medical and social theory is
without doubt, though charting a clear influence is impossible given that
their letters do not refer to ‘key thinkers’ or their principal concepts. Indeed,
sympathy, identification, embodied connection was well established in
familiar letters from the late seventeenth century. This cautions us not to
over rely on literary or philosophical sources for our chronologies in the
 Sympathy in practice 99
history of emotions. Emotional practice among friends, family and kin sug­
gests these literary and philosophical works arose out of a longstanding
social practice. Though their sympathetic exchanges appear exemplary of
these specifically Western European ideas of sympathy, within which indi­
viduals would indeed make particular strategic moves, these letters speak of
an enduring human desire to generate bonds not as an instrumental path to
a well-functioning society but for the sake of the bonds themselves and the
experience of mutual recognition as an end in itself.
The letter which began this chapter can be safely referred to as a ‘love
letter’. Yet all of the letters that have been discussed – between female
friends, between siblings of the same and of different sexes, between parents
and children – were ‘love letters’. As such, they strove to bring people
together and hold them close, even when they were at a physical distance.
As these letters show, sympathy was not a replacement for Christian love
but for eighteenth-century men and women worked alongside a Christian
faith that persisted in shaping their relationships and emotions.96 Concepts
of sympathy in the fields of medicine, philosophy and social theory pre­
dicated their discussions of sympathetic connection between objects on the
distinction between those objects. The ambition of sympathetic practice in
letters was to see those distinctions dissolve. Sympathy, like love, entailed a
degree of selflessness and a disruption of the self.97 If the absence of the
body was the precondition for a letter, the letter was also the tool through
which the body was again made present and loved ones would be united in
sympathy.

Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Katie Barclay, Sarah Goldsmith, Sheryllynne
Haggerty and Abigail Williams for their comments on the chapter.

Notes
1 David Anderson to Christina Findley, 14 Dec 1787, f1v, Add MS 82675, British
Library (hereafter BL).
2 Christina Findley to David Anderson, 16 Dec 1787, f3, Add MS 82675, BL.
3 Christina Findley to David Anderson, 24 Jan 1788, f10, Add MS 82675, BL.
4 David Anderson to Christina Anderson, 3 Jul 1789, f77, Add MS 82675, BL.
5 Christina Anderson to David Anderson, 17 May 1789, f26, Add MS 82675, BL.
6 Christina Anderson to David Anderson, 17 May 1789, 27v, Add MS 82675, BL.
7 Sally Holloway, The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions,
and Material Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 45–68.
8 Ibid., 68.
9 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth
Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
10 Leonie Hannan, Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in
Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 156,
171–174.
100 Karen Harvey
11 For example, see Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the
later eighteenth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 56–79; Abigail
Williams, ‘“I Hope to Write as Bad as Ever”: Swift’s Journal to Stella and the
Intimacy of Correspondence’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 35:1 (2011), 102–118;
Tessa Whitehouse, The Textual Culture of English Protestant Dissent 1720–1800
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 22–54; Isabel Rivers, Vanity Fair and
the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangelical Literary Culture in
England 1720–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), especially 291–323.
12 Michael Boiger and Batja Mesquita, ‘The Construction of Emotion in Interac­
tions, Relationships and Cultures’, Emotion Review (2012), 221–229.
13 Ryan Patrick Hanley, ‘The Eighteenth-Century Context of Sympathy from Spi­
noza to Kant’, in Eric Schliesser (ed.), Sympathy: A History (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015), 171.
14 These helpful definitions are given in Luigi Turco, ‘Sympathy and Moral Sense,
1725–1740’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 7 (1999), 79.
15 Hanley, ‘Eighteenth-Century Context’, 172–173.
16 Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 1–23.
17 Fay Bound Alberti, ‘Bodies, Hearts and Minds: Why Emotions Matter to His­
torians of Science and Medicine’, Isis, 100:4 (2009), 798–810; Ulinka Rublack,
‘Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions’, History Workshop Journal,
53:1 (2002), 1–16; Olivia Weisser, Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in
early modern England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 81–103.
18 Roy Porter, ‘Review of G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and
Society in Eighteenth Century Britain’, Journal of Social History, 28:4 (Summer
1995), 895.
19 Abram Van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New
England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Christia Mercer, ‘Seventeenth-
Century Universal Sympathy: Stoicism, Platonism, Leibniz, and Conway’, in Eric
Schliesser (ed.), Sympathy: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015),
107–138.
20 Hanley, ‘Eighteenth-Century Context’, 174.
21 Ibid., 183–184, 198.
22 John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eight­
eenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).
23 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), I.1.1.5, quoted in Michelle
A. Schwarze and John T. Scott, ‘Mutual Sympathy and the Moral Economy:
Adam Smith Reviews Rousseau’, Journal of Politics, 81:1 (2019), 13.
24 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.2–4, quoted in Schwarze and Scott,
‘Mutual Sympathy’, 73.
25 Schwarze and Scott, ‘Mutual Sympathy’, 66–81.
26 Hanley, ‘Eighteenth-Century Context’, 192–194.
27 Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.ii.5.1, I.ii.4.1, quoted in Schwarze and
Scott, ‘Mutual Sympathy’, 77.
28 Fonna Forman-Barzilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopoli­
tanism and Moral Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
29 Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and
English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007).
30 Evelyn L. Forget, ‘Cultivating Sympathy: Sophie Condorcet’s Letters on Sym­
pathy’, Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 23:3 (2001), 324–325.
31 Ibid., 319–337; Michael L. Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and
the Moral Sentimentalism in the Eighteenth Century and Today (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
32 See Jonathan Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century
(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009), Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability and
 Sympathy in practice 101
Ann Jessie van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in
Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
33 Jeanne M. Britton, Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–
1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), esp. 1–140.
34 Letter to Ralph Thoresby from Katherine [Catherine] Dockwray, 26 Aug 1681,
YAS/MS6/14, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.
35 Copy of letter from Ralph Thoresby to ‘Honour’d Sr’, 29 Nov 1684, f1v. YAS/
MS6/43, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.
36 Dorothy Wright to Catherine Elliott, dated ‘24 1746’ [no month, Apr or May],
f1, LD1576/1, Sheffield Archives (hereafter SA).
37 Dorothy Wright to Catherine Elliott, 23 May [1746?], LD1576/1, SA.
38 Dorothy Wright to Catherine Elliott, 27 May [1746?], LD1576/1, SA.
39 Williams, ‘“I Hope to Write as Bad as Ever”’, 103.
40 Richard Dalton to Samuel Mould, 10 Mar 1736, BAG/5/4/1/68, John Rylands
Library, Manchester.
41 John Smith to Rebecca Smith, 10 Mar 1726, LC/70/6, SA. See also Karen Harvey,
‘Epochs of Embodiment: Sex and the Material Body in the Eighteenth Century’,
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42:4 (2019), 458, 462–464.
42 Thomas Ward to ‘Mrs Herbert’ 23 Apr 1772 (with draft reply 28 Apr), f1r, f1v,
HE378, Huntington Library (hereafter HL).
43 Elizabeth Clift to William Clift 14 May 1794, f35, f36v, Add MS 39955, BL.
44 Elizabeth Clift to William Clift 18 Jan 1795, f39, Add MS 39955, BL.
45 ‘A Letter from a Person at Sea to his Friends on Shore’, Thomas Goodman, The
Experienc’d Secretary: or, Citizen and Countryman’s Companion (London, 1707),11.
46 On goal-based and rational views of emotions see: Robert Solomon, Not Pas­
sion’s Slave: Emotions and Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003);
Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cam­
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
47 Elizabeth Hare to Ann Hare, 13 Feb 1772, LD1576/4 (1), SA.
48 Elizabeth Hare to Ann Hare, no date, LD1576/4 (3), f1, SA.
49 Elizabeth Hare to Ann Hare, Saturday 19 Oct [no year], LD1576/4 (11), SA.
50 Forman-Barzilai, Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy, 62.
51 Monique Scheer, ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes
Them Have a History?) A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding’, History and
Theory (2012), 193–220.
52 Williams, ‘“I Hope to Write as Bad as Ever”’, 105.
53 Elizabeth Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century
Republic of Letters (Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 12.
54 Ibid., 168, 169.
55 Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early
America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 107.
56 Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern British
World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 118.
57 George Howell to John Rawlinson, 28 May 1698, f1r, DDHJ2/2/3, Rawlinson
family of Graythwaite, 1687–1806, Barrow Archives Centre.
58 John Yate to Edmund Herbert, 7 Nov 1749, with Herbert’s draft reply, F1r,
HE368, HL.
59 John Yate to Edmund Herbert, 7 Nov 1749, with Herbert’s draft reply, F1v,
HE368, HL.
60 Edmund Herbert to Col John Leighton, 17 Oct 1754. Copy, F1r, HE144, HL.
61 John Leighton to Edmund Herbert, 10 Dec 1754, F1r, HM145, HL.
62 John Leighton to Edmund Herbert, 10 Dec 1754, F1v, HM145, HL.
63 John Leighton to Edmund Herbert 15 Jun 1758, and Edmund’s draft reply of 28
Jul 1758, f2r, HE269, HL.
102 Karen Harvey
64 John Eliot to Mary Eliot, 30 Sep 1765, Acc.1017/1034, London Metropolitan
Archives [hereafter LMA].
65 John Eliot to Mariabella Eliot, 22 Jul 1761, ACC/1017/1024, LMA.
66 John Eliot to Mariabella Eliot, 12 Dec 1765, f1, ACC/1017/1025, LMA.
67 Mariabella Eliot to John Eliot, 20th Dec 1759, ACC/1017/1019, LMA.
68 Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2006), 19–21.
69 Christiana Shuttleworth to Ann Hare, 5 Aug 1780, f1, LD1576/5, SA.
70 Christiana Shuttleworth to Ann Hare, 5 Aug 1780, f1, LD1576/5, SA.
71 John Stutterd to Thomas Stutterd 16 May 1789, f1, SFP275, HL.
72 Jabez Stutterd to John Stutterd 20 May 1789, f1, SFP279, HL.
73 Evelyn L Forget, ‘Evocations of Sympathy: Sympathetic Imagery in Eighteenth-
Century Social Theory and Physiology’, History of Political Economy, 35:5
(2003), 284–288.
74 Pearsall, Atlantic Families, 83–89.
75 Forget, ‘Evocations of Sympathy’, 304.
76 Ibid., 294–295.
77 The Complete Letter-Writer: or, New and Polite English Secretary, 2nd edition
(London, 1756), 93.
78 Michael Stolberg, Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern
Europe (Basingstoke: Springer, 2011), 87–88.
79 The Complete Letter-Writer, 110.
80 William Rawlinson to his wife, 19 May 1706, DDHJ2/2/1, Barrow Archives Centre.
81 Lisa Wynne Smith, ‘“An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper”: The Experi­
ence of Pain in Early Eighteenth-Century England and France’, Eighteenth-Cen­
tury Studies, 41 (2008), 459.
82 Susanna Wesley to John and Charles Wesley, 21 Feb 1732, 2r, DDWF/2/9, John
Rylands Library.
83 Harvey, ‘Epochs of Embodiment’, 463–4.
84 John Stutterd to Thomas Stutterd 15 Dec 1780, f3, SFP35, HL.
85 John Stutterd to Thomas Stutterd 15 Jul 1780, SFP23, HL.
86 John Stutterd to Thomas Stutterd 26 Mar 1787, f4, SFP146, HL.
87 Thomas Stutterd to John Stutterd Mar 26–27 1787, f1–3, SFP147, HL.
88 John Stutterd to Thomas Stutterd 8 Apr 1787, SFP148, HL.
89 Thomas to John 16 Mar 1790, f1, SFP340, HL.
90 John Stutterd to Jabez Stutterd 2–5 Jul 1796, f1r, SFP681, HL.
91 Weisser, Ill Composed, 81–103.
92 Thomas Stutterd to Mary Stutterd 25 Sep 1788, SFP221, HL.
93 Noah Robert Black to Alick [Alexander Black] 11 Feb 1814, f1r-f1v, HM49197,
HL.
94 John Stutterd to Jabez Stutterd 12 Oct 1788, f2, SFP225, HL.
95 George Dyson to Thomas Stutterd, 17 Dec 1791, f1r, SFP440, HL.
96 See also Katie Barclay, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).
97 See for example Shiah, Yung-Jong, ‘From Self to Nonself: The Nonself Theory’,
Frontiers in Psychology, 7:124 (4 Feb 2016); Ildiko Csengei, Sympathy, Sensibility
and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012), 172–194.
5 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’
Pain, play and the material text in
Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella
Abigail Williams

‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing …’.1 So ended a letter written by Jonathan
Swift on 30 March 1712. The cryptic phrase shows him struggling to
describe the torment of his recent attack of shingles, searching for a sound
and a metaphor to capture his physical discomfort. In its physicality and
aurality it is not unusual – the letter is one of a series written between 1710
and 1713 and published posthumously as the Journal to Stella, in which the
exiled Irish clergyman offered a detailed and often graphic account of his life
in London to his two closest female friends, Esther Johnson and Rebecca
Dingley, who were living in Dublin. Part diary, part political history, part
personal correspondence, the Journal to Stella offers a remarkable insight
into the varied intersections between body and letter in this period. In the
public and political context, Swift used his text to record the physical ail­
ments of the notable figures who dominated his working life in London: his
sense of professional vulnerability is reflected in his preoccupation with the
failing health of Queen Anne and the Lord Treasurer, Robert Harley. The let­
ters often seem to link these very public bodies to Swift’s own physical experi­
ences, which, as seen in the title quotation, he charted with some attention.
What we also find in the Journal to Stella is an acute self-awareness of the way
the letter can substitute for the body, and create a form of textual intimacy.
Swift frequently reminds Johnson and Dingley not only of the haptic qualities
of the letter, but also of the bodily circumstances in which he writes, making
them look anew at the paper in their hands. And finally, within the surviving
manuscripts of the letters, we see a text materially shaped by the corporeal:
unable to control his pen while he was ill, Swift stopped writing the dis­
tinctively cramped and playfully obscured letters with which he used to
tease his friends: the letters written in illness look very different from those
composed in health. This chapter uses the printed and manuscript sources
for the Journal to Stella to tease out some of the many ways in which
eighteenth-century correspondence and its material presentation offered
insights into public and private bodies, real and imagined.
Over the past three decades there has been sustained critical interest in
Swift’s depiction of the human body. His imaginative and political works
draw powerfully on the shock of the physical and, as has been widely
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-8
104 Abigail Williams
recognised, he frequently uses images of the body to question the con­
temporary understanding of the civilised or the ideal. In his satirical
pamphlet, A Modest Proposal (1729), he evokes the tender young flesh of
Irish infants in order to attack English economic and political policy in Ire­
land. Graphic descriptions of monstrous Brobdingnagian breasts and child­
ish defecation in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) are used to mock the truth-telling
rhetoric of contemporary travel narratives, and to defamiliarise the norms of
contemporary society. As has been well documented, poems which seem to
mock the idealisation of the female form, such as ‘A Beautiful Young
Nymph Going to Bed’ (1734), or ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ (1732) with
its climactic revelation that ‘Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!’, return obsessively
to the hidden flaws and secretions of the natural female body.2 In ostensibly
satirising the naivety of the narrator, such poems effectively force the reader
into complicity with his acts of horrified witnessing. Carol Houlihan Flynn
has argued that Swift’s writings about the body and, in particular, the
female body, show him trying to control appetite by demystifying the female
body, containing it through nursery games that he controls.3 She examines
the trope of fascinated revulsion that recurs throughout the works, and the
way in which this offers a form of mediation of Swift’s personal responses.
Other critics have drawn attention to the way Swift uses resemblances
between the political and natural body to explore the problematic nature of
individuality, or have discussed the deployment of images of physical bru­
tality and cannibalism across his works.4 This chapter explores the way in
which the epistolary framework of Journal to Stella links the Swiftian return
to the body with the materiality of the text. It argues that the letter series
offers us new perspectives on ideas of public and private bodies, orality and
the representation of speech and intimacy and materiality.

Public bodies
The letters that make up the Journal to Stella were all written between 1710
and 1713, and were first published posthumously as a discrete collection
entitled the Journal to Stella in Thomas Sheridan’s collected The Works of
the Rev. Dr Swift in 1784.5 Not one of the replies from the two women
survives; and only a third of Swift’s letters still exist in manuscript.6 The
Journal to Stella recounts Swift’s experiences of the three most politically
active and exciting years of his career in a series of familiar and apparently
unguarded epistles to the two women. The letters are a curious blend of
high political narrative, personal memoir, business transaction, and flirta­
tious exchange. As this suggests, the Journal to Stella is at once a private
and a public document. It is a form of life-writing: a journal communicated
in letter form to at least two external readers. And at the same time, it is a
narrative of contemporary political events. During the period covered by the
Journal to Stella series, Swift was working in London on government busi­
ness, sent on behalf of the Church of Ireland to negotiate with the English
 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’ 105
authorities and gain for the Irish clergy remission by the Crown of England
of a set of clerical levies known as the First Fruits and Twentieth Parts. For
Swift, this period brought about both a political realignment and a profes­
sional transformation from a relatively obscure Irish clergyman to one con­
sidered for an English bishopric, and finally appointed Dean of St Patrick’s
in Dublin. It was an episode in his career which marked his closest point of
contact with political power in England, a time during which he saw himself
as central to the fraught governmental dynamics of the final years of Queen
Anne’s reign.
Across the course of three years of correspondence with Johnson and
Dingley, Swift relates both his daily social encounters with the political elite
and the broader events of his time. We hear first-hand of the furious par­
liamentary debates around the conduct of the war of the Spanish Succession,
the rivalry between Harley and St John, the ongoing presence of Jacobite
intrigue, alongside the workings of the coffeehouse culture of the period and
the social lives of the political elite. Because of the first-hand, detailed nature
of their content, Swift’s observations have become a primary source for
many historical accounts of the period. While we have no evidence to sug­
gest that he ever intended the Journal to Stella letters to be published, he
was clearly aware of their historiographical potential as a memoir of a life
lived in exciting times. At times he seems to present the Journal to Stella as
a first draft of contemporary history, and we can glimpse some of his exci­
tement in being present as history is made: ‘this is a long journal, and of a
day that may produce great alterations, and hazard the ruin of England … I
shall know more soon, and my letters will at least be a good history to shew
you the steps of this change.’7 Here the notion of journal is not so much
daily intimate record of domestic routine but journal as historical memoir.
Elsewhere he seems to think of the letters as something more like a secret
history, a behind-the-scenes narrative of high political life, comparable with
the eyewitness revelations of contemporary authors such as Daniel Defoe
and Delariviere Manley. Swift’s self-conscious recognition of the correspon­
dence as a form of historical record is evident in his early description of the
series: ‘These letters of mine are a sort of journal, where matters open by
degrees; and, as I tell true or false, you will find by the event whether my
intelligence be good.’8
We might assume that Swift’s representation of the body would be con­
fined to the personal, familiar aspect of the Journal to Stella and his direct
exchanges with his two female friends. But this is not the case: his accounts
of the high political life of the nation have a recursive move towards the
physical, and it is through the lens of bodily illness and its described symp­
toms that Swift reflects his anxiety over the precariousness of the con­
temporary political context. In some ways this is not surprising – the health
of the childless and frequently bedridden Queen Anne was a matter of
national concern, a constant reminder of the fragile nature of the Protestant
succession. Her body and its repeated failures and losses was at the heart of
106 Abigail Williams
ongoing anxiety about the future of the nation.9 While the Act of Settlement
of 1702 had theoretically secured the throne after Anne’s death for the
Hanoverian heirs of the German Protestant Electress Sophia, this arrange­
ment was potentially open to contest from a Jacobite claimant, and thus the
prospect of Catholic rule. The vexed question of the succession and all its
national and international implications runs through the political debates of
the first decade of the eighteenth century and is reflected in a wide range of
texts. Ambrose Phillips’s 1709 pastoral poems refashioned contemporary
Whig anxiety over the Queen’s frailty as a series of bucolic interludes in
which shepherds worried over the fate of their flock:

Nor fox, nor wolf, nor rot amongst our sheep;

From these good shepherd’s care his flock may keep:
Against ill-luck alas! all forecast fails;
Nor toil by day, nor watch by night, avails.10

This sense of impending catastrophe intensified as the years passed. In the

spring of 1713 Daniel Defoe would publish a set of three pamphlets con­
cerning the succession, in which he imagined for his readers the worst-case
outcomes of the current situation: in An Answer to a Question that No
Body Thinks of, viz, But What if the Queen Should Die? (1713) he imagines
the prospect of a French king, the loss of democratic process and the impo­
sition of Catholicism as the national religion.11 Swift’s letters also reflect a
sense of deep concern about Anne’s health and its wider ramifications.
Within the Journal to Stella there are more than thirty references to the
Queen’s gout, her agues, her health crises and remarkable recoveries, and
the appropriateness of her treatment by the royal physician, Dr John Rad­
cliffe. Swift details on a daily basis for his two distant friends these ups and
downs: ‘The queen did not stir out to-day, she is in a little fit of the gout’;12
‘th Qu— was at Church to day; but was carried in an open Chair. She has
got an Ugly Cough’;13 ‘I hear te Qu was not at Church; perhaps th Gout has
seised her again.’14 At times he is keen to reassure – both his friends, and it
seems, himself – that the rumours of danger are misplaced: ‘Bank stock is
fallen three or four per cent by the whispers about the town of the queen’s
being ill, who is however very well.’15 Even if the Glorious Revolution of
1688 had theoretically transformed monarchical authority from semi-divine
embodiment to a contractual relationship between leader and subject, the
political and symbolic force of the monarch’s two bodies was alive and well
in the decades after the Revolution.16 Queen Anne’s body was both cause
and reflection of the ongoing political uncertainty of her time, and we can
trace in the Journal to Stella Swift’s sense of the vulnerability of the body
politic to the body natural, and of his being buffeted by external events over
which he had very little control.17 At times is it not clear where exactly the
line between Swift’s accounting of his own and his monarch’s illness begins
and ends:
 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’ 107
I have taken a Vomit to day; and hope I shall be bettr: I have been very
giddy since I writt what is before, yet not as I used to be, more fre­
quent, but not so violent. Yesterday we were allarmed with te Queens
being ill. She had an Aguish & feaverish Fitt and you never saw such
Countenances as we all had; such dismal Melancholy. Her Physicians
from Town were sent for; but towards night she grew better, to day she
misst her Feet, and was up; We are not now in any Fear It will be at
worst but an Ague; and we hope even that will not return.18

Here Swift’s record of his own symptoms seems to overlap with his map­
ping of the Queen’s illness, further reinforcing the seemingly symbiotic
relationship between the political health of the nation and the wellbeing of
the letter-writer.
Swift’s physical lens on contemporary public life was not confined to
Queen Anne: the other significant figure around whom his life, happiness
and prospects depended was his chief patron, the Lord Treasurer, Robert
Harley. Swift’s sense of emotional connection with the man to whom he
owed a large part of his public success is nowhere more manifest than in his
account of the failed assassination attempt on Harley in March 1711. On 8
March, Antoine de Guiscard, a French spy, was being examined in a cabinet
meeting, when he suddenly moved forward, produced a knife and stabbed
Harley twice. Although the knife broke, lessening the impact, the Treasurer
was seriously injured, and he spent the next six weeks in bed. During the
period of this confinement, Swift published a formal account of the failed
assassination in a pamphlet, and kept careful track of the progress of Harley’s
health in his Journal to Stella. In the letters, his own physical and emotional
suffering feature prominently, and it is notable that in this context, ‘pain’ is
both an emotional and a physical sensation. Swift wrote immediately after the
attack to Johnson and Dingley ‘I am in mortal pain for him. … Pray pardon my
distraction; I now think of all his kindness to me – The poor creature now lies
stabbed in his bed by a desperate French popish villain. Good night, and God
preserve you both, and pity me; I want it.’19 Two days later, he is clearly
cheered by the first signs of recovery from Harley:

This morning Mr. secretary and I met at Court, where he went to the
queen, who is out of order and aguish: I doubt the worse for this acci­
dent to Mr. Harley. We went together to his house, and his wound
looks well, and he is not feverish at all, and I think it is foolish in me to
be so much in pain as I am.20

Swift’s ‘pain’ elides the aftereffects of the physical violence experienced by

Harley with his own emotional distress. He writes similarly on 12 March:
‘We have been in terrible pain to-day about Mr. Harley, who never slept last
night and has been very feverish.’21 A day later, his sense of shared suffering
is literalised when he experiences his own accident and injury:
108 Abigail Williams
Mr. Harley is better to-day, slept well all night, and we are a little out
of our fears. I send and call three or four times every day. I went into
the city for a walk, and dined there with a private man; and coming
home this evening broke my shin in the Strand over a tub of sand left
just in the way.22

Swift was to continue to link the two incidents in his letters to Johnson and
Dingley: ‘My journals are like to be very diverting, now I cannot stir
abroad, between accounts of Mr. Harley’s mending, and of my broken
shin.’23 The assassination attempt releases a fascination with the sick and
injured body that colours all he sees. Confined at first by his injury to his
sick bed, he resorts to telling Johnson and Dingley about their mutual friend
Biddy Floyd’s battle with the smallpox, of another woman recently dead of
the same disease, and of the assassin, Guiscard’s painful death of his
wounds and blood loss. Once able to get out and about again, he visits his
friends and brings back further bodily encounters:

Mr. Harley is not yet well, but his extravasated blood continues, and I
doubt he will not be quite well in a good while: I find you have heard of
the fact by Southwell’s letters from Ireland: What do you think of it? I
dined with Sir John Percival, and saw his lady sitting in the bed, in the
forms of a lying-in woman; and coming home my sore shin itched, and I
forgot what it was, and rubbed off the s—b, and blood came; but I am
now got into bed, and have put on allum curd, and it is almost well.24

In this passage, Swift moves from his reportage of Harley’s recovery, to the
appearance of an acquaintance during her confinement, to his own recent
injury. While they are none of them causally connected, we can see the way
in which Swift circles around public bodies and private bodies, to return,
rather graphically, to the skin and blood of his own. It is a move repeated
elsewhere in the Journal to Stella, where Swift continually grounds his
anxiety and fascination with the physical within the detail of his own
corporeality.
One of the most striking aspects of the story of the failed assassination,
particularly from a modern perspective, is the way in which Swift memor­
ialised his connection to the event through material objects. He writes in the
immediate aftermath of the stabbing: ‘I had the penknife in my hand, which
is broken within a quarter inch of the handle. I have a mind to write and
publish an account of all the particularities of this fact: it will be very cur­
ious.’25 He kept both the knife and the plaster from Harley’s wound until
his death, when they were handed back to the Harley family. A letter from
John Lyon, his executor, records:

After the Death of my ever to be honoured & admired Friend and

Patron Dr Swift, I took care of that Knife & also of the first Plaster,
 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’ 109
that was taken off the Wound, both which the good Dean had pre­
served, & did afterwards wrap them together, in a Paper, with a short
Acct of tht Villain’s Attempt.26

The broken knife, the discarded plaster – these seem to come to bear a
totemic significance for Swift, a connection through objects to the threa­
tened body, and the threatened body politic, to which he was bound in such
close connection, and an emblem of recovery. It is interesting that although
he would later come to feel he had been failed by the Tory ministry, and
write a series of poems and prose pieces representing Harley in a less flat­
tering light, he nonetheless held on to these relics. The attempted assassi­
nation was a moment when his political status was assured: he was close to
those at the heart of power, and he was valued. Political intimacy endured
through the affairs and things of the body.?

Intimate bodies and voices

As we have seen in this account, political disquiet – and its personal implica­
tions – are refracted in the Journal to Stella letters through the diurnal accounts
of the health of the nation’s leaders, which often seem to overlap with Swift’s
accounts of his own wellbeing. The body is also at the heart of the more per­
sonal aspects of the Journal to Stella, and its mediation of Swift’s relationship
with Johnson and Dingley. We know very little about the biography of either
woman beyond what Swift himself wrote, since most of what we know about
Esther Johnson comes from Swift’s short biographical sketch begun on the
night of Johnson’s death in 1728.27 He had first met her in his twenties, when
she was a child of eight or nine, in the spring of 1689, when he arrived at Moor
Park, the household of his employer, Sir William Temple. Johnson’s mother,
Bridget Johnson, was in the service of Lady Martha Giffard, sister of Sir Wil­
liam, and Esther Johnson was frequently present in the household. Rebecca
Dingley, then aged around 23, was a dependent relation of Temple, and the
two women had become friendly at Moor Park.28 On Temple’s death in
1699, Johnson received some money and land in Ireland, and in 1700–1701
she and Dingley were encouraged by Swift to move there, ostensibly for
financial reasons, because the cost of living was cheaper. By the time Swift
was writing his Journal to Stella letters, they had spent the past decade
living in close proximity in Ireland, with a shared social circle. During this
time, as the editors of Swift’s Account Books note, they had become the
closest thing Swift had to a family.29 When Swift left Ireland for London at
the end of August 1710, he wrote confidently to them that he would be home
by Christmas. As it turned out, it was three years before he returned. Over
the course of that period, he often wrote daily to the two women, who he
referred to jointly as ‘MD’ (‘my dears’) or ‘ladies’, describing for them his
distant life in the metropolis, asking after mutual friends, undertaking
errands and passing on news.
110 Abigail Williams
Like many elite and non-elite correspondents of the era, such as those
discussed in Feldberg and King’s chapters in this volume, Swift used his
letters to record his physical ailments. Over the course of the series, he suf­
fers sickness, dizziness, colds, and a violent attack of shingles: ‘I know not
what’s the matter; it has never been thus before: two days together giddy
from morning till night, but not without any violence or pain; and I totter a
little’;30 ‘came home, because I was not very well, but a little griped: but
now I am well again’;31 ‘in my conscience I fear I shall have the gout. I
sometimes feel pains about my feet and toes’;32 ‘I have still one or two
itching Pimples, and a little Pain now and then.’33 These – along with their
various treatments (gold beater’s skin, allum, melilot plasters, vomits and
clysters) – are described in some detail. In return, Johnson and Dingley seem
to have shared their woes – the fate of Johnson’s eyesight is a frequent
refrain in Swift’s letters. The three of them also swapped news about the
health of mutual acquaintances, or even non-mutual acquaintances: ‘I was to
see lady ——, who is just up after lying-in; and the ugliest sight I have seen,
dead, old and yellow for want of her paint. She has turned my stomach.’34. But
beyond the figuration of ill health, we can also see the ways in which the
mediated body helps shape the form and content of the letters. This is evident
through the orality of the letters; their imaginings of physical situations; and in
the material form of the surviving manuscripts.
Throughout the journal, Swift emphasises the role of the letters as a form
of intimate and familiar communication, a diary that offers a substitute for
physical companionship. The letter is frequently depicted as conversation,
and its words as speech. This is, as numerous theorists and historians of
epistolary form have noted, a commonplace of the early modern and eight­
eenth-century letter, an idiom used to create a fantasy that the addressee will
surmount absence.35 In his exchanges with the two women, Swift repeatedly
tries to replicate speech, often through performative set pieces, staged dia­
logue or mimicry. He imitates street cries, asks direct questions and antici­
pates their answers, and claims to be writing just as he speaks.36

What’s all this to you? What care you for Atterburys and Smallridges?
No, you care for nothing but Presto, faith. So I’ll rise, and bid you
farewel; yet I’m loth to do so, because there is a great bit of paper yet to
talk upon; but Dingley will have it so: Yes, says she, make your journals
shorter, and send them oftener; and so I will.37

Or

I was this morning to visit the dean, or Mr. Prolocutor, I think you call
him, don’t you? Why should not I go to the dean’s as well as you? A
little black man of pretty near fifty? Aye, the same, A good pleasant
man? Aye, the same. Cunning enough? Yes. One that understands his
own interests? As well as any body. How comes it MD and I don’t meet
 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’ 111
there sometimes? A very good face, and abundance of wit; do you know
his lady? O Lord! whom do you mean? I mean Dr. Atterbury, dean of
Carlisle and Prolocutor. Pshaw, pdfr, you are a fool: I thought you had
meant our dean of St. Patrick’s. – Silly, silly, silly, you are silly, both are
silly, every kind of thing is silly.38

While these passages mimic the multiple exchanges of conversation, its

movement and even its potential confusion, Swift’s attempts to mimic
spoken language are of course not really like actual speech, in that they edit
out much of the inarticulacy and repetitiveness of spoken language. But he is
insistent on reminding his readers of the spokenness of his words: ‘I wish
you could hear me repeating all I have said of this in its proper tone, just as
I am writing it. ’Tis all with the same cadence with oh hoo, or as when little
girls say, I have got an apple, miss and I won’t give you some.’39 In the let­
ters, he draws on a range of techniques to represent his letters as spoken
interactions with his addressees. Perhaps the most distinctive of these is the
‘little language’ of the letters, the intimate babytalk with which Swift
addresses Johnson and Dingley. ‘O Rold, I must go no further fear of
aboozing fine Radyes [Oh hold, I must go no further for fear of abusing fine
ladies]’; ‘A mellyTlismas; melliTlismas, I sd it first. I wish oo a sousandzoll,
with halt and soul [A merry Christmas; merry Christmas, I said it first. I
wish you a thousand fold, with heart and soul]’; ‘Maram ppt oo are vely­
tempezant [Madam, you are very unpleasant]’; ‘Pay cake cale of oo Health
[pray take care of your health]’.40 In the portions of little language that
remain, largely found in the letters derived from manuscript sources, we find
a form of words that, unlike many modern codes, is not based on spelling,
but on sound; so, for example, any k sound such as k, ck, ch, c may be
replaced by a t. The little language works on the basis of mutation by sub­
stitution, the most common of which is ‘l’ for ‘r’ and vice versa. We can
infer from one handwritten correction on a letter by Rebecca Dingley that
the ladies also used some form of the language in writing back to Swift.
Dingley both refers to Swift as ‘pdfr’ or ‘poor dear fellow’, and uses the
baby language when she corrects Swift’s misdated letter 51, and writes
‘Podefar was misken’ (‘Pdfr was mistaken’) in the margin of the letter.41
It appears that in this language, Swift was trying to represent on paper a
pronunciation which would recall the very tones of his voice to the ladies in
Dublin, yet at the same time he had to write forms which the eye could
identify immediately. The letters must then have become vocal performances
when they were read out by Rebecca Dingley to Esther Johnson (Johnson is
repeatedly cautioned not to read the letters herself on account of her weak
eyesight).42 The little language is insistently oral. Swift himself writes of the
impulse to speak his entries: in letter 17 he writes: ‘Do you know what?
when I am writing in our language I make up my mouth just as if I was
speaking it. I caught myself at it just now.’43 This in turn brings its own
absurdities: ‘I have my mouth full of water, and was going to spit it out,
112 Abigail Williams
because I reasoned with myself, how could I write when my mouth was
full.’44 Unusually, it is language whose orality is crucial to both writing and
reading: the mouth demands to be held in a particular way as the language
is written down, and again as it was read out. But while it may seem to be a
form of baby language, it is an adult attempt to represent childish speech
rather than an accurate transcription of infantile speech patterns. The con­
sonantal substitutions are not those a young child would make. It is prob­
ably quite closely related to the sounds of mothers talking to children.
Contextual linguistic analysis of the little language has emphasised this
quality:

experience of language of this kind and evidence from the forms Swift
writes shows that the lips must be strongly pursed and the speech in
consequence would be markedly labialised. This posture is the ‘com­
forting’ position used in baby-talk to infants, chiefly by women.45

Swift returns again and again to the figure of the nurse and wet nurse in his
writings, and through the little language of the Journal to Stella, that figure
is mediated in linguistic terms.46 We see the insistent physicality of speech in
the Journal to Stella letters: part written in a form of language which insis­
ted upon oral presentation, in the act of reading aloud the reader was forced
to adopt physical postures which reflected early childhood intimacies. The
physical, oral delivery demanded by Swift’s writing is intrinsically connected
to emotional intimacy within the group. In letter 10, he writes of one of his
corrections: ‘Faith, I could hardly forbear our little language about a nasty
dead chancellor, as you may see by the blot.’47 The chancellor was evidently
an unworthy subject of the special language that the three friends used.
There is an explicit link between the choice of linguistic form and the ideal
of a separation of emotional space within the form of the letter. The little
language seems here to be associated with an innocence, or an intimacy
untainted by the rest of the world it excludes.48

Imagined bodies and writers

Swift’s representation of his relationship with Johnson and Dingley within
the letters is complex. As we have seen, at times he adopts the role of older
comforter, addressing the two women – Johnson in her late twenties,
Dingley, like Swift, in her mid-forties – as young children. It is hard for us
now to know the precise dynamics of the little language – did speaking
together using the same idiom create a sense that all three were children, or
that one, probably Swift, was the parent figure, using babytalk to build a
connection with his addressees? It is clear that the vocal performance of the
letters creates a sense of immediacy and presence, enabling the three con-
versants to occupy a virtual shared space. This recreation of a shared epis­
tolary moment is also achieved through a focus on the material condition of
 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’ 113
the text. Swift frequently draws attention to the physical features of the
letter that the two women held before them. ‘Here must I begin another
letter, on a whole sheet, for fear sawcy little MD should be angry, and think
much that the paper is too little’;49 ‘So, now the puppy’s come in, and I have
got my own ink, but a new pen; and so now you are rogues and sauce-boxes
till I go to bed; for I must go study, sirrahs.’50 He remarks on the paper the
ladies hold in their hands in ways that put all three in the same physical
space: ‘Is that tobacco at the top of the paper, or what? I don’t remember I
slobbered.’51 ‘But when must I answer this letter of our MD’s? Here it is, it
lies between this paper on t’other side the leaf: one of these odd-come­
shortly’s I’ll consider, and so good night.’52 ‘– How could I help it, pray?
Patrick snufft the candle too short, and the grease ran down upon the paper.
It en’t my fault, ’tis Patrick’s fault; pray now don’t blame Presto.’53 Because
the majority of the letters no longer survive in manuscript, we have only
these textual indicators left as evidence of the material form of the page. Yet
in inscribing these features, the letter form facilitates a fiction of all three
conversants present in a combined physical space, exploring and witnessing
the same object, in the same moment. It stages a shared moment of pro­
duction and consumption, writing and reading, noticing and interpreting.
The self-consciousness of the act of letter-writing and reading does not end
there. Swift liked to remind his readers of the potentially suggestive cir­
cumstances of his location: ‘Smoak how I widen the margin by lying in bed
when I write. My bed lies on the wrong side for me, so that I am forced
often to write when I am up.’54 Here and elsewhere, the very form and
script of the writing insists on the intimate context of its composition. At
other times the mingling of body and text effects a slapstick comedy: ‘I’ll
keep it between the two sheets; here it is, just under; oh, I lifted up the sheet
and saw it there: lie still, you shan’t be answered yet, little letter; for I must
go to bed and take care of my head.’55
In eighteenth-century letters, the physical presence of correspondents’ bodies
was brought forth using a number of techniques, as several of the chapters in this
volume (including those by Goldsmith, Raapke, Harvey and Perl-Rosenthal)
suggest. In playing with the confusion between paper sheets and bedsheets, letters
and persons, Swift’s emphasis on the physical presence of the letter allows him
to conjure the physical presence of its addressees in erotic and titillating ways.
The present tense dramatisation of the disappearing letter animates the scene,
putting bodies and pages in motion. He pushes his readers to look at the
material evidence of the pages before them – the slanting hand, the wider spa­
cing – and to infer from it the scenes of his writing in undress, in bed: ‘Smoak
how wide the lines are, but faith I don’t do it on purpose: but I have changed
my side in this new Chelsea bed, and I don’t know how, methinks, but it is so
unfit, and so aukward, never saw the like.’56
In an entry of 7 January 1711 he effectively uses the conceit of the letter to
create a sense of temporal progression as he writes, and effectively to take
the two women into bed with him:
114 Abigail Williams
so good morrow, sirrahs, and let me rise, pray. I took up this paper
when I came in at evening, I mean this minute, and then said I, No, no,
indeed, MD, you must stay, and then was laying it aside, but could not
for my heart, though I am very busy, till I just ask you how you do since
morning; by and bye we shall talk more, so let me leave you softly down,
little paper, till then; so there – now to business; there, I say, get you gone;
no, I won’t push you neither, but hand you on one side – So – Now I am
got into bed, I’ll talk with you.57

In other places his writing is charged with sexual innuendo. He conjures his
body for the two women in various states of undress, his and their bodies
imagined in ways they were almost certainly not mutually known. On 5
February 1711 he writes: ‘’tis still terribly cold – I wish my cold hand was in
the warmest place about you, young women.’58 He refers to them as ‘dee­
lestsawcy doxes’ and ‘extravagant sluttikins’. Throughout, they are made
complicit in risqué jokes that would have been deeply inappropriate for two
virginal maiden ladies in their middle years. He writes of the ladies of Ire­
land, ‘who never walk at all, as if their legs were of no use, but to be laid
aside’.59 He repeats verses written on St John: ‘Gently I wait the call of
Charon’s boat, / Still drinking like a fish and —— like a stoat.’60 Within this
letter series, absence seems to enable virtual intimacies, and virtual liberties
which were not possible, or perhaps even desirable in real life. Located at
great geographical and temporal distance from his readers, Swift imagines a
present-tense intimacy in which the letter creates a bodily connection far
surpassing that ever likely to have been realised – he once claimed never to
have been on his own in a room alone with Esther Johnson in his life.61 The
epistolary form of the Journal to Stella created bodily encounters that
transgressed most of the norms of the relationships underpinning it. It
enabled Swift to ‘speak’ and imagine acting in ways that were not otherwise
permitted.

The marks of the body

So far the chapter has been talking about the body and letter as a relation­
ship which is based on conscious representation of the body: as an indicator
of anxiety, eroticism, intimacy. But the last part of this chapter considers the
way in which the material letters also bear the marks of Swift’s illness.
Within the Journal to Stella series, Swift was remarkably consistent in his
writing and sending, trying to sustain a cycle within which he was writing
one letter, one was on its way to the ladies, and a third was being read by
them:

And now let us come and see what this saucy dear letter of MD says.
Come out, letter, come out from between the sheets; here it is under­
neath, and it won’t come out. Come out again, I say: so there. Here it
 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’ 115
is. What says pdfr to me, pray? says it. Come, and let me answer for
you to your ladies. Hold up your head then, like a good letter. There.
Pray, how have you got up with pdfr? madam Ppt. You write your
eighth when you receive mine: now I write my twelfth, when I receive
your eighth. Don’t you allow for what are upon the road, simpleton?
What say you to that?62

The extant manuscript letters from this period of good health show us a con­
sistent presentation: individually numbered letters with a cramped patchwork
of dense script, in which each daily entry begins on the left hand side and fin­
ishes pushed up to the margin on the right hand side. The endearments and
little language are often obliterated with a swirled form of crossing out. The
margins are almost non-existent; the compressed hand often hard to read.
However, this changes with Swift’s prolonged attack of shingles in the spring
of 1712. He began to feel ill on 29 March, plagued with pains in his shoulder,
which he first attributed to rheumatism, and then he became sicker, resuming
his journal after a period of days missed. When he did resume, he offered a very
detailed description of his illness and symptoms:

31. Ap. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,–8. All these days I have been extreamly ill, tho I
twice crawld out a week ago; but am now recovering, thô very weak; The
violence of my Pain abated the night before last; I will just tell Y how I was
& then send away this Lettr wch ought to have gone Saterday last. The
Pain encreasd with mighty Violence in my left Shouldr & Collar bone &
that side my Neck. On Thursday morning appeared great Red Spots in all
those Places where my Pain was, & the violence of the Pain was confined
to my Neck behind a little on the left side; which was so violent that I not a
minutes ease nor hardly a minutes sleep in 3 days & nights. the Spots
encreasd every day & had little Pimples which are now grown white & full
of corruption [tho] small. the Red still continues too, and most prodigious
hott & inflamed. The Disease is the Shingles I eat nothing but Water
gruell; I am very weak but out of all violent Pain. The Doctrs say it would
have ended in some violent Disease if it had not came out thus. I shall now
recover fast. I have been in no danger of Life, but miserable Torture, I must
not write too much – so adieu.63

There is a marked change in Swift’s pattern of writing and sending from

the start of the shingles episode onwards. As we can see from this pas­
sage, the pattern of daily entries collapses entirely during the most severe
phase of the illness – and he draws MD’s attention to this change of
habit, to the impact of the body on the letter. The journal ceases to
become a daily record for the next six months: there are only seventeen
entries in total between the beginning of May 1713, and mid-December
of that year. The letters from this period look different: composed of
only one or two entries, the lines widely spaced and the writing large
116 Abigail Williams
and clear, they little resemble the squashed script that is typical of earlier
and later letters. Swift returns to daily journal entries in from mid-
December 1712 to the end of April 1713, but the letters and entries are
never again quite as full as the period before the illness: it seems as
though once Swift had got out of the habit of the long daily entry, he
never quite regained it.
Numerous critics and editors have drawn attention to a psychological
dimension to the patterning of Swift’s journal correspondence in the
latter part of the Journal to Stella, noting a diminishing emotional
involvement from early 1712 onwards, which some have attributed to
his developing relationship with his close friend Esther Vanhomrigh.64
Yet the correlation between the onset of illness, and the change in
appearance and frequency of his correspondence with Johnson and
Dingley suggests an alternative, or supplementary explanation: that
changes in the emotional tempo and frequency of the letters were the
consequences of Swift’s illness. He returns again and again to the sub­
ject of his epistolary style in his letters to MD after the illness. He
writes on 10 May: ‘I have not yet ease or Humor enough to go on in my
Journall Method, tho I have left my Chambr these 10 days.’65 Three
weeks later: ‘I cannot yet arrive to my Journall letters, My Pains con­
tinuing still tho with less Violence, but I don’t love to write Journalls
while I am in pain, and above all, not Journalls to Md.’66 Two weeks
later he is still unable to resume: ‘I have been so tosticated about since
my last, that I could not go on in my Journall manner, tho my Shoulder
is a great deal better.’67 It seems that the playful style of writing to MD
was a source of pleasure, perhaps of physical release, that could not
flourish under physical discomfort. This is reflected in the dimunition of
the playfulness of earlier letters – one of the things that is distinctive
about the Journal to Stella letters is the way in which Swift writes his
endearments in baby language and then appears to cross them out,
before he sends the letters, using a distinctive form of circular oblitera­
tion.68 There is a correlation between the prevalence of obliteration and
Swift’s state of mind and health when he was writing to Johnson and
Dingley. The deletion stops when he has the shingles from March to
May 1712, which is roughly between letters 42 and 53. As we have seen,
the letters composed at this time look entirely different: they are much

Figure 5.1 Letter 41, Add. MS. 4804, fol. 55v.

Courtesy of the British Library.
 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’ 117
more legible, widely spaced, with larger handwriting, and are generally
much shorter, composed on a single occasion, not across a whole week.
The image in Figure 5.1 shows an example of a typically obliterated
salutation, from letter 41, with its distinctive compressed and overlined
ending of the daily entry. We might compare this with the ending of
letter 44, which is one of the shingles series, where we find a very dif­
ferent-looking salutation, which is represented in Figure 5.2: here the
ending is open, legible and unobliterated, and is followed by Swift’s
comment ‘Fais, I don’t conceal a bitt’. The material form of the corre­
spondence was clearly shaped by Swift’s body and his sense of health
and ill-health in very marked ways. The letters sound, look, and work
differently during and after his serious illness, and there is a notable

Figure 5.2 Letter 44, Add. MS. 4804, fol. 60v.

Courtesy of the British Library.
118 Abigail Williams
shift in the ways they are able to mediate the relationships at their
heart. The letters were hard to access while their author was well, and
far more readable during his period of ill health. It appears that the
‘difficulty’ of the obliterated and scrawled letters was a further dimen­
sion of their playful flirtation with their readers, using the material text
to enact complex games of decipherment and revelation.

Conclusion
Swift’s Journal to Stella letters foreground many aspects of the epistolary
body that are explored elsewhere in this collection. We can see the way in
which the body mediates private and public concerns, how writing for
reading aloud can create its own striking and immediate orality, and how
the letter can forge intimacy through a range of textual and material strate­
gies. The Journal to Stella demonstrates the degree to which the somatic can
operate as a reflection of external concerns, at the same time as it performs
versions of erotic intimacy. What is perhaps most striking reading across the
textual and material evidence of these missives is the insight they offer into
the letter as a genre which enables forms of physicality not possible in the
real world. It can enable the writer to say and imagine words and scenarios
very far from the lived reality of the relationships underpinning the corre­
spondence. In the Journal to Stella, letters embody imagined situations and
intimacies that extend far beyond those known or probably even desired by
Swift and his friends. As the twenty-first-century reader pries into the dimly
lit word games of this curious threesome, she is struck by the creative lib­
erties unleashed by the epistolary form, its ability to take both reader and
writer into newly imagined physical and mental spaces. Yet at the same
time, the letters manifest the very real limitations of the body, its weak­
nesses and discomforts a context which shapes the very form of the epistle
itself.

Notes
1 Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella: Letters to Esther Johnson and Rebecca Dingley
1710–1713, (ed.), Abigail Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2013), 419.
2 See, for example, Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cam­
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
3 Ibid., 5.
4 James Ward, ‘Personations: The Political Body in Jonathan Swift’s Fiction’, Irish
University Review, 41 (2011), 40–53; Claude Rawson, God, Gulliver and Geno­
cide: Barbarism and the European Imagination (Oxford: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); Julia K. Callander, ‘Cannibalism and Communion in Swift’s
“Receipt to Restore Stella’s Youth”’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 54
(2014), 585–604; Ronald Paulson, ‘Swift, Stella, and Permanence’, ELH, 27
(1960), 298–314.
 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’ 119
5 The works of the Rev. Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin.
Arranged, Revised, and Corrected, with Notes, by Thomas Sheridan, A. M.
(London, 1784).
6 For an account of the textual history of the journal and its combination of
printed and manuscript copy texts, see Abigail Williams’s introduction in Swift,
Journal to Stella, lxxi–lxxxiv.
7 Swift, Journal to Stella, 342.

8 Ibid., 36.

9 Anne experienced seventeen pregnancies over the course of her reign. There were

multiple miscarriages, six still-born infants, two babies who died within hours of
birth, and two daughters who died as infants. Her son and heir William, Duke of
Gloucester died at 11 years old.
10 Ambrose Philips, second pastoral, Poems of Ambrose Philips, (ed.), M. G. Segar
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1937), 50.
11 Daniel Defoe, An Answer to a Question that No Body Thinks of, viz, But What
If the Queen Should Die? (London, 1713).
12 Swift, Journal to Stella, 260.
13 Ibid., 409.
14 Ibid., 520.
15 Ibid., 243.
16 For history and interpretation of the theory of the monarch’s two bodies, see E.
H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theol­
ogy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957). On the literary repre­
sentation of Elizabeth’s body and succession anxieties, see Marie Axton, The
Queen’s Two Bodies, Drama and the Elizabethan Succession (London: Royal
Historical Society, 1977). For studies of shifting political mythologies around
Elizabeth I, James I, and Charles I, and their literary and artistic uses, see Jona­
than Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare,
Donne and their Contemporaries (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1983).
17 On the link between humoral theory and models of authority and the body
politic, see Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau, Gout: The Patrician Malady (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press,1998); Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of
Commerce & Empire: Britain and its Tropical Colonies 1660–1830 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010).
18 Swift, Journal to Stella, 445.

19 Ibid., 159.

20 Ibid., 161.

21 Ibid., 161.

22 Ibid., 162.

23 Ibid., 163.

24 Ibid., 167–168.

25 Ibid., 161–162.

26 John Lyon to Deane Swift, 8 Mar 1783, National Art Library, Forster MS

570.
27 ‘On the death of Mrs Johnson’, Miscellaneous and Autobiographical Pieces,
Fragments and Marginalia, in Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, (ed.), Herbert
Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1939–1968), 5, 227–236.
28 On Rebecca Dingley’s family background, see Margaret Toynbee, ‘The Two Sir
John Dingleys’, Notes & Queries, 198 (1953), 478–483.
29 The Account Books of Jonathan Swift, eds. Paul V Thompson and Dorothy Jay
Thompson (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1984), xxxv.
30 Swift, Journal to Stella, 187.
120 Abigail Williams
31 Ibid., 362.
32 Ibid., 251.
33 Ibid., 432.
34 Ibid., 350. On Swift’s attitudes to and depiction of pregnancy and maternity, see
Louise Barnett, Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006), 103–124.
35 See Gary Schneider, Vernacular Letters and Letter-Writing in Early Modern
England, 1500–1700 (Delaware: University of Delaware, 2005), 29; Janet Gurkin
Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Ohio: Ohio State University Press,
1982), 135; Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basing­
stoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 22.
36 Frederik N. Smith, ‘Dramatic Elements in Swift’s Journal to Stella’, Eighteenth-
Century Studies, 1 (1968), 332–52.
37 Swift, Journal to Stella, 111.
38 Ibid., 113.
39 Ibid., 51.
40 Ibid., 452, 472, 493, 486.
41 Ibid., 440.
42 On the tropes of sight and vision and the reading aloud of the letters, see Aileen
Douglas, ‘Mrs. Dingley’s Spectacles: Swift, Print and Desire’, Eighteenth-Century
Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr 10 (1995), 69–77.
43 Swift, Journal to Stella, 157–158.
44 Ibid., 62.
45 E. M. Whitley, ‘Contextual Analysis and Swift’s Little Language of the Journal
to Stella’, in In Memory of J. R. Firth, (ed.), C. E. Bazell et al. (London: Long-
man, 1966), 475–500, 490.
46 On Swift’s recurring interest in nurse and wet nursing, see Flynn, The Body in
Swift and Defoe, 100–105.
47 Swift, Journal to Stella, 77.
48 For further discussion, see Abigail Williams, ‘“I Hope to Write as Bad as Ever”:
Swift’s Journal to Stella and the Intimacy of Correspondence’, Eighteenth-Cen­
tury Life, 35 (2011), 102–118.
49 Swift, Journal to Stella, 16.
50 Ibid., 84.
51 Ibid., 38.
52 Ibid., 86.
53 Ibid., 172.
54 Ibid., 19.
55 Ibid., 133.
56 Ibid., 202.
57 Ibid., 115.
58 Ibid., 134.
59 Ibid., 208.
60 Ibid., 119. On Swift’s complex attitude towards gender and sexual innuendo
in the Journal, see Barnett, Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women,
47–48.
61 There has been considerable critical discussion of the nature of the relationship
between Swift and Johnson, including theories of a secret marriage, which date
back to the mid eighteenth century. For a summary of the various theories, see
Barnett, Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women, 40–42.
62 Swift, Journal to Stella, 105–106.
63 Ibid., 420.
 ‘Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing’ 121
64 For a fuller discussion of Swift’s relationship with Vanhomrigh, see Barnett,
Swift in the Company of Women, 60–72.
65 Swift, Journal to Stella, 422.
66 Ibid., 425.
67 Ibid., 429.
68 See Abigail Williams, ‘The Difficulties of Swift’s Journal to Stella’, The Review
of English Studies, New Series, 62:257 (November 2011), 758–776.
6 Blackness, whiteness and bodily
degeneration in British women’s
letters from India
Onni Gust

In 1810, Catherine, Lady Mackintosh (née Allen, 1765–1830) wrote a ‘Political

Epistle’ to her husband from the Cumbrian, part of the Bombay merchant fleet
bound for Britain loaded with a cargo of hemp, as well as passengers.1 Mack­
intosh was returning home, accompanied by her three children, to her family
and friends after a six-year residence in Bombay (Mumbai). Her husband, Sir
James Mackintosh (1765–1832), remained behind with his three daughters
from an earlier marriage in order to continue performing his duties as Recorder
of the Court. Mackintosh’s six-page ‘Political Epistle’, written in verse, began
with a comparison between her husband’s ‘plight’ and that of ‘the Negro’ who
had been enslaved and separated from his wife and children. Both, Mackintosh
claimed, were doomed to a life of isolation and exile, one to the labour camps
of the Caribbean, and the other to the material grandeur of Bombay’s elite
Anglo-Indian society. The main difference between her husband and ‘the
Negro’, Mackintosh stated, lay in the colour of their skin, which acted as a
mere cover for what she perceived to be similar feelings and predicaments.2
Neither her vastly exaggerated horrors of Anglo-Indian life in Bombay, nor the
reference to bodily difference were new topics of epistolary conversation for
Mackintosh, who obsessed over the threat that Bombay posed to the manners
and morals, as well as to the bodily constitutions and looks, of her family. Her
‘Epistle’ developed these themes in verse, shifting focus from her husband to the
general state of the Anglo-Indian community. The poem narrated the typical
life-path of the young, ‘European’ woman from her arrival on the shores of
Bombay, to her rapid courtship and unhappy marriage to an East India Com­
pany man. The concomitant swift decline of the woman’s body reflects this
transition. The burdens of childbirth and motherhood, alongside an ‘exhaust­
ing’ climate, destroy her ‘light and pliant form’ and youthful grace, transform­
ing her into a ‘shapeless swol’n squalid figure’.3
Catherine Mackintosh was not unique in making a connection between
bodily degeneration and moral decline. Indeed, her ‘Epistle’ reflects a wider
discourse in which bodily difference, including skin colour, ‘deformity’, and
the susceptibility of the body to decay served as markers of moral and
‘civilised’ status. This correlation between bodily states and wider social
mores had a long inheritance, which combined ancient pathological models
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-9
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 123
4
with Christian teachings on the meaning of life, death and disease. In the
eighteenth century, however, ideas about the body in British culture and
society were undergoing transformation in constitutive relationship to
imperial expansion. As the chapters by Goldsmith and Haggerty in this
volume make clear, the changes wrought to the body by new environments
(in this case, continental Europe and the Caribbean) were often subjects for
comment in eighteenth-century British letters. Reports of encounters with
people whose physical appearance and moral worldviews appeared radically
different and unfamiliar raised questions about the meaning of bodily attri­
butes.5 Furthermore, as greater numbers of Europeans lived and died in
places such as India and the Caribbean, where climates and lifestyles were
different to those from which they had emigrated, questions about bodily
adaptability and the relationship between constitution, climate and character
became more pressing.6 As a concept that categorises and demarcates the
boundaries between different peoples, ‘race’ in the eighteenth century
became associated with the combination of bodily and cultural differences
that were increasingly marked as inherent and hereditary. In the context of
European colonial conquest and imperial expansion, the racialised body was
harnessed to the project of justifying and consolidating imperial rule, a
process that has been well-documented by historians looking at the emer­
gence of colonial race science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.7
Eighteenth-century colonial race science has largely been associated with
the literature of natural history and philosophy that was dominated by elite
men such as Buffon, Linnaeus, Montesquieu, Kant and Hume, whose names
have become synonymous with the Enlightenment. Yet for their racial sche­
mas and philosophical arguments for white superiority to become part of
the common-sense worldview of wider European society, it was necessary
for them to be employed and circulated far beyond the libraries of elite
homes and universities. Letters played a fundamental role in adopting and
disseminating those ideas and embedding them as part of the articulation of
lived experience. As Dena Goodman has argued, letters embodied the prac­
tices of exchange, conversation and the circulation of ideas that were central
to the Enlightenment’s vision of society.8 The observations and experiences
of letters from colonial travels often provided the foundations upon which
male philosophers constructed their universalising theories of human differ­
ence and development, theories upon which they built their names and
reputations.9 At the same time, letters played an intimate part in forging
human connection. Letters, Liz Stanley argues, are invitations to engage in a
dialogue, invitations that fashion both an ‘epistolary self’ and a community
in relationship to that self.10 In the colonial context, that epistolary dialogue
was the primary medium through which eighteenth-century imperialists
could share their lives and experiences with their family and friends across
vast distances. Letters to and from India and Britain were valuable sources
of news of events that, by the time they reached (and if they reached) their
recipients, were at least six months out of date. Writers often duplicated
124 Onni Gust
letters to be sent overland and by sea and kept a copy for themselves; this
process of duplication and transcription is often what has enabled the pre­
servation of these letters.
The eighteenth-century letter was a capacious genre, ranging from the
epistolary novel, didactic manuals, travel narrative and political critiques, to
unpublished correspondence between lovers, and diaries circulated among
family and friends.11 Published or unpublished, letters from colonial sites
served a multiplicity of functions: they enabled the reconstitution of familial
relationships and friendship networks, configured and performed selfhood,
and offered insights into different cultures, societies and places.12 These
functions were not mutually exclusive; rather, they came together to config­
ure community identity around the idea of a ‘white’ subjectivity that was
deeply ambivalent, often nebulous and contradictory. This chapter examines
the use of debates over race in the published and unpublished letters of
British women writing from India during the long eighteenth century, asking
what role racial schemas played in their representations of bodily difference
in India and examining their intersection with ideas of femininity. It begins
by situating these letters and letter-writing practices in the context of British
imperial expansion into India. It then examines the ways in which British
women’s letters drew on colonial race science in order to configure the
meaning of bodily difference, looking at the ambivalences of blackness and
whiteness in relationship to ideas of femininity and moral virtue. Finally, the
chapter considers the role that these letters played in the configuration of
whiteness, femininity and beauty.
This chapter focuses on the work of four British women letter-writers
who wrote about their experiences of living in India between 1742 and 1810:
Jane Smart’s (dates unknown) very brief Letter from a Lady at Madrass to
her Friends in London (1742) is the first known, published description of
India by a British woman; it documents her participation in a visit to the
wife, children and household of the Nawab Safdar ‘Ali, who had sent his
family to Madras (Chennai) for their protection.13 Over thirty years later,
Jemima Kindersley (1741–1809) published her travel account, Letters from
the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good Hope, and the East Indies
(1777), which records her observations on Indian peoples and customs as she
travelled with her husband, Nathaniel, an artillery officer in the East India
Company Army, and her son, Nathaniel Edward (b. 1764).14 Kindersley’s
Letters were written primarily from Allahabad (Prayagraj) in 1767, although
she also travelled through Patna, Pondicherry, Madras and Calcutta (Kolk­
ata). Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India (1817) discuss her journey
across France, Italy, Egypt and from the Suez via sea to Calicut (Kozhikode)
in the South of India and then to Madras and Calcutta between 1779 and
1782. Fay (1756–1816) travelled with her Irish husband, Anthony Fay, a
lawyer who eventually gained a position as Advocate at the Supreme Court
in Calcutta.15 Finally, Catherine Mackintosh’s unpublished ‘Political Epistle’
reflected on her six-year residence in Bombay between 1804 and 1810 and
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 125
forms part of a much larger collection of letters from this period, the
majority of which were written by her husband and held under his name in
the British Library.16
The letters of the four women examined in this chapter represent different
modes of letter-writing. Jemima Kindersley’s Letters, which began by
addressing an anonymous ‘you’ to whom she had promised to give an
account of ‘anything worthy of notice’, is by far the most stylised of the
four, following the standard form of many eighteenth-century travel narra­
tives.17 So frequent were published collections of letters from travels that the
Monthly and Critical Review of New Publications began its brief review of
Kindersley’s Letters with the exclamation, ‘More Letters!’18 More conversa­
tional in style, Eliza Fay’s Original Letters were edited for publication in an
attempt to capitalise on the popularity of travel writing. Unlike Kindersley,
however, Fay probably originally wrote her letters to her sister and parents,
and only compiled and edited them for publication much later in life in the
hope of gaining a small income. She did not live to see them in print. On her
death in 1816 all her manuscripts were destroyed, leaving only her edited
letters, which were published as a means of repaying her debts.19 Neither
Jane Smart nor Catherine Mackintosh appear to have intended their letters
for publication, but that does not mean that these, and other unpublished
correspondences, did not circulate widely beyond their addressee. The pre­
sence of a handwritten copy of an extract of Jane Smart’s letter in the
Mellish collection provides one example of the ways in which unpublished
letters could reach a wide, if unintended, audience. The subject of Mack­
intosh’s ‘Political Epistle’, and her choice of title, suggests an awareness that
her poem went beyond the conventional boundaries of what was deemed
respectable and proper for women’s letters. Whether she intended it for
much wider circulation in the ‘public’ sphere is difficult to ascertain; there is
no evidence it was widely circulated or published.20 Other letters from the
Mackintosh archive, however, went far beyond the parlours and drawing-
rooms of their elite friends in Britain. For example, when Mary Rich (née
Mackintosh, Catherine Mackintosh’s eldest stepdaughter) wrote to her
father from Baghdad, he sent extracts of the letter documenting the ‘extra­
ordinary weather’ to be published in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal,
where it appeared anonymously in 1820.21

British women letter-writers in colonial India

It was not until the mid-nineteenth century that greater numbers of British
women began to live in, and correspondingly write about, India. In the
eighteenth century, women were largely discouraged from living in India by
the East India Company who controlled passages to and from metropolitan
Britain.22 Tillman Nechtman describes the numbers of British women in
eighteenth-century India as ‘demographically insignificant’.23 However, as
the ledger stones of St Thomas’s Cathedral in Mumbai or the moss-covered
126 Onni Gust
gravestones in South Park Street Cemetery in Kolkata attest, they were
valued members of Anglo-Indian communities. Eighteenth-century Anglo-
Indian women, many of whom spent almost all their lives in India, main­
tained sustained epistolary conversation with friends and relatives in Britain.
Unlike the published and unpublished letters and diaries of their more
numerous nineteenth-century counterparts, their letters from India have only
very recently been the subject of historical research.24 Those letters offer an
insight into a very different world, one in which British imperial fortunes
and security in India was far more fragile, reliant on, and sometimes at the
mercy of, local Indian rulers and the Mughal imperial court in Delhi. Rela­
ted to this, are the ways in which Anglo-Indians in general, and women in
particular, imagined their own differences in relationship to the multi-ethnic
populations among whom they lived. Unlike the nineteenth century, when
British women in India drew on a more concrete and biologically deter­
mined discourse of racial difference to assert their own power and agency,
eighteenth-century British women in India negotiated more fluid, flexible
and radically changing discourses of difference.25 This chapter examines
their relationship to emergent discourses of racial difference and their
articulations of whiteness and blackness.
Although not the only letters written by British women in India in the
eighteenth century, the letters that are the focus of this chapter have in
common a self-conscious attempt to represent India to a wider, British
audience during a period of rapid change. They span the period from 1742
to 1810, during which the British East India Company extended its dom­
inance over large parts of the Indian subcontinent. The India in which Jane
Smart lived in the early 1740s was governed by small, local rulers, the
majority of whom paid allegiance to the overarching authority of the
Mughal Emperor, Muhammad Shah. Madras itself was the site of a pro­
tracted and entangled conflict between the French and British East India
Companies as part of the War of Austrian Succession (1740–1748) and local
rulers fighting their own succession disputes.26 Jemima Kindersley’s arrival
in Calcutta in August 1765 coincided with the signing of the Treaty of
Allahabad, in which the Mughal Emperor, Shah Alam, granted the East
India Company the diwani – the right to the revenues of the land. This
marked a significant first step in the drawn-out process of political and
social change that would, eventually, see the final eclipse of the Mughal
Empire by British imperial power over large parts of the Indian Sub­
continent by the middle of the nineteenth century. By the time Eliza Fay was
living in India, the East India Company had consolidated much of its rule in
the North, but hostilities remained in the South. Fay reached Calicut in 1780,
at a moment of renewed hostilities between the British East India Company
and the ruler of Mysore, Haider Ali, in alliance with the French East India
Company.27 She and her husband were immediately taken captive by Haider
Ali. Their proposed plans to escape from captivity – first by seeking the pro­
tection of the Danish factory in Calicut, then by procuring passports from a
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 127
‘Native Portuguese’ to travel to Mahé, disguised as Frenchmen, and finally
through the help of a Jewish merchant, Mr Isaac – encapsulates the complex
political dynamics between different regional and European powers, as well as
the multi-ethnic character of India during this period.
The East India Company’s territorial and political gains were met with
criticism in metropolitan Britain, largely due to the expense of war and
partly out of concern about the extent of its dominance in India. What had
begun as a trading company was rapidly looking more like a state, with few
checks and balances on its power. From the 1770s, a number of parliamen­
tary acts, including the Regulating Act of 1770 and Pitt’s India Act of 1784,
attempted to curb the Company’s power and bring it under the authority of
the Crown and Parliament.28 The Mackintosh family’s arrival in Bombay in
1804, and Sir James Mackintosh’s position as Recorder of the Court, was
part of those attempts at greater regulation and centralisation. He had been
appointed by the Crown, rather than the Company and his role was, in part,
to call the actions of Company servants to account. Alongside legislation
introduced by Parliament to take greater control of the financial, judicial,
and trading activities of the Company, a range of reforms were introduced,
designed to make a clearer demarcation between ‘British’ and ‘Indian’. From
1786, for example, the Governor-General, Cornwallis, decreed that mixed-
race or ‘Eurasian’ sons of East India Company officers would no longer be
entitled to serve in either civil or military roles in the East India Company.29
This decree was part of a wider attempt to discourage sexual relations
between Indian women and East India Company men, which could result in
a racially mixed settler colony in which the distinctions between colonised
and coloniser were blurry. These reforms do not simply represent attempts
to enforce a colour line, rather they were part of the construction of ‘race’
and racial hierarchies during this period. It is in this context of the changing
dynamics of imperial power and the emergence of ideas of white super­
iority – ideas that by the mid-nineteenth century would consolidate and
justify British imperial dominance in India – that Smart, Kindersley, Fay,
and Mackintosh were writing their letters.

Enlightenment orientalism and the body

India had long presented a source of fascination, as well as titillation, for
Europeans. Understood as part of a wider, homogenised ‘East’, European
literary and artistic representations of India placed emphasis on its anti­
quity, material luxury, exoticism and eroticism; a subject that has been well-
covered by post-colonial literary scholars since the publication of Edward
Said’s Orientalism in 1978.30 As Rosemary Raza, Felicity Nussbaum and
Indira Ghose have shown, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British
women writers played a particular role in developing those Orientalist
tropes by capitalising on their ability to enter the women’s quarters of elite
Indian households.31 By the mid-nineteenth century, British women’s travel
128 Onni Gust
writing, including the compulsory visit to the harem, was a burgeoning
genre; in the eighteenth century, however, women’s writing from India was
unusual and generally in the form of unpublished letters rather than as
travel narrative.32 The interest with which Jane Smart’s letter was received
and circulated in Britain reflects the appetite for, and rarity of, insights into
elite Indian women’s spaces. Smart’s description of her meeting with Nawab
Safdar ‘Ali Khan’s female household re-confirmed ideas of ‘Eastern’ women
as embodiments of a luxurious and decadent culture. Describing the vast
number of diamonds and pearls that adorned the body of the ‘Nabob’s lady’
and her surroundings, Smart wrote that the whole scene was like ‘some fairy
story … I own I thought myself in a dream all the time I was there.’33
Smart’s brief account ended with a reference to another Oriental trope in
the European-imperial imaginary: that of the seclusion of ‘Eastern’ women
in the harem. The Nawab’s wife’s material riches were, she claimed, ‘all the
enjoyments they have for she is not suffer’d to go out the year round’.34 This
representation itself relied on a public/private dichotomy that denied the
important and complex role that courtly women played in the political
affairs of the Mughal state.35 Despite its brevity, therefore, Smart’s early
letter revised some of the generic tropes of ‘Eastern’ luxury and decadence,
but, aside from a passing mention of their ‘tawny’ complexion – ‘as the
moors are’ – and black eyes, she made no reference to, or meaning out of,
bodily attributes. Rather, Smart used makeup, dress and jewellery to mark
the differences between her own party of Englishwomen and the women of
the Nawab’s court, concluding that ‘to end all we was [sic] the first English
women they had ever seen, and I doubt not but we appear’d as odd to them
as they did to us.’36
Smart’s explicit intention to ‘give you a discription [sic] of her [the lady’s]
person and dress’ shows her awareness of her readership’s interest in bodies
and bodily attire, yet unlike later eighteenth-century writers, her discussion
remained focused on the exterior body.37 In this respect, Smart’s brief
extract shows similarities with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish
Embassy Letters (1763), based on her travels in the Ottoman Empire
between 1716 and 1718, which paid similar attention to clothing and its
possibilities for revealing and disguising difference.38 Smart’s focus on the
exterior of the body is suggestive of a wider cultural and intellectual con­
figuration of identity that placed emphasis on external markers of difference.
Over the course of the eighteenth century, however, Enlightenment ideas of
selfhood would increasingly turn inward, rendering difference inherent and
more closely aligned with the body.39 This alignment would have important
implications for the construction of ‘race’ as a category of difference in India
and throughout the European empires. Historians of colonial race science
are fairly unanimous in seeing the period from the mid-eighteenth century to
the mid-nineteenth century as one in which European scientific and popular
understandings of ‘race’ increasingly hardened around essential biological
differences that were determinative of character and culture.40 By the mid­
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 129
nineteenth century, the majority of British writers on India displayed a clear
sense of superiority over their Indian counterparts and a nationalist arro­
gance that is inseparable from the idea of a racial hierarchy.41 The growing
numbers of travel narratives and letters from India by British women during
the nineteenth century reflected this trend; as Indira Ghose argues, these
women travellers were ‘colonized by gender [but] colonizers by race’.42 For
eighteenth and early nineteenth-century British women letter-writers, how­
ever, ‘race’ and the meanings ascribed to different bodies were far from
fixed. Their letters reveal the ways in which British women engaged with
colonial race science, but also ambivalences of the meaning of ‘race’ as a
physiological, cultural, and moral construct, and of the body as a site of
meaning.

‘Race’, climate theory and blackness

Of the four letter-writers discussed here, Jemima Kindersley’s Letters made
the most explicit use of Enlightenment theories of difference. Kindersley
drew on Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Law (1748), from which she quoted
extensively, and was clearly familiar with Enlightenment debates over racial
difference. Like many travel writers on India, Kindersley picked up on
Montesquieu’s homogenisation of ‘Eastern’ governments and his use of the
term ‘Asiatic despotism’ to define societies that were supposedly char­
acterised by a lack of security for private property, unlimited power, arbi­
trary rule, and stagnation. ‘The Indies’, Montesquieu had argued, ‘have ever
been the same Indies they are at present’.43 Kindersley concurred, arguing
that under despotic states man was like beast, ruled by instinct, obedience
and the fear of punishment, rather than by a sense of justice, and lacked the
capacity to advance.44 The nature of the government, she argued, meant that
Indians were so oppressed by their superiors that they ‘have learned to allow
themselves no opinions’.45 Montesquieu’s argument had an extensive influ­
ence on Anglophone Enlightenment thinkers. Published in the same year as
Kindersley’s Letters, Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil
Society (1767) stated that, ‘it is in India, and in the regions of this hemi­
sphere, which are visited by the vertical sun, that the arts of manufacture,
and the practice of commerce, are of the greatest antiquity, and have sur­
vived, with the smallest diminution, the ruins of time, and the revolutions of
empire.’46 Yet, as part of the wider argument for the determining influence
of climate on different societies’ social and political structure and character,
both Montesquieu and Ferguson attributed the ‘despotic’ nature of Indian
government to the heat of the climate, which, they argued produced passive,
irrational and ‘effeminate’ subjects.47 Kindersley similarly blamed the cli­
mate for what she perceived to be the submissive, servile and indolent
character of the people. Whether Hindu or Muslim, the ‘climate is such as
to enervate every person who resides in it, and to render the most active
after a time indolent; this disposition increases, and every generation
130 Onni Gust
becomes more and more slothful, which seems to account for the present
degeneracy of the Mahomedans of Hindostan’.48 Kindersley understood that
‘degeneracy’ as both bodily and moral. She wrote approvingly of the ‘taller
and more robust’ physiques, as well as the lighter skin colour, of the men in
the northern part of India and attributed those ‘qualities’ to their compara­
tive distance from the sun.49
The role of climate in explaining human variation is also evident in
Mackintosh’s ‘Political Epistle’. Written in verse, albeit with frequent inter­
jections in prose to explain terms or traditions that would be unfamiliar to
British readers, the ‘Political Epistle’ was less obviously an engagement with
Enlightenment debates over racial difference. Yet Mackintosh’s representa­
tion of Bombay implicitly drew on a number of eighteenth-century ideas
about the role of climate on physical and moral health. Like Kindersley,
Mackintosh blamed the rapid loss of youthful beauty among Indian and
European women on the ‘exhausting climate’. Unlike some Enlightenment
philosophers who explicitly connected the heat of the ‘torrid zone’ to greater
sexual desire, both Mackintosh and Kindersley focused on the effects of the
climate on intellectual and moral worth.50 For both writers, India’s climate
engendered a universal apathy and indolence in which people ‘neither love,
nor feel, nor think’.51 Mackintosh’s representation of Bombay as stifling,
petty and indolent mirrored in microcosm the broader theory of ‘the East’ as
despotic, irrational and unfree.52 In contrast, she connected the ‘balmy gales’
of the Thames and the ‘freshness’ of England’s ‘flow’ry fields’ with freedom
of both body and mind.53 This association of heat with moral vice and
despotism, and more temperate climates with virtue and freedom, was
characteristic of climate theory, which itself developed out of the Galenic
paradigm, in which cold, heat, moisture and dryness informed blood circu­
lation and bodily constitution and the habits and mores of people.54 Not
only Montesquieu, but also Adam Ferguson and William Falconer, argued
that the ‘temperate zone’, in which the majority of European nations
(including, albeit ambivalently, Britain and Scandinavia), were situated, was
where humans naturally flourished and progressed.55 ‘Man, in his animal
capacity, is qualified to subsist in every climate’, wrote Adam Ferguson:
‘The intermediate climates, however, appear most to favour his nature; and
in whatever manner we account for the fact, it cannot be doubted, that this
animal has always attained to the principal honours of his species within the
temperate zone.’56
While both Kindersley and Mackintosh made obvious use of climate
theory, their position in relationship to changing ideas of blackness is more
difficult to gauge. As Roxann Wheeler and Andrew Curran have argued, the
meaning and definition of ‘black’ as part of emergent racial schemas under­
went contestation and transformation in this period. Whereas in the seven­
teenth and early eighteenth centuries, ‘race’ signified a range of cultural and
religious differences, and ‘black’ could refer to skin colour, heritage, status,
or even character, by the end of the eighteenth century, ‘black’ and ‘white’
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 131
were gaining more concrete, if not necessarily always essentialised, meanings
that linked blackness more closely to African heritage.57 Linnaeus in Sys­
tema Naturae (1735) and Buffon in Histoire Naturelle (1749) referred to
Africans alone as ‘black’. According to Linnaeus’s classification, Indian
people were placed under the category Homo asiaticus, who he referred to
as ‘dark’ or ‘swarthy’, which later changed to ‘yellow’.58 Buffon described
the people living in the East Indies as ‘brown’, while those in northern India
he included under the category ‘white’.59 In contrast, Kindersley and Mack­
intosh employed a more nebulous, capacious and flexible definition of
blackness that included Indian people. Their use of blackness was usually
associated with negative and pejorative characteristics. For example, Kin­
dersley wrote that ‘When a black man receives any order, he does not con­
sider the justice of that order, but the favour of the person who gives it, and
obeys accordingly.’60 Similarly, Mackintosh’s reference to the East India
Company man’s ‘black and stupid temporary mate’, referred to any Indian
women and situated blackness in relationship to inferior intelligence.61
While Kindersley and Mackintosh did not employ the gradations of racial
taxonomy, they were clearly aware of and engaged with the debates over
racial classification, hierarchy, and the meaning of racial difference.62
Addressing the question of white superiority directly, Kindersley stated:

I will not pretend to determine (on a point which has been often urged)
whether black people are by nature inferior in understanding to white,
who can judge it here, where the nature of the government checks the
growth of every virtue … In such a government can we wonder, that
the general character of the inhabitants should be stupidity and low
cunning?63

Mackintosh’s own position on racial difference and hierarchy was more

opaque. Her (quite absurd) comparison between her husband’s isolation in
Bombay and the plight of ‘the Negro’ enslaved and separated from his
family contradicts earlier ideas about the relationship between black skin
and sensibility. In very different ways and to different effects, Adam Smith,
Immanuel Kant and Edward Long all argued that Africans lacked the capa­
city for feeling and attachment.64 Mackintosh’s ‘Political Epistle’ reflected
the contrary position in which attachment was natural to all humans, an
argument that was used by abolitionists to inspire sympathy and pity for the
enslaved.65 Indeed, her line, ‘But save the covering of the man the skin’,
suggests that skin colour itself carried no meaning. Addressing the East
India Company man, she made a similar point later in the poem, which
implied that there was no inherent difference in virtue or intelligence
between the East India Company’s black concubine and white wife: ‘Much
whiter than thy former one her skin / But what oh what the difference
within.’66 On the one hand, this rhetorical question reinforces the idea that
skin colour carries no inherent meaning, yet on the other the comparison
132 Onni Gust
functions as a means of debasing the ‘white wife’ by likening her to the
‘black and stupid temporary mate’.67
Eliza Fay’s Original Letters differed from Kindersley and Mackintosh in
both style and focus. Her attention was focused primarily on the details of
her party’s predicament during their captivity, her husband’s failings, and
her acquaintance with the elite British members of Calcutta’s ‘English’
society. Throughout her Letters she made little reference to skin colour. The
one mention she did make of whiteness is in the context of her party being
surrounded by ‘all the mob of Calicut, who seemed to take pleasure in
beholding the distress of white people, those constant objects of their envy
and detestation’.68 In the paragraph prior to this she expressed her indigna­
tion that English subjects could be treated ‘with such cruelty’; that was,
forcing their party to walk through the sand in the rain and heat to an
empty house where they remained for most of the period of their captivity by
Haider Ali. In this context, ‘English’ referred to the specific privileges that she
expected as a result of national power and prestige on ‘this Continent’, whereas
‘white’ in her subsequent paragraph became a generic marker of supremacy and
superiority, which provoked ‘envy and detestation.’ This assumption of white
superiority was also subtly evident in her description of ‘Isaac the Jew’, which
focused on his ‘long white beard; his complexion by no means dark, and his
countenance benign yet majestic’.69 Fay did not make an explicit link between a
‘dark’ complexion, beauty or morality in the way that Kindersley and other
Enlightenment racial taxonomists did. Yet in the wider context of her praise for
Isaac, which subsequently became a plea to reconsider the reputation of Jews as
‘a people’, ‘by no means dark’ functioned as a marker of his benevolence and
virtue. In this respect, Fay’s Letters reiterated the prevailing assumption of
white moral superiority that was suggested in Mackintosh’s ‘Political Epistle’.
Yet, like Mackintosh, she, too, was ambivalent about the meaning of skin
colour. Casting doubt on the role of climate on either physical or moral virtues
she stated that ‘human nature has its faults and follies everywhere, and that
black rogues are to the full as common as white ones, but in my opinion more
impudent’.70

Race, beauty and the fragility of whiteness

The question mark that remains over both Fay and Mackintosh’s under­
standing of the meaning of skin colour and racial difference does not negate
the overall assumption, shared with Kindersley, that whiteness was inher­
ently superior. This configuration of whiteness as superior was articulated
through the language of beauty and aesthetics, which intersected with ideas
of moral virtue and played out on the female body. Like Buffon, who refer­
red to Europeans in the ‘temperate’ zone as both the most beautiful and the
most white, Kindersley represented white skin as the most significant marker
of beauty.71 In ‘Letter LIII’, written from Allahabad, Kindersley began her
‘account of the Oriental ladies’, by stating that ‘even the handsomest of the
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 133
Mahomedan women have very disagreeable complexions; the fairest among
them may rather be called more yellow than white’.72 Praising the beauty of
their eyes, eye-brows and lashes, Kindersley stated that, ‘If they were set off
by a fine red and white complexion they would be incomparable.’73 She
concluded her observations by linking the darkening of the complexion to
the decline of youth: ‘by the time they are turned twenty [they] are thought
old women; and are really so in point of beauty; for after fifteen their com­
plexions grow every year darker: the climate, as it hastens their maturity,
likewise hastens their decline’.74 For Kindersley, the beauty, or otherwise, of
women was directly related to their proximity to whiteness, which reached
its most beautiful in the ‘colder climates’ where the addition of ‘red’ ‘ani­
mates and gives life to beauty’. The ‘yellow and the black’ complexion was
perhaps, she stated, not ‘altogether intolerable’ to Europeans, yet at first
‘appears frightful’.75
Kindersley’s assumption that a ‘fine red and white complexion’ was
superior to darker skin tones reiterated eighteenth-century aesthetic philo­
sophy, which argued for the superiority of white skin over black on the
basis that the variety of shades that it could produce correlated with the
complexity of emotions beneath it.76 As Simon Gikandi has argued, this
philosophical position, which was constructed in opposition to blackness,
rationalised the aesthetic preference for white skin and represented the
superiority of whiteness as a universal truth.77 In different ways, Mack­
intosh’s poem and Fay’s letters also subtly reasserted this position. Mack­
intosh’s poem did not explicitly relate darker skin colour to a lack of beauty
and virtue, but other correspondence suggests that she was aware of, and
engaged with, discussions of beauty and race. In his journal, which he
addressed directly to his wife when they were apart, James Mackintosh
referred back to a conversation that they had had about Kantian notions of
beauty and skin colour:

Those who have been accustomed to associating every thing excellent

and amiable in human nature with a black colour may prefer it to a
white. But they must admit that variety, brilliancy and contrast of col-
ours with such a disposition of them as renders them expressive of
mental qualities are all beauties. And having made these admissions
they must also acknowledge that the fair complexion is in all these
respects superior to the dark – I however qualify this superiority by
adding your very acute and original observation that though a fair
European complexion be far superior yet the usual muddy complexions
of the West are equally inferior to the jet black of Asia.78

If this remark by her husband supported Catherine Mackintosh’s ambiva­

lence about the meaning of blackness, it also implied a tacit agreement with
the idea that ‘a fair European complexion’ was aesthetically ‘superior’ to
any other. As the dismissal of ‘the usual muddy complexions of the West’
134 Onni Gust
suggests, this superiority was by no means universally applied to people who
would be broadly considered in racial taxonomies as ‘white’. Rather, this
aesthetic whiteness configured the skin’s translucence as more beautiful
because it acted a window onto the soul, which revealed ‘interior mental
states’ in a way that darker skin tones obscured from the viewer.79 As Bar­
bara Rosenthal has shown, the classic symbol of this was the blushing,
white girl, whose beauty was borne of the ability to read her virtue on her
face.80
Fay’s Letters drew less on Enlightenment racial taxonomies and more on
a related, if more marginal, ‘science’ of the body, physiognomy: the ancient
system of deducing character from appearance, or ‘countenance’, which saw
a revival in the mid-eighteenth century.81 Describing Captain Ayres, for
example, she stated that ‘at the sight of him I shuddered involuntarily,
though at that time ignorant of his real character, such an air of wickedness
and ferocity overspread his features’.82 Similarly, her description of John
Hare, a fellow crew member travelling from Mocha to Calicut, as ‘covered
in scorbutic blotches’ provides a visual reinforcement of her distaste for a
man who she perceived to be full of affectation and false refinement.83 At
first sight, this ‘reading’ of bodily ‘defect’ and demeanour appears to have
little to do with race and whiteness. Yet it shared the assumption that phy­
sical markers of difference had aesthetic meaning, which served as a sign of
moral virtue.84
This association between countenance, aesthetics and moral character is
also evident in Fay’s brief encounter with ‘two apparently very beautiful
women’, which she mentioned in the context of a wider (and very cursory)
discussion of East Indian customs and ceremonies. Without elaborating any
further on this encounter, Fay determined that it was impossible to really
judge their beauty because of the layers of decoration and adornment that
obscured their ‘real’ person: ‘they use so much art however, as renders it
difficult to judge what claim they really have to that appellation’.85 The
make-up, jewellery and rich clothes that Smart had described and admired
in detail in 1742, were, to Fay, a sign of ‘artifice’ and deception. Fay’s cri­
tique of the ‘Hindoo ladies’ who painted their faces must be situated in the
context of a much longer debate over the meaning of cosmetics, one that in
early modern England was entangled with racial, national and social hier­
archies. Cosmetics themselves, as Farah Karim-Cooper argues, had long
been associated with foreignness and the ‘conceits of Barbarous Nations’.86
The whitening cosmetics that English women used to beautify themselves
were widely critiqued as forms of deception but, as Kimberly Poitevin
argues, they also reflected a hardening relationship between whiteness, nat­
ural beauty and racial superiority.87 Fay’s praise for the youth and ‘love­
liness’ of Frances, Lady Chambers (née Wilton), made evident this coming-
together of whiteness and naturalness. Unlike the ‘Hindoo ladies’ who ‘all
undergo certain processes to render them more completely fascinating’,
Chambers was ‘truly fascinating’, a ‘truth’ that was inseparable from the
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 135
‘agreeable frankness in her manners’. Thus, while Fay did not explicitly
88

employ skin colour as a marker of superiority, the same paradigm of legible

and illegible bodies, which in her Letters mapped-on to white and brown
bodies, informed her understanding of both virtue and beauty.
In the colonial context, the virtues associated with whiteness – honesty,
integrity, hard work, robustness and reason – were placed in jeopardy by
the climate and the lifestyle that it engendered. In India, English bodies were
deemed to be particularly susceptible to the ill-effects of the heat. Writing
from Madras in 1780, Fay commented on the spectre of ‘Europeans lan­
guishing under various complaints which they call incidental to the cli­
mate’.89 The idea that ‘Europeans’ living in India were corrupted by its
climate and culture of ‘effeminacy’ was common both in medical and wider
popular literature. The same model stoked fears about the bodies, morals
and culture of those Englishmen, referred to as ‘nabobs’, living in India.
Plays and novels such as Samuel Foote’s The Nabob (1772) and Phebe Gib­
bes’s Harley House, Calcutta (1789) recited the stereotype of ‘the nabob’ as
an orientalised figure who posed a threat to both British and, in some case,
Indian society.90 Transformed by the intersecting effects of climate and a
culture of ‘decadence’ and ‘effeminacy’, the ‘English’ or ‘Europeans’ in India
appeared to British travellers to be both unfamiliar and inferior to their
metropolitan counterparts. Thus, Kindersley wrote, ‘The mode of living,
from the religion of their servants the heat of the climate, and other cir­
cumstances, is so extraordinary, that I can scarcely believe myself among
English people.’91
Kindersley’s questioning of the Englishness of the Anglo-Indian people she
met in Calcutta intersected with her doubt about their whiteness. In India,
she wrote, the rosy cheeks of English youth were rapidly replaced by ‘pale
yellow complexion’, a sign of their sickliness, while the sunburnt faces of
Anglo-Indian men justified the epithet of ‘red’ rather than ‘white’ given to
them by North India.92 Held up as symbols of virtue, the status of white
women in India was a particular source of concern to British women travel
writers in India. As Cecily Jones argues, belonging to whiteness was not
only contingent upon skin colour but also upon certain modes of behaviour,
which for white women was focused on sexual practices and gendered per­
formances.93 This coming-together of whiteness and sexual behaviour is
particularly evident in Mackintosh’s ‘Political Epistle’ which attributed the
‘vice and folly’ of Bombay’s colonial society on the curtailment of youth,
where children were exposed to a sexualised culture – ‘where children throw
aside their dolls and toys / For balls, flirtation, less appropriate joys’ – long
before they were emotionally and morally mature enough to handle the
responsibility.94 If rushed marriages meant the loss of any hope of comfort,
fortune and peace of mind for young men, for the ‘giddy girl’ premature
marriage and childbirth meant the curtailment of ‘joyful youth’ and beauty.
The rapid loss of the ‘rosy smiles of youth’ and its replacement by ‘the
sunken rayless eyes and fallen cheek’ of immature motherhood signified the
136 Onni Gust
overall decline of morals in Bombay’s colonial society.95 Mackintosh’s
references to Bombay as a ‘hot-house for weeds’ encapsulated the idea that
heat produced inferior ‘species’ and, implicitly, posed a threat to the
strength and character of the whole, white ‘race’.

Conclusion
Historians of white women’s travel writing from ‘the East’ in general, and
India in particular, have focused on the ways in which women used their
observations of different cultures to negotiate and construct white feminin­
ity. This important discussion has shown how, despite the oppressions of
patriarchy under which white women lived and wrote, the knowledge that
they produced and the subjecthood that they were able to claim as a result
of their whiteness rendered them complicit in the colonial project. As Feli­
city Nussbaum has argued, during the eighteenth century this culture and its
intersections with white femininity were in the process of being configured.
In this context, British women travel writers to ‘the East’ used travel less as
a means of upholding ‘British femininity’ and more as a way of evading,
critiquing and reframing it.96 This chapter has shown how British women’s
letters brought race, beauty and ideals of femininity together to construct
the meaning of whiteness. It has argued that their letters reconfigured, rein­
forced and recirculated ideas of ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ that formed an
integral part of emergent ‘race’ science that was a critical part of Enlight­
enment knowledge formation. Unlike natural history, philosophy and medi­
cal treatises, however, British women’s letters offer a more personal
relationship to questions of ‘race’. Their proximity to difference and the
increasing threat posed by that difference to their own whiteness meant that
their assertions of the superiority of whiteness were themselves perfor­
mances of belonging to a ‘white’, British community of readers.
Eighteenth-century British women’s published and unpublished letters
from India engaged with, and contributed to, wider Enlightenment debates
about human variation. The differences between these debates and their
own, internal contradictions over the meaning of skin colour reflect the
ambivalences, uncertainties and overlapping theories that were circulating
during this period. In different ways and to different extents, Smart, Kin­
dersley, Fay and Mackintosh engaged with the questions of racial difference
that were taking place in the wider literary and philosophical world around
them. None of these letter-writers, however, developed their thoughts on
‘race’ in any systematic fashion, neither were they intended to provide in-
depth commentary on the meaning of human variation. In many ways, it is
the lack of systemisation in these letters that reveal the ways in which the­
ories of human variation were woven into the fabric of epistolary con­
versation as modes of thinking that generated and recited a common-sense
understanding of difference. Surrounded by people whose skin colours and
cultures were remarkably different from their own, these British women
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 137
letter-writers drew on the wider discourse human variation and emergent
discourses of ‘race’, in part to make sense of that alterity and in part to
speak to an audience for whom that discourse represented a shared point of
encounter. From Jane Smart’s brief account of her meeting with the elite
women of the Nawab of Arcot’s household to Mackintosh’s derisive repre­
sentation of the physical and moral decay she witnessed among Anglo-
Indians in Bombay, all four letter-writers positioned themselves as observers
of a strange, unfamiliar, and increasingly undesirable, world.

Notes
1 Anne Bulley, The Bombay Country Ships, 1790–1833 (London: Routledge, 2013),
58, 100.
2 Catherine Mackintosh, ‘A Political Epistle to Sir J M on his return to Bombay
from Point de Galle with notes. Cumbrian at Sea, 1 May 1810’, British Library
[hereafter BL], Add MS 78771a, 139–145.
3 Ibid., 144.
4 Kevin Siena, Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th-Century Britain (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 21–27.
5 See Antoinette Burton and Tony Ballantyne (eds), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking
Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
6 Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and
British Imperialism in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
7 Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eight­
eenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia University Press,
2010); Andrew Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an
Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
8 Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French
Enlightenment (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 5–6.
9 Margot Finn, ‘Presidential Address: Material Turns in British History: III. Col­
lecting: Colonial Bombay, Basra, Baghdad and the Enlightenment Museum’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 30 (2020): 1–28.
10 Liz Stanley, ‘The Epistolarium: on Theorizing Letters and Correspondences’,
Auto/Biography, 12 (2004): 201–235.
11 Rebecca Earle, ‘Introduction: Letters, Writers and the Historian,’ Epistolary Selves:
Letters and Letter-Writers 1600–1945, Rebecca Earle (ed.), (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1999), 1–11; Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter-Writers 1660–
1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau and
Cécile Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages
to the Nineteenth Century, trans., Christopher Woodall (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1997); Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic
Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
12 See Onni Gust, ‘The Perilous Territory of Not Belonging: Exile and Empire in Sir
James Mackintosh’s Letters from Early Nineteenth-Century Bombay’, History
Workshop Journal, 86 (2018): 22–43; Sarah Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and
Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008);
Laura Ishiguro, Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence
and the Settler-Colonial Everyday (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2019).
13 [Jane Smart], ‘Part of a Letter from a Lady at Fort St George, 1742’, Nottingham
University Manuscripts and Special Collections, MeX1/3, n. See H. D. Love,
Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800 (London: J. Murray, 1913), 280–284.
138 Onni Gust
14 Mrs Kindersley, Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazil, the Cape of Good
Hope, and the East Indies (London: J. Norse, 1777); Carl Thompson, ‘Introduc­
tion’, in Carl Thompson (ed.), Women’s Travel Writing in India, 1777–1854
(Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), xiii; Felicity Nussbaum, ‘British Women Write the
East after 1750: Revisiting a “Feminine” Orient’, in J. Batchelor and C. Kaplan
(eds), British Women’s Writing in the Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship,
Politics and History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 121–139; Rosem­
ary Raza, ‘The Role of Early British Women Writers in Shaping Perspectives of
India’, South Asian Review, 30:2 (2009):192–216.
15 Eliza Fay, Original Letters from India, introduction Simon Winchester, annotated
by E. M. Forster (New York: New York Review Books, 2010); Nussbaum,
‘British Women’, 132–133.
16 Mackintosh, ‘Political Epistle’.
17 Kindersley, Letters, 1. For Kindersley’s part in Enlightenment literature, see Karen
O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 97–98.
18 Anon., ‘Letters from the Island of Teneriffe, Brazi, the Cape of Good Hope, and
the East Indies. By Mrs Kindersley. 8vo.3s.6d. Nourse’, in The Westminster
Magazine (London, 1777), 434.
19 E.M. Forster, ‘Introductory Notes’, in Eliza Fay, Original Letters, 7–8.
20 On the political epistle as a genre, see Catriona Kennedy, ‘“Womanish Epistles?”
Martha McTier, Female Epistolary and Late Eighteenth-Century Irish Radical­
ism’, Women’s History Review, 13:4 (2004), 649–668.
21 31 Jan 1820, BL Add MS 52444, 40; ‘Extreme Heat at Bagdad’, The Edinburgh
Philosophical Journal, 3 (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Company, April–
October 1820), 197.
22 Joan Mickelson Gaughan, The ‘Incumberances’: British Women in India, 1615–
1856 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013), 103–115.
23 Tillman W. Nechtman, ‘Nabobinas: Luxury, Gender, and the Sexual Politics of
British Imperialism in India in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Women’s
History, 18:4 (2006), p.11.
24 See Nechtman, ‘Nabobinas’; Margot Finn, ‘The Female World of Love and
Empire: Women, Family and East India Company Politics at the End of the
Eighteenth Century’, Gender and History, 31:1 (2019), 7–24; Katherine Butler
Schofield, ‘Sophia Plowden, Khanum Jan, and Hindustani airs’, retrieved from
http://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2018/06/sophia-plowden-khanum-jan-and-hin
dustani-airs.html (accessed 9 January 2022).
25 For discussion of nineteenth-century British women in India, see Margaret MacMil­
lan, Women of the Raj: the Mothers, Wives and Daughters of the British Empire in
India (London: Thames and Hudson, 1988); Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An
Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Psychology Press,
1991); Indira Ghose, Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female
Gaze (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); and Rosemary Raza, In Their Own
Words: British Women Writers and India, 1740–1857 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006). Much of the published writing has been recently re-edited and introduced
here: Carl Thompson, Kartina O’Loughlin, Éadaoin Agnew, Betty Hagglund,
Women’s Travel Writings in India, 1777–1854 (New York: Routledge, 2020).
26 See Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partition: A History of Modern
India (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2009), ch. 1.
27 For Anglo-Mysore wars, see Irfan Habib (ed.), Confronting Colonialism: Resis­
tance and Modernization Under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan (London: Anthem
Press, 2002).
28 See Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), ch. 6.
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 139
29 Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 8.
30 See Balachandra Rajan, Under Western Eyes: India from Milton to Macaulay
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Kate Teltscher, India Inscribed:
European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995).
31 Ghose, Women Travellers; Raza, In Their Own Words.
32 Mills, Discourses of Difference.
33 Smart, ‘Part of a Letter’, n.p.
34 Ibid.
35 See Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Introduction’, in Indrani Chatterjee (ed.), Unfamiliar
Relations: Family and History in South Asia (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni­
versity Press, 2004), 22–30.
36 Smart, ‘Part of a Letter’, n.p.
37 Ibid.
38 Arthur Weitzman, ‘Voyeurism and Aesthetics in the Turkish Bath: Lady Mary’s
School of Female Beauty’, Comparative Literature Studies, 39:4 (2002), 347–359.
39 See Dror Warhman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in
Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
40 For the South Asian context, see David Arnold, ‘Race, Place and Bodily Differ­
ence in Early Nineteenth-Century India’, Historical Research, 77:196 (2004), 254–
273; Peter Robb (ed.), The Concept of Race in South Asia (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998); Mark Harrison, Climates and Constitutions.
41 Arnold, ‘Race, Place and Bodily Difference in Early Nineteenth-Century India’,
254–273; Nuria López, ‘British Women versus Indian Women: The Victorian
Myth of European Superiority’, in Richard Littlejohns and Sara Soncini, Myths
of Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 183–195.
42 Ghose, Women Travellers, 5.

43 M. de Montesquieu, The Complete Works of M. Montesquieu translated from

the French by K Secondat (Dublin, 1777), vol. 1., 24.

44 Kindersley, Letters, 192.
45 Ibid., 186.
46 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh: Millar and
Kaddel; Kincaid and Bell, 1767), 169.
47 David Harvey, The French Enlightenment and its Others: The Mandarin, the
Savage and the Invention of the Human Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmil­
lan, 2012), ch. 1.
48 Kindersley, Letters, 165.

49 Ibid., 249–250.

50 See Pat Moloney, ‘Savages in the Scottish Enlightenment’s History of Desire’,

Journal of the History of Sexuality, 14:3 (2005): 237–265.

51 Mackintosh, ‘Epistle’, 140.
52 Onni Gust, ’Mobility, Gender and Empire in Maria Graham’s Journal of a
Residence in India (1812)’, Gender and History, 29:2 (2017): 273–291.
53 Mackintosh, ‘Epistle’, 145.
54 See Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, 48–49.
55 Fredrik Albritton Johnson, Enlightenment’s Frontier: The Scottish Highlands and
the Origins of Environmentalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013),
72–73; Charles Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographical
About the Age of Reason (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ch.6;
R. J. W. Mills, ‘William Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781)
and the Study of Religion in Enlightenment England’, Intellectual History
Review, 28:2 (2018), 293–315.
56 Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, 80.
140 Onni Gust
57 Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eight­
eenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press,
2000); Andrew Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an
Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2011).
58 Christina Skott, ‘Human Taxonomies: Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Travel in Asia
and the Classification of Man’, Itinerario, 43:2 (2019), 218–242, 225.
59 See Harvey, French Enlightenment, 140.
60 Kindersley, Letters, 192.
61 Mackintosh, ‘Epistle’, 142.
62 For discussion of Enlightenment racism and anti-blackness, see Emmanuel
Chukwudi Eze (ed.), Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Malden, MA:
Blackwell, 1997); Emmanuel Eze, ‘Hume, Race, and Human Nature’, Journal of
the History of Ideas, 61:4 (2000): 691–698.
63 Kindersley, Letters, 193–194.
64 See Onni Gust, Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760–1830
(London: Bloomsbury, 2020), ch.1.
65 Ibid., ch. 4. See also Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of
Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
66 Mackintosh, ‘Epistle’, 143.
67 Ibid., 143.
68 Fay, Original Letters, 120.
69 Ibid., 149.
70 Ibid., 162.
71 Stock, ‘Almost a Separate Race’, 8.
72 Kindersley, Letters, 220.
73 Ibid., 221.
74 Ibid., 220.
75 Ibid., 230.
76 Richard Dyer, White: Essays on Race and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997);
Barbara Rosenthal, ‘Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness’, Art History, 27:4
(2004), 563–592.
77 Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­
versity Press, 2011), 7.
78 3 Dec 1811, BL Add MS 52440, 25.
79 Kathryn Woods, ‘The “Fair Sex”: Skin Colour, Gender and Narratives of
Embodied Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Non-Fiction’, Journal of Eight­
eenth-Century Studies, 40:1 (2017), 57.
80 Rosenthal, ‘Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness’, 566.
81 Patricia Fara, ‘Marginalized Practices’, in Roy Porter (ed.), The Cambridge His­
tory of Science, v.4 Eighteenth-Century Science (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­
versity Press, 2003), 495; Kathryn Woods, ‘“Facing” Identity in a “Faceless”
Society: Physiognomy, Facial Appearance and Identity Perception in Eighteenth-
Century London’, Cultural and Social History, 14:2 (2017), 137–153.
82 Fay, Original Letters, 116.
83 Ibid., 106.
84 See Felicity Nussbaum and Helen Deutsch (eds), Defects: Engendering the
Modern Body (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002).
85 Fay, Original Letters, 202 and 207. For a discussion of eighteenth-century British
representations of Indian women’s dress and material culture, see Nadini Bhatta­
charya, Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century
British Writing on India (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 33–35.
86 Farah Karim-Coooper, ‘“This Alters Not Thy Beauty”: Face-Paint, Gender and
Race in Richard Brome’s The English Moor’, Early Theatre, 10:2 (2007), 140–
149, 141.
 Blackness, whiteness and bodily degeneration 141
87 Kimberly Poitevin, ‘Inventing Whiteness: Cosmetics, Race, and Women in Early
Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 11:1 (2011), 59–89.
88 Fay, Original Letters, 174. For Chambers, see T.H. Bowyer, ‘Chambers, Sir
Robert’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, retrieved from https://
doi-org.ezproxy.nottingham.ac.uk/10.1093/ref:odnb/5078, accessed 10 Jan 2021.
89 Ibid., 162.
90 See James Watt, British Orientalisms, 1759–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­
versity Press, 2019), ch.2; Tillman Nechtman, ‘A Jewel in the Crown? Indian Wealth
in Domestic Britain in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Eighteenth-Century Studies,
14:1 (2007), 71–86.
91 Kindersley, Letters, 80.
92 Ibid., 86, 250.
93 Cecily Jones, Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barba­
dos and North Carolina, 1627–1865 (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2007), 6.
94 Mackintosh, ‘Political Epistle’, 142.
95 Ibid., 144–145.
96 Nussbaum, ‘British Women’, 124–125.
7 ‘A thousand kisses’
Postscript, appendices and desire in The
Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley, Late of
Drury Lane Theatre (1787)
Frith Taylor

Pray destroy all my letters, least [sic] any one should see them by axcedent.
– Peniston Lamb, Lord Melbourne, letter to Sophia Baddeley, c.17711

The letters discussed here were written by Peniston Lamb, then Lord Mel­
bourne (1745–1828), to Sophia Baddeley (1745–1786), an actress and cour­
tesan. Melbourne featured as Baddeley’s most significant client of the early
1770s in the memoir by her close friend and companion Elizabeth Steele
(1740–1787), who lived with Baddeley from 1769–1774. Elizabeth Steele’s
The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley, Late of Drury Lane Theatre (1787)
not only described relations between courtesan and client, detailing the
events that led to Melbourne and Baddeley’s longstanding companionate
and sexual relationship, it also included seven of Melbourne’s letters in the
appendix. These were provided as evidence to support Steele’s claims about
Baddeley and Melbourne’s affair, published without Melbourne’s permission
and used by Steele to imperil his reputation. According to Steele, Melbourne
had been married only ten months to the ‘very amiable’ Elizabeth Lamb,
who was pregnant with their first child, when he attempted to ‘prove him­
self one of [Baddeley’s] admirers’ and began their affair.2 Eighteenth-century
familiar letters often contained rich and varied records of the life of the
body, but Melbourne’s letters were sparing in their descriptions of his or
Baddeley’s body despite including thousands of postscript kisses and pro­
fessions of love and longing. The letters were therefore at once a testament
to bodily desire and a site of absence, entangled in the complexities of the
eighteenth-century courtesan model.
Steele’s ‘sentimental satire’, to use Amy Culley’s useful description, is a
scandal memoir that combined gossipy comments about late eighteenth-
century London’s elite with details of Steele and Baddeley’s long-standing
partnership.3 While Steele’s Memoirs have received limited critical attention,
both Emma Donoghue and Culley’s analyses are attentive to power relations
between Baddeley, Steele and the elite men who funded their household.
Donoghue reads Steele’s Memoirs as a queer partnership in her survey of
eighteenth-century lesbian culture, while Culley argues that the text’s generic
flexibility allows for an anarchic reordering of power relations between
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-10
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 143
4
aristocratic men and working women. Grounded in historical materialism
which holds that the interaction between people and nature in the labour
process is an ‘everlasting nature-imposed condition of human existence’, this
chapter builds on Culley and Donoghue’s observations in order to create a
materialist analysis of the eighteenth-century courtesan model.5 Kieran
Allen’s assertion that it is the labour process that ‘makes us social animals’
is particularly relevant to analysis of sex work. In applying a materialist
lens, this chapter will more fully demonstrate the power dynamics implicit
in Baddeley’s dependence on clients.
The Memoirs were slated by the press who assumed that they had been
ghost written by a man in order to blackmail Baddeley’s suitors.6 The Cri­
tical Review presented Steele’s memoir as a work in which ‘[c]haracters are
unfeelingly wounded, and the peace of families wantonly sported with’,
while the Monthly Review declared, ‘“Gallants, beware! look sharp! take
care!” For, sooner or later, all will out: and then, brothers, uncles, fathers,
aye and grandfathers too, will stand exposed, as in these volumes.’7 The
accusations of extortion were not unfounded, yet the attempts to dismiss
Steele’s gossipy biography are revealing. They betrayed an anxiety that this
scandal memoir overly exposed men to criticism of their romantic relationships
and affairs.
Using the memoir and letters together, this chapter is chiefly concerned
with desire, sexuality, and the strategies Melbourne and Steele employed to
make their respective claims on Baddeley. As with Williams’s chapter in this
volume on Jonathan Swift’s Journal to Stella, this discussion concerns a
hybrid document that was both public and private; the focus here, though, is
on the tensions arising from the two authors in the Memoirs. The letters
detail Melbourne’s attempts to conduct a private romantic relationship with
Baddeley and his efforts to exercise control over her from a distance. Simi­
larly, Steele used the letters in her memoir to publicly make a superior claim
on Baddeley’s affections, emphasising the depth of their emotional bond,
and deliberately undermining Melbourne in the process. This chapter also
explores conceptions of the actress-courtesan’s body in various ways. It
begins by considering the increased scrutiny and taxonomical standards of
beauty and class to which actresses, as public spectacles, were subjected, and
the ways in which these standards were related to, and dependent on, each
other. This chapter next draws on a materialist analysis of eighteenth-century
sex work by Laura Rosenthal, Markman Ellis and Anne Lewis to offer a fresh
analysis of Baddeley’s sex work that focuses on the coercion of the wage rela­
tion between Baddeley and Melbourne.8 The final section considers Steele’s
own power over Baddeley and Melbourne. While Steele used affective strategies
to reorder power relations between Baddeley and the elite men in the text, she
too was guilty of reproducing gendered expectations of Baddeley’s behaviour,
and did so for financial gain.
Steele’s selection of anecdotes and letters was a kind of curation, an
arrangement that can be read as an act of care. In creating the narrative,
144 Frith Taylor
Steele deepened and enriched the public understanding of Baddeley with
their relationship and household at the centre. In curating a discrete capsule
of letters, Steele further created a miniature narrative appended to the main
text. That this was done explicitly against Melbourne’s wishes – who, as the
opening quote shows, had implored Baddeley to destroy them – is sig­
nificant.9 In doing so, Steele revealed his pursuit of Baddeley and exposed
him to ridicule. By humiliating him, Steele contextualised Baddeley’s work
as a courtesan. This act of hostility towards Melbourne can be read as fur­
ther proof of her devotion to Baddeley, a relationship that some scholars
have posited had queer-romantic elements.10
Steele emphasised the value of her bond with Baddeley by foregrounding
emotion. The biography blended the generic conventions of sensibility,
satire and farce, as well as including long conversations that infused the
memoir with the liveliness of theatre. By framing Baddeley as a sentimental
heroine, Steele created a more detailed version of her in print for a public
only familiar with fleeting descriptions in reviews and gossip columns. Part
of Steele’s effort to rehabilitate Baddeley’s reputation was her emphasis on
their shared domestic life. As Culley observes, the eighteenth-century cour­
tesan ‘was typically presented in opposition to a domestic ideal of privacy,
frugality, self-regulation, and modesty’, and so in fleshing out these private
spaces Steele connected Baddeley with the rich interiority and sensibility of
the sentimental novel.11 What is crucial, however, is that their domestic
model typically resisted normativity. Steele’s memoir reveals a network of
unorthodox kinship bonds and patterns of sociability: a household run by
women bonded by some degree of queer-romantic desire, funded by acting
and sex work, and largely preoccupied with the pursuit of pleasure.
Steele’s inclusion of Melbourne’s letters went some way towards redres­
sing the power imbalance otherwise present. Melbourne was a man with
society influence and political power, but within Steele’s memoir his letters
were subject to her editing and curation. Chronology was significant in the
competing claims made over Baddeley. Melbourne’s letters were written to
Baddeley during their relationship and were concerned with their arrange­
ments to spend time together (more often than not making excuses for his
absence). Steele gained the upper hand by publishing a memoir that exploi­
ted Melbourne’s letters, using his words against him and annexing his letters
(and voice) to the appendix. Melbourne’s letters were subsumed by Steele’s
framing in her memoir published after Baddeley’s death.
Steele’s reasons for including Melbourne’s letters were not, however, an
uncomplicated expression of devotion to Baddeley. Like many scandal
memoirs, Steele’s narrative was premised on assessing Baddeley’s moral
character. While often sympathetic, it exposed her secrets and exploited
gendered stereotypes. In his 1804 review of Samuel Richardson’s work,
Francis Jeffrey praised the epistolary novel for the way it allowed readers to
‘slip invisible, into the domestic privacy of [their] characters and hear and
see everything that is said and done’.12 To ‘slip invisible’ is to cross a
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 145
threshold without consent, and so reading epistolary exchanges was invari­
ably intertwined with questions of intrusion, stealth and exposure. Steele’s
exposure of Melbourne is evident in her decision to publish his personal
letters, but her exposure of Baddeley was more subtle.
While her memoir may have fleshed out Baddeley’s character beyond
sensationalist snippets, her project was nevertheless entangled with various
financial imperatives. Steele’s choice of subjects depended on who was or
was not willing to extricate themselves from scandal. Melbourne was one of
many society men exposed in the memoir because they failed to pay Steele
off. Moreover, Steele’s inclusion of Melbourne’s letters had commercial
advantages. First, the sensational details and direct evidence of Melbourne’s
relationship with a courtesan made the Memoirs a tempting, marketable
read. While the letters and affair were presented as scandalous, it was no
secret among London’s ton that such a relationship existed, nor was it par­
ticularly shocking or unusual for men of Melbourne’s class and position.
The appeal of the letters had as much to do with the ridicule of a young
nobleman as with the erotic and voyeuristic thrill that came with reading
someone else’s love letters. Second, the letters functioned as what Jacques
Lacan calls a point de capiton for the credibility of Steele’s narrative.13
While readers may have expected anecdotes to be embellished, the letters
served as an anchoring device, lending credibility to claims made in the text.
The Morning Herald suggested that Steele’s memoir was an act of
‘extortion’, not an ‘authoritative history’, and that the 140 aristocrats who
appeared in Steele’s Memoirs represent only those ‘who refused to buy
themselves out rather than a full cast of characters’.14 These objections were
part of a wider debate about taste, privacy and ownership in epistolary
exchanges. Louise Curran observes that ‘As long as one had a stash of let­
ters in one’s pocket to sell on to an unscrupulous publisher, there was no
fear of lacking for anything important. Letters had become metonymic of
ready cash.’15 Nevertheless, Curran identifies a squeamishness regarding the
trading of intellectual property. Not only did the transformation of letters
into material goods bring up the question of taste (namely the recipient’s
willingness to sell letters they received in confidence), but there was also the
matter of classifying letters. Were they now commodities? And if so, who
had the right to trade in them? Now that letter-writing was within the reach
of many ranks and subject to the ‘vulgar’ demands of the literary market­
place, there was concern regarding the quality of epistolary exchanges.
Reputations also hung in the balance. Those who took part in publishing
letters without permission, such as Steele, were seen to have entered into a
kind of Faustian bargain for material gain.
Melbourne’s interest in Baddeley and Steele’s ability to write a memoir
that traded on Baddeley’s reputation were a result of changes to the eight­
eenth-century public sphere, celebrity and spectacle. As a politician
(Member of Parliament for Ludgershall, 1768–1793) and aristocrat, Mel­
bourne was very much in the public eye. His wife Elizabeth was a close
146 Frith Taylor
personal friend of the duchess of Devonshire and, as part of the Devonshire
set, the Melbournes were included in the lively metropolitan social circle
that revolved around the Whig party. A leading performer in London’s
entertainment industry, Sophia Baddeley was an early celebrity and the
object of much press attention throughout the highpoint of her acting and
singing career in the 1770s. This chapter draws on Felicity Nussbaum’s
argument that eighteenth-century actresses played a pivotal role in shaping
public perceptions of femininity, as well as the work of Brian Cowan, Jim
Davis and Cheryl Wanko, who argue that eighteenth-century celebrity was
an experience of affect and contemporaneity. It also discusses Hannah Grieg,
who argues that perceptions of beauty among the beau monde were inse­
parable from rank, and Marilyn Morris, who observes that a culture of
‘institutionalised hypocrisy’ lay at the heart of eighteenth-century sex scan­
dals.16 In doing so this case study serves as a microcosm for London’s culture of
intense sociability, revealing the close interrelation between fashion, politics
and sex in London’s beau monde and changes to the eighteenth-century public
sphere.

The actress-courtesan and public spectacle

In 1755 Richard Brinsley Sheridan made the following comments about
actresses:

She is the Creature of a mercenary Manager, The Servant of the Town,

and a licens’d Mark for Libertinism: – She leaves a situation compara­
tively private, where her abilities only distinguish her, to become a
Topic for illiberal News-Paper Criticism and Scandal, and to enter the
list of envious Contentions, which a set of practiced Harlots on one
side, and profligate Scoundrels on the other.17

Sheridan’s comments made clear the close association between the actress
and the body, as well as identifying the actress as a locus of anxieties and
desires in the eighteenth-century imagination. Sheridan became the manager
of Drury Lane Theatre a year later, despite describing the theatre as ‘the
greatest Nursery of Vice and Misery on the Face of the Earth’.18 His com­
ments were teasing, but nevertheless reveal the complex cultural coding to
which actresses were subject: a heady combination of profligacy, sex work
and scandal. Sheridan also gestured towards the paradoxical nature of
eighteenth-century celebrity. Famous actresses were at once embodied (phy­
sically present, sexualised and associated with venereal disease and con­
tagion) and abstracted through the reproduction of their likenesses and
reviews of their performances in print (‘News-Paper Criticism’). The imme­
diacy of performance and proximity of the crowd made eighteenth-century
theatre an embodied experience for performer and audience alike. It was this
experience of shared sensations, an expansion in size and number of public
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 147
spaces, and the increased circulation of actresses’ likenesses in print and
material culture that created the cultural phenomenon that was the celebrity
actress-courtesan.
Sheridan was uncomfortable with actresses trading the private for the
public and connected their canny exploitation of the economy of spectacle
with sex work. In leaving ‘a situation comparatively private’ to become a
public spectacle for financial gain, actresses made themselves fair game for
exploitation, and began an apparently inevitable ‘fall’ into sex work. In his
other comment on theatres, the hallowed female space of the nursery
became perversely refigured as a spawning ground of ‘Vice and Misery’.
Central to current scholarly conceptions of the power and expression of
eighteenth-century actresses is the staging of the personal, what Felicity
Nussbaum has referred to as the ‘interiority effect’ and Joseph Roach has
termed ‘public intimacy’.19 This staging of the intimate or interior was, as
Nussbaum argues, not ‘transparent but rather a provisional, multitiered, and
situational interiority bolstered by the circulation of celebrity news and
gossip, and one that, reduced to a fetishized version of itself, comes to sub­
stitute for the living, evolving person that is the actress herself’.20
As Nussbaum observes, there was an enduring fascination with this
‘fetishised version’ of the actress owing to the eroticised gaze of the theatre
and public gallery. This eroticised gaze revelled in the spectacle of the
actress while admonishing her for moral failings. As Culley observes, Bad­
deley was portrayed by Characters of the Present Most Celebrated Courte­
zans (1780) as the ‘victim of her unruly desires’, with her final years
characterised ‘by a dreadful and excessive indulgence in love, liquor, lust
and laudanum’. In John Williams’s satirical poem The Children of Thepsis
(1787), she was configured as ‘an eminent instance of feminine terror/ A
public example to keep us from error’, and was chastised by the Town and
Country Magazine as being in need of ‘prudence and economy’.21 These
contemporary assessments of Baddeley posited a causal relation between
indulgence and ruin, demonstrating the censure that actress-courtesans faced
for their celebrity. However, as Rosenthal argues, analysis of eighteenth-
century actresses has been preoccupied with whether contemporaries con­
sidered actresses as ‘prostitutes or ladies’, as ‘reified objects or emergent
professionals’. She stresses the need to ‘place this important question in the
broader context of changing constructions of gender, the marketplace and
the distinctiveness of eighteenth-century theatre culture instead of debating
what might be a false opposition’.22
Baddeley appealed to Melbourne directly because of her position as a
famous actress-courtesan. Indeed, Sheridan’s criticism of actresses demon­
strates their increased visibility, and the ways in which their presence in
magazines and gossip columns meant that they occupied more space in the
eighteenth-century imagination. As Roach observes, the celebrity and fame
of eighteenth-century actresses ‘was at least anticipatory and perhaps gen­
erative of modern celebrity because their images began to circulate widely in
148 Frith Taylor
the absence of their persons, a privilege once reserved for anointed sover­
eigns and saints’.23 As Nussbaum, Rosenthal and Wanko have argued, the
rise of the eighteenth-century actress signified an unprecedented develop­
ment in social dynamics as non-elite women were able to wield consider­
able cultural and financial power.24 Over the long eighteenth century,
London theatre culture underwent profound change. The expansion in the
number and size of London theatres and performance spaces, the emer­
gence of female performers and the formation of modern celebrity were all
part of broader societal transformations that saw the formation of the
public sphere, facilitated in turn by a printed press revolution and a new
culture of sociability. While still subject to gendered expectations and
more public scrutiny than their male counterparts, actresses were never­
theless influential figures who were able to shape public conceptions of
femininity.25
Cowan argues that eighteenth-century celebrity was a ‘certain kind of
fame’ that was the intersection of ‘[c]ontemporaneity, publicity, and per­
sonality’.26 This differed from the old regime’s ‘preferred form of notoriety:
la gloire’.27 Glory was ‘a lasting recognition of achievement; if it might be
recognized incipiently during the lifetime of its recipient, it could only be
confirmed posthumously’.28 Celebrity, however, as Stella Tillyard argues,
was about contemporaneous experience: ‘possessing celebrity was at a
simple level someone celebrated, the centre of a throng, a person sur­
rounded, the object of joyous attention. Celebrity was about being with
others, together, adored in the here and now by an audience.’29
The adoration of actresses, this newly visible category of celebrity, was
magnified by an explosion in print culture. Jim Davis notes that eighteenth-
century celebrity was created by the affective strategies employed by artists
and a rapid increase in ‘the number of graphic images – satirical prints,
engravings, lithographs, mezzotints – in circulation. In effect vision began to
be mediated by new technologies of viewing which shaped the individual’s
perceptions of the surrounding world.’30 Gill Perry has examined how this
was utilised in ‘actresses’ flirtatious relationships with the audience … con­
ducted via stage and canvas’.31 As Wanko notes, Perry’s reference to
‘“double mediation” – the woman plays a role on stage which is then pre­
sented in a portrait – dissects complex representational machinery of sexu­
ality and gender’.32
Throughout the Memoirs, Steele shows Baddeley’s instinctive and skilful
understanding of the economy of spectacle. Her theatrical use of public
space ensured that she captivated London society, which in turn yielded
professional acting opportunities, and attracted the interest of clients like
Melbourne. Tillyard’s description of celebrity as a communal, pleasurable
experience suggests that actress’s fame was closely connected to the senses,
to perceptions of the body, and to the idea that bodies are legible. In her
memoirs, Steele described Baddeley’s fame as extending ‘through every circle
of fashionable and middling life’, and that she ‘became caressed, adored and
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 149
followed by the first persons of the nation’. Celebrity was an experience in
33

which proximity, touch, adulation and widespread recognition were com­

bined. As Sheridan’s comments demonstrate, much of the appeal of seeing
women on the stage was a sense of exposure; a contrived publicity that was
irresistible to the voyeur who was simultaneously repulsed and beguiled, and
that compromised the actresses’ agency in various ways. Actresses may have
been lauded for their performances and garnered respect for their artistic
achievements, but they nevertheless expressed themselves in gendered bodies
that were regarded as conduits for sensation.
The female body, Sue-Ellen Case argues, may be regarded as ‘a site where
contesting discourses converge, rather than as a site for a shared identifica­
tion as “women”’.34 For the eighteenth-century actress, those contesting
discourses were a complex combination of her capacity for expression
within a culture of sensibility, speculation regarding her proximity to sex
work, and a preoccupation with class transgression. The question of sex
work was particularly complicated in a theatre culture that, as Rosenthal
observes, ‘eroticised the pairing of the high and the low’ and featured plays
in which ladies and prostitutes were confused for comic effect.35 While, as
Nussbaum observes, it is too simple to state that all actresses were read as
sex workers, and that ‘prostitution was sometimes used as a paradigmatic
catch-all term for female labor of any sort’, there was an association
between theatre and contagion. Jokes about actresses having venereal dis­
eases, for example, served as a general expression for anxieties surrounding
the moral contagion posed by performing women.36
As an actress and courtesan, Baddeley’s physicality was central to her
appeal. Baddeley was known principally for her beauty, which had ‘attrac­
ted hundreds’, and her charm, which was regarded as her most compelling
attribute.37 Steele indulged this fantasy throughout the memoir, presenting
Baddeley as captivating but naïve. Steele relayed an anecdote in which
Samuel Foote makes a direct reference to Baddeley during a performance of
The Maid of Bath:

Mr. Foote enlarged much on the beauty of the Maid of Bath, he added,
‘Not even the beauty of the nine muses, nor even that of the divine
Baddeley herself, who there sits, (pointing to the box where we sat,)
would exceed that of the Maid of Bath.’ This drew a thunder of
applause from all parts of the house; he was encored, and Mr. Foote
repeated the words three times. Every eye was on Mrs. Baddeley, and I
do not recollect ever seeing her so confused before. She rose from her
seat, and curtsied to the audience, and it was near a quarter of an hour
before she could discontinue her obedience, the plaudits lasting so long.
This trick of Mr. Foote’s, put her to the blush, that the colour did not
leave her face the whole evening. Mrs. Baddeley’s face, was not,
according to the fashion of modern beauties, made up by art, for she
never used any rouge but on the stage.38
150 Frith Taylor
Steele emphasised the overwhelming attention Baddeley received from the
public and her apparent confusion at being so singled out. She did not seek
attention, reacted to the public’s praise with ‘obedience’, and was so over­
whelmed by the experience that her blushes did not fade ‘the whole eve­
ning’. The compliment from Foote was also curiously framed. The Maid of
Bath was more beautiful, but Baddeley’s beauty was enough to compare
them, so she should therefore be grateful for the recognition. Baddeley’s
behaviour was not represented by Steele as performance or affectation. This,
and most especially her involuntary blushes, was in line with eighteenth-
century conceptions of feminine virtue.39 As Angela Rosenthal and David
Turner argue, eighteenth-century depictions of the beauty of ‘the fair sex’
were inseparable from constructions of whiteness. In the many treatises on
beauty over the long eighteenth century, blushes signalled the apparent leg­
ibility of white skin, and therefore its superiority.40
Baddeley’s blushes were used by Steele to reflect virtue, modesty, and
crucially, an emotional innocence and frankness that countered the pre­
sumed immorality of actresses. Steele’s description also revealed the imbal­
ance of power at play. As Rosenthal argues, the blush ‘secures the object-
subject hierarchy of traditional Western amorous tropes, of the Pygmalion­
like agency of the man and the materiality of the woman.’41 Baddeley’s
embarrassment was the proper response for the attention she received; she
was presented by Steele as irresistible but somehow unaware of her appeal.
As an actress and courtesan, however, Baddeley would have been keenly
aware of the importance of performing a specific version of herself. Badde­
ley’s mastery of spectacle and her ability to combine charm and notoriety
ensured that she remained an enduring subject of public fascination. Badde­
ley’s appeal was premised on her naiveté, that she was apparently insensible
of her performative and sexual power. By emphasising Baddeley’s modesty
and embarrassment Steele was able to demonstrate her appeal without
appearing to endorse vanity or immorality. In doing so, Steele set up a pro­
blematic subject–object hierarchy between audience and performer.
Steele’s description of Baddeley’s beauty not only emphasised her innocent
appeal, but was an attempt to reframe her class position. Steele indicated
that Baddeley’s blushes must have been real because she was not ‘made up
by art’, distinguishing Baddeley’s natural beauty from the ‘fashion of
modern beauties’. Greig argues that mid-late eighteenth-century conceptions
of beauty were governed by behaviours rather than physical appearance.42
Beauty was not subjective and could be reduced to specific qualities. Several
publications created grading systems for beauty. In October 1776, the
Morning Post published a ‘Scale of Bon Ton’ in which women of fashion
were assessed according to ‘beauty, figure, elegance, wit, sense, grace,
expression, sensibility, and principles’.43 Public praise of a woman’s beauty
was really a confirmation of her social status as a fashionable woman,
‘could not, by definition, be anything but “beautiful”’.44 Baddeley’s lower
social status placed her outside of this taxonomy of beauty and meant that
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 151
the ‘art’ of tasteful cosmetics was not available to her as any make-up she
did wear would be read differently to an elite woman. While it was per­
missible for ‘virtuous’ women to use products to improve their complexion,
stereotypes regarding cosmetics endured; sex workers who solicited in the
street were depicted either with theatrically painted faces or as using cos­
metics to deceive clients.45 Baddeley’s virtue was already imperilled by her
work as an actress. Steele’s readership would have assumed that Baddeley
wore make-up on the stage, and so giving an example of Baddeley’s fresh
appearance off-stage countered the image of the painted actress-courtesan.
Her lack of social prestige and sophistication was reimagined as an unstu­
died freshness and natural beauty.

The actress-courtesan, private practicalities and sex work

Baddeley’s sex work was an elusive, often deliberately obscured, presence in
Steele’s memoir. Obscuring sex work was typical for the time. Culley notes
that there were a variety of contemporary terms for courtesans, such as
‘Hetaera, Cytherian, Thais, Laïs, Cyprian, and Paphian, also the “fashion­
able impure,” “high impure” or the “demirep”’.46 The classical and renais­
sance references in the many euphemisms used for courtesans were intended
to make their presence more palatable, and with their own terminology and
codes of behaviour, courtesans became a kind of elite metropolitan sub­
culture. Nevertheless, Steele went even further, refusing to even make use of
these euphemistic terms. Instead, she piqued the reader’s interest by refer­
ring to Baddeley’s ‘affairs’ while ensuring that Baddeley’s status as a cour­
tesan remained distinct from sex work that took place in brothels or on the
street.
Steele’s presentation of sex work was aspirational, and the reader was
repeatedly given examples of the material advantages of being a courtesan;
Baddeley was apparently lavished with gifts of jewellery and cash, and nei­
ther ‘sex’ nor ‘work’ were ever mentioned. Culley argues that Baddeley’s
‘exchange of sex and social credit for financial gain allowed the women to
live temporarily without economic restraint or reference to their social ori­
gins’.47 While it is certainly true that Baddeley and Steele’s unorthodox
domestic arrangement granted them financial and social freedom unusual for
women of their rank, in discussing Baddeley’s arrangements with Melbourne
and other men, Steele’s Memoir shows that they still endured a degree of
financial dependence. Through this, insights into the practical considerations
and challenges of the actress-courtesan, especially the managing the inter­
relation of sex and labour amidst a culture fascinated by celebrity and
engaged in public scrutiny, can be gleaned.
In Steele’s memoir, the eighteenth-century courtesan model was a ritua­
lised brokering process, an attempt to formalise the complexities of sexual
desire into a defined arrangement, absolving both parties of the stigma of
sex work. Steele described a kind of gift economy: Baddeley was given a
152 Frith Taylor
‘present’ of several hundred pounds every time one of her ‘suitors’ visited
her.48 An annual amount would be settled on Baddeley, and the ‘suitor’
would be responsible for all of her debt and future spending. In Melbourne
and Baddeley’s case, the terms of their relationship were settled only after
several discussions in which Melbourne made a number of offers regarding an
annual settlement on Baddeley. It was eventually understood that Melbourne
would also be responsible for trade bills and that he would give ‘presents’ of
cash, which Baddeley could spend as she wished.49 Steele accounted for each
sum Baddeley received during this process and demonstrated that Baddeley
could receive up to five hundred pounds during a single appointment. This
dwarfed her acting salary of twenty pounds a week.50
Despite this, Steele’s framing allowed little room for the notion that
Baddeley was being paid for sex work. In one comic incident, when Mel­
bourne fled their house through the window, he left two hundred pounds as
‘atonement for his intrusion’ rather than for sex.51 More typically, Steele
framed their relationship in romantic rather than transactional terms.
During the early stages of the brokering, for example, Steele reported Mel­
bourne declaring that he ‘must and would see [Baddeley], even at the risk of
his life. He had the highest regard for her.’52 Likewise, in his letters, Mel­
bourne only talked about Baddeley in terms of love and longing, with no
mention of money or sexuality. The letters, then, were paradoxically a
record of intimacy and a site of absence, erasing the bodily reality of sex and
labour. This romantic framing, maintained by Steele in her memoir and
Melbourne in his letters, had considerable implications for Baddeley.
Melbourne’s letters also give insight into some of the other challenges of
managing the interrelation of sex and labour. They reveal his coercive and
persuasive strategies for containing Baddeley’s behaviour, as well as his dif­
ficulty in reconciling his attraction to her with his anxieties regarding scan­
dal. Crucially, this anxiety meant that he would miss appointments with
her. Such failure had material consequences for Baddeley as she would not
be paid. But while Melbourne’s letters emphasised the emotional cost of his
unreliability, the fact that Melbourne only framed his and Baddeley’s rela­
tionship in romantic terms meant that there was no acknowledgement of the
considerable financial impact of his absence. This erasure of their wage
relation and lack of any explicit acknowledgement of sexuality demonstrates
a striking lack of respect for, and potentially discomfort with, the realities of
sex work on Melbourne’s part.
Melbourne’s letters also contain an implicit assumption that Baddeley
would tolerate a level of precarity and unpredictability in order to maintain
their relationship and the income generated by it. This problem became
more acute when Melbourne encouraged Baddeley to leave her work at the
theatre. Having ‘lamented’ the ‘fatigues to which her profession exposed
her’, he assured her that he ‘should be happy to enable her to quit that
profession’.53 Melbourne characterised his desire to be Baddeley’s sole ben­
efactor as a concern for her, yet she described her dependence on him in less
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 153
positive terms: ‘as to my connexion with Lord Melbourne, having broken
with Mr. Garrick, and given up my singing at Ranelagh, I must preserve it,
having now no other resource’.54 Despite this, because Baddeley’s arrange­
ment with Melbourne was not regarded as work, she did not enjoy even the
most meagre of job security, relying instead on Melbourne’s goodwill. As
Rosenthal notes, even when contracts were drawn up between sex worker
and client, they were not legally binding.55 There were very few legal struc­
tures that made provisions for women outside of marriage.56
While Melbourne and Steele tussled to make the superior claim on Bad­
deley’s affection, the erasure of sex work suited both of their enterprises. For
Steele, a scandal memoirist, sexuality posed a problem. A courtesan’s sexu­
ality was the titillating centre of the memoir but were the memoir to go too
far, it would be deemed obscene. The reader was therefore required to
accept contradictory explanations for Baddeley’s work as a courtesan. For
example, she entered into an arrangement with Melbourne because she was
apparently overwhelmed by gratitude for his kindness, but she was simul­
taneously shown as dispassionately involved in a clearly defined companio­
nate arrangement.57
Similarly, the erasure of sex work suited Melbourne because it liberated
him from having to consider that his absence might have a financial impact
on Baddeley. Through the inclusion of Letter Five, Steele exposed this and
the coercive strategies he employed to smooth over Baddeley’s emotional
reaction. Melbourne made a flippant excuse for his absence, writing that he
was sure that Baddeley would be:

convinced it was totally impossible for me, as I was obliged to go to the

club with some ladies, who obliged me to play ’till after supper, when
you know I could not be so happey to call on you on many accounts.
My dear, I hope you will not be angry, as you know I have ever made a
point not to disappoint you, which nothing that would hinder, should
you ever make me do; and if you knew how happey I am to see you,
you will pity my being so unfortunate as not to see you half so much as
I wish.58

Melbourne anticipated her irritation at the broken engagement, and

smoothed it over with imagined acquiescence: ‘you will be convinced’, and
‘you know I could not be so happey’.59 In Steele’s hands, words like
‘obliged’ take on ironic inflections: obliged ‘to go to the club with some
ladies’, and then ‘obliged to play ’till after supper’ simply show Melbourne’s
inability to keep his promise to Baddeley, with whom he has a formalised
romantic and financial arrangement. Melbourne’s playful tone was typical of
fashionable epistolary styles, with his affected disinterest and pleasure-seek­
ing behaviour meant to signal his ‘clubbability’.60 Yet under Steele’s cur­
atorship, this performance of clubbability instead demonstrated his
disregard for Baddeley’s feelings. The emotional cost of this unequal power
154 Frith Taylor
relation is further revealed by his class-connected flippancy: were Melbourne
courting someone of his own rank, he would never boast of contact with
other women.
Melbourne’s infatuation with Baddeley was evident in his letters. With
their frequent reference to love and kisses, they bore all the hallmarks of
romantic longing and yet they were not straightforward expressions of
attraction. Melbourne’s letters demonstrate how he was simultaneously
beguiled and repulsed by Baddeley’s celebrity; he was entranced by her as a
spectacle and understood the value of her social capital, and yet his tacit
understanding of these attractions also came with a fear that being seen with
her could imperil his respectability and create a scandal. As such, he
expressed desire while simultaneously making efforts to limit contact.
Kisses – given in their thousands – were one example of ‘paper touches’ in
familiar letters, as the chapter by Raapke in this volume demonstrates.
Kisses were one of the few references to tactility that Melbourne made in his
letters to Baddeley, and he transformed them into an economy of desire and
approval. In Letter Six, Melbourne referred to celebrity portraitist Joshua
Reynolds’s depiction of Baddeley, and his enthusiasm for the work reveals
the complex interplay between Baddeley’s celebrity and their personal
connection.

My dear Love,
I have just seen your picture at Reynold’s [sic], and think it will be
well done. I send you a million of kisses, and long to see you, on which
account I will stay as short a time as I can in the country. I hope to see
you by Wednesday next. My life, think of me: remember I love you
Satturday, Sunday, and every day.
Yours ever,
Melbourne61

Melbourne’s attraction to Baddeley was inseparable from her celebrity.

The Reynolds portrait was a physical manifestation of social capital, con­
firming Baddeley’s place in the late eighteenth-century society. Melbourne’s
enthusiasm for the portrait had as much to do with Baddeley’s public image
as Baddeley herself; he rewarded her for the accrued social capital with a
‘million of kisses’. Reynolds’s portrait was entitled simply ‘Mrs. Baddeley’
and now only survives in print form. It is half length with an oval frame,
and features Baddeley with a black ribbon at her throat and pearls in her
hair, holding a kitten with both hands.62 While Baddeley is realised in
careful detail, the kitten’s features are strangely exaggerated. Its eyes are
very large and limpid, and Baddeley holds it close to her chest; the effect is a
caricature of tenderness. It is difficult to know whether Melbourne was pri­
marily charmed by the spectacular softness of the painting, or by the plea­
sure of seeing Baddeley’s portrait painted by a society artist, and the
anticipation of its exhibition. The number of kisses in the memoir’s
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 155
selection of letters range from one thousand to one million, and it was
seeing Reynolds’s portrait that yielded the most. In giving so many kisses,
Melbourne’s affections appear excessive, and governed by an almost ado­
lescent sentimentality which was excited by Baddeley’s fame.
Melbourne’s enthusiasm for Baddeley’s portrait demonstrates the inter­
relation of intimacy and publicity of the beau monde (that ‘elite within an
elite’) and celebrity.63 In this letter there was a palpable sense of activity and
sociability, in which promises of love sat alongside evidence of their fre­
quent contact. This was a relationship that needed to be navigated in the
midst of a variety of social networks and lives lived publicly. The letters’
brevity, and references to clubs, theatres and pleasure gardens, were typical
of the preoccupation with sociability, spectacle and entertainment of Lon­
don’s fashionable aristocracy. Melbourne’s letter was as brief as it was
intense, a million kisses were promised in what feels more like a note. Speed
was privileged over length and detail; Melbourne was eager to communicate
with Baddeley, and would see her the following week.
For Melbourne, Baddeley’s celebrity was a double-edged sword. Her fame
and social status made her irresistible to him, and yet his letters expressed
an anxiety regarding scandal. Melbourne’s concerns reflected changes in the
public sphere, and demonstrated the ways in which elite men felt plagued by
new levels of scrutiny. As an MP and a member of the aristocracy, Mel­
bourne was conscious of being recognised in public. The eighteenth century
saw an explosion in the print marketplace, and the press inherited an intense
focus on the personal lives of public figures from a court culture that ritua­
lised mundane activities (such as the levée) and invited a kind of cult of
personality for public figures. Modes of reporting were influenced by the
gossip and intrigue of the court, and elite men like Melbourne who engaged
in extramarital affairs with famous actress-courtesans were a prime target.
Melbourne’s anxiety regarding scandal was used to place limitations on
his contact with Baddeley. Melbourne’s stipulations offer insight into the
rules that governed public spaces: who may be seen in certain places, with
whom and at what time. For example, in Letter Seven, Melbourne’s efforts
to negotiate public spaces and Baddeley’s problematic presence is evident:

You will I know excuse my not calling now, as you know the hazard I
run in being seen in the day time, otherwise I should be happey in
seeing my love every minnitt, with sending you a thousand kisses.
Yours ever,
Melbourne64

Melbourne acknowledged the scandal that would result from his relation­
ship with Baddeley being made public. He was perhaps concerned about
being included in Town and Country Magazine’s ‘Tête-à-Tête’ series which
had previously featured small portraits of Baddeley and her previous client,
John Hanger. As Culley observes, the series ran from 1769–1792,
156 Frith Taylor
demonstrating an enduring appetite for ‘textual and visual couplings of the
demimonde and bon ton’.65 Colin Brown notes that Steele’s house on the
King’s Road in Chelsea was ideal to meet Baddeley ‘because it was suffi­
ciently far away from Piccadilly to enable him to visit her by Hackney cab
without being identified by the coat of arms … of his own carriage’.66 In
order to maintain his relationship with Baddeley and avoid scandal, Mel­
bourne had to compartmentalise his marital and extramarital lives. His let­
ters reveal his attempts to contain her both temporally and spatially: he
would only visit Baddeley at her house at night.
Read in the context of Steele’s letter curation, Melbourne’s assertions
become unstable: how could he be ‘ever’ Baddeley’s if he refused to see her
in the daytime? What emerges is a clear power dynamic. Rather than apol­
ogising for not calling, he wrote, ‘You will I know excuse my not calling.’67
Melbourne’s sentences ramble, but were nevertheless phrased as commands
softened with ‘a thousand kisses’. Melbourne’s combination of coercive and
persuasive strategies were exposed by Steele’s inclusion in her memoir, and
demonstrate the power dynamics implicit in conducting extramarital sexual
relationships across class lines.
Melbourne’s feelings were typical of elite men over the eighteenth century.
While he clearly had no moral qualms about conducting an extramarital
affair, he was understandably eager to limit public embarrassment in the
press. Sexuality and sexual behaviour over the long eighteenth century were
subject to complex interrelated moral codes. While these codes were pre­
mised on the sanctity of marriage, community approval and the preservation
of virginity, there were also a number of licit sexual behaviours that were
widespread in eighteenth-century culture. Much of this depended on class.
Katie Barclay observes that advice given to young Scottish elite men ‘often
assumed that they had some sexual experience before marriage’.68 Julie
Hardwick argues that public, physical intimacy, time alone and even sexual
relationships were perfectly acceptable between young couples of the same
rank who intended to marry.69 Certainly there was social stigma attached to
actress-courtesans, but, as Nussbaum argues, the celebrity of famous
actresses eclipsed their association with extramarital sex; actresses’ ‘alluring
linkage between the aristocratic and the commonplace meant that celebrity
competed with class in determining their social standing and revised the
tenacious residue of the whore’.70
In light of this, Melbourne seemed overly anxious, especially considering
the tacit assumption among aristocratic society that most elite men would
engage in extramarital sex of some kind. However, while members of the
elite may have been frank about their affairs between themselves, ridicule in
gossip columns was not meaningless. Melbourne lived in a culture that
condoned extramarital affairs but may still have wanted to avoid embar­
rassment in his wider social circle and the public, certainly considering that
he was a young MP who had only recently married, and whose wife was
expecting their first child. As he wrote to Baddeley, ‘Pray be carefull not to
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 157
mention my name at Brighthelmston, or any where that whe [sic] may not
be plagued again by the ill-natured world.’71 It was anxiety about his name
and public persona, rather than about marital fidelity, that dictated their
contact and public associations.
As Barclay has demonstrated, for elite eighteenth-century circles these
views on sexuality were entangled with Enlightenment ideals, and the need
for distinction from the ‘uncivilised’ lower orders.72 Fidelity, then, had as
much to do with performing rank and maturity as with the sanctity of
marriage. It is this class relation that is the key to understanding eighteenth-
century scandal and Melbourne’s evasive behaviour, which may be more
simply explained as a symptom of his entitlement. Irrespective of Mel­
bourne’s true feelings, he made it clear to Baddeley that they were not
enough to weather a scandal, despite his professions of love and adoration.
Of equal significance was the power dynamic between them. He cancelled
appointments with ease and attempted to coerce her into acquiescing to his
demands while she bore the financial burden of his absence.

Memoirs, letters and power dynamics

Steele’s memoir used a number of strategies to unbalance the established
power balance between the courtesan and her elite male client, as well as
challenging the characterisation of courtesans in eighteenth-century cul­
ture.73 Steele’s affective strategies were for the most part effective. She
emphasised her close bond with Baddeley, made space for Baddeley’s long,
expressive speeches, and used humour to destabilise the authority of elite
men throughout the text. As Culley argues, Steele represented her relation­
ship with Baddeley as a ‘companionate marriage’, drawing on sentimental
romance and moral reform genres in order to emphasise the value of their
unorthodox home life.74 Steele also exposed eighteenth-century London’s
sexual double standards, thus creating a ‘feminist polemic and a satire of
fashionable society.’75
Culley argues that Steele’s memoir was an effort to posthumously recup­
erate her reputation.76 In 1769 Baddeley moved in with Steele, and they lived
together until 1774. During this period Baddeley was at the height of her
fame.77 As discussed, the combination of Baddeley’s fame and her position
as an actress-courtesan meant that she was subject to criticism regarding her
sex work, her extramarital affairs and her life of luxury and indulgence, and
had little recourse to defend herself or acquaint the public with a more
nuanced sense of her character. Steele aimed to remedy this and represent
Baddeley (and by extension herself) as a fully realised, complex woman. As
Culley observes, the ‘general decline of satire and scandal in favor of senti­
mental expression suggests that during this period women writers dis­
covered a public authority in the privatized language of femininity rather
than a public discourse of political gossip’.78 Central to this refashioning of
public persona was the blending of genre. While the language of sensibility
158 Frith Taylor
‘enabled a fantasy of intimacy, transparency, and accessibility for readers’,
women writers who drew on the language of sensibility ‘evoked dangerous
associations with affectation, self-display, and sexual excess that was a
dominant strand within the antisentimental discourse of the period’.79 By
blending genres, Steele was able to furnish Baddeley with the complex
interiority of sentimental memoir while also maintaining a satirical distance
from her other subjects through using her referential scandal memoir to
destabilise male authority.
Steele’s memoir was an exercise in control over speech, over who was
given space to express themselves and how much space they were afforded.
Through her descriptions of her relationship with Baddeley, and her cura­
tion of Melbourne’s letters, Steele presented her claim to Baddeley as
superior to Melbourne’s as it was based on a deep emotional bond. This
description of her relationship with Baddeley in turn validated her position
as biographer.

as children we were brought up together, and educated at the same

school; … our intimacy continued through the whole of her life, and
that for several years of it, she lived in my house; that as friend and
confidante she unbosomed herself to me.80

Steele justified her narrative authority by describing the depth of her

relationship with Baddeley. It was their shared domestic life, as well as a
sense that they were emotionally intertwined over a long period of time, that
gave the impression of intimacy. Steele’s use of ‘unbosomed’ is particularly
telling. Her conflation of physical and emotional intimacy suggests that
confiding in someone had a bodily dimension. Steele’s memoir was governed
by swells of emotion, the intensity of which points to a slippage between
friendship and sexuality. In Steele’s memoir, Baddeley was placed firmly in
the foreground, while Steele’s role was somewhere between guardian and
confidante. She provided advice, stability and financial support.81 The lan­
guage Baddeley and Steele used to describe each other (as reported by Steele)
was ardent and devoted, often expressed in terms of bodily pain, as well as
dependence, relief and joy. Steele referred to Baddeley as ‘my dear angel’,
and said her love for Baddeley ‘was so great, that I would cheerfully risk my
life’.82 Baddeley was ‘almost inconsolable’ at the thought of separation from
Steele.83 As both Culley and Donoghue argue, this suggests that Baddeley
and Steele’s relationship may have had queer-romantic elements.84
In addition to emphasising their deep bond and casting Baddeley as a
sentimental heroine, Steele claimed space for Baddeley by including long
conversation scenes in which Baddeley delivered moving speeches. This
affective strategy created a palpable sense of Baddeley’s presence and must
be read as a deliberate choice made by Steele, as long passages of conversa­
tion were remembered apparently verbatim many years after the fact. One
example was Steele’s account of a confrontation between Baddeley and
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 159
Hanger, a significant romantic partner of Baddeley’s and the text’s principal
antagonist. Before Melbourne, Hanger had a formalised sexual and compa­
nionate arrangement with Baddeley, and they lived together early in the
narrative. His abandonment of Baddeley and later pursuit of her was the
catalyst for Baddeley’s early emotional and financial crises. Recounting a
previous incident with Hanger in which he brandished a knife and threa­
tened suicide should she leave him, Baddeley reportedly said:

the fright you put me in, so alarmed me, that I would have promised
any thing. I then foolishly told you I would occasionally see you, though
I never designed it; and you made me swear I would go to Paris to meet
you which to get rid of you I did swear, though I now repent it. To
keep my oath I went, but not to gratify any wishes of your’s … My
intent was to mortify you … Don’t persuade yourself that any regard
for you took me there; a wish to see the country, and an opportunity of
revenging myself were my sole motives.85

The swells of emotion in Baddeley’s ringing monologue, emphasised by

Steele’s use of italics and expressive sentences that follow patterns of speech,
are effective in creating a sense of immediacy. This dramatisation of con­
versation foregrounded personal testimony and created the sense of speaking
directly to the reader.86 By relaying conversations she had with Baddeley in
minute detail, Steele provided space for both women to express the com­
plexities of their emotions with a similar immediacy. Day-to-day life was
inflected with dramatic intensity as the distinctions between autobiography,
biography and the storytelling modes of the stage are collapsed by Steele’s
attempt to combine oral and written traditions.
Steele’s generic flexibility allowed for a reordering of power relations as
her emphasis on the depth of her bond with Baddeley ran alongside farcical
scenes in which elite men were ridiculed. Culley observes that satire ‘con­
figures its audience as detached an amused spectators’ while, as Vivien Jones
argues, the reformist seduction narrative ‘discovers, and seeks to contain,
the prostitute as redeemable victim’.87 In Steele’s blend of genres, however,
‘Baddeley is neither a distant object nor fully contained as the repentant
sinner. The strategic interweaving of sexual farce and social commentary
collapses textual boundaries, as protagonists, biographer, and reader share a
joke at the expense of aristocratic male dignity.’88 Steele, meanwhile, was
able to take the role of responsible husband and protector and revelled ‘in
these opportunities to “forget my sex” … This heroic masculine persona is
created out of her relationship to Baddeley and is reinforced by her role as
the writer and reader of a shared romance’.89 As demonstrated earlier,
Melbourne’s failure to keep appointments had financial implications for
Baddeley, whereas Steele was the one who could be reliably depended on to
provide financially. Steele’s memoir attempted to posthumously reconfigure
Baddeley’s dependence on clients like Melbourne.
160 Frith Taylor
By including Melbourne’s letters, Steele further reconfigured the dis­
tribution of power in this gendered dynamic. These letters contained the
emotional outpourings of a young man and were moderated by a female
‘editor’. This directly reversed the gendered power dynamic implicit in
most fictional epistolary narratives of the time. As Elizabeth Heckendorn
Cook notes of Clarissa and Les Liaisons dangereuses, the ‘correspondents’
may have collected the letters but it was a ‘male editor [that] appropriates
and authenticates a correspondence’.90 Alongside reversing this norm,
Steele’s conception of narrative authority was further modelled on different
values to conventional epistolary narratives in which female emotion was
ordered by male logic.
Steele used Melbourne’s own words to form her narrative about him, and
chose the letters that made Melbourne seem ridiculous in order to displace his
claims on Baddeley. This intention was clear from the outset, as witnessed by
her introduction to the appendix:

The following are a few of Lord Melbourne’s Letters. No. 1. was sent
to Mrs. Steele, the Day after he fled out of the Parlour Window, in St.
James’s-place.91

Melbourne’s first letter was addressed to Steele, confirming that he recog­

nised her as a gatekeeper for Baddeley. In it, he implored her to ‘send me
word back if my dear creature will meet me’.92 He made scant mention of
the circumstances that led to the writing of the letter, but Steele relayed this
wider context in the memoir proper:

When I was absent from my new house, Lord Melbourne got admit­
tance in St. James’s Place to drink tea with her [Baddeley]. On my
return, I found them together. She came out to me, and on my remon­
strating her on the impropriety of her encouraging any gentleman’s
visits, his Lordship … overheard me, and fearing an attack on him
personally, threw up the parlour window, and precipitately leaped out.
Being too much in a hurry to take sufficient precaution about a safe
landing place, he fell down the area; however, receiving no material
hurt, he scrambled up again and took to his heels.93

This extraordinary scene was typical of the farcical, slapstick moments that
punctuated the narrative. In it, Melbourne’s relationship with Baddeley was
represented as secondary to the focus of the narrative, which was Baddeley’s
relationship with Steele. Steele positioned herself as the wronged spouse who
returned home to an unfaithful wife. As Culley observes, Steele often took on
male roles in order to inhabit a ‘heroic masculine persona’ and to imply that her
life with Baddeley was a ‘romance’.94 In addition to this, Steele also pre­
sented herself as a knowing third party in a text replete with game-playing
and mischief in order to destabilise male and female categories.
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 161
Steele’s curatorial and editorial choices were leveraged for comic effect.
For example, she preserved Melbourne’s poor spelling throughout. Letter
Seven’s claim – that he would be ‘happey’ in seeing Baddeley ‘every min­
nitt’ – is a typical example.95 By the late 1780s, such spelling errors would
have been conspicuous in print, if not in manuscript, letters. Steele’s pre­
servation of orthographical ineptitude was therefore a pointed editorial
decision that exposed his lack of intelligence and education. Melbourne’s
contemporaries commonly observed that ‘his education at Eton left a lot to
be desired’ and that he was known primarily for burning through his
inheritance ‘in pursuit of pleasure’.96 Steele herself claimed that Melbourne
was ‘not the brightest man of the age’, ‘acquainted neither with good
grammar or orthography’.97 She affirmed and evidenced this consensus,
using Melbourne’s poor spelling to render the man himself infantile and
ridiculous. Strikingly, she seized the opportunity to further subvert gendered
notions of education and authority by allowing an implicit contrast between
his words and Baddeley and Steele’s sophisticated grasp of the English lan­
guage. Here it was the working women, not the aristocratic man, who were
the gatekeepers of grammatical and orthographic standards.

Conclusion
Lord Melbourne’s letters to Sophia Baddeley serve as a microcosm for the
desires and anxieties of late eighteenth-century London society. Beguiled by
spectacle, but anxious regarding scandal, Melbourne was exposed by Steele
who marshalled his contradictory feelings against him. Melbourne’s repe­
ated declarations of love and longing made visible unrestrained romantic
impulses that would otherwise be shielded from view, while his fickleness
and unreliability showed him to be characteristic of a political class plagued
by entitlement and indulgence.
In foregrounding her deep bond with Baddeley and demonstrating the
value of the life they shared, Steele countered the charges levelled at Badde­
ley for her work as an actress-courtesan. This new form of celebrity was
closely associated with the body, and explicitly gendered. Steele capitalised
on Baddeley’s proximity to theatre culture by including heartfelt mono­
logues whose dramatic intensity gave a palpable sense of Baddeley’s pre­
sence. Metropolitan sociability increased opportunities to see and be seen,
and brought with it explicit relations between spectator and spectacle. For
actresses this meant the eroticised gaze of the public gallery as well as the
abstraction of their image through widespread reproduction in the press.
The personalisation of politics and explosion in print technologies created a
media culture preoccupied with the manufacture of scandal. The relation­
ship between text and body was particularly acute for actresses-courtesans;
few other professions were as reliant on media coverage, nor personally
scrutinised by gossip columns. Steele repudiated the characterisation of
Baddeley in the press, and gossip was turned on elite men instead. Steele’s
162 Frith Taylor
skilful editing of Melbourne’s letters implicitly contrasted his treatment of
Baddeley to her own. As Baddeley’s responses were not included by Steele in
the appendix, Melbourne’s letters read as a rapid accumulation of his pro­
mises and excuses; the letters swing wildly from ardent declarations of love
and affection to flimsy excuses for not keeping appointments. The cumula­
tive effect of Melbourne’s letters was one of caprice, vanity and indifference.
Steele allowed eleven pages for Melbourne’s letters in a memoir that spans
six volumes and over one thousand pages. Steele’s skill was to cannily lure
the reader in with details of Baddeley’s famous relationships, and then
diminish them in light of her own relationship with Baddeley.
Steele’s blending of genre was subversive and allowed her to destabilise
male authority. In presenting Baddeley as a sentimental heroine within a text
that maintained a sharp satirical eye on elite men, she invited readers into a
space in which social hierarchies were disrupted, entertainment was privi­
leged over industry and sensibility and desire were the guiding principles.
This generic flexibility allowed for several farcical interludes that relied on
the ridicule of aristocratic men. As Culley notes, these scenes concluded with
an ‘audience of women … convened around images of deflated male power
in a text that resounds with anarchic female laughter’.98 Steele’s skilful
management of scandal throughout the memoir allowed readers into spaces
that would otherwise carry some level of censure. In tempering Baddeley’s
excesses with cautionary admonitions and softening the edges of the narra­
tive with farcical interludes, Steele invited readers into a tantalising world of
balls and masquerades, making space for cross-dressing, queer romanticism
and a domestic model disinterested in normative constructions of morality.
Steele’s reasons for writing her memoir were nevertheless not a straightfor­
ward expression of her devotion to Baddeley nor a clear-cut effort to recuperate
her reputation. Intrusion and exposure were among the central tension of
Steele’s memoir. She exposed Baddeley’s secrets for financial gain and depicted
Baddeley’s appearance and behaviour in ways designed to appeal to conven­
tional eighteenth-century constructions of femininity that were riddled with
power imbalances and reliant on a performance of naivete. In trading in Bad­
deley’s secrets and Melbourne’s letters, Steele made a Faustian bargain that laid
her open to charges of extortion, the reliance on ghost writers and voyeurism.
Culley argues that the aim of Steele’s memoir was to recuperate Badde­
ley’s reputation through its emphasis on their domesticity, depiction of
their significant emotional connection and refusal to be wholly dependent
on the elite men who finance their lifestyle.99 As this chapter demonstrates,
however, the material cost to Baddeley of Melbourne’s missed appoint­
ments destabilises the claim that Steele and Baddeley were able to fully
exploit wealthy men. Baddeley had to endure some level of precarity and inse­
curity in order to live as she did. Melbourne’s discomfort with Baddeley’s
profession was evident in his wish to be her sole benefactor, and both he and
Steele obscured sex work, representing his relationship with Baddeley primarily
in romantic terms.
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 163
Melbourne’s letters to Baddeley were a mass of contradictions, with an ever-
present complex negotiation between privacy and exposure, affection and
embarrassment, invitation and apology. Melbourne’s pleasure in seeing Badde­
ley’s portrait closely linked to her fame, and yet he bowed to social pressures and
refused to be seen in public with her. Steele exploited these contradictory impul­
ses in order to recuperate Baddeley’s reputation. By placing Melbourne’s words
as an appendix to her narrative, she implicitly presented Melbourne as secondary
to Baddeley’s other concerns, skilfully defending Baddeley by damning
Melbourne with his own letters. Melbourne’s narrative became a super­
fluous appendage; his clumsiness, excuses and poor spelling magnified as
they repeated in letter after letter. This curious triangulation of Steele,
Baddeley and Melbourne reveals the complexities of eighteenth-century sex
work, queer romanticism and scandal.

Notes
1 Elizabeth Steele, The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley, Late of Drury Lane
Theatre (Dublin, 1787), vol. 1, 124.
2 Ibid., vol. 1, 28, 41.
3 Amy Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire of Sophia Baddeley’, SEL Studies in English
Literature 1500–1900, 48:3 (2008), 677–692.
4 Emma Donoghue, Passions between Women: British lesbian culture 1668–1801

(London: Scarlett Press, 1993), 167; Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 677–692.

5 Karl Marx, quoted in Kieran Allen, Marx: The Alternative to Capitalism

(London: Pluto Press, 2017), 118.

6 Donoghue, Passions between Women, 167.
7 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 683–684.
8 Laura J. Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth Century
British Literature and Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 4;
Ann Lewis and Markman Ellis, ‘Introduction: Venal Bodies – Prostitutes and
Eighteenth-Century Culture’, in Lewis and Ellis (eds), Prostitution and Eighteenth-
Century Culture: Sex, Commerce and Morality (London: Routledge, 2012), 6.
9 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 124.
10 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 677; Donoghue, Passions between Women, 167.
11 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 679–680.
12 Francis Jeffrey, quoted in Louise Curran, Samuel Richardson and the Art of
Letter-writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 2.
13 Paul H. Fry, Theory of Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012),
167.
14 The Morning Herald, quoted in Culley, British Women’s Life Writing, 1760–1840:
Friendship, Community, and Collaboration (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014), 98.
15 Curran, Samuel Richardson, 12–13.
16 Hannah Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013), 169; Brian Cowan, ‘News, Biography, and Eight­
eenth-Century Celebrity’, Oxford Handbook Topics in Literature (online edn, Oxford
Academic, 16 Dec. 2013), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935338.013.132
(accessed 31 December 2021); Jim Davis, ‘Spectatorship’, in Jane Moody and Daniel
O’Quinn (eds), The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830 (Cam­
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57–70; Cheryl Wanko, ‘Celebrity Studies
164 Frith Taylor
in the Long Eighteenth Century: An Interdisciplinary Overview’, Literature Compass,
8:6 (2011), 351–362; Marilyn Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eight­
eenth-Century British Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 3.
17 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, quoted in Sharon M. Setzer, Women’s Theatrical
Memoirs, Volume 1 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007), xi.
18 Ibid.
19 Joseph Roach, quoted in Felicity Nussbaum, Rival Queens: Actresses, Perfor­
mance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater (Philadelphia, PA: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 16.
20 Ibid., 21.
21 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 679–680.
22 Rosenthal, ‘Entertaining Women: The Actress in Eighteenth-Century Theatre
and Culture’, in Moody and O’Quinn (eds), British Theatre, 159.
23 Joseph Roach, quoted in Rosenthal, ‘Entertaining Women’, 161.
24 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 15; Rosenthal, ‘Entertaining Women’, 160; Wanko,
‘Celebrity Studies’, 351–362.
25 See Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 15.
26 Cowan, ‘News’.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Stella Tillyard, quoted in ibid.
30 Davis, ‘Spectatorship’, 60.
31 Gill Perry, quoted in Wanko, ‘Celebrity Studies’, 355.
32 Ibid.
33 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 9.
34 Sue-Ellen Case, quoted in Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 193.
35 Rosenthal, ‘Entertaining Women’, 168–169.
36 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 36–40.
37 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 3, 163.
38 Ibid., vol. 3, 67–69.
39 Angela Rosenthal, ‘Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in
Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture’, Art History 27:4 (2004), 563–592; David
M. Turner, ‘The Body Beautiful’, in Carole Reeves (ed.), A Cultural History of
the Human Body in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 125.
40 Turner, ‘The Body Beautiful’,125.
41 Rosenthal, ‘Visceral Culture’, 563–592.
42 Greig, Beau Monde,169.
43 Ibid., 168.
44 Ibid., 169.
45 Turner and Alun Withey, ‘Technologies of the Body: Polite Consumption and
the Correction of Deformity in Eighteenth-Century England’, History, 99:5
(2014), 778.
46 Culley, British Women’s Life Writing, 78.
47 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 679.
48 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 43.
49 After paying a £450 shopping bill, Melbourne requested that Baddeley ‘make him
acquainted with anything she might fancy in that way and she would take care
that she should have it’. Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 47.
50 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 95–96.
51 Ibid., vol. 1, 43.
52 Ibid., vol. 1, 45.
53 Ibid., vol. 1, 45.
54 Ibid., vol. 2, 216.
55 Rosenthal, Infamous Commerce, 8.
 PS ‘A thousand kisses’ 165
56 Ibid.
57 Melbourne hoped to ‘enable her to quit [acting], by empowering her to live in an
easier sphere of life, than either a Theatre, Ranelagh, or any public place of
entertainment’, and Baddeley had ‘almost the command of his Lordship’s purse’.
Melbourne’s description sounds like an offer of work, which contrasts with
Baddeley’s effusive response, ‘Mrs. Baddeley, on receiving these favours at his
Lordship’s hands, expressed the highest sense of gratitude and esteem, for his
noble and liberal conduct to her, professing herself more indebted to his bounty
than to any man living.’ Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 45–46, 48.
58 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 250.
59 Ibid., vol. 1, 250 (italics added).
60 Samuel Johnson’s term for the ‘sustained accessibility and conviviality’ desirable
in a man. Morris, Sex, Money and Personal Character, 66.
61 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 251.
62 E. Welsh, (print) after Joshua Reynolds, Mrs. Baddeley, 1772.
63 Greig, Beau Monde, 4.
64 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 252.
65 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 679–680.
66 Colin Brown, Lady M, The Life and Loves of Elizabeth Lamb, Viscountess
Melbourne 1751–1818 (Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2018), 35.
67 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 252.
68 Katie Barclay, ‘Sex, Identity, and Enlightenment in the Long Eighteenth Century’,
in Jodi A. Campbell, Elizabeth Ewan and Heather Parker (eds), The Shaping of
Scottish Identities: Family, Nation, and the Worlds Beyond (Guelph: Centre for
Scottish Studies, 2011), 31.
69 Julie Hardwick, ‘A Sexual Revolution in the Eighteenth Century?', Age of Revo­
lutions, 15 March 2021, retrieved from https://ageofrevolutions.com/2021/03/15/a
-sexual-revolution-in-the-eighteenth-century (accessed 16 December 2021).
70 Nussbaum, Rival Queens, 47.
71 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 2, 41.
72 Barclay, ‘Sex, Identity, and Enlightenment’, 34–35.
73 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 681; Donoghue, Passions between Women, 169.
74 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 677.
75 Ibid.
76 Ibid.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid., 678.
79 Ibid.
80 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 1.
81 When negotiating her separation from her husband in 1767, Baddeley agreed to
pay his debts. According to Steele, the debts ‘then amounting to eight hundred
pounds … were discharged through my hands.’ Steele also claimed that when
Mr. Baddeley was ‘sued afterwards for two debts contracted by his wife, the
costs of which were paid by me to his attorney, Mr. Levy’. Steele, Memoirs, vol.
1, 7.
82 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 235; vol. 3, 106.
83 Ibid. vol. 1, 42.
84 Donoghue, Passions between Women, 167; Culley, The Sentimental Satire, 677.
85 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 152–153.
86 For a discussion of immediacy, intimacy and authenticity as the key tropes in
epistolary narratives, see Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender
and Genre in the Eighteenth Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1996), vii.
87 Vivien Jones, quoted in Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 684.
166 Frith Taylor
88 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 684.

89 Ibid., 682.

90 Cook, Epistolary Bodies, 2.

91 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 245.

92 Ibid.

93 Ibid., vol. 1, 43.

94 Culley. ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 682.

95 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 252.

96 Brown, Lady M, 17, 35.

97 Steele, Memoirs, vol. 1, 6667.

98 Culley, ‘The Sentimental Satire’, 684.

99 Ibid., 677.

Part III

Bodies deployed
8 I ‘never had the happeness of
Receivin one Letter from You’
Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756
Sheryllynne Haggerty

The Europa’s letter bag

Patrick Kelly was an ordinary sailor on HMS Greenwich, a Royal Navy
vessel stationed in Jamaica at the start of the Seven Years’ War. When he
wrote to his brother that he ‘never had the happeness of Receivin one Letter
from You’,1 he was expressing a sentiment common among letter-writers in
the eighteenth-century Atlantic: the desire to receive a letter from loved
ones. However, letters such as Patrick’s are not common and it is only due
to the vagaries of war that it survives. Patrick was one of many people
posting letters home from Jamaica during September, October and Novem­
ber 1756, some of which were put into the post bag of the Europa, a mer­
chant vessel from Dublin.2 In contrast to the ‘traditional archive’ of elite or
mercantile letter-writers, the letters in the Europa’s letter bag are from a
random group of individuals, many of whose letters would not normally
have survived for posterity.3 This is significant because Patrick’s letter, and
the others used in this chapter, provide important correctives to the litera­
ture on transatlantic letter-writing and significant additions to that on letter-
writing of the non-elite sections of society in Britain. Patrick’s lament also
highlights the importance of letters between correspondents at such long
distances from one another.
Much of the work on British Atlantic letter-writing focuses on either the
political elite – for example, Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s study of Benjamin
Franklin and Toussaint Louverture’s correspondence – or wealthy mercan­
tile networks, such as that by Konstantin Dierks and Kenneth Morgan on
the Bright-Meyler family.4 Equally, studies that focus on the letters of
Atlantic families, such as those by Sarah Pearsall, note that the quality of
whitish paper used by letter-writers spoke to access and privilege.5 These
historians all argue that such letters made empire possible, or at least held it
together, but at the same time their sources dictate that they miss out a large
section of the trans-Atlantic community, including the poor.
Yet research on letter-writing within the British context has shown that
non-elites, and even the poor, did write letters, and wrote them well. Indeed,
it would appear that literacy went far down the social scale. Susan Whyman

DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-12
170 Sheryllynne Haggerty
has demonstrated how an ‘epistolary moment’ in the eighteenth century
meant that not only did letters have a significant impact on culture, but also
promoted literacy, even if many wrote phonetically.6 Indeed, Steven King
has argued that it is exactly these spelling mistakes, lack of punctuation and
random capitalisation that demonstrates these letters were penned by the
signatories, a point underlined in his chapter in this volume. People learnt
from other people’s letters, from chapbooks and balladry, and from each
other.7 George Farmer, whose letters are also used here, was well aware of
epistolary standards; he knew that his handwriting was supposed to be
relatively neat. ‘This I have wrote in a hurry’, he noted, ‘yt I believe yu ownt
[ought] be Able to read it’.8 Equally, the apprentice carpenter Ewbank Ogle
wrote home to his mother himself.9 Nor was money necessarily a problem.
Lindsay O’Neill has shown that despite the fact that the post was costly and
far from reliable, especially across the Atlantic, even the poor knew how to
work the system and might send letters within parcels that were to be
redirected or sent by hand via friends to save money.10 Indeed, merchant
seaman Robert Nelson posted a letter on the Europa to his friend Robert
Smith to pass on. As ‘a friend youll Be So good as to Send this Letter of min
hom if it Comes to your hand’.11 These were ordinary men, yet they
understood the usual conventions and uses of letter-writing. The Europa’s
letters therefore provide an opportunity to write a corrective to the domi­
nant story of elite letter-writing in the British Atlantic world, and add to the
evidence for a more literate society further down the social scale in Britain.

The letters
The letters posted on the Europa are a rare source for historians of Britain’s
empire and only exist due to the vagaries of war. Nearly home from
Jamaica in December, the Europa was taken by a French privateer, Le
Machault, on the 21st. However, two days later, as the French were taking
the Europa south en route to Spain, she was retaken by the British. When
the British crew searched the Europa, they found ‘Concealed under one of the
Guns in the Cabin, A Bagg Containing a Great Number of Letters or Papers’.12
The bag of letters was taken, along with all the cargo on board and the vessel
itself, to be used as evidence in the High Court of Admiralty (HCA). This was
always done to prove the title of captors, or the claims of neutrals, as to whom
owned the profits from the prize.13 These letters were therefore never delivered
and remain extant at the National Archives, London. It was unusual for vessels
to be retaken in this way, and this is the only set of such letters of this type
remaining for the British Caribbean for the whole of the Seven Years’ War in?
the records of the HCA.14 There are many letters from other nations, including
the French of course, and recent work – including Raapke’s chapter in this
volume – has shown the marvellous potential of such caches of letters in
understanding the lives of ordinary people, and especially those whose letters
would not normally have survived.15
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 171
The Europa’s post bag contained over four hundred letters and other
documents which were written mostly by merchants, planters, attorneys,
overseers, lawyers and ships’ captains. There were also some letters from
women.16 However, this chapter focuses on nine ‘unlettered’ letters by eight
ordinary sailors. They are not representative of the collection as a whole,
nor are they intended to be. Most of the letters in this collection are well-
written and contain relatively standardised spelling (according to eighteenth-
century standards), including those written by the majority of the ships’
captains and by women. In contrast, the letters used here have been chosen
specifically because they exhibited poor penmanship, poor spelling, phonetic
spelling, or a combination of all three, in order the highlight the letter-writing
of practices of less-well educated, working people. It is for this reason I have
called them ‘unlettered’ letters.17
An unintended consequence of this choice is that all the letters are from
ordinary seamen working on either Royal Navy ships or merchant vessels.
The writers are: William Nickell, Robert Nelson and Joseph Fraizer, sailors
on three different merchant vessels; Edward Magnar, a sailor who jumped
off a slave trade vessel and joined HMS Shoram; George Farmer, an ordin­
ary seaman on HMS Dreadnought; Patrick Kelly, an ordinary sailor on
HMS Greenwich; Martin Swords an ordinary seaman on HMS Princess
Mary; and John Smith, on another unidentified Royal Navy vessel. John
Smith was from Somerset, William Nickell was from Belfast and George
Farmer was from Cork, but Edward Magnar, Joseph Fraizer, Patrick Kelly,
Robert Nelson and Martin Swords were all from Dublin.18 The number of
Irishmen is not surprising given that the Europa was Dublin-owned and
heading home; and this may also explain much of the phonetic spelling. The
original spelling, punctuation and capitalisation have been kept throughout
to highlight this regionality, and the authenticity and character of these let­
ters. Indeed, if you read the letters out loud, the letter writers’ broad accents
come alive, as do their words. While these nine letters usually conform to
certain formats or rhetorics in terms of salutations and valedictions, none of
them conform to a formal letter-writing style that could be classed as ‘sen­
timental’ or of the ‘cult of sensibility’.19 In this these letters appear extre­
mely honest, open and guileless. This is not to say that these letters were
only intended for the recipient, or were not shaped for a wider audience. As
we shall see, news was meant to be shared and passed on to family and
friends.20 The letters also speak to several themes around which the remainder
of this chapter is centred. The first section considers concerns over being for­
gotten. The following sections deal in turn with love (consanguineal, affinal
and friendship), health, and war. A close reading of these ‘unlettered’ letters
shows us that it was not only merchants and elites that wrote transatlantic
letters. It demonstrates that even poorer sections of society understood formal
letter conventions and that they deployed their letters to bridge the distance of
the Atlantic, to send and maintain love, and to inform and express fears and
hopes about health and the war surrounding them.
172 Sheryllynne Haggerty
Remembrances, reminders and reassurances
The very format of these letters shows that the writers were well aware of
basic protocols regarding letter-writing. Five of the letters have the word
‘opportunity’ in the first line. In the context of transatlantic letters, this
would most likely have meant a ship leaving for Britain with a post bag,
though for some it might mean asking a friend to write something for them
in their own letter.21 The writers thereby suggested both that there had not
been previous opportunities to write, and that they were being conscientious
correspondents. Edward Magnar wrote to his wife: ‘haveing this oportunitie
to wright to you I Send these Fue Lines’.22 William Nickell wrote: ‘Dr
Brother having this opertunity …’.23 Joseph Fraizer similarly wrote to his
sister, ‘I gladly embraced this Oportunity By the Bearer Mr Murphy on the
Europe Capt Cook’.24 Clearly he wanted to avoid her having to pay postage
by sending it to her with someone rather than in the mail.25 George Farm­
er’s letter to his brother began ‘I’m glad of this Opportunity to Acquaint
you how the world goes with me’;26 whereas, to a non-family member,
Richard Hull, who seems to have helped him get work, he wrote more for­
mally: ‘Dear Sir, I take this opportunity to thank you, & assure you that
nothing Shall Ever make me for get the many Obligations I am under to
you’.27 He also referred to a letter that he had received by hand. Four of the
letters start differently. Patrick Kelly simply said: ‘My Dear Brothers this is
to lett you know …’.28 Martin Swords began, ‘Dear Brother this Coms with
my kind Love to you’, as did John Smith’s letter to his wife, ‘this is Come with
my Cind love to you and my Duty to my Child’.29 Robert Nelson’s letter to his
friend opens with ‘friend Robert this Coms to Let you Know …’.30 All of these
letters maintained the convention of a formal greeting, even if the particular
choice of phrasing was used affectionately to express and send love home
across the Atlantic with the letter.
Valedictions were similarly varied according to the hierarchical and familial
relationship between the writer and the recipient.31 William Nickell signed, ‘So
Remans your Loving Brother’, while Joseph Fraizer signed, ‘your Ever Loving
and Duttifull Brother till Death’.32 Similarly Martin Swords ended his letter,
‘from your Ever Loving Brother till Death’.33 Patrick Kelly also wrote, ‘no
more at present from your Loven Brother’.34 George Farmer simply signed, ‘Yr
most Afft[affectionate] Loving Brother’.35 Writing to wives sometimes, but not
always, demanded different language. John Smith simply wrote, ‘Remain your
loving husband’, but Edward Magnar wrote to his wife that he was her ‘true
Love’.36 Deference appears in two valedictions. In Edward Magnar’s covering
note to his mother-in-law, he signed ‘from your Respectfull Son’,37 while
George Farmer’s letter to the family friend who had helped him ended ‘Yr most
Oblig’d Humblest To Command’.38 This shows knowledge of, and conformity
with, letter protocols regarding deference and hierarchy.
Importantly, these letters also tell us something about notions of family, home
and friendship. In eighteenth-century England, the family was synonymous with
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 173
39
the household, rather than modern notions of the nuclear family. This would
include, most likely, a man, his wife, their child or children and any dependents
and servants living in the house. This created a family ‘emanating from rela­
tionships of co-residence and authority’.40 This family, however, might in turn
exclude blood-relatives who did not live in the household. At the same time the
eighteenth-century meaning of friends was wider than we now understand it to
be, and ‘could comprise a very broad spectrum of relationships’.41 These might
include relations by blood and marriage, but also someone who was good to you,
or supported you in one way or another, such as George Farmer’s family
friend.42 For the poor at least, the idea of ‘home’ might be similarly broad and
mean the dwelling or homestead itself, but also the parish or township, or even a
district. It might also encompass shared memories, family, residency, employ­
ment or reputation.43
These complex relationships regarding household and family, and the
extra challenges of maintaining them at a distance, can be seen in some of
the longer valedictions and other comments added to the letters. Some were
dutiful, such as when George Farmer extended his regards to Mrs and Miss
Hull, Richard Hull’s closest family. However, he also asked Mr Hull to
‘Rembr my Duty to my Uncles & Aunts, & Kind Regards to all Others that
Enquire for Me’.44 Clearly Mr Hull was known to the whole of Farmer’s
kinship networks. William Nickell asked his brother to ‘Give my Dutey to
my father and Mother and Sisters all friends that asketh of me’.45 Duty, paid
to senior family, was a common expression of deference. Joseph Fraizer had
a longer list of people to whom he wanted to be remembered: ‘My kind
Love and Servise to Mrs Doyell, Mr Dreaper and his famelly and tell Miss
Nancy Dreaper That I houp to See Hir in Liverpool Before Long’.46 Some­
times, not all names could be remembered. John Smith wrote another long
list: ‘My Dear Rembembr me to my father And mother and Both Your Sis­
ters and your Brother Daniell and your Brother in Law for I have for got his
name’.47 Clearly managing extended family relationships was a complex
business, especially when distant sailors might not always have met new
family members by birth or marriage. Sometimes writers would also pass
similar messages on for others; perhaps they could not write, could not
afford the paper, or simply did not have the time. This may also have been a
function of the communal spaces in which letters were written, possibly on
ship, or in a tavern or coffee house.48 James Nickell wrote on behalf of
Captain Hathorn, who wanted to let his wife know ‘he heas Roatt Seaveral
tims he Wroat from St Estate [St Eustacia?] by the Way of Holand [probably
a captain or a vessel, not the country] and all other opertunities’.49 Simi­
larly, Edward Magnar added that ‘Antony Viccar’s Joyns me in Comply­
ments with me to my Dear Jane [his wife]’.50 Opportunities of being
remembered back home were not to be wasted, even if the sender was not
able to write themselves at that time.
Yet feeling that friends had forgotten them was a constant refrain among
all the letter-writers.51 This could lead to a sense of betrayal and hurt.
174 Sheryllynne Haggerty
George Farmer wrote to his brother, ‘My Friends I believe have all Forgot
me, For I have not heard a word From um yet, tho it’s now Six months
Since I wrote home’.52 In his letter to his brother his valediction noted first
his brother’s Master, & Mistress, but added, ‘& all Other Friends in Corke,
My Duty to my Aunts, & Love to my Sisters (& Kind regards to all Others
that enquire for me)’; he also added that he had heard nothing from some­
one called Robin, but believed he would soon hear in a ‘letter from my Sis­
ters’.53 In his letter to his brother he was even more insistent; ‘I believe All
my Friends have Forgot me For it’s Six months Since I wrote home & have
had noe answer they can have no Excuses for there are Ships come here
Daily from Corke.’54 George was deploying his letters to make his family
feel guilty about not writing, and his brother was supposed to encourage his
sisters to write. Such tactics could not be used with superiors, however, and
George had to write more deferentially to Mr Hull: ‘P.S. If it’s not too much
trouble, I beg You’l Favour me with a Line’.55
The time delay in transatlantic post meant that correspondents could not
always hold a ‘conversation’, but nonetheless, family members were clearly
expected to write. Martin Swords wrote to his brother that he would be,
‘very glad to her[hear] from you and My Sister and Give my kind Love to
her And to All Absent friends give My Kin John Lynham And his family
And to Jane … Send word as soon as Possible’; he continued, ‘kind Love to
Cosen Mikel Swords And our friends at Hom’.56 Yet again the letter was
used to send love home. Patrick Kelly was even more insistent that letters
should be reciprocated: ‘I have wrote to you several times but never had the
happeness of Receivin one Letter from You – Which give me a great Deal of
Concern to think you Should be so ungreatfull[,] nothing in the World
would given me a greater happeness than to hear of Your Welfare and to
hear how you get on in the World.’57 He wanted a commentary on daily life.
Yet even when faced with epistolary silence, he did not forget his own
remembrances, writing, ‘Love to my Brothers and Sisters and to all friends
atome’.58 Just for good measure he added, ‘Be sure to Send me an Answer
by the first Oppertunity and when you Direct Your Letter Derected for the
Grennige Man of War Lying in Port Royal’.59 People wanted news of
deaths, births, marriages, who was courting whom and who was on which
ship. At a distance, gossip was wanted in addition to reassurances of peo­
ple’s health; it was part of the exchange, a kind of gift.60
Correspondents knew that post could go awry, especially across the
Atlantic.61 Martin Swords let people know at home that sailor friends of his
had been moved to another Royal Navy vessel, just in case their own letters
failed. For example, ‘M and Ferons[?] Malovney [now] be Long to the
Drednot’.62 However, whether it was the distance between them, or the time
lag, this knowledge did not stop people from fretting and fearing the worst
when letters were not received. John Smith wrote to his wife: ‘My Dier I
hope that you Will Ansur this as soon as it Coms to your hand for I have
write a Grat Many and never had an Ansur which Maks me verey un
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 175
63
Easy’. Joseph Fraizer appeared frantic after not hearing from his wife,
telling his sister: ‘I have wrote 4 Letters to Hir Besides Since We Have Been
Here and Hav Not Goat one Line from Hir.’64 Similarly Edward Magnar
was writing his sixth letter to his wife but had, ‘Nevr Receivd an Anwr from
your hands’; ‘Nothing could doo me a greater pleasure than to hear from your
My Dr’, he added.65 Edward feared she was dead: ‘My Dr att present my
having to Importune you to Answer my Letters which as yet not being Done
gives me room to Despair of your being alive’.66 However, he was still in
‘Hopes yt you are Yett Surviving which is ye Real wish of your true love’.67
These letters were therefore far more than courtesies; they were reassurances
that loved ones were alive and well, and that the depths of their affections had
not been altered by time and distance. For some, the lack of letters from their
loved ones added mental anguish above and beyond simply missing home.
Certainly Joseph Fraizer wished that ‘He coud Have the Happeness of Seeing
His Mother once more Before she Dyed’ (see Figures 8.1–8.3).68 Working at
such distances from home meant that many important life events were missed,
just when family should have been able to comfort each other. Letters were a
physical reminder of the absent person, a way of sending ‘cind love’, a reminder
not to forget the sender, and, for our ordinary people in Jamaica, a way of
seeking assurance that in turn they were not forgotten.

Family, friendship and the future

The loving relationship that these sailors kept with their extended families was
in sharp contrast to family life in Jamaica. In 1756, the white population was
only about 8.3 per cent of the total, the remainder being predominantly
enslaved Africans on whom the dominant sugar production depended.69 High
mortality rates and low immigration meant that men outnumbered women by
2.6 to 1.70 Moreover, culturally, Jamaicans had a ‘weak commitment to mar­
riage’, and married men could be held in ‘utmost derision’, preferring to have
their ‘housekeepers’ of colour to white wives.71 There were households in
Jamaica, but they were usually nothing like households in England. Non-elite
white men with a house had their own ‘Little Republic’ writ large in Jamaica,
and with authority not only over a physical household but over hundreds of
enslaved people as well.72 As visitors, our letter-writers may have felt the
difference between Jamaican ‘households’ and their own keenly.
Certainly our writers used their letters to convey plans for their futures
with their families. Perhaps this served both to make the writers feel closer
to their family, as well as to reassure the recipients of the senders’ enduring
love. John Smith hoped that his wife and he would be able to live, ‘With
Satisfaction the Remendar years of our Days’.73 It seems that John was
looking forward to a quiet life after his career in the Royal Navy, but one
shared with his wife in contentment. No doubt he would have liked to see
his child grow up as well. Edward Magnar clearly cared for his mother-in­
law’s as well has his wife’s wellbeing. As we saw above, he was despairing
176 Sheryllynne Haggerty

Figure 8.1 Page one of Joseph Fraizer’s letter to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5 Oct 1756.
The National Archives, UK. Permission Courtesy: The National Archives, ref.
HCA30/259.
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 177

Figure 8.2 Page two of Joseph Fraizer’s letter to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5 Oct 1756.
The National Archives, UK. Permission Courtesy: The National Archives, ref.
HCA30/259.
178 Sheryllynne Haggerty

Figure 8.3 Envelope of Joseph Fraizer’s letter to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5 Oct 1756.
The National Archives, UK. Permission Courtesy: The National Archives, ref.
HCA30/259.

of his wife being alive. Hoping to earn around £50 from prizes (French ships
taken in war) which was around a yearly wage for an artisan at home, he
promised that if they were ‘Detained Longer’ he would remit the ‘greatest
part’ home ‘by ye first shure hand’.74 Before arriving in Jamaica he had been
ill on the Coast of Guinea and had sent his mother his Will and a Power of
Attorney. He must have thought he was going to die. It was relatively unu­
sual for men in this period to entrust a woman with such powers to act for
them, so clearly he also trusted his mother.75 In his letter from Jamaica he
added, ‘ill or well you Should have it and all ways will’.76 George Farmer on
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 179
HMS Dreadnought clearly had a younger brother, Jeremiah. Apart from
news about the war, the main body of his letter was devoted to giving
brotherly advice and support. It would appear that Jeremiah was appren­
ticed. George began: ‘I hope You & Yr Masters Agree, You are now to
Come to Years of Discretion, & you must Certainly Know, tho You, have
not Felt them the many Difficulty’s I have Under gone not to be Depending
on others.’77 Possibly George had paid for Jeremiah’s apprenticeship to an
Apothecary, Richard Maguire, as that was to whom the envelope was
addressed. George said that he would do anything in his power to assist
Jeremiah, but also encouraged him to be ‘an honest Industrious Young
Fellow’, and advised him to go ‘to the Hospital, turn it to the best Acct, &
get all in the insight in Surgery You can, as it May be of particular Service
to You hereafter’.78 It would seem that the family had lost their parents
quite young and that George had fought hard for his financial independence:
‘Never Forget Yr Sisters that took so much care of you when You were not
Able to take care of Yr Self’.79 His tight-knit family were looking after each
other at a distance and trying to better themselves at the same time.
Joseph Fraizer was busy loading the merchant vessel on which he worked
for Liverpool, but he was very concerned for his wife. After telling his sister
Ann that he was healthy and had had a good journey to the Caribbean, he
quickly turned to the subject of his spouse.80 He had written to her in
Liverpool, but was ‘afraid That she will Not Be Left Dubing [Dublin] By It
geats there’.81 Joseph then reminded Ann of a promise she had made to find
his wife in Liverpool if she had left Dublin already:

Dr Sister I Houp that you Have Been as Good as Your word In Going
over to Liverpool Which if That you Have I will Teake it as Very Great
fiver Dr Sister I feeds my Self With the Thoughts of spending Some of
my Day In mirth and Plesure In Liverpool Which Please God Will Be
Some Time In January.82

He signed off hoping for ‘a happy meeting of my Dr Wife and You Which Is the
Constent Prayers of your Ever Loving and Duttifull Brother till Death’.83 Per­
haps his wife came from Liverpool and was going back there while he was
away, or possibly she had run off with another man and Joseph could not face
the truth. These sailors wrote letters that sent heartfelt messages to their wives
and concern for their kin. Being in the strange world of the Caribbean they may
have felt not only the distance more sharply, but witnessing the Jamaican
household which was often so different from their own, may have made them
yearn only more for their own family, friends and lovers.

Death and disease

The Europa was anchored at Kingston harbour during the rainy season.
October, along with May, experiences the largest rainfall in Jamaica.
180 Sheryllynne Haggerty
Indeed, many of the other letters from the Europa’s letter bag complain of
the torrential rain and the burst banks of rivers which meant that no busi­
ness was possible.84 Hurricanes and rains exacerbated problems caused by
disease in Jamaica, to the extent that the rainy season was regarded as the
most dangerous of all.85 White mortality was especially high in the main
port of Kingston, with a death rate of around 129 per 1,000, which was
nearly three times as bad as unhealthy London.86 Moreover, around 60 per
cent of all deaths in Jamaica occurred in the rainy season, just when these
letters were being written.87 The most deadly diseases for whites were
malaria and yellow fever, which was heightened in the rainy season, and 78
per cent of deaths of transients such as visiting sailors occurred during this
part of the year.88
No wonder, then, that all but one of the nine letters mention health
immediately after the salutation.89 Indeed, updating correspondents on
health was an important norm in eighteenth-century letters. People writing
home from Jamaica needed even more than usual to reassure their friends
and family that they and their colleagues were alive and well. Therefore,
Patrick Kelly’s first point was, ‘I am in Good health hoaping that these few
Lines will find you the in the same blesed be to god for it present thank God
for itt.’90 Invoking God was a common way of dealing with situations which
were uncertain, and where bad luck or misfortune might occur.91 Edward
Magnar had even more reason to reassure his wife about his health, having
served on a slave ship on his way to Jamaica and been ‘Very Ill’ when he
was on the coast of Guinea.92 Given the death rates of sailors on slaving
vessels, it is not surprising then that he jumped ship to join a man of war in
Jamaica.93 Indeed, many sailors left their ship at Jamaica, claimed their pay,
and then rejoined another vessel when they had run out of money, had
enough of ship discipline, or due to the threat of disease.94 They had reason
to be worried: Robert Nelson told his correspondent that ‘John Wilson[?] a
Saltcats [Saltcoats] man dayed Since we Com heir in fave days Sikness’.95
John Wilson probably died of yellow fever, as most people died of this
within ten days.96
Informing loved ones about illnesses that had been survived was therefore
common, and no doubt a relief for writer and recipient alike. For example,
George Farmer wrote to his brother that he had ‘had two very severe Fevers,
the last of which had like to have provided for me, but thank God I have
quite recover’d my health’; he added, ‘hope I shall have the pleasure once
more of seeing my Friends … you have been Always in my toughts’.97 He
was certainly one of the lucky ones, but it is striking that he quite deliber­
ately omitted information about how many men were dying. Possibly he did
not want to alarm his brother. He had no such compunction when writing
to family friend Richard Hull however, reporting that ‘we have buried
above one Hundred men since we Arriv’d here. I have had two Feavers …
Everyone tought wou’d have done for me’.98 George had reason to be wor­
ried because medical care was poor for sailors. Imperial hospitals were
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 181
makeshift and insubstantial. There was a hospital for sailors at New
Greenwich which was completed in 1745, but it was built near lagoons and
marshes which led to many patients dying from fevers, rather than recover­
ing. Eventually a new hospital was built at Port Royal in 1756.99 A bill to
give lands in Spanish Town for the building of a hospital for sick and
invalid seamen serving in the Royal Navy was also read on 8 November
1756, but was only passed on 21 December.100 There did not appear to be
any provision for merchant seamen, and living conditions for soldiers were
equally poor and in bad condition.101 Furthermore, the cure could some­
times be worse than the disease; bleeding, purges and emetics were all pop­
ular treatments.102
Surviving an initial bout of disease on arrival was important given wider
understandings of the tropics. For example, John Smith’s letter to his ‘loving
wife’ told her he was in good health now, but ‘had Bout of verrey Bad State
of helth Since I have Bein in the Cuntry but I have Got the better of it for I
think I am Got Sesaned With the Cuntrey’.103 The term seasoning is often
associated with the enslaved as a period of psychological and physiological
adjustment on arrival in the Caribbean, of somewhere between one and
three years.104 However, it was a phenomenon that whites knew they had to
endure as well. By the eighteenth century ‘seasoning’ had become a global
discourse, a stranger’s affliction when at the periphery of empire, as bodies
became ‘fit to live’ in a new place.105 Jamaica’s high death rate was often
additionally blamed on the intemperance of white men which was thought
to reduce resistance to disease; they were often described as heavy drinkers,
a trope which increased with the abolition movement.106 Of course, heavy
drinking was also a popular past time for sailors on arrival at port.107
Indeed, Royal Navy men were not punished for being peaceably drunk when
in port, and even the best captains might find their men unfit for duty for up
to twenty four hours after pay day.108 To some extent John Smith may have
been telling himself, as much as his wife, what he wanted to believe, but his
chances of survival were better, if only slightly, if he had lived through one
bout of fever. Receiving a letter back home told family and friends that the
writer was still alive, at least on the date of the letter. The heightened dis­
ease environment of Jamaica added poignancy to this news.

Waging war
For sailors, this dire disease environment heightened the risks of war and
troops were rightly fearful of the tropics. No wonder when even the normal
death rate in peace time for servicemen in the Caribbean was 250 per 1,000.
This is not surprising given the standard of medical care (or lack thereof).
Of the troops sent to besiege Cartagena in 1741 around 70–80 per cent died
from disease.109 Furthermore, by autumn 1756, the Seven Years’ War, which
had been formally declared on 17 May 1756, was in full swing. The start of
the war did not bode well for Britain and the French Fleet which had arrived
182 Sheryllynne Haggerty
in St. Domingue was reported as vastly superior to the British.110 Indeed,
several of the Europa’s letters comment on the relative weakness of the
British fleet. Worse, there were rumours that the French fleet was going to
attack Jamaica, which the governor relayed to London.111 In November
Admiral Townsend moored the larger naval vessels in Kingston harbour,
but this only increased the sense of panic.112 There were only six vessels
stationed at Jamaica in July: HMS Dreadnought, HMS Princess Mary, HMS
Greenwich, HMS Shoram (the latter sometimes stationed at Havana), HMS
Sphynx and HMS Rye.113 The first four at least were still in Jamaica
throughout the autumn. As we have seen, some of our letter-writers were
serving on these ships.
For the merchant seamen, however, trade continued amidst the war, as
Robert Nelson, William Nickell and Joseph Fraizer knew. Robert wrote to
his correspondent in Dublin that the Birmingham, on which he was sailing,
was ‘Now taken in Showgers[sugars] for London and I Expect that We Will
Sail gien [by/before] the 20 of this mownth’.114 In fact this was unlikely
because vessels usually had to wait for the fleet to provide a convoy, or pay
even higher insurance.115 Indeed, William, who had arrived in Jamaica on 6
October, reported to his brother that they had, ‘Got Som of the Cargoe on
her Bott When We shall be cler to Sail I canot teel But as Soun as I know I
will Send you Word’.116 Although William was sending the letter to his
brother James via a friend in Belfast, it was clear that James too was a
sailor, possibly with the Royal Navy: ‘I herd that you was in Sant Christo­
pors With ye flite Which I wase Varey Satisfied to heare that you was in God
health’. Joseph had arrived on 14 August and was still in Kingston harbour
with his merchant vessel. They had travelled from Cork in convoy with a
‘40 Goon[gun] ship Who Convoy’d us about 100 Leags from the Land’.117
He continued, perhaps to put his sister Ann at ease, that he had had ‘the
Plasentest Pasage and the Best wether that Ever I was at Sea in all my Life’.
They were ‘Now a Loading Know for L[iver]pool and Expect That we will
Be Ready to Sail by the 10th of Next Month’. This was not only relevant
news for Ann, but also for the families of anyone else serving on the same
merchant vessel, who then could work out roughly when their loved ones
might be due home.
At the same time, Patrick Kelly was on HMS Greenwich and Martin
Swords on HMS Princess Mary. Both of their letters are relatively short, and
Patrick did not mention the war at all, possibly not to worry his family and
friends. It was noted above that Martin had let people at home know that
M. and Ferons Molvney were now on HMS Dreadnought. He added that,
‘Pat Fulham be long[s] to the Humber her[e]’.118 As with advising of possi­
ble dates for travel, this was important news as sailors could be transferred
to another Royal Navy vessel with no warning and future letters needed to
be addressed accordingly. It also hints at whole naval communities back
home in Ireland.119 For example, Lieutenant Edward ONeal had arrived on
HMS Wager, but was transferred onto HMS Dreadnought with twenty of
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 183
120
his marines. ONeal was treated well and was happy with the transfer, but
one wonders whether the twenty marines were made to feel so welcome.
Martin made a point of asking his brother to send his mail to him, ‘on bord
the Prinses Mary Captin Craven Commander in Jamaica’.121 George Farmer,
who was a marine serving on HMS Dreadnought, had written home to his
brother in October. He also noted the relative states of the French and British
fleet: ‘our fleet are Far Inferior to the French (which Obliges us) to keep (in the
Harbour) but we Expect a supply of Ships from England Every Day’.122 George
was enthusiastic about the war, however.123 He said of the French: I ‘Shall, I
hope be Soon able to trash their Jackets well’. He also conveyed these brave
sentiments to Richard Hull. ‘I hope in a short time, be Able to Trash um well’,
he enthused. George clearly thought that it was an expectation that a sailor like
him should report on the war, to keep the community at home updated. In his
letter to Richard Hull he noted: ‘I suppose you’l Expect to hear how Affairs
stand in this part of America’. He wrote something very similar to his brother.
However, in his letter to Hull he noted that there were in terms of Royal Navy
Ships only ‘two Sixtys, one Fifty, one Forty and Four twentys’, making eight
large Naval vessels in total.124 At least there were two more than there were in
July. He also passed on the rumours about a French invasion of Jamaica. We
had, ‘an Acct that they Intend to Invade the Island, with Twenty Sail of Men of
War which made all Jamaica betake to their Arms’. However, he also noted
that a British vessel had reported ‘their Fleet is not above half that Number’.
George had also heard that Port Mahon [Minorca] had been taken, but added,
‘I hope it is not true’. In fact it was true and was a very embarrassing defeat for
the British.125 More personally, George complained about the price of food in
Jamaica to both his brother and Richard Hull. ‘Provisions of all Sorts Are
Expensive, Deer, Beef from three to four pounds P Barrell Butr[butter] three
pounds PCt, & Every thing else in proportion’.126 Prices would rise in periods
of war, but provisions in Jamaica were always particularly expensive due to the
carriage costs involved in importing food into an economy dominated by
sugar.127
For some, of course, war was a potential way of making money beyond
their normal wages. Writing home to his wife and her mother in Dublin,
Edward Magnar boasted, ‘we have taken Soom prises and Expect to Share
50 pounds a man and we hope to Sail for England before Christmas’.128
Similarly, when John Smith wrote home to his wife and child in Somerset,
he hoped that they would be able to ‘live with Satisfaction The Remendar
years of our Days’.129 This was because they had ‘taken a grat maney prises
[since] we have bein in this Cuntrey’ and he was ‘expecting to be payed for
them Every Day as I am sure that my Sher will bee Dubell and tribell to a
privet mans Sher Which I hope Will Come to a hundred pounds Sterling’.130
If Edward and John were on the same ship, Edward was possibly an ordin­
ary seaman and John an able seaman, as the latter always got more pay than
the former.131 Of course, these men knew that French sailors would also
join their own privateers. Indeed, it was exactly this fate that befell the
184 Sheryllynne Haggerty
Europa on which these letters were sent. Despite the best intentions of these
sailors to use their letters to keep their families and communities informed,
their letters often never made it home.

Conclusion: ‘unlettered’ letters

These letters are not representative of all letters sent from the Caribbean at this
time, but they are extremely enlightening on how ordinary sailors wrote home
from the West Indies, and what they wrote about. These men were from the
lower echelons of society, and most, being Irish, would have been on the mar­
gins. However, it would appear that they all wrote their letters themselves, and
phonetic spelling aside, were very aware of letter-writing conventions. They
knew to excuse themselves for not having written before, and to stress that they
were writing by the first opportunity, thereby being prompt correspondents.
They also sent messages or news home about, and for others, to be shared and
read aloud, keeping both their families and wider communities updated on the
latest news, reassuring friends and family alike. As visitors to Jamaica, their
ideas of household, family and friendship were probably more aligned with the
English model than the Jamaican. Letters home were therefore an important
way of counteracting the huge distance between them and their loved ones; to
bring them together and not be forgotten. Indeed, some such as George Farmer
tried to look after their siblings from afar, while Joseph Fraizer desperately
wanted to find his wife. These letters also reflect the particular fears of sailors
in the tropics. The lethal potential of yellow fever and malaria was only too
real for them. They were quick to reassure their families of their health, espe­
cially if they had survived ‘seasoning’, and, more sadly, to inform friends at
home of who had died. Despite the very real threat of a French invasion,
normal trade continued for merchant sailors such as Fraizer, Nickell and
Nelson, but for others war presented opportunities through French prizes.
Edward Magnar certainly thought it was worth jumping off a slave trade vessel
for the chance of earning a year’s wage in a few weeks.
These men therefore deployed these letters in a variety of ways. They
followed epistolary conventions, including of deference, to not be forgotten;
they developed courtships, and maintained families and friendships from
afar; they expressed their fears and experiences of the dreadful disease
environment and their hopes and fears of war. Importantly, and possibly
this stands out more to us as readers than their intended recipients, they sent
their physical embodiment in their broad accents, bringing their words to
life. No wonder a letter in return would have brought much happiness to
those such as Patrick Kelly.

Acknowledgements
This research has been funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 2019–
2021; Francesca Carnevali Small Research Grant, Economic History Society,
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 185
2018; Small Research Grant, Historical Society of Lancashire and Cheshire,
2014, both for the project ‘Merchants and Managers: Sojourners and Slaves’.
I would also like my fellow editors for their insightful comments on drafts
of this chapter. Any errors, of course, are mine alone.

Notes
1 The National Archives, London (hereafter TNA), HCA 30/259, f.68, Patrick
Kelly to Christopher Kelly, Jamaica, 8 Sep 1756.
2 The letters can be found at HCA 30/259 and HCA 32/189/22, TNA.
3 Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the
Archive (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 1.
4 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, ‘Atlantic cultures and the age of revolution’, William
and Mary Quarterly 74:4 (Oct 2017), 667–696 (see also his chapter in this
volume); Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communica­
tions in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2009); Kenneth Morgan (ed.), The Bright-Meyler Papers: A Bristol West India
Connection, 1732–1837 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British
Academy, 2007). See also David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London
Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Simon D. Smith, Slavery,
Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The World of the Las­
celles, 1648–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
5 Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eight­
eenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press [2008] 2010), 18. See also
Susan Clair Imbarrato, Sarah Gray Cary, From Boston to Grenada: Shifting
Fortunes of an American Family, 1764–1826 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2018).
6 Susan Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5–6.
7 Steven King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s to 1830s (Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019), 137, 131.
8 TNA, HCA/30/239, f.63, George Farmer to Jeremiah Farmer, on board the
Dreadnought, Port Royal, 12 Oct 1756.
9 TNA, HCA 30/259, f.18, Ewbank Ogle to Mrs Ogle, Kingston, 9 Oct 1756.
10 Lindsay O’Neill, The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern Period
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 30–33.
11 TNA, HCA 32/189/22, f.142, Robert Nelson to Robert Smith, Kingston, 2 Nov
1756.
12 TNA, HCA 32/189, CP4, Examination of Andrew Mitchelson. For the full set
of questions and interrogatories see TNA, HCA 32/189 CP 1–6 and TNA,
HCA/32/189 SP 1–2.
13 Amanda Bevan and Randolph Cock, ‘High Court of Admiralty Prize Papers,
1652–1815: Challenges in Improving Access to Older Records’, Archives, 53:127
(2018), 34–58, 35. On British privateering more generally see David Starkey,
British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century (Exeter: University of
Exeter Press, 1990).
14 Ship Papers and Court Papers do exist for thirteen other British vessels from
the Seven Years’ War at TNA, but not the letters. There are many letters from
other nations, including the French of course, because it was usual for the
British to take as ‘prizes’ the vessels of other nations in war. Just before pub­
lication, one other smaller set of letters came to light for the Fortune of Bristol
186 Sheryllynne Haggerty
from 1757, at HCA 32/191/25. There was not any material which would change
any of the analysis presented here.
15 See the large project under way at the TNA, www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a
bout/news/prize-papers-project-launches-at-oldenburg-castle (accessed 5 Oct
2020). See the case of the undelivered letters of a seventeenth-century Dutch
postmasters at http://brienne.org/unlockedbriennearchive (accessed 5 Oct 1756).
Xavier Lamikiz was the first to use such letters extensively, Xabier Lamikiz,
Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic: Spanish Merchants and
Their Overseas Networks (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Royal Historical
Society, 2010).
16 For examples of letters from women see TNA, HCA 32/189//22, f.127, Sarah
Folkes to her child, Kingston, 1 Oct 1756; TNA, HCA 30/259, f.177, Ann
Morley to James and Isaac Henchells, Kingston, 2 Oct 1756.
17 King calls them ‘oral’ letters. King, Writing the Lives, 17.
18 The letter-writers were identified from a mixture of their letter headers, the
envelopes to the recipients, cross referencing with other letters in the collection
and with Secretary of State records at TNA, CO 137/60, f.239.
19 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press [1992], 1996), xix.
20 As Toby Ditz has shown for mercantile letters, they were often intended to be
read in taverns and coffee houses, ‘Shipwrecked; or, Masculinity Imperiled:
Mercantile Representations of Failure and the Gendered Self in Eighteenth-
Century Philadelphia’, Journal of American History, 81:1 (June 1994), 51–80;
Toby L. Ditz, ‘Formative Ventures: Eighteenth-Century Commercial Letters
and the Articulation of Experience’, in Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves:
Letters and Letter Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, c.1999), 59–78.
21 On the postal system generally Kenneth Ellis, The Post Office in the Eighteenth
Century: A Study in Administrative History (London: Oxford University Press,
1958).
22 TNA, HCA 30/259, f.48, Edward Magnar to his Mother, Port Royal, 10 Oct
1756.
23 TNA, HCA 32/189/22, f.159, William Nickell to James Nickell, Kingston, 8
Oct 1756.
24 TNA, HCA 30/259, f.64, Joseph Frazier to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5 Oct 1756.
25 Postage was paid by the recipient in Britain. Ellis, The Post Office, 38.
26 TNA HCA 30/259, f.63, George Farmer to Jeremiah Farmer, on board HMS
Dreadnought, Port Royal, 12 Oct 1756.
27 TNA HCA 30/259, f.158, George Farmer to Richard Edward Hull, n.g., n.d.
28 TNA, HCA 30/259, f.68, Patrick Kelly to Christopher Kelly, Jamaica, 8 Sep
1756.
29 TNA, 30/259, f.192, Martin Swords to James Swords, Port Royal, 8 Oct 1756;
TNA, HCA 32/189/22, f.171, John Smith to his Wife, Port Royal 3 Oct 1756.
The envelope shows that this letter was sent via Robert Smith. On ‘cind love’
see also Karen Harvey’s chapter in this volume.
30 HCA 32/189/22, f.142, Robert Nelson to Robert Smith, Kingston, 2 Nov 1756.
31 Many of these fit with King’s rhetorics in Writing the Lives, 134–225.
32 William Nickell to James Nickell, Kingston, 8 Oct 1756; Joseph Fraizer to Ann
Shuwell, Kingston, 5 Oct 1756.
33 Martin Swords to James Swords, Port Royal, 8 Oct 1756.
34 Patrick Kelly to Christopher Kelly, Jamaica, 8 Sep 1756.
35 George Farmer to Jeremiah Farmer, on board the Dreadnought, Port Royal, 12
Oct 1756.
36 John Smith to his wife, Port Royal, 3 Oct 1756; Edward Magnar to his mother,
Port Royal, 10 Oct 1756.
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 187
37 Edward Magnar to his mother, Port Royal, 10 Oct 1756. On deference see
Whyman, The Pen and the People, 8, 21–22, 34.
38 George Farmer to Richard Edward Hull, n/g, n.d.
39 Peter Laslett, ‘Size and Structure of the Household in England over Three
Centuries’, Population Studies, 23:2 (1969), 199–223, 202.
40 Naomi Tadmor, ‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century
England’, Past and Present, 151 (May 1996), 111–140, 113.
41 Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household,
Kinship and Patronage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 171.
42 Tadmor, Family and Friends, 174; K. D. M. Snell, ‘Belonging and Community:
Understandings of “Home” and “Friends” among the English Poor, 1750–1850’,
Economic History Review, 65:1 (2012), 1–25.
43 Snell, ‘Belonging and Community’, 6.
44 TNA, HCA/30/259, f.158, George Farmer to Richard Edward Hull, n/g, n.d.
45 William Nickell to James Nickell, Kingston, 8 Oct 1756.
46 Joseph Fraizer to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5 Oct 1756. Nancy must have been a
family friend as Joseph was already married.
47 John Smith to his wife, Port Royal, 3 Oct 1756. Even writers that supposedly
were more well educated wrote these long lists, and also forgot to ‘be remem­
bered’ to them in the main body. See for example a letter from a Lieutenant on
HMS Dreadnought. TNA, HCA 30/259, f.127, Edward ONeal to Jean ONeal,
Jamaica, 4 Oct 1756.
48 King, Writing the Lives, 88.
49 William Nickell to James Nickell, Kingston, 8 Oct 1756.
50 Edward Magnar to his mother, Port Royal, 10 Oct 1756.
51 This was true of the wider collection of letters, including more permanent
residents in Jamaica.
52 George Farmer to Richard Edward Hull, n/g, n.d.
53 George Farmer to Jeremiah Farmer, on board the Dreadnought, Port Royal, 12
Oct 1756.
54 Ibid.
55 George Farmer to Richard Edward Hull, n/g, n.d.
56 Martin Swords to James Swords, Port Royal, 8 Oct 1756.
57 Patrick Kelly to Christopher Kelly, Jamaica, 8 Sep 1756. Note that Patrick
corrected his own spelling in this quotation, adding the ‘a’ to hear.
58 Patrick Kelly to Christopher Kelly, Jamaica, 8 Sep 1756.
59 Ibid.
60 Lindsay O’Neill, ‘Dealing with Newsmongers: Trust and Letters in the British
World, c.167–1730’, Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 75:2 (Summer 2013), 215–
33, 220.
61 See for example, TNA, HCA, 30/259, f.156, Ann Graham to Mrs Littlejohn,
Jamaica, n.d.
62 Martin Swords to James Swords, Port Royal, 8 Oct 1756.
63 John Smith to his wife, Port Royal, 3 Oct 1756.
64 Joseph Frazier to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5 Oct 1756.
65 Edward Magnar to his wife’s mother, Port Royal, 10 Oct 1756.
66 Ibid.
67 Edward Magnar to his wife, Port Royal, 10 Oct 1756.
68 Joseph Frazier to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5 Oct 1756.
69 There was also a small population of free people of colour, Trevor Burnard,
‘European Migration to Jamaica, 1655–1780’, William and Mary Quarterly,
3rd Ser., 53:4 (Oct 1996), 769–96, 772, 776.
70 Burnard, ‘European Migration’; Trevor Burnard, ‘“The Countrie Continues
Sicklie”: White Mortality in Jamaica, 1655–1780’, Social History of Medicine,
188 Sheryllynne Haggerty
12:1 (1999), 45–72, 48–61, 52; Trevor Burnard, ‘“Not a Place for Whites”?
Demographic Failure and Settlement in Comparative Context, Jamaica 1665–
1780’, in Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen Richards (eds), Jamaica in Slavery
and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture (University of West Indies Press,
2002), 73–88.
71 Trevor Burnard, ‘“Rioting in Goatish Embraces”: Marriage and Improvement
in Early British Jamaica, 1660–1780’, History of the Family, 11:4 (2006), 185–
97, 190. ‘Housekeeper’ was a euphemism for a forced or at least very unequal
sexual relationship.
72 Karen Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity & Domestic Authority in
Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1. By the
later eighteenth century Jamaican mores came increasingly under attack along
with the rise in abolitionism. Christer Petley, ‘Gluttony, Excess, and the Fall of
the Planter Class in the British Caribbean’, Atlantic Studies, 9:1 (2012), 85–106.
73 John Smith to his wife, Port Royal, 3 Oct 1756.
74 Edward Magnar to his mother, Port Royal, 10 Oct 1756. Starkey, British Pri­
vateering Enterprise.
75 On women and the law see Amy Louise Erickson, Women & Property in Early
Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993).
76 Edward Magnar to his mother, Port Royal, 10 Oct 1756.
77 George Farmer to Jeremiah Farmer, On board the Dreadnought, Port Royal,
12 Oct 1756.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid.
80 We are not told her name.
81 Joseph Fraizer to Ann Shuwell, 5 Oct 1756, HCA 30/259, f.64.
82 Ibid.
83 Ibid.
84 See for example, TNA, HCA 30/259, f.207, Sarah Folkes to Mrs Eatley, King­
ston, 1 Oct 1756.
85 Thirty-seven have hit Jamaica since 1687. The most notorious was in 1692
when Port Royal was mostly consigned to the sea, killing around 3,000 people
Colin Clarke, Kingston, Jamaica: Urban Development and Social Change,
1692–2002 (Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2006), ch. 1, ‘Physical Environ­
ment’, 1–5.
86 Burnard, ‘“The Countrie Continues Sicklie”’, 48–61.
87 Ibid., 58.
88 Compared to 50 per cent of deaths of native-born Kingstonians. Burnard,
‘“The Countrie Continues Sicklie”’, 58.
89 The one exception was George Farmer to Richard Edward Hull, n/g, n.d.
90 William Nickell to James Nickell, Kingston, 8 Oct 1756.
91 Peter L. Bernstein, Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (New
York: Wiley & Sons, 1966), 121.
92 Edward Magnar to his wife, Port Royal, 10 Oct 1756.
93 Slave ship crew were particularly susceptible to fevers, while the enslaved were
more likely to die from gastrointestinal problems, Richard H. Steckel and
Richard A. Jensen, ‘New Evidence of the Causes of Slave and Crew Mortality
in the Atlantic Slave Trade’, Journal of Economic History, 46:1 (Mar. 1876),
57–77, 60–61.
94 This happened in the Royal Navy too, N. A. M. Rodger, The Wooden World:
An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 188–204.
95 You can hear the broad Irish accent if you read this aloud. Robert Nelson to
Robert Smith, Kingston 2 Nov 1756. Saltcoats is on the North Ayrshire coast
of the Firth of Clyde opposite the Isle of Arran.
 Unlettered letters from Jamaica, 1756 189
96 Burnard, ‘“The Countrie Continues Sicklie”’, 54.

97 George Farmer to Jeremiah Farmer, on board the Dreadnought, Port Royal, 12

Oct 1756.
98 George Farmer to Richard Edward Hull, n/g, n.d.
99 Mark Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce & Empire: Britain and its
Tropical Colonies 1660–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 19.
100 British Library, C. S. F. 150, Vol. IV, Journals of the House of Assembly, Mar
1746–Dec 1756, ff.688, 721.
101 Journals of the House of Assembly, ff.640, 687.
102 Harrison, Medicine in an Age of Commerce, 122.
103 John Smith to his wife, Port Royal, 3 Oct 1756.
104 Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 64–65. Ideas around seasoning were so
malleable they were used with regards to enslaved Africans by pro-slavers and
abolitionists, Sean Morey Smith, ‘Seasoning and Abolition: Humoural Medi­
cine in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic’, Slavery & Abolition, 36:4
(2015), 684–703.
105 Suman Seth, Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Cen­
tury British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), chapter
three, ‘Seasoning Sickness and Imaginative Geography’, 91–111. Quotation is
Seth quoting Hans Sloane, 93.
106 Petley, ‘Gluttony, Excess’.
107 Seth, Disease and Difference, 95; Burnard, ‘“The Countrie Continues Sick-
lie”’, 67.
108 Rodger, The Wooden World, 74.
109 The normal death rate for troops in Britain was around 4 per cent. Harrison,
Medicine in an Age of Commerce, 15.
110 Stephen Conway, War, State and Society in the Mid-Eighteenth Century
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 22–26.
111 TNA, Original Correspondence, Secretary of State, CO 137/60, f.243 Henry
Moore to n/k, Spanish Town, 8 Nov 1756. See also TNA, HCA 30/259, f.129,
Hibberts & Millan to Francis Wightwick, Kingston, 1 Oct 1756.
112 In fact, Jamaica was not really threatened until the last year of the war. The
Admiralty decided in May 1757 to keep eight ships of the line and eleven
smaller vessels regularly stationed at Jamaica, but it could not always fulfil this
objective, Richard Pares, War & Trade in the West Indies, 1739–1763 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1936), 267.
113 Henry Moore to n/g, Kingston, 26 Jul 1756, Original Correspondence, Secre­
tary of State, CO 137/60, f.239. It was not possible to create a definitive list of
the Royal Navy vessels stationed at Jamaica at any one time.
114 Robert Nelson to Robert Smith, Kingston 2 Nov 1756.
115 Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’? Business Culture in the British
Atlantic, 1750–1815 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 48–49.
116 William Nickell to James Nickell, Kingston, 8 Oct 1756.
117 Joseph Frazier to Ann Shuwell, Kingston, 5 Oct 1756.
118 Martin Swords to James Swords, Port Royal, 8 Oct 1756.
119 The Irish were a significant part of the growth in Britain’s armed forces in the
mid-eighteenth century, Conway, War, State and Society, 56–82.
120 TNA, HCA 32/189/22, f.145, Edward ONeal to John Day, Jamaica, 4 Oct
1756. All ONeal’s letters direct the recipient to write to him on the
Dreadnought.
121 Martin Swords to James Swords, Port Royal, 8 Oct 1756, HCA 30/259, f.192.
122 George Farmer to Jeremiah Farmer, On Board the Dreadnought, Port Royal,
12 Oct 1756.
190 Sheryllynne Haggerty
123 His optimism was not well placed, as extra vessels and men were not sent to
Jamaica until 1757. Pares, War & Trade, 267.
124 George Farmer to Richard Hull, n/g, n/d.
125 Rodger, The Wooden World, 246–249.
126 George Farmer to Jeremiah Farmer, On Board the Dreadnought, Port Royal,
12 Oct 1756.
127 Trevor Burnard, Laura Panza and Jeffrey Williamson, ‘Living Costs, Real
Incomes and Inequality in colonial Jamaica’, Explorations in Economic His­
tory, 71 (2019), 55–71.
128 Edward Magnar to His Mother, Port Royal, 10 Oct 1756.
129 John Smith to his Wife, Port Royal, 3 Oct 1756.
130 Ibid.
131 Prizes were larger in the Navy than for merchant seamen because all of the
prize money was allocated to the captors. On a merchant privateer only one
half went to the captors, and usually expenses were taken out before the money
was distributed. Seamen in private men of war did not receive wages. Starkey,
British Privateering Enterprise, 66, 72. One quarter went to the ordinary
seamen, Rodger, The Wooden World, 128–129.
9 Constructing the body in English
pauper letters, 1780–1834
Steven King

On 14 January 1823, John Pearson wrote from Whitehaven (Cumberland) to

Stephen Garnett, the overseer of the poor for the parish of Kirkby Lonsdale
(Westmorland).1 He said:

I am Now laying in a Deplorable Situation I took on the Night of the

Sixt a very strong shiviring fit which made the bed Crack under me and
it shot from head to foot throw my Whole frame and I have been
Racked with pain day and Night ever since I have never been out of my
bed nor no sines of Relief … I am fetched viry Low and viry weake.2

Whether writers like Pearson told the truth is a matter to which we return.
If momentarily we assume that he did, then this letter is a remarkable
window onto the emotional state of a man approaching destitution (he was
very low and weak), his intimate suffering (racked by uncontrolled shivering
and pain), his sense of natural justice (Pearson’s situation was deplorable),
and his ultimate dependence in what was a discretionary welfare system.
Above all, the letter affords us a remarkable perspective on the living pauper
body.3 Pearson mentioned twice that he was confined to bed, clearly sig­
nifying his withdrawal from the world of the public. The shivering fit that
resulted in the breaking of his bed is described in vivid detail, conveying lack
of control, an invasion of the body by disease, and mental despair.4 His
body had become weak (much as his mind had become low) because he had
struggled for a week before writing to seek welfare. The body, in short, was
at the heart of this case, and the letter that conveyed the information was a
graphic embodiment of his pain and despair.
Research on how bodies were culturally, medically, philosophically and
rhetorically constructed and represented during the long eighteenth-century
has grown vigorously in the last two decades. We now understand that
contemporaries saw physical and mental impairment as compromising mas­
culinity, the potential for public and community service, and the ability to
labour that was a primary identifier of the labouring poor.5 The fascination
with monstrosity, traced by Karen Harvey for the early eighteenth-century,
gathered vigour and pace thereafter.6 Clean, ordered and healthy selves
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-13
192 Steven King
became central to medical constructions of the body, while cleanliness
became a core concern for elite groups and those who worked for them,
both as a medical issue and a potent symbol of respectability.7 And the
ability to know, record and publicise the exact condition of bodies (from
height and weight, to skin tone and birthmarks) became an increasingly
precise tool through which the powerful sought to control the notionally
powerless.8 Despite this rich literature, the history of the body is fundamentally
influenced by work on elite groups, or by their perspectives on and engagement
with the bodies of people from the lower orders. Our knowledge of those who
probably had the most diseased and vulnerable bodies (the 10–20 per cent of
the long eighteenth-century population on, or on the margins of, state welfare),
is remarkably thin.9 We know more about their houses, clothing and diet than
we do about the poor bodies which lived, wore and ate. Similarly, while com­
mentary on the physical and mental state of the poor by middling commenta­
tors is plentiful, our understanding of the perspectives and experiences of the
poor themselves, and of their sense of selfhood and body, is vanishingly rare.
Letters like that of John Pearson help here. Using them we can ask: how did the
poor construct bodies and suffering? How did they use bodies as a rhetorical
and strategic instrument? How did bodies shape the immediate reception of
appeals? How did a rhetorical focus on bodies influence subsequent discussion
and development of the case? And what can we learn about the selfhood of
these writers? This is the agenda for the rest of the chapter. First we turn to the
question of pauper letters and their extent and interpretation.

Pauper letters and Kirkby Lonsdale context

Many early writers on literacy suggested both that oral and literate cultures
persisted side-by-side, and that functional literacy among the poor was lim­
ited.10 For Martyn Lyons, the democratisation of literacy was largely a
function of the post-1860 period. Reading and writing were taught sepa­
rately. Before this date, limited schooling and a lack of subsequent practice
soon put paid to writing literacy among the poor.11 David Vincent thus
suggests that sending and receiving letters in working-class households was
unusual, even after the introduction of the penny post.12 Some contemporary
observers also documented elaborate methods used by ordinary people to
avoid postage costs.13 Yet, the work of Rosalind Crone on the literacy of
prisoners who had gained their literacy skills in late eighteenth or early
nineteenth-century eastern England does not paint such a definitive picture.
She finds that while male literacy outstripped that of women, for both sexes
writing literacy was significant.14 The discovery by James Taylor and
Thomas Sokoll of caches of ‘pauper letters’ like that of John Pearson, and
subsequent large-scale projects to identify further collections of such mate­
rial, should also lead us to question senses that literacy levels were low and
fragile for poor people in the long eighteenth-century.15 This is further
underlined in the chapter by Haggerty in this volume.
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 193
Pauper letters were written and preserved as a function of the operation
of the Old Poor Law (OPL; 1601–1834) and the administration of welfare
resources, largely by the officers of ecclesiastical parishes. Under the OPL,
no individual had a right to receive payments, but every English and Welsh
person had a parish of belonging to which they could apply for such relief.
For those falling into need and living where they ‘belonged’, appeals for
welfare might be made in person, though even then those too sick to move,
or in spatially large or topographically problematic parishes (such as those
in Wales, Yorkshire or Cumbria), might apply by letter. People who had
migrated from their place of belonging either had to move back ‘home’ or
write a letter of appeal to try and negotiate welfare at a distance. Rare
before the 1780s, such letters become increasingly common thereafter. Some
26,000 letters by or about poor people are known to survive in parochial
archives, with some communities retaining formidable collections of corre­
spondence. We know from other sources (postage and paper costs recorded
in accounts, inventories of parish documents, and texts (now lost) read out
and transcribed in ratepayer meetings) that many more letters were sent
than have survived. It is likely that the extensive collections of certain iconic
parishes would have been ‘normal’.16
These archives contain many individual letters from the dependent poor and
new applicants, but numerically most collections are dominated by extensive
letter series relating to a small number of people or families.17 These can run
into hundreds of items and provide a rich resource through which we can
understand the rhetoric, strategy, feelings and experiences of the poor as they
negotiated their place in a discretionary welfare system. There are (in common
with most studies using epistolary sources) many potential reasons to be wary
of such material: did writers tell the truth? Did they embellish their stories
short of untruths? Are those who wrote and whose letters survive representa­
tive of all writers and of those who negotiated their relief in person? Did the
people who signed letters really write them, or would they have used scribes?
Yet, those who have considered pauper letters see little basis for such scepti­
cism. I have argued elsewhere that most writers told a version of the truth that
was acceptable to parish authorities and that in almost all cases those who
signed letters also wrote them.18
For this chapter, the essential strength of pauper letters is that they are
simultaneously documents of record, negotiation, rhetoric and strategy. If,
as the chapter will argue, the body is central to the narrative in such letters
then we can discover a sense of how the very poorest thought about, con­
structed, rhetoricised, imagined and experienced their bodies in a way that
has not been anywhere near possible in the current historiography.19 To do
this I focus on the serial letter-writers in one of the richest parochial col­
lections, that for Kirkby Lonsdale in the historical county of Westmorland.
This small market town was prospering in the later decades of the long
eighteenth-century, but substantial numbers of the poor people for which it
was responsible (certainly well over half) lived outside the community. The
194 Steven King
majority circulated between places within thirty miles of their place of birth,
but others had migrated much further. Thus, the collection contains letters
from London and Surrey in the south, Mold in north Wales, port cities such
as Glasgow and Newcastle, and villages such as Hawes and market towns
like Lancaster, which were in the same locality. Both groups wrote back
when they fell into need. From 1807 a new overseer, Stephen Garnett,
appears to have ensured that all of the incoming correspondence and a
selection of copies of his replies were kept as matter both of record and
administrative competence. This means that there are more than 1,200
individual items of correspondence. As elsewhere, the poor who wrote
infrequently (on fewer than four occasions) dominate the record of the
number of writers, but serial writers dominate the number of letters
received. An archive of this reach and depth affords an unparalleled window
onto the lives and words of the poor.20

Bodies as an influence on how letters were written

The sense that bodies would be a central subject and vehicle for welfare
appeals is an obvious, if previously unexplored, one. While the OPL was
discretionary, it had a basic duty to ensure that the deserving (however
defined) did not simply perish. Rights of appeal to magistrates by claimants
were included in the original 1601 laws for this reason. The accounts and
rhetoric of emaciated frames, naked children, and desperate old people that
we find in the current literature on pauper letters speak directly to this basic
requirement of parishes – and bodies were central to such narratives.21 We
return to this theme below. Meanwhile, bodily conditions also influenced
how letters were written rather than just shaping their contents. Most
obviously, some were written by advocates because the poor person
could not write given their bodily state. Thus, William McWilliams
writing from Carlisle (Cumberland) on 15 June 1811 sought support for
George Boothman who was unemployed because of ‘a Severe Swelling in
one of his Legs & having a Bone wrought out of his Ancle’. Without the
charity of neighbours (itself implicit testimony to the truth of the case)
Boothman ‘wou’d have been literally Starv’d he has a Wife & 4 Children
to Support therefore you may easily judge of his wants which shoud be
done immed’y when in health he is a very infirm Creature & not able to
work for such a Family’.22 We know from other correspondence that
Boothman was perfectly able to write. One interpretation of this inter­
vention is that his primary and accumulated sickness left him unable to
write or post a letter. Certainly, the fact of an advocate letter was meant
to convey to the recipient overseer a sense of severe bodily indisposition
and the need for the subject to surrender themselves to the care of the
parish.23 Almost all collections of serial correspondence, both in Kirkby
Lonsdale and more widely, contain instances where bodily incapacity
affected the ability of the subject to correspond.24
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 195
Other aspects of the relationship between the body and the nature of
writing are more subtle and can be explored through the authorial voice of
Richard Garlick across thirty-five letters written mostly from Clitheroe
(Lancashire). On 15 December 1827 he wrote asking that the overseer ‘will
have the goodness to send me sum of the dow [due] money to wards sum
Clothing for the Boy that had his legs tacken of for he is very near naked’.25
In this instance Garlick was writing about the body of his son, who had lost
both legs in an accident as a young boy, though even here Garlick claimed
that ‘he is goten a great strong Boy fit to go to sum trade’.26 A text osten­
sibly from him on 7 February 1834, however, noted:

A fortnight since, while working at the lime Kiln a splinter of Stone

struck my left eye and so seriously injured it that I shall in all prob­
ability lose it the pain and inflamation extends to the other eye and has
totally deprived me of sight and has disordered my whole frame – This
serious accident has reduced my family to great distress being wholly
dependent on my earnings for support … from the Kindness I have
experienced from you heretofore encourages me to hope that you will
assist me on the present occation27

This letter is more boldly written than any of the other Garlick correspon­
dence, in a different hand (though he also signed this one), and with a
stronger and more direct authorial line. Clearly (and logically), a man on the
verge of losing one eye and with problems in the other was unlikely to be
able to write and thus sought and found a scribe. It would have been
obvious to the recipient overseer that the authorial hand was of a very dif­
ferent character to the ‘usual’ Garlick letters. The sense that the injury had
affected his whole being – it had disordered his frame – is nonetheless clear
and the sentiment, even if not the exact phrasing, almost certainly came
from Garlick himself. A follow-up letter from Henry Brasewell of West
Clough (Lancashire, Garlick’s landlord) on 7 May 1834 tells us:

Richd Garlick … the Pore man is not able to Pay himself he as nothing
but bad Forten [fortune] he as got cut with a stone on his Eye and as
lost it and the Paine of it as mede him very tinder of the other that he
canot mentane is Laber [cannot maintain his labour] at all times for is
Helth as not ben so well Since the Eye was cut.28

While landlords commonly wrote direct to parishes asking officers to pay

rent arrears for poor tenants, this letter is very much a strategic continua­
tion of the February text, developing the story to confirm the loss of an eye.
Garlick had, either through necessity or strategy, entered into epistolary
silence because of the disabling accident.
Others faced with accidents or illnesses continued to write, but acknowl­
edged the impact of such experiences on how they wrote. John Atkinson,
196 Steven King
living in Lancaster (Lancashire) noted the difficulty of writing because ‘the
Bones is begining to Come Away out of my hand’.29 Similarly, Anne This­
tlethwaite (from Leek in Staffordshire) claimed she could have got a scribe
but felt a text in her own hand would be better. She went on to provide
some of the most ‘oral’ letters in the sample. Thus, she claimed that:

our serkamstanc is wors since ther has Ben so Much tik it is tuno one
that we Could Be trasted one Pane whear We Coude have Ben trasad a
Pound Befor Bot it was on the same Ground that you Brot me from
Ingleton by ranen me doun that Was in Your Ppaur I donat men to say
hou in pertekler Bot it sems a Great Comfert30

For a subset of these paupers, writing (already difficult as the example of

Thistlethwaite demonstrates) literally caused physical pain. William Gornall
from Manchester said that he could ‘Rite no more on this subject’ because
he was exhausted, and hoped that the overseer would recognise his efforts.31
Even when people did not link the effort of writing with bodily weakness,
some were acutely aware that their condition affected the quality of writing,
the ability to sustain an argument, or authorship of sufficiently expansive
letters. Harriet Hall, writing from an unknown address on 29 October 1824,
for instance, was ‘in such a Bad state of Health that I cannot wait of my self
and ham … unable to Write’. In this instance, Hall meant not that she was
unable to write, but that she was unable to write to the standard that the
overseer might have expected given the nature of her hand in prior letters.32

The body as subject

Whatever the difficulties that poor writers faced when constructing letters,
the rhetoric of bodily indisposition was central to their claims-making stra­
tegies. Several chapters in this volume discuss the significance of physical
ailments or limitations to the letter-writer’s personal self-representation,
though using letters of the middling, gentry and aristocracy (Feldberg,
Goldsmith and Harvey, for example), yet this was particularly meaningful for
the poor. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise given that an inability (or
reduced ability) to labour had been central to concepts of the deservingness of
men and women across the age spectrum from the very foundations of the OPL
in 1601.33 Against this backdrop, the difficulty of categorising the content of
letters of the sort used here is common to all studies of epistolarity.34 None­
theless, it is possible to see regular rhetorical patterns in the Kirkby Lonsdale
and other large collections, ones that centre round constructions of confine­
ment, decay, delicacy, frailty, reduced ability, and neglect.
As fact and rhetoric, the first core model for poor writers/advocates was
of the confined body. Thus, bodies were variously confined to beds (‘bed­
fast’), hospitals, maternity rooms, domestic premises, and to unbreakable
circles of misery. George Bainbridge of Manchester was visited by a
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 197
neighbour (George Grundy) on 20 February 1803. He promptly wrote to
Kirkby Lonsdale, reporting that Bainbridge was, and was likely to remain,
bedbound. A sense of the power of this image of a forced withdrawal from
the world of the public, including the world of work, is given by the over­
seer’s reply: ‘You write that they are not able to get out of bed which is a
bad situation if they are in Sickness they must have what is necessary or else
george [Bainbridge] is not a man that Can be much depended on [to become
independent through work].’35 To become invisible trumped existing paro­
chial concern about the moral worth of Bainbridge when deciding about
welfare. The fact of a body confined to bed was enough to elicit what was
‘necessary’. There are many examples of an elision between bodily confine­
ment and deservingness, but we see its importance most keenly played out in
long series of letters by or about the same person or family. The Bainbridges
of Manchester were one such. Thus, Ann Bainbridge (George’s wife) repor­
ted in a letter of 8 April 1816 that she ‘have been upwards of six weeks in a
deep decline which makes me unable to walk’, and thus to leave the house.
In the same letter George was ‘so werry [very] much afflicted with the head
Strruck fitts [epileptic fits] that it drives him to a state of derengment’, and
thus presumably also unemployment and confinement at home.36 By 12
January 1826 the advocate Edward Davies was writing from Manchester,
telling the overseer:

She has been … for several weeks past so ill, as not to be able to feed
herself: she is not in a state that will admit of a removal by any con­
veyance whatever, or she would be for now comfortable and much
better served for, if she was with you. She humbly begs you will be so
Kind as to take her case into consideration, and be so kind as send her a
little more relief, to all human appearance she will not need it long.37

This pessimism was unwarranted; the Bainbridges claimed parish relief into
the late 1820s. In turn narratives of domestic confinement and consequent
unemployment are replete in the corpus, especially when claimants faced
sudden crisis. Christopher Grime, for instance, wrote from Langcliff (Lan­
cashire) on 25 November 1825 that his legs had nearly been amputated when
a flag (presumably a flagpole or flagstone) fell on him. His central (and he
hoped telling) claim was that ‘I ham Condfind [confined] to my roum
[room] and Cannot help My self and My young Childeren’.38 Similarly,
John Pearson, writing from Whitehaven (Cumberland) on 21 March 1823,
noted that he ‘was 10 weeks and never brought one penny into the hous’.
This was not his fault, but reflected the fact that ‘my wife is lying and not
able to turn hir self in bed and has been now going in three weeks she may
survive till you Recd. this and she may not for the Doctor now Can Reco­
mend nothing but Nurishment for hir and it is not in my Power to gett it for
hir’. Pearson appropriated the voice and authority of the doctor to empha­
sise the severity of the familial case, but the core issue was that his wife’s
198 Steven King
illness had confined them both to the domestic sphere with dire con­
sequences for his ability to act as a working husband should.39
Ann Bainbridge and John Pearson’s wife were beyond childbearing when
we encounter them, but younger women (and their advocates) regularly
elided ‘confinement’ for childbirth and assumed deservingness. On 13
August 1810, for instance, Rachel Boothman of Carlisle (Cumberland) was
‘laying in Childbed’ and her husband could not maintain his regular work.40
Similarly William Winder wrote from Kendal (Cumberland) on 2 November
1831 ‘to let you know that my Wife was brought to Bed yesterday morning
& is in a very weak state’. He begged assistance because her ‘confinement’
meant he could not himself leave the house and earn money.41 The rhetoric
of confinement was more clearly used when William and his wife wrote a
joint letter on 2 November 1834, soon after another birth. Claiming ‘cir­
cumstances of a very hard Kind’ William (it was his hand, though both
signed) was ‘myself confined to my bed in sickness and my Wife likewise on
a bed of sickness & child-bed’. Emphasising their confinement, he elided
their domestic situation and bodily needs: ‘it is now a house of distress and
poverty.’ To further convey their precarious situation, William added, ‘I
cant offer to rise out of bed without the assistance of two men’.42 As women’s
historians have demonstrated, a key aspect of the lying-in period was the
withdrawal of the self and body from the public world, but in this case dis­
abling sickness for William Winder heavily exacerbated the multiple costs of
‘confinement’. The Winders were socially, culturally and economically disabled
through no fault of their own and they assumed that officials would understand
this submersion of the public body as conferring entitlement.43
Most of those employing confinement rhetoric had (and conveyed) a sense
that if helped they would return themselves and their bodies to something
broadly ‘normal’ in terms of a healthy ability to work. For others, however,
a second core trope was the failing/decaying body and a related or con­
sequent sense of hopelessness.44 Ann Bainbridge, writing from Manchester
on 17 January 1825, could point to a litany of bodily misfortune. Now she
apologised for further communication, claiming: ‘I should not have troubled
you with writing but that otherwise you might not know whether I was still
alive.’ Bainbridge implied that her accumulated state meant that a reason­
able person would have doubts about her very ability to live.45 Eleanor
Beck, writing from Mold (Wales) on 6 September 1822, rhetoricised more
eloquently on accumulated misfortune, asking that her correspondent,
‘obtain for me a little to blunt the shafts of penury [and] you will ensure
yourself the blessings of Him who is styled the Judge of the Widow’.46 This
appropriation of biblical text spoke to the assumed Christian philanthropy
of officials but also adopted well-known imagery of the body and personae
of the poor friendless widow.47 Usually, this rhetorical model involved
detailing at length both the nature of decay and its impact on the ability to
play the normative roles (husband, wife, earner) that might be expected of
writers. Ruth Kitchen wrote from Preston (Lancashire) on 2 March 1826: ‘as
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 199
my advanced years is now arived to that State when I am Sinking under old
age and infirmity’. The aged body was not, in and of itself, a signal of
deservingness and Kitchen knew this, noting she had:

now Gotten Past doing any thing Towards my Support and Trade and
other things is now in a deploreable Situation this may Perhaps be Some
things better but I shall never be younger but shall Continue to Worsten
and as men and Christians I think you will Easily Suppose that Persons
at 75 years are Past doing much and I hope and Trust I shall be assisted
in a reasonable manner.48

Here then bodily decay was a heavy burden, emphasised by the juxtaposi­
tion of a definite age – 75 – with the abilities that accrued to her younger
self. A failing body prompted withdrawal from labour and the public world
of work, and raised the prospect of lifelong domestic confinement. Others
had less time. When John Haley wrote from Horton (Lancashire) in
November 1814 for ‘Old Joseph’ Nelson, he was: ‘Verry porley and has
given over work three weeks since will be next thursday and he is Realey
Verry Short of Breath and spits a great Deal whether he will be Better or not
I Canot tell but I think he is almost done now’.49 Nelson’s body was literally
decaying with every breath. To augment the weight of his observations
Haley noted that ‘I have written the truth as I Can and I am an eye witt­
ness’.50 Decay was more than a rhetorical strategy; its stark reality dripped
from the pen.
When writers wanted to establish long-term relief eligibility, constructing
a narrative of decay might require a long series of letters and thus a period
of no or inadequate relief while they were written, sent, and responded to.
Thus, we can also detect a subtly different trope of the fragile body, one
which necessarily meant from the outset of correspondence that dependence
would be life-long. The argument was made most commonly about chil­
dren.51 Rachel Boothman, encountered already above, is a good but not
untypical example. She wrote from Carlisle on 21 July 1833 to thank the
overseer for previous relief and respond to his request for the ages of her
children. Officials often asked this question to ascertain whether the children
should be contributing to the family economy, or as a precursor to their
forced apprenticeship, a ripping apart of the body of the household.52
Recognising the intent of the overseer’s letter, Boothman noted that ‘their
earnings never has amounted to aney thing as yet’, and suggested that her
daughter had been prevented from working by ‘a Dry Scald [ringworm] in
her head’. But she reserved the most telling comments for her son James
who ‘Likewise has Been under the Dispensrey Doctors for at Different times
for the space of eight and nine Month at a time they – and he a Very Small
Delicate Boy’.53 This language of delicacy was not accidental. While the
term has multiple potential meanings during the long eighteenth century, in
relation to poor children it categorised and characterised those who were
200 Steven King
small, slight, prone to repeated illness and often with some physical dis­
ability short of being completely incapacitating. Boothman reinforced the
message on 20 May 1835, claiming that, ‘as for the oldest Boy, I think he
will never be fit for any thing he is so dilicate’.54 Delicate in this sense sig­
nalled long-term dependency on family and parish. In similar fashion Mary
Grime wrote from Langcliff on 17 May 1835 having been abandoned by her
husband. Clearly aware that abandonment did not equate to deservingness
Grime claimed she had been unable to work because: ‘my son he is a very
delicate boy he is scarcely ever well’. Her focus on delicacy worked and the
letter is annotated with a note that the overseer sent her five shillings.55
Sometimes the physical manifestations of delicacy were specified with more
precision, as in the case of William Lowry of Clitheroe (Lancashire), one of
whose step-children was considered delicate because he ‘will always have
Lame hand as he never can move his fingers’.56 All of these writers sought
ongoing relief for the children, and the range of impairments tacitly
encompassed by the word delicate constitute a rare occasion in the corpus
(both for Kirkby Lonsdale and more widely) where poor people fail to
construct degrees of ability rather than simply disability.57
A broader rhetoric of what we might understand as fragility or frailty
cohered to other life-cycle groups. John Garnett, writing from Kendal on 2
April 1831 asked for help because, ‘I feel my Boodly weekness [bodily
weakness] still to incrace [increase]’, while William Garnett of Preston
claimed in April 1836 that his allowance should be maintained because ‘I am
now strugglen [struggling] hard aganst grate Weeknes of Body to do a littel
Work and Keep on my feet’, by which he meant to avoid being confined to
the home.58 John Pearson, encountered already, was a rhetorical master at
signalling bodily frailty. His letter of 3 August 1820 said that he was unable
to manage on his wages, claiming that ‘I have been allmost fainting at work
but I was still hoping for better but it is wors’.59 By 30 October 1822 his
personal fragilities had magnified. Pearson was ‘born to Crisis and hard
fortune’. Having injured his leg at work, he now talked of it as a dis­
embodied limb: ‘which I had but viry bad hopes of it [the leg] at one time
and I am not able to work mutch with it yeat [yet]’. Pearson remained pes­
simistic about the ability of his body to hold out because ‘there is a pain still
lays in my Side ever since winter’. He also elided fragility of body and mind,
exercising a rhetorical flourish with his assertion that; ‘when I take a Serous
thought of my hard fortune it trouble me till I Call again to Recolection that
the Lords will must be don and I must submitt to it all’. For Pearson then, it
was not simply a lame leg that directed his unwilling application, but a
sense that his body and mind was susceptible to a God-given life of
misfortune.60
In these adult cases writers expected to regain bodily strength, with all
that this implied for perceptions of deservingness in the present and the
nourishing ability to work and sustain an independent household in the
future. For a subset of poor adult writers, however, recovery was (in their
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 201
eyes) unlikely. In such cases we very rarely encounter the rhetoric of com­
plete disability, but that of the less able body is plentiful. George Boothman,
writing from Little Corby (Westmorland) on 30 May 1822 claimed:

I am always forced to Walk with Crutches and must so long as I live

Since Winter 1819 I have been much worse I can safely say that I am not
1 Hour without pain and frequently forced to sit up for whole Weeks
together for I cannot rest in Bed … the little I can do in the Shoe busi­
ness I am frequently disappointed by sickness.61

Boothman constructed himself and his body as able to work for some of his
subsistence and perhaps more if helped in the present. Christopher Grime,
encountered already above, also constructed himself as partially able, writ­
ing on 6 May 1830 that his wages were insufficient because: ‘I have had bad
turns In my body several times the past winter and I have been Very bad
Now for this last week or more through my belt being bad and I Cannot
Get a truss Covered and made under 14s’.62 Grime invited the overseer to
think how he must be situated for physical labour and to send him the
money for a truss, clearly assuming his reader would understand the bodily
and mental effects of a ‘rupture’.
This narrative of degrees of bodily (and mental) ability plays out most
keenly in the context of young adults, where cases of compromised bodies
threatened long-term parochial and familial dependence. Thus, we learn on
1 August 1821 that Grace Nelson’s (unnamed) daughter ‘has been much
afflicted Both in her Body and Eys but as She grows Elder I think her Eye
Rather Strengthes but She has a good appetite’.63 This narrative deepened
over a number of letters from Horton (Lancashire) and the daughter was to
undergo (in an epistolary sense) a radical physical and moral transforma­
tion. By 5 June 1828, she was ‘Verrey Deficient in Memorey and sence and
Can see not weell on one Eye a Verrey Simple foolish Creator [creature] and
Cannot Learn hardley any thing’.64 Shortly afterwards (24 October 1828) we
learn that the daughter was called Betty but such naming did not improve
perceptions of her worth: She ‘Canot see verry well & bad memorey tis
Impossable to Learn her anything she is so short of witt memory and
Understanding I Cannot tell what must Cum of her’. Adopting a philoso­
phical bent, the respondent suggested: ‘but we are short sighted Creatures
Canot tell what a Day may bring forth’, conveying an implied hope that
Betty Nelson might not end up as a parochial burden. Indeed, ‘my Daughter
likes Bett and Rather than she should Com to you this Winter she will take
a Trial of her this next 20 weeks with you allowing the 2 shillings per
Week’.65 This experiment with informal apprenticeship ended badly. By 23
February 1829, we learn that:

I Canot but give her a bad Caracter she is a dirty slothful Nasty Idle
Creator and a Verey great Liear I think She Can See Verry porley she
202 Steven King
Canot Learn anything dull Stuped Sleepy Verry little sence or Ever will
have I think … I have Cleared my Concience66

In the space of eight years, Betty Nelson had moved from being someone
with a little potential to being a young woman with no future. A final letter
on 15 October 1829 noted that Betty was homeless. John Haley said of her:
‘there is Nothing But Loss at that and greef and Truble with her sumtimes I
think she Borders on Idoitesm and she Can Never Come of herself’.67 Betty
was not physically unable but her mental incapacity and associated mis­
behaviours pushed her inexorably towards the less able and more dependent
end of the spectrum that contemporaries constructed.
These are important examples of how fact and rhetoric entwined to con­
struct particular images, layers, and versions of the poor body. This process
reaches its most sophisticated in constructions of the neglected body. When
parishes left letters unanswered, delayed responses, and paid less than was
requested or with conditions that were deemed unwarranted, poor writers
often fashioned new claims. In particular, we see them yoking delay or
denial with worsening bodily conditions such that writers needed more
relief, more intensive relief and of longer duration than if parish officers had
responded as they should have done initially. James Wilson, living in
Blackburn (Lancashire), is a good but not untypical example. On 7 August
1822, he was ‘greatly Surprised that the person you spak of [as coming to
inspect him] has never calld nor yet have I received aney answer to my last
[letter]’. The parish, he argued ‘can not be unacquainted with my Situation’
given frequent prior correspondence. Outlining a litany of woes, Wilson
asked for help with rent arrears.68 We learn from a letter of 20 November
1822 that the request was successful, but also that Wilson considered the relief
insufficient given his ‘third misfortune in two years and six weeks’. While his
bodily health was tolerable, his mood was brought low by the requirement to
struggle continually on a pittance. By acting now the overseers would save
themselves money – his situation was sure to worsen – and relieve his mental
suffering: ‘by so doing you will ease a mind already overburdend and save my
familey from Further Misery’.69 On this occasion, the parish did not act and
Wilson was obliged to ‘trouble you again and hope you will take my case into
Immediate consideration’ on 10 December 1822. In turn, non-response had
hindered physical recovery from a broken leg (which ‘mend verry slowly,
owing to its having been broke in the same place before’), but also greatly
increased his mental suffering. Wilson reminded his correspondent that he
could not get for his children ‘Scarce half sufficient of Provisions … this, Sir is
an afliction to a parent which none but those who have experianced it can feel’.
With body and mind suffering after parochial neglect, he asked for extra
resources and reminded readers that, ‘where my Family broke up and cast on
the parish I am convinced the expence would be greater than aney relief we
stand in need of at present’. Emphasising his mental suffering, Wilson closed
the letter with the phrase ‘I fear the worst’.70
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 203
These broad categories are not, of course, static. Rather, they are simpli­
fications of sometimes very complex situations where writers could incor­
porate several constructions of the body into a single letter, or vary them
between letters in the same series. The presence of advocate letters in the
archives complicates this issue further, not least when advocate and poor
writer constructed the pauper body in different ways. Nonetheless, we can
be clear that failings of the adult and child body, and associated inability to
work or play normative gender roles, was the central conceptual and rheto­
rical basis for establishing deservingness under the discretionary OPL.

The body and questions of reception

Irrespective of the exact framing, it was also possible for accounts and
rhetorics of the body to shape how letters were received. Eleanor Beck
(encountered earlier) wrote on 4 January 1833 to say: ‘I need not tell you of
my weakness you are concs. [conscious] of that when you saw me being
above 63 years of Age I have no clothes to cover me to Keep me warm’.71
Claims of nakedness are a familiar rhetorical vehicle in pauper letters, but
Beck reminded the overseer that he had seen her broken and aged body in
person – that he was conscious of her weakness – with the implication that
personal knowledge ought to prompt action.72 Similarly, Thomas Atkinson
reminded officials on 26 May 1811: ‘you Know my sittuation with a wife &
3 Childer and onley just begining this world for myself’.73 This personal and
familiar element of pauper texts shaped their reception and the nature of the
correspondence that followed. Thus, poor writers variously claimed the
patronage, friendship, humanity, and protection of parish officers, juxta­
posing conditions such as friendlessness, lack of kin, weakness, submissive­
ness and powerlessness. These conditions were literally embodied in the
letter itself. Sometimes there was an invitation to consider and act upon the
bodily indispositions described so precisely in a text. James Hall in Kendal
assumed his description of a dislocated shoulder would be sufficient ‘so you
may judge of my Condtion at present’.74 Similarly, after describing at length
how she had a gate fall on her which ‘almost Crippled me’, Isabella Pratt of
Liverpool assumed that the overseer ‘must be sensible that it would be
impossible for me to live on a Shilling P. [per] week’.75 Here, the poor
constructed welfare as not merely necessary, but right and justified.
Sometimes, such arguments were buttressed with familiar rhetorical
tropes, including asking the recipient to put themselves into the situation of
the writer. John Gonnal, for instance, wrote from Preston (Lancashire) on 3
July 1817 to describe being confined to bed. He asked: ‘now lett mee & you
put ourselves in his situation, you know we should want help for our dayley
Bread it is not the wish of our heavenly Father that we should famish for want
of Bread may God of his tender mercy give you a soft heart’.76 Occasionally,
writers would look to subvert the scribal and power relationship between
pauper and overseer, using the same rhetoric to approach ratepayers directly.
204 Steven King
Thus, describing the pain of losing his wife in childbirth and with four young
children to support, John Loftus of Lancaster appealed: ‘please to lay this
plaine Statement before the Heads of your Township, whose Feelings, as
Fathers, I am confident will send me something to lessen my present Distress’.77
Most serial letter-writers used this sort of rhetoric episodically. Almost
universally, however, they also adopted a more personalised approach,
seeking emotional connection. Their rhetoric ranged across a spectrum from
hopes that the recipient would ‘remember’ the writer, through to active
assertion of friendship and addressing of officials by their forenames. Thus,
Dorothea Heaton of Bolton asked on 2 November 1820: ‘Mr Garnet as a
husband and the father of a family I tendrly beg your kind interfearance in
our behalf’.78 John Thistlethwaite clearly had a strained relationship with
the overseer, writing from Leek on 20 February 1825: ‘it is Quite out of my
Pour [power] to Help my self out of this Troble be Not my Enme [enemy]
for Godessak bot [but] for Give me the Troble I May Have Given you at
one time’.79 We also see a sub-theme of flattery in many letters, perhaps not
unexpected given unequal power relationships between writer and reci­
pient.80 Fanny Wilkinson of Kendal, for instance, thought that a cancerous
breast should warrant relief, but that: ‘your influence will have great weight
with the Parish of Kirkby Lonsdale, should you condescend to take so much
trouble upon you’.81 No writer did more to establish personal connections
than George Dodgson of Lancaster, who called the overseer by his first
name whereas others used the notation Mr Garnett or Stephen Garnett. In
his letter of 11 January 1824, for instance, Dodgson implored his brother to
‘se steven and let im no our stat for sum relfe whe must have tell steven whe
found the last not it was at post ofes whear very much a blidch to him he
may think hus trublsum but this whe canot help this is no neglet of ours’.82
The obverse is to be seen where denial of relief when faced with bodily
indisposition generated anger and indignation. Thomas Dodson asked the
overseer on 1 August 1810: ‘I reseaved your fuelins and I am greatly sur­
prised at the contents how can you think it posabal I can dow such hard
times as these without Asistance’. While the few lines of the overseer are
lost, the sense that being ‘unhelthful’ should necessarily occasion relief is
clear.83 No writer, however, was angrier than William Wilson who wished:
‘I could feel satisfied that you were as free from blame in this sad case as
you represent’.84

Bodies after letters

The letters considered thus far can be read as closed conversations, even if
many writers requested (and sometimes demanded) replies. In some cases,
however, the rhetoric employed meant that information did not simply stay on
the page. It (and sometimes the letter that conveyed it) was circulated, dis­
cussed and remembered, creating an extended conversation about bodies in
recipient communities. Margaret Gill wrote from Beverley (East Yorkshire) on
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 205
5 June 1827, requesting relief because of sickness and impending childbirth. She
claimed: ‘i doo not expect to live long for their is a virytrien [very tiring] time
coming on for me in my situation i am so poorley’. Requesting that the overseer
walk in her shoes – ‘think when you reed this few lines’ – she asked:

pleas to giv my cind love to my father William Sorah the ostler at the
red Dragon in Kirkby Lonsdale and i hope he will think on my poor
little sistrs so long as he doos live tell him that idoo not think that ever
he will see me a live again in this world for ihav been for three days
withought meat.85

The overseer could have ignored this request, but there is compelling
broader evidence that they did not generally do so.86 Rather the letter, at the
centre of which stood the pregnant body and all of the risks that were
inscribed upon it, would likely have been taken to the family.
The afterlife of information and rhetoric can be seen even more clearly in
the case of Robert Beck, writing from Mold on 10 September 1832. Given
that ‘Povart Stears [poverty stares] in our faces’ – a subtle play on the idea
that need could be written onto the very bodies of the deserving – Beck
‘Could wish Dearley if you Could Send by Some of the gentlemen From
your nebourhood to Call and See our distress’.87 This invitation for sur­
veillance inevitably elicited further conversations. His wife, Eleanor Beck
(encountered above), must also have anticipated an afterlife for the infor­
mation and rhetoric in her letter of 6 September 1822 which said:

As the last recource I apply to you, the charecter of whose Sacred office is
charity and benevolence; the applications of the Vicar and the Overseer of
the Parish of Mold on my behalf have fail’d to obtain any relief from the
Overseer of Kirby – he is not a stranger to my case – he Knows that I am
destitude and aged – still he singles me out as an object worthy of nothing
but to be a prey of adversity he deigns not to drop the least ingredient of
comfort in bitter cup of affliction which I am doom’d to quaff88

Beck was clear. Her case was known; she had been seen in the neighbour­
hood, her body (as it were) viewed. Subverting the normative channels of
communication and authority she went direct to a prominent ratepayer to
make claims that the inaction of parochial officials was doing her unto
death. Beck would have known that circumventing officials was likely to
have further (conversational and procedural) consequences. We see such
consequences played out most clearly in the letters surrounding Christopher
Grimes (also encountered above), who episodically claimed relief because of
bodily weakness. For most poor writers, such claims were accepted at face
value. Grimes, however, was seen as lacking honesty. On 5 June 1823 the
Kirkby Lonsdale overseer received a letter from his counterpart in Settle,
Samuel Grundy, who said: ‘Brother John & myself walked up to Mr.
206 Steven King
Clayton’s mill, in order to enquire into the earnings of Christopher Grimes
Children, the clerk was extremely civil, he gave us a written copy of their
average earnings’. These were substantial and Grundy opined: ‘This fellow
deserves punishing for such a rascally application to his Parish’.89 This new
intelligence ensured that Grime’s original claims maintained a currency.
Information was circulated in the parish and Matthew Lofthouse was dis­
patched to make further enquiries. Straying beyond an accepted tolerance of
embellishment and fabrication by officials, Grime had, as it were, over­
played his body and caused a substantial legacy for his rhetoric, as well as
compromising his relief eligibility.90
Even where someone was not seen as dishonest, the tone of a letter might
give its contents a legacy. Bettey Teabay’s letter of 3 September 1809 detailed
bodily infirmity. Its physical state compared to the rest of the archive suggests
that it has been well-thumbed in a process of physical circulation, probably
because it opened with a statement which would likely to have been read as one
of breathtaking arrogance: ‘First Jentlemen Bettey Teabay desiers you Give A
Tension To what I Going to Say’. It comes as no surprise that the original letter
is annotated with the phrase ‘nothing to be done’.91 At the opposite end of the
spectrum, sometimes the bodily issues described in letters were simply so awful
as to ensure that information about, and discussion of, bodies circulated
widely. John Haley reported on 23 March 1815:

[Elizabeth Nelson’s] Cloths Caught fire and She was Dreadfully burnt
Before the flame got Extingwished She was so Dreadfuly burnt that her
life was Despared of and a Doctor was Caled in … he Ordered pultises
[poultices] of white Bread and wine Same that Cost from 1/4 to 1/6 a
Day and Last Sunday thought a Mortification was About to take place
but on her being Clean washed all her Sores there was not so bad but
their is now Sum hopes of her Recoverey with Length of time92

Elizabeth Nelson did recover, but multiple annotations (in multiple hands) on
the letters written for or about her suggest that the case and the texts circulated
in her ‘home’ parish. The same is true of her sister Sarah who, on 21 March
1817, ‘has been VVerey porley sum time she lookes like a goost [ghost] and she
has nothing to help her’.93 It is not hard to imagine ongoing parochial interest in
a family seemingly born to misfortune. Amputations, chronic disease, infectious
disease, serial familial sickness, and mental illness all tended to prompt the
subsequent circulation of information within and between parishes, if the exis­
tence of further correspondence, letter annotations or the physical condition of
some texts are read as symbols of legacy.

Conclusion
Pauper letters have fostered a reconsideration of how the poor experienced
dependence and navigated parochial social relations. Never before, however,
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 207
have welfare historians appreciated the centrality of the body to these let­
ters, to how they were written, rhetoricised, received and their contents cir­
culated. Using the Kirkby Lonsdale letters and the particularities of serial
writers, however, it is possible to see that the poor understood how to tailor
their rhetoric to different types of claim, life-cycle stages or situations. They
employed the body as a currency, as the source of a powerful universalising
rhetoric and strategic tool with which to make claims. Fused with other
rhetorical tropes – as we have seen for instance the appropriation of biblical
language to appeal to the assumed Christian philanthropy of recipient offi­
cials is a consistent sub-text in the letters – this currency gave poor writers
and their advocates a powerful tool in both epistolary and practical nego­
tiations. These letters also, of course reported real bodily indispositions and
impairments, speaking to what must have been a universal communal
understanding of the risks that ill-health posed to life, work, and livelihood.
In the sense that the decision over who got what relief under the OPL was
essentially a discretionary consideration on the part of parochial officials, the
body – its history, current state, and future – shaped and constrained the ability
of those with discretionary power to exercise it. In turn, the poor could learn the
value of this currency. They could gather it in and over a series of letters deepen
the narrative and rhetorical reporting and construction of bodily indisposition.
As elite support for the OPL leached away in the 1820s and early 1830s, pri­
marily because the poor seemed to have established rights under a law that
afforded them none, it becomes clear from this analysis and its implications for
other large pauper letter collections, that the effectiveness of a universalising
body rhetoric had undermined the very legitimacy of the single most important
domestic function of the nineteenth-century state. The OPL had, in system­
atically supporting the bodies of those who could not support themselves, sown
the seeds of its own destruction.

Notes
1 Overseers were elected annually from local ratepayers. Most were unsalaried.
2 Cumbria Archive Service (hereafter CAS) WPR 19/7/6/16/3. Here and hereafter
all quoted spelling is from the original.
3 On dead paupers see Elizabeth Hurren and Steven King, ‘Begging for a Burial:
Death and the Poor Law in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England’, Social
History 30:3 (2005): 321–341.
4 For mental oppression: Alannah Tomkins, ‘“Labouring on a Bed of Sickness”:
The Material and Rhetorical Deployment of Ill-Health in Male Pauper Letters’,
in Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth Hurren and Steven King (eds), Poverty and Sick­
ness in Modern Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 51–68.
5 Clare Walker-Gore, ‘Noble Lives: Writing Disability and Masculinity in the Late
Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth Century Contexts 36:3 (2014): 363–375, 364,
369; David Turner and David Blackie, Disability in the Industrial Revolution
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), passim.
6 Karen Harvey, ‘What Mary Toft Felt: Women’s Voices, Pain, Power and the
Body’, History Workshop Journal 80:1 (2015): 33–51. Also Naomi Baker, Plain
208 Steven King
Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2010) and Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows
and Modern British Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010).
7 See Marissa Rhodes, ‘Domestic Vulnerabilities: Reading Families and Bodies into
Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Atlantic Wet Nurse Advertisements’, Journal of
Family History 40:1 (2015): 39–63; Peter Ward, The Clean Body: A Modern
History (London: McGill-Queens University Press, 2019).
8 Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton, ‘Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and
Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World’, Journal of Social History
40:1 (2005): 39–64, 41–50.
9 Though not absent. See for instance Tim Hitchcock, ‘Tricksters, Lords and Ser­
vants: Begging, Friendship and Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century England’, in
Laura Gowing, Michael Hunter and Miri Rubin (eds), Love, Friendship and
Faith in Europe 1300–1800 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), 177–196.
10 Bob Bushaway, ‘“Things Said or Sung a Thousand Times”: Customary Society
and Oral Culture in Rural England 1700–1900’, in Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf
(eds), The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1850 (Manchester: Man­
chester University Press, 2002), 256–283.
11 Martyn Lyons, The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe c.1860–1920
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
12 David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
13 Edward Boys-Ellman, Recollections of a Sussex Parson (London: Barnes, 1912).
14 Rosalind Crone, ‘Reappraising Victorian Literacy through Prison Records’,
Journal of Victorian Culture, 15:1 (2010), 3–37.
15 Thomas Sokoll, ‘Old Age in Poverty: The Record of Essex Pauper Letters, 1780–
1834’, in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Chronicling Pov­
erty: The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1997), 127–54 and James Taylor, Poverty, Migration and Settlement
in the Industrial Revolutions (Palo Alto: SPSS, 1989).
16 See Steven King, ‘“It Is Impossible for Our Vestry to Judge His Case into Per­
fection from Here”: Managing the Distance Dimensions of Poor Relief, 1800–40’,
Rural History, 16:2 (2005): 161–189.
17 Who thus constantly rehearse and repeat their stories allowing us to establish
narrative authenticity. For a similar point in terms of trial contexts, see Harvey,
‘What Mary Toft Felt’, 40.
18 Steven King, Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s–1830s (London:
McGill-Queens University Press, 2019), 60–92.
19 This is not to downplay the rich literature on reading the authorial voice of
ordinary people in court records and depositions. See for instance James
Oldham, ‘Truth-Telling in the Eighteenth-Century English Courtroom’, Law and
History Review, 12:1 (1994): 95–121.
20 A small part of the collection has been analysed in James Taylor, ‘Voices in the
Crowd: The Kirkby Lonsdale Township Letters 1809–36’, in Chronicling Pov­
erty, 109–126.
21 Peter Solar, ‘Poor Relief and English Economic Development before the Indus­
trial Revolution’, Economic History Review, 48:1 (1995): 1–22.
22 CAS WPR 19/7/6/4/17.
23 See also Geoffrey Hudson, ‘Arguing Disability: Ex-servicemen’s Own Stories in
Early Modern England 1590–1790’, in Roberta Bivins and John Pickstone (eds),
Medicine, Madness and Social History (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 1–10; Lea
Laitinen and Taru Nordlund, ‘Performing Identities and Interaction through
Epistolary Formulae’, in Marina Dossena and Gabriella Camiciotti (eds), Letter
Writing in Late Modern Europe (London: John Benjamin, 2012), 65–88.
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 209
24 Steven King and Peter Jones, ‘Testifying for the Poor: Epistolary Advocates for
the Poor in Nineteenth Century England and Wales’, Journal of Social History
49:3 (2016): 784–807.
25 CAS WPR 19/7/6/20/39.
26 For similar narratives see Turner and Blackie, Disability.
27 CAS WPR 19/7/6/27/50.
28 CAS WPR 19/7/6/27/45.
29 CAS WPR 19/7/6/16/63. Undated.
30 CAS WPR 19/7/6/15/19. This highly orthographic text would read in standard
English: ‘our circumstances is worse since there has been so much credit it is to
no one that we could be trusted one penny where we could have been trusted a
pound before. But it was on the same grounds you brought me from Ingleton by
running me down that was in your paper. I do not mean to say how in particular
but it seems a great comfort.’ Crudely, Thistlethwaite claimed that she had
managed to obtain credit from shops before but now the family circumstances
were such that no one would trust them to repay. She reminded the overseer that
his letter encouraging her to go to the village of Ingleton had held out the pro­
spect of her being able to get credit and she had acted on that assertion.
31 CAS WPR 19/7/6/4/9. Undated.
32 CAS WPR 19/7/6/17/39. As with character development in contemporary novels
‘authenticity and sincerity are expressed primarily physically’. Erin Wilson, ‘The
End of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Litera­
ture and Medicine, 30:2 (2012): 276–291, 283. Note too overlap with middling-
sort letters where words were confected to convey physical states. See Elizabeth
Hallam, ‘Speaking to Reveal: The Body and Acts of “Exposure” in Early Modern
Popular Discourse’, in Catherine Richardson (ed.), Clothing Culture 1350–1650
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 239–262. It is often possible to see handwriting
deteriorating where people claimed or described deepening illness across a series
of letters.
33 On the OPL, work and deservingness see Steve Hindle, On the Parish: The
Micro-Politics of Poor Relief in Rural England c.1550–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2004), ch. 3.
34 Claire Brant, Eighteenth Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Pal-
grave, 2006).
35 CAS WPR 19/7/6/4/20.
36 CAS WPR 19/7/6/9/3.
37 CAS WPR 19/7/6/19/1.
38 CAS WPR 19/7/6/18/34.
39 CAS WPR 19/7/6/16/21. On the wider relationship between bodily indisposition
and public masculine citizenship see Patricia Reeve, ‘The “Bone and Sinew of the
Nation”: Antebellum Workingmen on Health and Sovereignty’, in Timothy Light
(ed.), Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800–2000, (London:
McGill-Queens University Press, 2014), 25–52.
40 CAS WPR 19/7/6/3/24.
41 CAS WPR 19/7/6/24/52. On the link between feminine ‘weakness’ and confine­
ment, see Wilson, ‘The End’, 276, while for men as carers see Lisa Smith ‘The
Relative Duties of a Man: Domestic Medicine in England and France, ca. 1670–
1740’, Journal of Family History 31:3 (2006):237–256.
42 CAS WPR 19/7/6/27/21. Note attempts to emphasise connectedness within the
community through the constant help of ‘two men’.
43 CAS WPR 19/7/6/28/21.
44 For this model in literature see Tomas Beebee, Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500–
1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 48–51.
45 CAS WPR 19/7/6/18/2.
210 Steven King
46 CAS WPR 19/7/6/15/23.
47 See for instance Lynn Botelho, ‘“The Old Woman’s Wish”: Widows by the
Family Fire? Widows Old Age Provisions in rural England 1500–1700’, History of
the Family, 7:1 (2002): 59–78.
48 CAS WPR 19/7/6/19/11.
49 CAS WPR 19/7/6/7/14. On the intersections of age, failing health and masculinity
see Helen Yallop, ‘Representing Aged Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Eng­
land: The “Old Man” of Medical Advice’, Cultural and Social History, 10:2
(2013): 191–210.
50 CAS WPR 19/7/6/7/14.
51 For analogous discussion of contemporary perceptions of the fragility and resi­
lience of sick children in the classes above those considered here, see Hannah
Newton, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 31–62.
52 Pamela Sharpe, ‘Poor Children as Apprentices in Colyton 1598–1830’, Continuity
and Change, 6:1 (1991): 53–70.
53 CAS WPR 19/7/6/26/29.
54 CAS WPR 19/7/6/28/47.
55 CAS WPR 19/7/6/28/11. On the inter-relationship between fragile child and
female bodies see Sebastien Rioux, ‘Capitalism and the production of uneven
bodies: Women, motherhood and food distribution in Britain c.1850–1914’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 40:1 (2015): 1–13.
56 CAS WPR 19/7/6/17/23.
57 Elite society similarly concentrated on abilities. See Gore, ‘Noble Lives’, 368.
58 CAS WPR 19/7/6/24/1; CAS WPR 19/7/6/29/18.
59 CAS WPR 19/7/6/13/19.
60 CAS WPR 19/7/6/15/34. Harvey, ‘What Mary Toft Felt’, 43, argues for an earlier
period that the elision of physical and emotional suffering was a particular
characteristic of female narratives.
61 CAS WPR 19/7/6/15/14.
62 CAS WPR 19/7/6/23/11.
63 CAS WPR 19/7/6/14/30.
64 CAS WPR 19/7/6/21/39.
65 CAS WPR 19/7/6/21/22.
66 CAS WPR 19/7/6/22/5. Phrases such as nasty idle creature resonate with wider
ideas that the poor could be rhetoricised in terms also used for livestock. See
Rhodes, ‘Domestic Vulnerabilities’, 50. In standard English this might read: ‘I
cannot but give her a bad character. She is a dirty, slothful, nasty, idle creature
and a very great liar. I think she can see very poorly. She cannot learn anything
[and is] dull, stupid sleepy. Very little sense or ever will have I think … I have
cleared my conscience.’
67 CAS WPR 19/7/6/22/27.
68 CAS WPR 19/7/6/15/22.
69 CAS WPR 19/7/6/15/39.
70 CAS WPR 19/7/6/15/41.
71 CAS WPR 19/7/6/26/13.
72 See King, Writing the Lives, passim.
73 CAS WPR 19/7/6/4/13.
74 CAS WPR 19/7/6/5/3.
75 CAS WPR 19/7/6/6/15.
76 CAS WPR 19/7/6/10/28.
77 CAS WPR 19/7/6/8/1. On rhetorics of mother/fatherhood, see Joanne Bailey,
‘“Think Wot a Mother Must Feel”: Parenting in English Pauper Letters c.1760–
1834’, Family and Community History, 13:1 (2010): 5–19.
 Constructing the body in English pauper letters, 1780–1834 211
78 CAS WPR 19/7/6/13/30.
79 CAS WPR 19/7/6/18/5.
80 On the linguistic register of flattery, see Laitinen and Nordlund, ‘Performing
Identities’, 72–77.
81 CAS WPR 19/7/6/18/41.
82 CAS WPR 19/7/6/17/1. In standard English this would read: ‘see Steven and let
him know our state, for some relief we must have. Tell Steven we found the last
note [letter enclosing money]. It was at the post office. We are very much obliged
to him. He may think us troublesome but this we cannot help. This is no neglect
of ours.’
83 CAS WPR 19/7/6/3/20.
84 CAS WPR 19/7/6/16/11.
85 CAS WPR 19/7/6/20/9. In standard English this would read: ‘please to give my
kind love to my father William Sorah, the landlord at the red Dragon in Kirkby
Lonsdale. I hope he will think on my poor little sisters [i.e. provide care for] so
long as he does live. Tell him that I do not think that he will ever see me alive
again in this world for I have been three days without meat.’
86 King, Writing the Lives, 43–68.
87 CAS WPR 19/7/6/25/46.
88 CAS WPR 19/7/6/15/23.
89 CAS WPR 19/7/6/16/40.
90 CAS WPR 19/7/6/21/12.
91 CAS WPR 19/7/6/2/26. On the rhetorical purpose of such demands see Jonathan
Culpepper and Dawn Archer, ‘Requests and Directness in Early Modern English
Trial Proceedings and Play Texts, 1640–1760’, in Andreas Jucker and Ina Too­
vitsainen (eds), Speech Acts in the History of English (Amsterdam: John Benja­
min, 2008), 45–84.
92 CAS WPR 19/7/6/8/4. This story was later recounted in four different parish
sources.
93 CAS WPR 19/7/6/10/12.
10 Labouring bodies
Work animals and hack writers in Oliver
Goldsmith’s letters
Taylin Nelson

Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll,

Who wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll.1

In a London coffeehouse in 1774, playwright David Garrick engaged in an ‘epi­

taph battle’ wherein he compared Irish author Oliver Goldsmith, who was
known to have a speech impediment, to Robinson Crusoe’s stuttering parrot
Poll. Garrick’s affectionate yet satirical animal metaphor contrasted Goldsmith’s
facility with the written word to his lesser abilities as a conversationalist. Gold­
smith’s stutter worked in tandem with his countenance to mark him as an object
of ridicule by friends and critics alike. In James Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791),
he noted that Goldsmith spoke with extreme excitement and a desire to impress
others, which often left him tongue-tied.2 Boswell further critiqued Goldsmith’s
physiognomy, writing that ‘his person was short’ – a point also parodied in
Garrick’s verse through the term ‘shortness’ – and his ‘countenance coarse and
vulgar’, referring to a childhood illness that left Goldsmith’s face badly scarred.3
Nevertheless, these physical impediments did little to stifle Goldsmith’s ambition
to one day become a respected writer with a famous face. In a letter written on
14 August 1758 to college friend Robert Bryanton, Goldsmith wrote ambi­
tiously – if not ironically – of high hopes following his first publication, An
Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe (1759). In the letter,
he imagined a day when his face might decorate memorabilia crafted by com­
mercial workers such as handkerchief-weavers and snuff-box makers, thus
marking his labours and commercial success as an author:

I have not yet seen my face reflected in all the lively display of red and
white paint on any sign posts in the subburbs [sic]. Your handkerchief
weavers seem as yet unacquainted with my merits or Physiognomy and
the very snuff-box makers appear to have forgot their respect. Tell them
all from me they are a set of Gothic, barbarous ignorant Scoundrells
[sic]. There will come a day, no doubt there will, I beg you live a couple
hundred years longer only to see the day, when … the age will vindicate
my character, give learned editions of my labours, and bless the times
with copious comments on the Text.4
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-14
 Labouring bodies 213
Goldsmith would not have to wait two-hundred years for his ‘labours’ to be
recognised, for in less than ten years he would be famous for his novel The
Vicar of Wakefield (1766), his poem The Deserted Village (1770), and his
comedy of manners She Stoops to Conquer, published in 1771 and first
performed in 1773. Despite this success, Goldsmith did not escape critical
attacks expressed through the medium of the animal body. His longtime
adversary and critic, William Kenrick, published an exceptionally hostile
review of She Stoops to Conquer on the ninth night of its success, men­
tioning Goldsmith’s days working as a hack writer on Grub Street and
lampooning his ‘grotesque Oranhotan’s figure … monkey face and cloven
foot’.5 Kenrick’s insult was two-fold; first, and most obviously, he used
animal imagery to attack Goldsmith’s short stature and scarred face; more
importantly, at the height of Goldsmith’s public success, Kenrick classed his
previous station as a hack writer as low, degrading, and animalistic. Ken­
rick’s insult proved prophetic. While Goldsmith did achieve commercial
success and celebrity, publishing upwards of 200 texts in a wide range of
genres, he never escaped the title of ‘hack’. Even his final work, a natural
history to rival French naturalist Comte de Buffon’s Histoire naturelle
(1749–1804), was said to have been produced by a ‘hack scientist’.6
Goldsmith was aware of his position as a struggling author during his
early writing years, and his views on the contemporary market made their
way into many of his later works – even after he achieved financial success.
Goldsmith wittily co-opted the affectionate and sometimes biting animal
metaphors that friends and foes used to mock him to illustrate the cultural
position shared between animals and struggling authors. In both his perso­
nal and fictional letters, Goldsmith often remarked on the toll of hack
writing, a profession which based its economic success on the production of
quantity over quality. Before his literary success, Goldsmith’s collected let­
ters and epistolary narratives explored the labours of writing and the con­
ditions of the literary marketplace through embodied animal metaphors.
Thus, this chapter considers Goldsmith’s personal and fictional letters and
the representation of animal embodiment therein as situated in London’s
hack-writing economy. This study limits itself to Goldsmith’s personal let­
ters, written to friends and family between 1753 and 1766, and his serialised
epistolary narrative, The Citizen of the World; or, Letters from a Chinese
Philosopher (1760–1761); texts both bound by the years before Goldsmith
rose to literary acclaim.7 In these, the animal body becomes a metaphor and
an embodiment of Goldsmith’s struggle within an eighteenth-century literary
marketplace; and his use of animal metaphors comes to represent both
London’s market-driven economy and the commodification of work animals
and hack writers alike.
References and critiques of hack writing as they appear in Goldsmith’s
epistolary canon are relatively unexamined by scholars today. The best
scholarship available is Michael Griffin’s and David O’Shaughnessy’s new
edited collection of Goldsmith’s letters, which greatly advances the work of
214 Taylin Nelson
Katherine C. Balderston. Their work focuses on broadening avenues of
research by providing access to letters previously only accessible through the
British Library. Furthermore, while epistolary studies and animal studies
have benefitted from recent scholarship, the convergence of these fields is
relatively unaddressed. Critics have examined, for example, the wealth of
eighteenth-century letters and travelogues exchanged between natural his­
torians who mailed living and non-living animal specimens. Scholars have
also acknowledged that, among the many ways letters were delivered, a
prevalent method was via horse-drawn mail coaches which made deliveries
more expedient.8 This study moves beyond the objective and peripheral
consideration of animals in letters to examine the implications of animal
embodiment and material labour in defining a writer-for-hire culture.
Though Goldsmith scholarship has revived in the twenty-first century,
there remains little critical examination of him within the field of animal
studies in general.9 Charles A. Westacott’s The Animals’ Historian (1946)
provides the only direct source connecting Goldsmith to animal studies;
however, it does not offer literary criticism and is not useful beyond the
realm of suggestion.10 Among scholars actively examining Goldsmith’s work
in an animal studies context are Julia Allen’s Samuel Johnson’s Menagerie:
The Beastly Lives of Exotic Quadrupeds in the Eighteenth Century (2002)
and Ingrid Tague’s Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eight­
eenth-Century Britain (2015). While Allen’s book primarily considers Samuel
Johnson’s dictionary entries on animals, it also effectively outlines Gold­
smith’s influence on natural history writing by providing essential points of
reference on his visits to the Buckingham Palace zebra and the Royal
Menagerie lions held at the Tower of London.11 Tague’s chapter on Gold­
smith’s natural history text, A History of the Earth and Animated Nature
(1774), shows that Goldsmith used the vocabulary of animal slavery to denote
‘friendship’ and ‘obedience’ in domestic animals and ‘natural independence and
ferocity’ in wild animals; thus drawing a distinction between the two.12 While
Goldsmith’s language is prescriptive, it remains inherently non-judgemental.
When he ascribed independence and ferocity to wild animals Goldsmith
relayed a clear message of awareness, even admiration, for the natural freedom
of wild animals – one that starkly contrasted with his opinions about domes­
tication which he blamed for propagating ‘a new race of artificial monsters’
created only to serve ‘human pleasure’ and ‘convenience’.13
Though not a letter, in Animated Nature, Goldsmith stated his opinion on
the unfair labour of domesticated work animals. Writing of the draught
donkey, Goldsmith wrote that ‘[m]an despises this humble, useful creature,
whose efforts are exerted to please him, and whose services are too cheaply
purchased’.14 Goldsmith’s recognition of the economic value of the donkey’s
labour as ‘cheaply purchased’ demonstrated his view that unfair systems of
labour existed for work animals – a view which Goldsmith easily translated
into the world of human writers. Through a commiseration with working
animals, Goldsmith illustrated the laborious nature of the literary marketplace
 Labouring bodies 215
and, more broadly, London’s culture of commodification; both of which were
causes for the present working conditions of hack authors and work animals.
Furthermore, Goldsmith sympathised with both humans and non-humans who
were dispossessed by shifting cultural systems. His non-epistolary works
depicted the negative consequences of domesticating wild animals and the
consequences of imported luxury that forced the rural poor to emigrate to
America.15 While Goldsmith was not an explicit advocate for human and non­
human rights in the manner of Thomas Tryon or Jeremy Bentham, his works
offer numerous explorations of themes such as: sensibility, vegetarianism,
animal cruelty, animals as individuals, animal emotions, and animal societies.16
If, at times, Goldsmith’s true opinion feels obfuscated, that can be attributed to
the nature of hack writing, which required hired authors to express their
employers’ political and cultural views. Despite the nature of the work, it
becomes clear through the sheer quantity of times that Goldsmith directly or
indirectly wrote of animals, that they were central to his thinking.
The plethora of unexplored animal themes in Goldsmith’s wider corpus
of works suggests a good reason for reading his letters within an animal
studies context. But while Goldsmith had plenty to say about animals in his
fictional and non-fictional works, his personal letters mention animals only a
handful of times. Despite Goldsmith’s small collection of surviving letters,
scholars must examine those few instances of animal metaphor as important
in contributing to his larger corpus of works concerning animals. Goldsmith
did not explicitly claim that work animals and hack writers are equally
worthy of better treatment, but his rhetorical use of work animals in his
letters shows not only that he saw himself as a labourer, but that he saw
animals as highly engaged in the act of labour too. Goldsmith’s identifica­
tion with subjugated work animals reflected his earlier experiences as an
Irish hack writer in London, at a time in his life when he struggled to gain
literary success. Part One of this chapter examines comparisons among hack
writing, the work horse, farm horse, and racehorse in Goldsmith’s personal
letters to establish a foundation for the financial problems he experienced
within the profession. Part Two analyses an individual letter which uses the
figure of the turnspit dog to represent the ceaseless nature of writing.
Finally, Part Three turns to Goldsmith’s epistolary narratives which set
forth his opinions on the literary marketplace through the rhetorical use of
exotic and exploited work animals such as the rhinoceros or performing
monkey; both of which were put to work and monetised for public enter­
tainment. The chapter concludes by proving that Goldsmith drew a parallel
between domesticated and captive work animals, and the toil of writing in
an increasingly competitive literary market. In seeking to establish Gold­
smith’s letters within both epistolary and animal studies contexts, this
chapter undertakes critical research which has not yet been done in the
current field of Goldsmith scholarship. In both forms of epistolary narrative,
Goldsmith displayed an innate ability to express the condition of the work
animal and the hired author through his own experiences in the hack
216 Taylin Nelson
profession – experiences that themselves appear through animal metaphors
comparing subjugated authors (forced to pander to public taste) to hackney
horses, work dogs, and performing street monkeys.

Authors like racehorses: hack writing, letter-writing, and animality

Personal letters and epistolary fictions are different genres distinguished by
their purpose, conventions, and intended audience; however, commonality is
found through their functionality in the public sphere. Goldsmith’s episto­
lary fictions were written in the style of the private discourse of a letter, and
(as with the letters discussed in the chapters by Williams and Taylor in this
volume) his personal letters operated within the public sphere – both were
inextricable from a Republic of Letters. Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook sets a
precedence for this intersection and suggests that manuscript letters and
epistolary fictions were both emblems of the private, ‘yet both publicly
[took] part in a Republic of Letters’.17 While it is understood that personal
letters inherently relied upon the public sphere through circulation, trans­
mission, and delivery, it is perhaps uncommon for an eighteenth-century
author’s collected letters to be so consistently invested with public matters.
Despite writing to friends and family, the contents of Goldsmith’s letters
almost always functioned at the commercial level and in a public-facing
way. Notably, they enacted ideas which appeared later in his literary
career, as he moved from impoverished hack on Grub Street to the presti­
gious position of one of the founding members of Johnson’s literati
‘Club’.18 Ergo, the intersection of Goldsmith’s personal and fictional letters
is located in his burgeoning career as a hack writer dependent upon public
taste, and as will be shown, this was inherently implicated with the
labouring ‘hackney’ horse.
Unlike other writers of the time, it is important to note that Goldsmith
was an infrequent letter-writer. Scottish contemporary James Grainger told
Goldsmith’s first biographer Thomas Percy: ‘When I taxed little Goldsmith
for not writing as he promised, his answer was, that he never wrote a letter
in his life; and faith I believe him – except to a bookseller for money’.19
Goldsmith’s later biographer James Prior similarly described how ‘his dis­
inclination to epistolary communication was well-known’.20 Likewise, Grif­
fin and O’Shaughnessy point out: ‘Though he wrote copiously across the
genres in order to provide for himself, Oliver Goldsmith’s corpus of letters
is one of the least extensive of any major writer of his age.’21 For context,
Goldsmith’s contemporary Johnson has a collection of nearly 750 surviving
letters and fragments, standing in stark contrast to the 66 surviving letters in
the Goldsmith collection. Though it is improbable that he only wrote 66
letters, Griffin and O’Shaughnessy explain that ‘except for professional
requests and courtesies, Goldsmith’s correspondence, never copious to begin
with, dwindled considerably once he had established himself’ as a figure
among London’s literary scenes.22
 Labouring bodies 217
Grainger’s comment that Goldsmith never wrote letters ‘except to a
bookseller for money’ provides concrete evidence for drawing a connection
between writing personal letters and writing for financial gain. That Gold­
smith wrote ‘in order to provide for himself’ suggests that his position as a
Grub Street author inhibited his ability to keep up correspondence. The
refrain in both his personal and fictional letters written during his time in
Grub Street suggests that Goldsmith was not writing unless he was profiting
from it in some way – for he was ‘pursuing plain prose’ to ‘make shift to
eat’.23 This sits in contrast to the typical focus of Republic of Letters scho­
larship, which has perhaps given too much focus to bodies of correspon­
dence produced by people who had the leisure and inclination to do so.24
It becomes clear why Goldsmith’s epistolary output was so meagre upon
reading the actual letters, which are almost wholly taken up with imperso­
nal matters. The majority of Goldsmith’s surviving letters functioned in the
public sphere and were written on topics relating to money or the writing
profession. Over half of his collected letters discuss aspects of the writing
profession such as the state of literature, culling subscriptions from an Irish
readership, courting loans, lamenting financial difficulties, and defending his
authorship against harsh critics.25 Goldsmith’s first nineteen letters, written
between 1752 and 1764, are directly concerned with finding work or receiv­
ing payment; thus, letter-writing was utilised as a means to consider
employment prospects. In one letter written in 1757 to brother-in-law Daniel
Hodson, Goldsmith half-heartedly joked about the poverty of a writer: ‘You
immagine [sic], I starve, and the name of an Author naturally reminds you
of a garret, in this particular I do not think proper to undeceive my
Friends’.26 Goldsmith invoked tropes of the impoverished Grub Street
author made famous by Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728), which
depicted hacks as poor scribblers willing to substitute literary merit for mass
production and profit. Before Goldsmith achieved public recognition, writ­
ing of any kind, including letters, was tediously bound to labour output and
monetary income. It is hypothesised that Goldsmith began to hack write as
young as sixteen-years-old while studying at Trinity College, Dublin.
According to Anne Chilton: ‘Legend has it that the teenage Goldsmith sup­
plemented his scant means by writing and selling ballads for five shillings. If
true, then the young Oliver set the pattern of his future career in letters by
writing out of need for money, rather than true desire.’27 Whether or not
Goldsmith had a ‘true desire’ to become an author, as he was still studying
to become a medical doctor, he does establish a pattern of writing as a trade
or labour from a young age.
The most striking evidence that Goldsmith’s personal letters operated in
the public sphere occurs when he uses his letters as practice sites for char­
acters, quips, and ideas that later become replicated in his published texts.
The most potent example appears in Goldsmith’s letter to his older brother,
Reverend Henry Goldsmith. In this letter, written around 1755, Goldsmith
offered a partial draft of his poem, The Traveller; or, A Prospect of Society
218 Taylin Nelson
(1764). Griffin and O’Shaughnessy note that this letter is a singular example
of Goldsmith using letters as a ‘sounding board’.28 However, quips and
characters are found throughout his letters, suggesting that before Gold­
smith knew he wanted to pursue a writing career, letters were useful sites of
expression and contemplation. In a 1753 letter, Goldsmith mentioned read­
ing the ‘Turkish Spy’, – or Letters Writ by a Turkish Spy (1687–1694), by
Giovanni Paolo Marana – a text that would later influence his Citizen of the
World; and, in a 1757 letter, Goldsmith used language later replicated in the
editor’s preface to that text.29 Additionally in a 1758 letter, Goldsmith
mentioned a Chinese character that ‘talk[s] like an Englishman’, which sug­
gests that he was contemplating the design of Citizen’s main character two
years before its first serial publication.30 In these moments, correlations
between letter-writing and the writing profession are made.
While there is a significant decline in the frequency of Goldsmith’s letters
that correlates with his rising success, Griffin and O’Shaughnessy note that
Goldsmith’s letters ‘tend to appear in clusters that can be associated with
particular [published] texts’.31 Thus, even though he wrote less letters as his
career developed, those he did write were produced for a public sphere as a
means to enhance the proliferation of his writing. For example, five of his
early letters, all written in August 1758, coincide with Enquiry’s imminent
publication; two letters in July 1767 and one in June 1770 are concerned
with the presentation of his first play, The Good Natur’d Man; and finally,
later letters written between September 1771 and December 1773 circulate
around the creation, publication, and performance of She Stoops to Con­
quer. As Griffin and O’Shaughnessy note, Goldsmith ‘composed very little
of note … between 1762 and 1766’, with the caveat that ‘these were the
years in which his name was made, in which he emerged from anonymous
drudgery into illustrious friendships and literary fame’,32 and in which he
produced a variety of letters surrounding his work.
At the same time that Goldsmith’s private letters had an undeniable link
to the public sphere both through their public-facing, often publishing-
driven content and through their role in perpetuating Goldsmith as a public
figure, his fictional letters operated in the public sphere by way of a reader­
ship demand that dictated the hack profession. Cook claims that epistolary
narrative ‘exposes the private body to publication’.33 While the private may
become disembodied through the process of publication, this transformation
also indicates the precise reason epistolary fictions were so popular to
eighteenth-century readers enthralled by public exposure of the private
body. The granting of the public to the private is, however, untrue of
Goldsmith’s writing style, which was to adopt different personas, thereby
divesting his work of his own identity. In her recent biography of Gold­
smith, Norma Clarke shows this contradiction created ‘a writer of strong
autobiographical impulse … whose mode was resolutely impersonal’ – a
characteristic typical of the hack writing profession.34 Clarke’s claim is
supported by Goldsmith’s friend and chronicler William Cooke, who, in
 Labouring bodies 219
describing the nature of Goldsmith’s research methods, stated that Gold­
smith compiled research notes when preparing to write a text, with ‘as
much as he designed for one letter[’s worth]’.35 Cooke also claimed that
Goldsmith approached writing with apparent ease: ‘He wrote … with as
much facility as a common letter’.36 To say that Goldsmith’s epistolary
narratives were written in the same way as a perfunctory letter is to say
that the hack writing profession was one of ease that required little time
and effort, especially when compared to more distinguished writing that
required more investment: a statement on the hack writing profession
which is plainly untrue.
In the pauper letters of the labouring poor examined by King in this
volume, labour was intrinsically physical. In contrast, Goldsmith’s writing
methodology was inextricable from a hack economy that created a system of
both intellectual and physical labour for the writer. The beginning of the
eighteenth century saw a transition from a dated system of literary patron­
age modelled on author–patron relationships, to author–bookseller–pub­
lisher relationships that depended largely on public taste.37 Realistically,
hack writing aligned with labour because of the nature of the burgeoning
capitalist system that it operated within. Hired authors were dependent
upon topical, spatial, and localised events and only profited from their
writing in terms of the quantity produced and how quickly such works
could be disseminated in response to public demand. Hack writing could be
thought of as a repetitive cycle of labour because much of it was in constant
dialogue and response to events occurring in society. Moreover, anonymity
was characteristic of the genre, and many works were amalgamated with
that of other works or lost in the slew of daily productions.38 The Sisyphean
nature of this market of authorship saw each work quickly followed by
another, in a never-ending cycle of literature turned consumer product.
Hack writing has its roots in animal labour and the language of animality
that was applied to Goldsmith as an author. The etymology of the term
‘hack’ is derived from the term ‘hackney’ – or horses for hire – suggesting
that hack writers’ labour production was similarly expected to sustain mass
production and popular demand.39 Thomas Almeroth-Williams has esti­
mated that by 1815, upwards of 31,000 horses were employed in London to
pull hackney coaches, wagons, stagecoaches and carts.40 Coach travel was
only secondary to the transportation of material goods, which were the
primary transportation for working horses. This fact suggests that the
economy was a primary factor in driving work-horse labour in eighteenth-
century London. Similarly, hack writing was bound to the economy as a
material good produced in response to public demand. The animal etymol­
ogy thus extends to eighteenth-century descriptions of hack writers. For
example, Thomas Amory described infamous publisher and enemy of Pope,
Edmund Curll, as someone who ‘stables his authors three in a bed’.41 This
language of equine taming and management was taken up by Goldsmith,
who admitted in Enquiry that, ‘authors, like running horses, should be fed
220 Taylin Nelson
but not fattened’; an observation which his biographer Prior noted is ‘scar­
cely necessary’ considering that Goldsmith’s work profits ‘scarcely gave him
bread’.42 Additionally, Chilton has compared Goldsmith’s time working for
Ralph Griffith’s at the Monthly Review as that of a ‘farmhorse … expected
at his desk every workday’.43 Admittedly, the hackney horse, farm horse,
and racehorse were each kept and used for entirely different purposes. While
the first two were considered beasts of burden, the latter was a symbol of
speed, grace, and luxury. Importantly, these instances trace a history of
animal metaphors used to depict the relations between work horses and
hack writers, whose labour production was dependent upon the will of
public demand.
Goldsmith deliberately used the racehorse – an animal that, though of an
elite status, was still labouring for profit within the capitalist order – to
illustrate what he believed to be his status as a genius labourer rather than a
hack. His differentiating between the two types of labouring and performing
horses can be seen in the first surviving letter from London.44 Having resi­
ded in the city since 1756, Goldsmith wrote at a time of serious quarrel with
Ralph Griffiths, the first bookseller to employ him. According to Griffin and
O’Shaughnessy, Griffiths was an ‘intrusive editor, and his alterations to Gold­
smith’s works proved increasingly irksome to the budding author’ – thus they
had a falling out, costing Goldsmith his job.45 Both editors note that Gold­
smith’s letter ‘conveys his sense of financial embarrassment and his conflicted
mental state’ as he found himself both critical of Ireland and homesick in the
same stride.46 In an attempt to convince himself of the rightness of his decision
to leave, Goldsmith claimed not to miss Ireland’s lack of cultural institutions,
stating that Irish society is only interested in breeding the perfect national
racehorse, rather than endorsing the intellectual pursuits of learned Irishmen:

Then perhaps ther’s more wit and [lea]rning among the Irish? Oh Lord!
No! there has been more [money] spent in the encouragement of the
Podareen mare there [in on]e season, than given in rewards to learned
men since [the ti]mes of Usher.47

Goldsmith appears to wrestle with an ironic jealousy. On one hand, the

Podareen mare – potentially the famed ‘Irish Lass’ racehorse that reputedly
‘raced with rosary beads around her neck’ – is representative of the Irish
rural gentry which Goldsmith wished to move beyond.48 On the other hand,
in implicitly wishing to be praised and remembered like Irish Lass, Gold­
smith made a remarkable comparison between racehorses and ‘learned men’
that recalls his Enquiry quip that ‘authors like racehorses should be fed but
not fattened’.
It is a result of his critiques of writing that Goldsmith turned toward meta­
phors to characterise hack writers’ labour in the eighteenth-century literary
marketplace. More than a century later, Virginia Woolf remarked on Gold­
smith’s agility in moving over the surface of so many genres and credited it to a
 Labouring bodies 221
‘detached attitude and width of view’ that gave Goldsmith his ‘peculiar flavour’
as a professional (or hack) author.49 While other authors ‘pack their pages
fuller and bring us into closer touch with themselves’, writes Woolf, ‘Gold­
smith … keeps just on the edge of the crowd so that we can hear what the
common people are saying and note their humours’.50 Woolf’s claim that
Goldsmith had an impersonal writerly voice is indicative of hack writing at
large, in that hack authors were sometimes required to sacrifice their name and
identity to the profession. In a 1758 letter, Goldsmith – imagining his own
future literary reputation in the third-person point of view – lamented the very
anonymity required by the industry of writing: ‘[Many of his earlier writings,
to the regret of the] learned world, were anonymous and have probably been
lost because united with those of others’.51 Goldsmith’s anxiety about anon­
ymity was related to the eradication of individuality from written work and the
low value of labour without it – a phenomenon which has roots not just in the
profession of hack writing, but in the origins of the utilisation of the term
‘hack’. Just as with the hack writer, the labour of work animals remained
anonymous in that the work of the animal, like the hackneyed horse, became
subsumed into large cycles of consumption, making it impossible to identify the
individual work, alienated in the final product. In his theory of the division of
labour, Adam Smith described the alienation of individuality that stemmed
from labour production and traced the transition from craftwork to indus­
trialisation, noting that if workers were designated to specific tasks that sim­
plified the operation, individuality would be replaced with collective work.52
Goldsmith’s use of animal labour to illustrate the changing conditions in the
workforce suggested that these concerns were not restricted to human labour
and should be considered in terms of animal labour as well. This concept
becomes especially apparent in his depiction of the turnspit dog.

The labour of writing: The turnspit dog and the author’s work
In a letter addressed to Robert ‘Bob’ Bryanton, postmarked 26 September
1753 – when Goldsmith was not yet a professional author and had just
begun his medical education at the University of Edinburgh – he confessed
to not writing sooner to his dear college friend:53

My dear Bob,
How many good excuses (and you know I was ever good at an
excuse) might I call up to vindicate my past shamefull [sic] silence? I
might tell how I wrote a long letter at my first coming hither, and seem
vastly angry at not receiving an answer; or I might alledge [sic] that
business (with business, you know I was always pester’d) had never
given me time to finger a pen … An hereditary indolence (I have it from
the mother’s side) has hitherto prevented my writing to you, and still
prevents my writing at least twenty-five letters more, due to my friends
in Ireland. No turnspit-dog gets up into his wheel with more reluctance,
222 Taylin Nelson
than I sit down to write, yet no dog ever loved the roast meat he turns,
better than I do him I now address; yet what shall I say now I am
enter’d?54

Though Goldsmith wrote in jest and leisure, his comparison of the turn­
spit dog’s labour with the act of writing is poignant, especially in light of his
later career. Now extinct, the turnspit dog was a species bred for a life of
toil. In a job otherwise given to the lowest kitchen staff, the turnspit dog
would run on a hollow wheel affixed to the wall, turning the spit until the
meat was fully and evenly cooked. Often scolded and mistreated, the dogs
were considered ‘household machinery’, that, as Jan Bondeson suggests,
worked ceaselessly out of fear.55 In his Letters of England (1807), Robert
Southey speculated that cooks would train the dogs by placing hot coals in
the wheel with them, which they could only escape by running at a full
gallop.56 With the developments of new breeding processes, many animals
were bred and domesticated to perform specific tasks. The propagation of
turnspit dogs, which were bred to be long-bodied and short-legged, gave
them enhanced abilities to run on a wheel for long periods of time. In an
emblematic cycle of labour, turnspit dogs produced the power necessary to
cook food for their masters. In The Illustrated Natural History (1853), John
George Wood described the extinction of turnspit dogs as a consequence of
improved roasting jacks, linking their obsolescence to the invention of the
spinning jenny, which eventually replaced the distaff and wheel.57 That the
turnspit breed became extinct because of more efficient machinery speaks to
the purpose of their domestication, as a labouring body made to serve.
The idea that working animals existed only as machinery was not a novel
concept by any means. Decades before the start of the eighteenth century,
René Descartes’s Treatise of Man (1633) developed what would become the
reigning philosophical thought concerning animal cognition, famously com­
paring animals to ‘automata’.58 Beginning in the seventeenth century, Car­
tesian thought posited that animals were machines ultimately deprived of
reason – like a clock, they worked within nature by the rule of their
instinctual needs. The idea that instinctual needs dictated existence was,
however, not strictly reserved to thinking about animal bodies. Descartes’s
Discourse on Method (1637) also examined the human body ‘as a type of
machinery’, that operated like the ‘clocks, artificial fountains, mills and
other similar machines’; distinguishing the human soul as the only thing
differentiating man from beast.59 The cyclical temporality of instinctual need
and mechanical, bodily reaction strongly resonates with the economic the­
ories that would follow Descartes’s thinking, particularly those of eight­
eenth-century political economists like John Locke, Bernard Mandeville and
David Hume. According to Locke, because work was the best means of
satisfying the wants of man, man was ‘locked’ into ‘a constant willingness
to work’.60 Following Locke’s lead, Mandeville, speaking not about labour
but about relaxation, argued that ‘Man’s natural Love of Ease and Idleness’
 Labouring bodies 223
61
was the very thing that spurred human labour onwards. Also speaking to
the relationship between work and respite, Hume claimed that ease followed
a cyclical pattern leading back to uneasiness, thus demanding action to
return to a state of equilibrium.62 Like the Cartesian animal, driven to work
by instinct, by the eighteenth century, humans came to be viewed incapable
of leading a life not centred around labour; both man and animal were
yoked to the material cycles of labour that drove economic life.
The mechanical motion of the turnspit dog running on its wheel parallels
the repetitive experience of sitting down to write. The physically and men­
tally demanding act of writing ‘at least twenty-five letters more’ was merely
a precursor to the profession which Goldsmith would later assume. The act
of hunching over a writing desk to transcribe twenty-five letters or more
cannot be dismissed as mere leisure; as even for those who did not hack
write, drafting business letters could be a laborious chore, as would be the
necessary act of rewriting letters which often went through multiple drafts
and were not restricted to single copies.63 Pat Rogers described the physical
demand of hack writing in Pope’s Dunciad, where the Dunces of Grub
Street ‘d[o]ve headfirst, with one’s backside uppermost’ into the dirty mires
of wit; an act which ‘was to assume the very posture of folly’.64 While
mention of an author’s backside is meant humorously, the author’s ‘posture
of folly’ speaks both to the indignity hacks were are subjected to, as well as
reminding readers of the actual posture writers assumed when hunched over
a desk. In this way, hack writers and turnspit dogs alike engaged in
undignified work for an economy that eighteenth-century contemporaries
recognised as degrading, but also necessary.
Goldsmith’s contemporaries habitually used the language of labour and
mechanism to describe the eighteenth-century literary marketplace, viewing
themselves almost exclusively as labourers, rather than something higher
and more prestigious like artists. Scottish author and hack writer Tobias
Smollett described Grub Street as a ‘literary mill’, while Irish essayist
Richard Steele complained that the art of writing had become ‘merely
Mechanik’, finding it satirically ‘wonderful’ that men ‘may make themselves
Great … by as Certain and Infallible Rules, as you may be a joyner or a
mason’;65 even Goldsmith described hack authors as those ‘labourers in the
magazine trade’.66 Editor and author of Goldsmith’s critical heritage, G. S.
Rousseau, notes that even nineteenth-century audiences viewed Goldsmith
and his contemporaries ‘as unreal persons writing as machines for a larger
machine’, that of ‘Grub Street’.67 This mechanistic language of labour used
to describe Grub Street and its milieu finds validity in the father of modern
economics, Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776), in which he described the
benefits of division of labour and the maximisation of profits from assembly
line production methods. Yet the consequences of such a system were that
labour ‘emerge[d] as an abstraction only possible through an almost wilful
forgetting of the variety of material and intellectual practices which it might
name’.68 In other words, labour became abstracted through physical toil and
224 Taylin Nelson
disappeared in the final material product, taking the intellectual capacity
along with it. While Smith’s treatise on political economy is often used to
consider the rise of capitalism and the back-breaking work of industrial
labourers, his musings on industrialisation by no means excluded authors
working within hack-systems. Like the labourers of Smith’s pin factory,
hired authors were subjected to mechanical labour processes that often
resulted in the loss of individuality as a consequence of mass-production.
It was, however, not only labourers who aided in production; the eight­
eenth-century reading public – also working as mechanic bodies digesting
and discarding products flooding the market – played a significant role in
sustaining cycles of production and consumption. Writing on the eighteenth-
century consumer, Christian Marouby locates a distinctive and significant
comparison between eighteenth-century economic tastes and concepts of
bodily growth, stating that ‘[t]he old analogy between the human body and
the body politic was still alive enough in this period to suggest a metapho­
rical body economic, where … the social body produces and consumes like a
real body’.69 In this regard, the literal phrase ‘consumer’ indicates both an
economic phenomena and a physical act. In Letter LXXXVII of Citizen of
the World, Goldsmith commented on the consumer-phenomenon through a
narrator that complained of ‘literary nausea’ resulting from booksellers who
overfeed a perceived popular taste.70 The ceaseless nature of anonymous
works defined this newly bloated marketplace, resulting in a sickened state
of the public body of the consumer. In Letter LI, Goldsmith directly defined
books as consumable products through the talkative bookseller Mr Fudge
who compares the art of selling books to a farmer or butcher selling his
wares: ‘Excuse me Sir, says he, it is not the season, books have their time as
well as cucumbers; I would no more bring out a new work in summer, than
I would sell pork in the dog days.’71 Concepts of consumption and produc­
tion remained important to Goldsmith’s canon, and particularly to his
turnspit letter, in which the dog toiling within the Smithian cycle,
laboured to turn animal flesh into the material object ‘meat’, which the
public body then consumed, defecated, and recycled back into nature.
Also functioning within Smithian cycles of labour, hack writers worked to
transform subjective experiences into the material objects ‘books’, for
eighteenth-century readers to digest and discard in a growing waste
economy. Irish essayist Jonathan Swift was aware of this market trend as
early as 1704, the year in which he published his wildly infamous satire A
Tale of a Tub, wherein the aftermarket of mass-produced print works
became supplies for ‘jakes, or an oven; to the windows of a bawdy-house,
or to a sordid lanthorn’.72 As Swift signified, the afterlives of hack-texts
varied in use; from kindling to toilet paper, with many works potentially
finding a home in the refuse pile.
Goldsmith’s quip that ‘authors, like running horses, should be fed, but
not fattened’ can be read with new meaning. The public body may glut itself
until it experiences ‘literary nausea’, but the authors themselves should never
 Labouring bodies 225
be well-fed: ‘The running horse, when fattened, will still be fit for very
useful purposes, though unqualified for a courser.’73 If indeed an author
should be well-paid (and therefore well-fed), the turnspit dog able to eat the
meat he turns, or the racehorse to become fat – then surely it would make
for unmotivated authors, work dogs, and racehorses. Like the turnspit dog
who was bred to work, working animals and hack writers were similarly
positioned within a changing society that forced them to labour for the
wider public. Thus, Goldsmith’s sympathy proved not just comedic, but also
genuinely felt – both the dog and the author remain embedded within a
collective struggle resulting from a powerful, luxury-driven nation that
valued excess consumption at the labourer’s expense. As the turnspit dog
toiled for the public stomach, Goldsmith toiled for the public digest.

Labour for luxury: the captive monkey and the author’s nightmare
The historical contexts of epistolary fiction and the rhetorical role of ani­
mals for British hack writers in a shifting, literary marketplace was facili­
tated by a larger cultural attitude towards commodities, which Goldsmith
saw as detrimental to both humans and animals. The remainder of this
chapter examines Goldsmith’s epistolary fiction, The Citizen of the World;
or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher (1760–1761). This was a collection of
letters published individually in the daily journal The Public Ledger, which
follow the adventures of a Chinese philosopher, Lien Chi Altangi, as he
experienced the bizarre customs and fashions of British society. Most letters
are a commentary on polite society, and often Altangi appeared equally
ignorant of British cultural customs as the Britons he encountered were of
Chinese cultural customs. Importantly, the fetishisation of peoples and ani­
mals easily translates to the politics of a hack-driven literary industry which
is directly addressed in the editor’s preface to Citizen. This fictional letter
has been scrutinised by various scholars throughout the years and poses a
unique interpretation when read through the lens of Goldsmith’s career in
the hack profession, in which animal labour and the labour of hack writing
can be thought alongside each other.
To understand the relevance of Goldsmith utilising animal metaphors as a
means of commenting on the commodification of literature, it is essential to
also acknowledge the rising national demand for exotic animals as a form of
commodification. In the eighteenth century, exotic animals were imported as
luxury objects of intrigue and entertainment. Goldsmith himself would have
encountered zebras, lions and larger beasts through menageries and zoos,
alongside smaller animals like parrots and monkeys which were kept as
pets.74 Many viewed the domestication of wild animals as an improvement
reflective of Man’s God-given power to have dominion over nature. Roy
Porter described how ‘enlightened apologists … represented the environment
as a farm, promoting policies for the responsible management of natural
resources for private profit and long-term public benefit. The mastering of
226 Taylin Nelson
the wild was a source of [public] pride.’75 This source of pride reflected a
larger imperial agenda that aimed to gain power over animals and other
humans, as ‘[t]he domestication of Nature’, or wild animals, ‘furthered the
civilising process – for wild environments bred wild people’.76 Goldsmith
was sensitive to this colonising outlook and deviated from these habitual
attitudes. Exotic and wild animals played a substantial role in his broader
political stance against society’s dependence on luxury and commodities. In
The Sagacity of Some Insects (1759), Goldsmith railed against colonial
expansion’s damaging repercussions on what we would now call animal
ecosystems, when he compared the industrious nature of the ants and bees,
to the beavers which ‘show the greatest sign of [industry] when united’.
Noting that ‘when man intrudes into their communities, they lose all their
spirit of industry and testify but a very small share of the sagacity, for
which, when in a social state, they are so remarkable’.77 This sympathetic
attitude towards animals also extended to the main character of Citizen.
While Goldsmith’s use of a foreign persona was a popular eighteenth-
century trope in epistolary literature, his positive representation of a Chinese
traveller indicates one way in which he sympathised with different races; a
sympathy which was expressed and extended through the animal body. In
Citizen, Goldsmith subverts the British reader’s expectations of Altangi’s
thoughts both through the character’s actions and the British hosts’ expec­
tations of Oriental culture. In Letter XXXII, Altangi pays a visit to aristo­
cratic hosts who, in anticipation of attending to his cultural customs, have
prepared a ‘plate of Bear’s claws, [and] a slice of Birds nests’ with a ‘cushion
on the floor’ for sitting.78 Altangi thinks to himself, and the reader, a simple
chair and plate of beef would do just as well, and ‘protested the Chinese
used chairs as in Europe’. However, his kindly ignorant host ‘understood
decorums too well to entertain me with the ordinary civilities’.79 This
representation, while perhaps Occidentalist, negates forms of representation
by subverting the reader’s stereotypical expectation of how an Oriental tra­
veller ought to act, eat and think. In postcolonial terms, Goldsmith can in
no way be considered unproblematic, as his writings on racial difference will
show. He was not a ‘staunch believer of biological differences’, but he did
rely on widely accepted concepts of the Great Chain of Being to inform his
view of other nations.80 Goldsmith took an interest in investigating the
similarities, rather than differences, among human races and animal spe­
cies.81 For example, when Goldsmith described the birth of all beings in
Animated Nature, he did not distinguish between humans and non-humans,
instead claiming that ‘[a]ll are upon a footing; the insect and the philoso­
pher’.82 Systems of hierarchy or classification – such as those used by other
natural historians like Carl Linnaeus – become arbitrary when all life begins
as ‘equally insensible’, and it is this attitude which carried Goldsmith
through his works.
Early readers of Citizen were troubled by Goldsmith’s representation of a
Chinese visitor that did not neatly fit into expected stereotypes. Altangi –
 Labouring bodies 227
often through irony – over-exceeded the reader’s expectation of a bumbling
foreigner ignorant of European ways, by commenting on the hypocrisies and
barbarism of the English.83 In the editor’s preface, Goldsmith stated that his
readers ‘were angry not to find [Altangi] as ignorant as a Tripoline ambas­
sador, or an Envoy from Jujac’.84 Regency-era literary critic William Hazlitt
was sensitive to the quick irony and subtle distinctions in Citizen and
observed that Goldsmith ‘contrives to give an abstracted and somewhat
perplexing view of things, by opposing foreign prepossessions to our own,
and thus strip[ping] objects of their customary disguises’.85 In his fictional
letters, Goldsmith used ‘opposing foreign prepossessions’ to reveal the faults
of the British, through the medium of the exotic animal body. In Letter
XLV, Altangi depicts an ironic vision of London’s commodified culture
through subverted expectations of receiving a distinguished audience among
English society. Fonder of ‘sights and monsters’ than genuine civility, the
English treat Altangi’s arrival as that of an exotic animal at the zoo:

Though the frequent invitations I receive from men of distinction here

might excite the vanity of some, I am quite mortified however when I
consider the motives that inspire civility. I am sent for, not to be treated
as a friend, but to satisfy curiosity; not to be entertained, so much as
wondered at; the same earnestness which excites them to see a Chinese,
would have made them equally proud of a visit from the rhinoceros.86

Altangi’s experience of being ‘collected by the London elite allowed Gold­

smith to criticise the commercial craze for chinoiserie’, and positions him,
not as a person, but as an impersonal body of interest that excites curiosity,
ideas of collection, and reveals an imperial interest in the East.87 According
to Maxine Berg, ‘oriental commodities were profoundly attractive’ to the
middle classes who were fascinated with exotic Chinese goods; animals not
excluded.88 By 1739, two rhinoceroses had been displayed in London zoos,
with viewing costs averaging 2s. 6d. per person, a considerable sum that
could have paid for four dinners.89 The rhinoceros’s entertaining popularity
in English society locates Altangi’s disappointment at being the entertain­
ment, rather than being entertained. Through the comparison, Goldsmith
commented on society’s dependence to exotic entertainment, lamenting that
it placed Altangi outside of the realm of man and inside the realm of beast.
Thus, foreign people and animals become objects of social and cultural
intrigue, and biopolitical products of the nation. Because of the intimate
nature of epistolary fictions, the English readership for Letter XVL had to
contend simultaneously with Altangi’s experience as both a subjective nar­
rator and objectified animal, forcing a reflection on Goldsmith’s satirisation
of English culture. The rhinoceros is illustrative of the fetishisation of exotic
animals and peoples. In the editor’s preface, Goldsmith drew links between
this and the oppressive working conditions of the hack writer in the literary
marketplace.
228 Taylin Nelson
The preface letter opens upon an editor who falls asleep complaining of
the mutability of public taste, and dreams of a ‘Fashion Fair’ where every
author who brings their published works is guaranteed to ‘find a very good
reception’.90 Taking place on the frozen River Thames, the editor watches
as several acquaintances successfully carry their works onto the ice. Gaining
courage, he puts his meagre collection in a wheelbarrow, and though he
‘fancied the ice had supported an hundred wagons before, [it] cracked under
me’, and ‘wheelbarrow and all went to bottom’.91 If we imagine the editor
as an extension of his author, this vision becomes largely symbolic of the
hack author’s fear of failure and deep mistrust of the systems controlling the
literary marketplace, which by this point, Goldsmith had spent three years
labouring within. Here, Goldsmith’s vision of a successful author proved to
be an illusion perpetuated by the public’s watery loyalty towards struggling
writers. Significantly, the editor awakens with existential dread to realise
that he has much more in common with the Rousseauian captive monkey
that bashes its brains out against the bars of its cage:

At present I belong to no particular class. I remember one of those

solitary animals, that has been forced from its forest to gratify human
curiosity. My earliest wish was to escape unheeded through life; but I
have been set up for half-pence, to fret and scamper at the end of my
chain. Tho’ none are injured by my rage, I am naturally too savage to
court any friends by fawning. Too obstinate to be taught new tricks;
and too improvident to mind what may happen, I am appeased, though
not contented … I am – But what signifies what I am.92

The captive animal which frets and scampers at the end of its chain man­
ifests as a bodily experience of confinement that is different but as oppres­
sive as that of the turnspit dog. Exotic animals were often captured abroad
during imperial pursuits and sold in England to menageries, street perfor­
mers, and as pets for wealthy patrons. In Discourse on the Origin of
Inequality Among Men (1755), Rousseau disparaged the tragedies that arose
from human evils like luxury, which ‘deprive useful animals of their sub­
sistence and spread famine and death wherever they blow’.93 The destruc­
tion of liberty was central to his argument and illustrated through the image
of ‘free-born animals’ that ‘dash their brains out against the bars of their
cage, from an innate impatience of captivity’.94 This embodied response to
captivity is replicated, albeit in tamer terms, in the editor’s epiphany, as the
creature’s movement are restricted by the length of its chain. What is more,
the animal’s captivity is clearly for public edification and amusement, as it
was ‘set up for half-pence’ to perform and earn money for its owner – an
experience not dissimilar to the relationship shared between author and
publisher during this time.
There are multiple critical interpretations of the editor’s preface. Srinivas
Aravamudan views the ‘performing monkey’ in the editor’s dream as a ‘sign
 Labouring bodies 229
of the marketplace’, identifying Goldsmith’s struggle to find individuality
within the London hack economy.95 Likewise, Wayne C. Booth saw the
‘monkey’ as symbolic of Goldsmith’s writing methods, as ‘determined to
entertain but who will do so with metaphors that bite and instruct through
biting’.96 Booth located the animality of Goldsmith’s metaphors, which were
to instruct eighteenth-century readers on the immorality of the market-based
system that humans and animals operated within. And Clare Brant has
suggested that the editor’s lack of identity is part of a much larger problem
with accurately presenting ‘foreign subjectivity’, stating that the ‘emptiness
of the oriental persona gave fullness to something else – not the occidental
satirist as an individual but a textual community of author and reader
through letter-writing’.97 Brant proposes that the editor’s identity indicates
epistolary fiction’s capacity to establish relations with its readership more
largely. Each interpretation recognises aspects of Goldsmith’s literary legacy.
This chapter’s reading adds that – in both his personal and fictional letters –
Goldsmith’s writer-identity was intimately bound with his representations
of animals, especially working animals like the turnspit dog or the captive
monkey who earned their place in a human world by drudgery and insipid
entertainment. Through his dream, the editor compares himself to a captive
animal experiencing changing social and economic positions. In conjunction
with the editor’s vision of his sinking texts, this direct metaphor suggests
that London’s culture of commodification forced working animals and hack
writers to meet the public’s demand for entertainment.
Through the editor’s many contradictions, Goldsmith used the metaphor
of a captive animal to express concern over class status, identity, and social
standing. The editor felt that he belonged to ‘no particular class’; like a
captive animal, he was not where he belonged and yet, not entirely accepted
as a subject or citizen in society. In Animated Nature, Goldsmith asserted
that captive animals must either accept human socialisation or die in their
fight against it. He claimed that animals that do not resist domestication
ideally gain humankind’s protection, but ultimately must yield to human
demands as either beasts of burden or slavish pets: ‘A domestic animal is a
slave that seems to have few other desires but such as man is willing to
allow it.’98 Goldsmith wielded these rhetorically driven and sentimental
images to illustrate Man’s position of power over, and responsibilities
toward, animal societies. Similar efforts are rendered by the editor who
depicts a half-tamed animal, introduced into human society and forced to
become part of a system that strips it of individuality, even animality.
Likewise, if we are to read the monkey through the editor, we see him
attempting to negotiate the boundaries of his identity; ultimately coming up
short, unable to rise above the systems which restrict him. His repetition of
‘I am’ suggests disharmony at the core level of his being. Though he is half-
domesticated by society’s expectations, he rebels against these cultural pla­
ceholders by questioning, ‘But what signifies what I am[?]’ – what others
signify of him, or what he signifies of himself? This metaphor of crisis in
230 Taylin Nelson
identity and the search for lasting impact abounds in Goldsmith’s personal
letters, revealing one aspect of what it meant to be an author and an Irish­
man in eighteenth-century London.

Conclusion: the embodiment of truth in an Irishman’s letters

The first letter that Goldsmith wrote upon arriving in London, in which he
jealously contrasted neglected learned men to the celebrated Podareen mare,
gives an account of his attempts to start his literary career.99 Despite his
distance from the home he condemned, Goldsmith bleakly related that being
‘without friends, recommendations, money, or impudence, and that in a
country where my being born an Irishman was sufficient to keep me [unem]
ploy’d’ would cause others in his circumstance to turn to suicide. He stated,
‘[I am too] poor to be gazed at and too rich to need the assistance [of
others]’.100 These complaints relate the very contradiction with which
Goldsmith grappled, as he attempted to establish himself in London’s lit­
erary landscape. By the time he wrote this letter, he had compared letter-
writing to the turnspit dog’s Sisyphean task; and in a few years more, he
would express his anxieties about the instability of the literary marketplace
through the editor’s vision of a captive monkey. In between these two
moments, Goldsmith vacillated between condemning and missing his home,
despising the Irish and English markets, while also striving to enter them. He
doubted that he would ever be prized like the Podareen mare in Ireland, and
feared that this very fact would impede him in London as well. Yet Goldsmith,
ever the optimist, remained hopeful for his future success. In a poignant letter
written to Bryanton on 14 August 1758, Goldsmith wrote in the third-person
voice of an imaginary biographer, predicting his future worth as an author and
his rise from anonymity into international renown through the metaphor of a
grand master equestrian race wherein he ‘take[s] a view of my future self, and
as the boys say, light down to see myself on horseback’.101 Here, Goldsmith
becomes elevated in status; from being the horse, to perhaps even merging with
the horse in a way that elevates them both.
Through his epistolary self-identification with the turnspit dog, the race­
horse and the performing monkey, Goldsmith chose animals to embody
keenly felt and highly personal aspects of himself and his place in the world.
In doing so, he was frequently re-orienting the animal metaphors used by his
critics to disparage him and his works, often revealing strength where others
saw weakness. Johnson once noted, ‘If nobody was suffered to abuse poor
Goldy but those who could write so well, he would have few censors.’102
Goldsmith himself was quick to note the weakness of their creative vision,
even from childhood. A remarkable anecdote relates a family gathering
where young Oliver was called upon to dance the hornpipe for entertain­
ment. This, combined with Goldsmith’s smallpox-scarred face, led a rela­
tion to remark that he was ‘the personification of Aesop’ – the reputedly
grotesque and disfigured ancient Grecian storyteller.103 Goldsmith briskly
 Labouring bodies 231
replied with an improvised couplet that left no doubts as to the wit that
would one day make him famous: ‘Heralds proclaim aloud this saying, / See
Aesop dancing and his monkey playing.’104 Speaking fondly of Goldsmith
after his death in 1774, Joshua Reynolds said that the indigent philosopher
made truth ‘wear the face of entertainment’.105 It is this embodiment of
truth which took the animal form.

Acknowledgements
My sincere thanks to the editors, Drs Christine Kenyon-Jones, Annika Mann,
Betty Joseph, Ron Broglio, and to my family and friends, Kristine Nelson,
Vincent Krough, Deanna Tremble, Melissa Marklin, Taylor Gruman, Jessica
Perry and Rowan Morar for their insights on this chapter.

Notes
1 G. S. Rousseau, Oliver Goldsmith: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge,
1974), 221.
2 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, vol. 1 (1891), 477. Boswell
wrote: ‘It has been generally circulated and believed that he [Goldsmith] was a
mere fool in conversation; but, in truth, this has been greatly exaggerated. He
had, no doubt, a more than common share of that hurry of ideas which we
often find in his countrymen, and which sometimes produces a laughable con­
fusion in expressing them … From vanity and an eager desire of being con­
spicuous wherever he was, he frequently talked carelessly without knowledge
of the subject, or even without thought.’
3 Ibid., 477.

4 Oliver Goldsmith, Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Michael Griffin and David

O’Shaughnessy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 28–30.

5 Ibid., p. 121. See Griffin’s and O’Shaughnessy’s commentary to Letter 53.
6 Griffin, Enlightenment in Ruins: The Geographies of Oliver Goldsmith
(Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 33.
7 This limitation allows scholars to trace his forming opinion and entrance into
the literary marketplace – as, it was during these intermediate years, in which
Goldsmith used the animal body as a rhetorical tool for exploring his unfolding
perceptions of authorship and ownership. These are the years in which Gold­
smith cycles through careers: from medical student to proof-reader, tutor, and
by 1757, hack writer.
8 Susan E. Whyman, The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers, 1660–1800
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 54.
9 For more on recent Goldsmith scholarship, see Griffin’s Enlightenment in
Ruins; and Norma Clarke, Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub
Street (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).
10 Charles A. Westacott, The Animals’ Historian (Clapham Park: Battley Broth­
ers Limited, 1946). The only copy I have been able to find of this text is housed
in the British Library.
11 Julia Allen, Samuel Johnson’s Menagerie: The Beastly Lives of Exotic Quad­
rupeds in the Eighteenth Century (Norwich: Erskine Press, 2002), 138.
12 Ingrid Tague, Animal Companions: Pets and Social Change in Eighteenth-
Century Britain (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 2015), 62.
232 Taylin Nelson
13 Goldsmith, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, vol. 2 (London: J.
Nourse, 1774), 327.
14 Westacott, The Animals’ Historian, 11.
15 One of Goldsmith’s most forward political pieces, The Deserted Village (1773),
expressed unpopular Tory views which many reviewers actively chose to over­
look because of the poem’s aesthetically moving images. See his acknowl­
edgement to Joshua Reynolds for more on his political views.
16 For other works by Goldsmith that address animals see: ‘The Effects Which
Climates Have Upon Men, and Other Animals’ (1760), ‘Letter XV’ and ‘Letter
XCI’ of Citizen of the World (1762), ‘An Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog’
(1766), The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes; Otherwise Called Mrs. Margery
Two-Shoes (1770), An History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774), ‘An
Essay on Fable’ (1784), and ‘The Sagacity of Some Insects’ (1810), to name a few.
17 Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the
Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1996), 8.
18 The ‘Club’ was a literary dining club founded in February 1764 by artist
Joshua Reynolds, and essayist Samuel Johnson, and included members such as
Edmund Burke, Christopher Nugent, Topham Beauclerk, Benet Langton,
Anthony Chamier, John Hawkins, and of course, Oliver Goldsmith.
19 Goldsmith, Letters, xv.

20 Ibid., xv.

21 Ibid., xv.

22 Ibid., xv. Griffin and O’Shaughnessy confirm that the current collection of let­
ters accessible to scholars ‘with a couple of mysterious exceptions, [have] been
deposited in libraries.’
23 Ian Watt, ‘Publishers and Sinners: The Augustan View’, Studies in Biblio­
graphy, vol. 12 (January 1, 1959): 3–20, 12.
24 Many thanks to Dr Sarah Goldsmith for pointing this out.
25 44 out of 66 letters to be precise.
26 Goldsmith, Letters, 21.
27 Anne Chilton, ‘Catching Pegasus by the Tail: Oliver Goldsmith’s The Citizen
of the World as Commercial Literature’, PhD diss. (Tempe: Arizona State
University, 1988), 86–87.
28 Goldsmith, Letters, 40.
29 Ibid., xxiv.
30 Ibid., 30. Not only was Goldsmith registering his ambitions for literary recog­
nition, but this letter anticipates his later epistolary fiction, Citizen of the
World, by styling himself as ‘the Confucius of Europe’.
31 Goldsmith, Letters, lxiv.
32 Ibid., xxxviii.
33 Cook, Epistolary Bodies, 8.
34 Clarke, Brothers of the Quill, 7.
35 William Cooke, ‘Table Talk’, European Magazine and London Review, 24
(October 1793), 93; or, easily accessible in Goldsmith, Letters, 133.
36 Cooke, ‘Table Talk’, 93; or, easily accessible in Goldsmith, Letters, 133.
37 For more information on the history of the book trade, see Dustin Griffin’s
Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century (Newark, DE: University of Dela­
ware Press, 2013) or Solveig Robinson’s The Book in Society: An Introduction
to Print Culture (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2013).
38 For further criticisms on the genre of eighteenth-century hack works, and the
historical and cultural development of ‘writers for hire’ see: Pat Rogers, Grub
Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972); George Justice, The
Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Marketplace in 18th
 Labouring bodies 233
Century England (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002); and
Edward A. Bloom, Samuel Johnson in Grub Street (Providence, RI: Brown
University Press, 1957).
39 Encyclopedia Britannica, ‘Hackney’, Encyclopedia Britannica (22 January
2004), para. 1.
40 Thomas Almeroth-Williams, City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian
London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 40–41.
41 Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle Esq., vol. 3 (London: Septimus Pro­
wett, 1825), 263–264.
42 Goldsmith, An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe
(London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), 123; and James Prior, The Life of Oliver
Goldsmith, M.B. from a variety of sources, vol. 1 (London: John Murray,
1837), 479.
43 Chilton, ‘Catching Pegasus by the Tail’, 88.
44 Written to Hodson, postmarked 27 December 1757.
45 Goldsmith, Letters, xxiii.
46 Ibid., 21.
47 Ibid., xxx.
48 Ibid., xxx.
49 Virginia Woolf, The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (E-artnow, 2017), 7,
retrieved from https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=RU9ODwAAQBAJ
50 Ibid., 7.
51 Goldsmith, Letters, 30.
52 Catherine Packham, ‘Labouring Bodies in Political Economy: Vitalist Physiol­
ogy and the Body Politic’, in Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture,
Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 89.
53 By this time, he had tried the professions of clergyman, tutor, and law student – all
without success. Despite an application for 6 pounds from his Uncle Contarine,
Goldsmith’s financial situation was no better. In a letter to brother-in-law Daniel
Hodson, he described his lonely company: a ‘Folio book a skeleton my cat and my
meagre landlady [whom] I pay 22p6 per am for Diet washing and Lodging’, and
described his apartment as ‘being the cheapest that is to be got in Edinburgh all
things here being much dearer than in Ireland’ (Letters, 3).
54 London, British Library, Western Manuscripts, Goldsmith–Percy Papers, vol.
1, MS 42515, ‘Dr Goldsmith’s letter to one of his companions from Edinburgh’,
26 September 1753, fol. 3.
55 Jan Bondeson, Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities (Chalford:
Amberley Publishing, 2011), 131.
56 Bondeson, Amazing Dogs, 131.
57 John George Wood, The Illustrated Natural History (London: G. Routledge,
1853), 316–317.
58 René Descartes, Treatise of Man, ed. Thomas Steele Hall (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1972), 113.
59 Minsoo Kang, ‘From the Man-Machine to the Automation-Man: The Enlight­
enment Origins of the Mechanistic Imagery of Humanity’, in Helen Deutsch
and Mary Terrall (eds), Vital Matters: Eighteenth-Century Views of Concep­
tion, Life and Death (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 151.
60 Packham, ‘Labouring Bodies’, 89.
61 Ibid., 89.
62 Ibid., 89.
63 The physical collection of Goldsmith–Percy Papers vols. I and II in the British
Library’s Western Manuscripts are replete with multiple copies of Goldsmith’s
letters that he would draft before sending off the final letter.
64 Rogers, Grub Street, 144. Emphasis mine.
234 Taylin Nelson
65 Clarke, Brothers of the Quill, 4; and Richard C. Taylor, Goldsmith as Jour­
nalist (Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993), 21.
66 Taylor, Goldsmith as Journalist, 19.
67 Rousseau, Oliver Goldsmith, 5.
68 Packham, ‘Labouring Bodies’, 83.
69 Christian Marouby, ‘Looking for (Economic) Growth in the Eighteenth Cen­
tury’, in Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and Literature on the Cusp of
Modernity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 36.
70 Chilton, ‘Catching Pegasus by the Tail’, 2.
71 Goldsmith ‘Letter XLIX. To the same’, The Citizen of the World (London: printed
for the author; and sold by J. Newbery and W. Bristow; J. Leake and W. Frederick,
Bath; B. Collins, Salisbury; and A. M. Smart and Co. Reading, 1762), 219, retrieved
from https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004897171.0001.001/1:55?rgn=div1;view=toc
72 Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub (Edinburgh: W. Sands, A. Murray, and J.
Cochran, 1750), 34.
73 Goldsmith, Enquiry, 123.
74 Tague, 52.
75 Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World
(London: Penguin, 2000), 311. For more information on Enlightenment views
on nature, see Keith Thomas’s seminal Man and the Natural World: Changing
Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin Books, 1983).
76 Porter, Enlightenment, 311.

77 Goldsmith, ‘The Sagacity of Some Insects’, The Bee (London: John Sharpe,

1810), 72; see also in Animated Nature, 310–325.

78 Goldsmith, Citizen, 137.
79 Ibid., 137.
80 Rotem Kowner and Christina Skott, ‘East Asians in the Linnaean Taxonomy’,
in Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel (eds), Race and Racism in Modern East
Asia: Interactions, Nationalism, Gender, and Lineage (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 51.
81 David Bindman, Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18th
Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 160.
82 Goldsmith, Animated Nature, 119.
83 Wayne C. Booth, ‘The Citizen of the World and Critical Method’, in Harold
Bloom (ed.), Modern Critical Reviews: Oliver Goldsmith (New York: Chelsea
House Publishers, 1987), 30.
84 Goldsmith, ‘Letter XLVIII and XLIX’, The Citizen of the World, in Arthur
Friedman (ed.), The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 2 (Oxford:
Oxford Clarendon Press, 1966), 175.
85 William Hazlitt, ‘On the Periodical Essayists’, Lectures on Comic Writers
(1819), included in The Collected Works, vol. 3 (London, 1903), 104.
86 Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World; Or, A Chinese Philosopher, vol. 1
(London: Taylor and Hessey, 1819), 186.
87 British Library, ‘The Citizen of the World; or, Letters from a Chinese Philo­
sopher, 1762’, British Library, para. 2, retrieved from www.bl.uk/collection-i
tems/the-citizen-of-the-world-or-letters-from-a-chinese-philosopher-1762
88 Maxine Berg, Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), 49.
89 Allen, Samuel Johnson’s Menagerie, 138.
90 Goldsmith, Collected Works, 175.
91 Ibid., 175.
92 Ibid., 175.
93 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rous­
seau: The Two ‘Discourses’ and the ‘Social Contract’, ed. John T. Scott (Chi­
cago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 131.
 Labouring bodies 235
94 Rousseau, Major Political Writings, 131.
95 Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the
Novel (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 100.
96 Booth, Modern Critical Reviews, 33.
97 Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (New York: Pal-
grave Macmillan, 2006), 216–217.
98 Goldsmith, Animated Nature, 326.
99 Written to Hodson, postmarked 27 December 1757.
100 Goldsmith, Letters, 23.
101 Ibid., 30.
102 Harold Bloom, Modern Critical Reviews: Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Harold Bloom
(New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 1.
103 Goldsmith, Letters, xx.
104 Ibid., xx.
105 Clarke, Brothers of the Quill, 343.
11 Sons of Liberty
Epistolary bodies and the early

American Revolution

Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

As an unprecedented American uprising against British imperial authority

began in late 1765 and early 1766, a new kind of letter started to crisscross
the territories of British North America. The political uprising, led by
groups of gentlemen from different colonies calling themselves ‘Sons of Lib­
erty’, opposed Parliament’s imposition of a stamp tax on British America. A
particular kind of epistolary exchange – stressing the correspondents’ bodily
presence and their sympathetic connection – provided the movement’s con­
nective tissue. Roughly two hundred of the Sons’ letters have survived in the
personal papers of movement participants, most held by archives on the
Eastern seaboard of the United States. This surviving archive is just a frac­
tion of the total number that were sent, which may have reached as high as
a thousand.1 The letters provide a crucial window into the workings of the
Sons’ political movement and illuminate how the Sons organised themselves,
the political outcomes that they hoped to achieve, and the limitations of
their epistolary strategy.
This chapter uses a close reading of the New York Sons of Liberty’s cor­
respondence to offer a revisionist account of the inter-colonial Sons’ move­
ment.2 It argues that the Sons sought to create a distinctive kind of border-
crossing political movement, which was based on sympathetic links among
individual gentlemen rather than official bodies politic. After a brief intro­
duction to the Stamp Act crisis, the first section shows that the conventional
account of the Sons of Liberty as a quasi-official network is inaccurate. The
Sons’ groups conceived of themselves as ad hoc associations of autonomous
gentlemen. The next section uses a mixture of material and textual analysis
to show how these groups used letters to cement this self-conception by
transmitting vivid, embodied images of their members as individual gentle­
men. This epistolary self-fashioning, the final section argues, was a core
element of the Sons’ strategy to foster political sympathy among the colonies
rather than engage in coordinated action. Because as individual gentlemen,
the patriot leaders were able – obliged, even – to limit themselves to
expressions of sympathy and mutual encouragement.
In the short term, during the conflict over the Stamp Act, the epistolary
strategy of the Sons of Liberty proved highly effective. One of the major
DOI: 10.4324/9781003027256-15
 Sons of Liberty 237
challenges the Sons faced in 1765 and early 1766 was persuading elites in all
of the North American colonies, who had relatively little in common with
one another, to mount a united front against the Stamp Act. The Sons’
epistolary strategy of fostering mutual sympathy among gentlemen managed to
do this without undertaking the challenging and fraught work of developing
formal coordination among the colonies. It was enough to enable their move­
ment, organised almost entirely at the local level, to force the empire to retreat
in 1766. This early success, however, was a mixed blessing. As early as 1768,
the lack of formal coordination among the colonies contributed to persistent
divisions and weaknesses in the patriot cause. These unaddressed divisions
remained a liability for the movement as late as American independence in
1776.3 The Sons’ epistolary strategies in 1765–66 were hardly the cause of
division in revolutionary American politics. But they created a precedent and
practice that contributed to significant, lasting divisions.

Context: The Stamp Act crisis

The Stamp Act crisis of 1765–1766 has always loomed large in the history of
the American Revolution. The Seven Years’ War between France and Brit­
ain, concluded by treaty in 1763, had ended in a great British victory over
their long-time rivals, but left the British treasury drained. In an attempt to
salvage the empire’s finances, the new prime minister, George Grenville,
decided to try to raise more revenue in the North American colonies. He
proposed a stamp tax, which would have required all printed documents –
everything from forms for shipping to newspapers and legal documents – to
be produced on special stamped paper. The Stamp Act would have been the
first tax levied directly on the colonies by Parliament. Grenville expected the
Act to be unpopular, but he and others in the government felt confident that
any opposition could be overcome. After all, the American colonists pre­
sented themselves as arch-patriots of the triumphant British empire.4
The British government turned out to have made a serious miscalculation.
The Stamp Act, which came hard on the heels of decisions to strengthen the
enforcement of customs rules and commercial regulations in the colonies,
generated an outcry along the entire seaboard. The complaints it evoked
were myriad, but they revolved in good measure around the twin themes of
economic fear and political paranoia. In practical terms, merchants and
others worried that the stamps would impose significant new costs on their
businesses and act as a drag on the colonial economy. On a symbolic level,
some colonists feared that the direct imposition of taxes on the colonies
signalled the beginning of a shift towards more hands-on governance from
the imperial centre. They feared the loss of local autonomy and power, and
the encroachment of a distant tyranny that they would be unable to resist or
restrain.5
The colonial movement against the Stamp Act began soon after the news
of its passage arrived in North America in June 1765. From this earliest
238 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
moment in the crisis, merchants and political leaders allied with them
recognised that the new regulations, because they affected all of the colonies,
called for an inter-colonial response. They began to look beyond the tradi­
tional political boundaries of the colonies and to contemplate an inter-colo­
nial collaboration against a shared threat.6 The Massachusetts House of
Representatives was the first official body to act on this realisation, sending
a message in June to the other colonies, inviting them to send delegates to
an inter-colonial congress. This initiative led to the meeting of the so-called
Stamp Act Congress in New York during October 1765. The meeting pro­
duced a powerful declaration of colonial rights, but provided little agree­
ment on how to put it into practice.7
In the absence of coordinated action by the colonial governments, local
groups calling themselves the Sons of Liberty formed and took the lead in
organising resistance in each colony. The New York Sons formed first, in
November 1765, and patriots soon followed suit in towns across New Eng­
land and upstate New York. By the beginning of 1766, Sons groups existed
in virtually every major town, including those of the middle and southern
colonies, and they were beginning to enter into contact with one another.8
Their leaders were men of some means, with close ties to merchants or
commercial ventures. Many of the main figures in New England and the
Middle Colonies (New York, Pennsylvania) were merchants or merchant
ship captains themselves.9 Lawyers formed another major segment of the
patriot party’s leadership in the northern and middle colonies.10 In the
South, where most of the leaders were planters, the influence of merchants
was less pronounced. But most of the planter-patriots were active managers
who were directly engaged in commercial farming.11

The Sons’ informal networks

The Sons of Liberty in late 1765 lacked an obvious model for their effort to
create sustained and coordinated action across the colonies. There were, to
be sure, regional groupings among the colonies whose elites had some
experience with working together: New Englanders shared similar forms of
local governance and religion; Southern elites had in common their com­
mitment to the institution of slavery. Many colonial elites had experience
with organising inter-colonial warfare against Native peoples, but by and
large the individual colonies felt that they had little in common with one
another and their governments were not wired to work together. Indeed, to
the contrary, a century of ‘Anglicisation’ had cinched tighter each colony’s
ties with the mother country at the expense of inter-colonial collaboration.12
Most scholars have argued that the Sons’ response to this problem was to
organise formal resistance committees within each colony and then to link
them together through formal ties that enabled coordinated action up and
down the seaboard. This interpretation dates back to the nineteenth century.
Carlo Botta, one of the earliest historians of the Revolution, described the
 Sons of Liberty 239
New York Sons as having formed an ‘association’ or ‘league’, complete with
‘articles of confederation’ that were ‘drawn up, and accepted by the Sons of
Liberty in the two provinces of New York and Connecticut; and afterwards,
passing from hand to hand, by those of the other colonies’.13 Edmund
Morgan, author of a still-standard study of the Stamp Act Crisis, argued
that ‘as the Sons of Liberty perfected their own organisation, that of the
regular governments was dissolving’.14 Pauline Maier, who made the most
thorough study of the Sons, saw them as having a ‘formal organisation’ by
December 1765.15
The interpretation of the Sons as having a ‘formal organisation’, however, is
difficult to sustain on a close examination of the evidence. Colonial America
offered two primary models for what a formal or officially constituted organi­
sation looked like: colonial governments and voluntary (or civic) associations.
These two kinds of groups had great diversity in their membership, their pur­
pose, and their scale. But they shared certain common features that were the
hallmarks of their existence as formally constituted bodies politic. The most
important were a permanent structure based on rules outlined in a founding
document; a program of regular meetings; a clearly stated membership and
leadership; and a system for record-keeping.16 This is not to deny, however,
that much of their activity took place in informal settings, such as taverns, and
relied on ‘informal’ bonds of personal trust, parentage and clientage.
By any of these measures, the Sons’ groups were not constituted as formal
organisations. On the most basic level, the Sons’ groups lacked formal
charters or constituting documents.17 Local Sons’ organisations frequently
produced statements of their formation or announced their meetings but,
almost without exception, these documents did not establish a set of gov­
ernance procedures nor did they offer a clearly defined leadership or mem­
bership system. The first meeting of the Sons of Liberty in New York, at the
home of William Howard in January 1766, illustrates the point. The meet­
ing produced a series of resolutions condemning the Stamp Act and reaf­
firming the group’s loyalty to the House of Hanover. But they took no
further steps to formalise their organisation beyond agreeing ‘to meet at the
same place’ in two weeks and to ‘continue their Meetings once a Fortnight’.
There is no evidence that they even carried out that bare-bones resolution.18
Local Sons’ groups had little if any continuity in either their membership or
their leadership from meeting to meeting. At a congress of Maryland Sons in
Annapolis in March 1766, for instance, the attendees appointed ‘a Moderator
and a Secretary’ to lead the meeting. But at their next meeting, the Maryland
Sons chose a new moderator to preside.19 A committee of correspondence
appointed at the first meeting of the Baltimore Sons consisted of five men
(Thomas Chase, William Lux, L. Charnier, Robert Alexander and Robert
Adams); just a month later a new committee of eight, which included only
three members of the previous month’s committee (Chase, Alexander and
Lux), was corresponding in the Sons’ name.20 This shifting leadership structure
was not unique to Maryland. The question of who led the Boston Sons of
240 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Liberty has been a longstanding problem in the literature. Scholars have offered
a wide variety of lists of leaders, reflecting the difficulty in determining who
was in charge.21 In New York, virtually every letter dispatched in the name of
the Sons of Liberty had a different group of signatories, with only a few names
(particularly Gershom Mott) party to many of them.22
Befitting its temporary and ad hoc character, the leadership of the indivi­
dual Sons groups brought almost all major decision before general meetings
of the group.23 When the Connecticut Sons wrote to their New York
brethren in February 1766 with resolves against the Stamp Act, for instance,
the New Yorkers replied that they had ‘laid [the letters] before our con­
stituents’ before sending a response.24 Likewise, the Trenton Committee,
responding to New York, thanked them for a letter and reported that it had
been ‘communicated to … a general meeting of the Sons of Liberty’. The
meeting appointed an ad-hoc committee to reply, which reported to the
New Yorkers that the group had found their proposals ‘extremely agree­
able’.25 Similar references to laying letters before general meetings appear in
much of the correspondence of Sons of Liberty during the crisis.26
Ofttimes, even what appeared to be the appointment of a leadership group
proved to be nothing of the sort upon closer examination. The outcome of a
‘general meeting of the delegates of the Sons of Liberty … in the Colony of
Connecticut’, held in March 1766, is instructive in this regard. The meeting,
which aimed to foster greater connection among the Connecticut Sons’ groups,
produced general resolutions calling for a repeal of the Stamp Act and reaf­
firming their loyalty to George III. In order to support their future activities, the
meeting also established a ‘committee’ whose purpose was to ‘maintain a …
correspondence with the loyal Sons of Liberty in [the] neighbouring colonies’.27
But the members of this committee lived in different towns scattered over the
Connecticut countryside, making this group less a colony-wide leadership than
a group of designated local correspondents.
The Sons of Liberty groups, finally, did not have anything like the formalised
record-keeping that was de rigueur for official bodies, both governmental and
non-governmental alike. Virtually none of the Sons groups kept records of their
meetings. This was not for a lack of familiarity with the practices of formal
record-keeping: many of the Sons’ leaders were members of associations that had
such recording practices. Indeed Charles Thomson, one of the leaders of the
Philadelphia Sons, went on to become the Secretary of the Continental Con­
gress.28 Their lack of record-keeping must have been deliberate, though the rea­
sons for that decision remain obscure. Such records as they did produce survived
in private hands and exist today as part of members’ personal papers.29

Epistolary self-fashioning
Through their correspondence, the Sons of Liberty groups constituted
themselves as loose associations of like-minded gentlemen. The Sons’ groups
drew on a sophisticated array of material and textual epistolary strategies to
 Sons of Liberty 241
create and publicise this distinctive structure: these included how they
authored and signed their letters, how they transmitted them, and the
metaphors and language that they employed. Together, these strategies
made the Sons’ groups’ correspondence into a powerful medium for self-
fashioning and for communicating the image of themselves as a political
organisation that existed, paradoxically, only as individual gentlemen.30
The Sons of Liberty groups consistently signed their letters with a series
of individual names rather than a collective moniker. An extreme case of
this practice was the first letter dispatched by the Sons in Kent County,
Maryland, to their counterparts in Anne Arundel and Baltimore Counties.
The Kent letter was actually signed by twenty-two individuals – apparently
everyone who had taken part in the meeting.31 Other letters offered a simi­
larly robust image of the senders as a sociable group of gentlemen. The Sons
of Liberty in Baltimore, for instance, sent an early April 1766 missive to
New York under the individual signatures of eight men.32 Writing to a cor­
respondent in Fairfield, Connecticut, a group of New York Sons signed
themselves individually: ‘Thomas Robinson / Isaac Sears / Wm Wesley /
Gersh Mott.’33 Similarly, when William Bradford of Philadelphia wrote to
the New York Committee, he addressed his letter directly ‘To Messrs Lamb,
Sears, Robinson, Welley & Mott.’34 And even when they wrote as a ‘Com­
mittee’, as the Sons of Oyster Bay, New York, did to New York City in
February of 1766, the members of the committee each signed their own
names rather than appointing one member as a secretary or deputy.35
The individual naming and signing that the Sons of Liberty performed in the
bulk of their letters represented a significant deviation from the practice of
formal institutions in the eighteenth century. Those groups typically corre­
sponded under their collective name. Usually, a secretary would be chosen to
handle the organisation’s correspondence, in which capacity he would speak
for the collective. For instance, when the fledgling Library Company of Phila­
delphia wrote in 1735 to John Penn, thanking him for his support, its secretary,
Joseph Breitnall, signed the letter ‘by Order of the Library Company’.36 Many
organisations had official stationery or seals as well. These served to verify and
authenticate their official correspondence while also making the group look like
a formal organisation to itself and to others.37
The Sons’ decision to sign their own names individually to most of their
letters marked a deliberate refusal of the fiction of collective existence and
representedness. Signature – in its general sense as a distinctive, recognisable
mark made by a person that authenticated and authorised the document to
which it was affixed – went back in some form to antiquity. By the late
eighteenth century, the physical act of signing one’s name, which had long
been the province of the richest and most powerful, had become a com­
monplace way of representing one’s self on paper. The signature was made
by the individual’s hand and it used the distinctive qualities of that person’s
body – their strength, dexterity, etc. – to instantiate his or her self on paper.
Signatures, for this reason, could bind an individual to a contract, serve as
242 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
evidence in a court of law, or simply communicate presence at a distance to
a friend, a child, or a lover. For the members of the Sons’ groups, signing
their individual names conveyed an image of themselves as discrete, physi­
cally present persons in sociable congress.38
The Sons’ general commitment to naming themselves individually did not
prevent the occasional use of pseudonyms that hinted at a collective identity.
The most common of these was the name ‘Sons of Liberty’, a term that was
already in widespread ‘generic’ use in British America earlier in the eight­
eenth century.39 Letters that used this moniker as a signature were the
exception rather than the rule. John Adams received one in February 1766.40
The Albany Sons signed their first letter to their counterparts in New York
City with just ‘the Sons of Liberty residing in Albany’. Subsequent letters
used their names. The Sons of Oyster Bay, Philadelphia and Baltimore all
wrote at least one letter with similar pseudonymous signatures to their New
York City brethren.41 On rare occasions, an individual might use it: John
Durkee signed himself ‘Son of Liberty’ in a letter sent to Isaac Sears on 10
February 1766.42
The ‘Sons of Liberty’ pseudonym, though collective, insisted on the pri­
macy of the individual (male) physical person as the necessary basis for
membership in the group. Pseudonyms were a well-worn technique in the
politics of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The most common eight­
eenth-century pseudonyms were classical names or abstract concepts. Three
well-known examples are the ‘Cato’ of Trenchard and Gordon’s celebrated
early eighteenth-century political tract; ‘Common Sense’, the pseudonym
used most famously by Thomas Paine; and ‘Federalist’, the pseudonym used
by James Madison, John Jay, and Alexander Hamilton in arguing for the
ratification of the US Constitution in New York State in 1787 and 1788. By
calling themselves ‘Sons’, patriot leaders both emphasised their maleness and
conjured a fictive familial context around them. Even as it concealed their
individual names, their choice of pseudonym imbued their correspondence
with the specific flavour of male sociability and suggested that their letters
partook of the culture of politeness that was the common currency of
eighteenth-century gentlemen and the honour-bound culture of early modern
masculinity (discussed further in the next section).
The passage of the Sons’ letters from one group to another took place
primarily through the agency of individual intermediaries. Most of the let­
ters received by the New York Sons in late 1765 and the first months of
1766, for instance, were directed not to the group collectively but to specific
individuals. An important communication from the Connecticut Sons in
February 1766, which passed on news from Boston, was written by Major
John Durkee of Norwich to Isaac Sears personally.43 A few days later, a
New York committee wrote a letter to Connecticut, addressed to a single
individual, most likely Durkee. Similar individual addresses linked the New
York Sons to their counterparts in Albany and New Jersey.44 Indeed, the
Philadelphia Sons stated outright in an early 1766 letter that as yet ‘no
 Sons of Liberty 243
occasion has required the appointment of a committee to represent us’. They
corresponded, instead, as individual gentlemen using their individual net­
works to reach the larger group.45
The complex fusion between the Sons’ individual and collective identities
can be seen in a pair of letters sent to the New York Sons in February and
March of 1766. In March, John Durkee, who had earlier signed a letter with
the Sons of Liberty pseudonym, signed another letter with that moniker. But
this time he thought better of it: he crossed out ‘Sons of Liberty’ and signed
his own name, ‘JnoDurkee’.46 An early communication between the Phila­
delphia and New York Sons in February 1766, affords another illustration.
On the 16th, two letters left Philadelphia for New York. One was a collec­
tive missive, addressed to their ‘Brethren’ and subscribed ‘Sons of Liberty in
Philadelphia’. This letter congratulated the New Yorkers on their ‘spirited
manner’ and assured them that, though divided by local politics, Philadel­
phians would rally ‘when the grand cause calls on us’.47 The other letter, on
a sheet of paper from the same stock, was signed by William Bradford and
addressed to five individual members of the New York Sons. It repeated the
sentiments of the collective letter and added the sensitive intelligence that
the night before, Philadelphians had burned the stamped paper destined for
Maryland ‘in a very full coffee house … amidst loud acclamations’.48
Bradford enclosed the collective letter in his personal one, seemingly
attempting to separate the two registers, body politic and individual body of
the actual correspondent. But a slip of the pen revealed how much the two
registers were entwined. Bradford’s covering note, written in haste while an
‘express’ waited for his answer, began with the phrase ‘IWe have inclosed a
letter to the Sons of Liberty.’ Like a collective letter signed by individual
hands, Bradford’s double pronoun, which he did not bother to correct,
expressed the unusual nature of the Sons’ groups as collective bodies that
nonetheless insisted that their true character was only as individuals.49
The bodies that the Sons so often invoked in their correspondence seemed
to be particularly well-endowed with hands. In February 1766, a correspon­
dent in New Brunswick (New Jersey) addressed a group of New York Sons
of Liberty. He began by referencing the letter to which it was an answer: ‘As
a true son of liberty I heartily concur with you in sentiments expressed in
your letter to me of the 14 inst which came to my hand only this day.’50 The
next month, a group of New York sons wrote to a correspondent in Bur­
lington that his ‘favour of ye 14th ultmo is come to hand, tho, we imagine
not with ye dispatch that was intended’.51 Similar references appeared
sprinkled throughout the Sons’ correspondence: mentions of letters ‘come to
hand’ or ‘left in the hands’ or ‘put in the hands’.52
The Sons of Liberty’s use of these phrases was not innovative in itself.
The phrases ‘came to my hand’ or ‘came to hand’ were conventions of early
modern letter-writing. (See, for instance, Clarissa, Letter 439: ‘I follow my
last … on occasion of a letter just now come to hand’.53) As with other
references to the physicality of epistolary exchange, these conventional
244 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
phrases were freighted with significance. In one sense, of course, the ‘hand’
merely stood in metonymously for the recipient him- or herself. For a letter
to ‘come to hand’ was simply to state that it had been received. Yet the
choice of this body part to stand in for the recipient was neither random nor
predestined. There were a number of other ways to express the notion of
receipt in this period: ‘came before me’, ‘before my eyes’, or simply ‘I have
seen’ would all have expressed the same idea. Yet the Sons of Liberty rarely
used these metaphors.
The ‘hand’ in early modern thought had connotations of pure activity, of
transaction, of exchange. The ‘hand’ also suggested activity that was in
some way unreflective or not socially elevated: this was suggested, for
instance, by the common opposition between ‘hands’ and ‘heads’ in the
period. Many of the other bodily metaphors for receipt conjured up a rather
different image. A letter that ‘came before’ the recipient did so as a peti­
tioner might before a sovereign: the recipient was figured, in that metaphor,
as a benevolent and distanced outsider. Similarly, one who ‘saw’ a letter
observed it without necessarily being implicated in or engaged with its con­
tent. The eye can observe without being involved. Not so the hand: to have
an early modern letter ‘come to hand’ was to feel the rough paper and the
glossy, burnished finish of the sealing wax. To have it in your hand was to
find the dust, ink, and sand of the wrapper smeared on one’s fingers. Hands
could never be above the fray.54
The language of ‘hands’ was particularly common among merchants and
artisans. In his Complete English Tradesman (1726), a sort of how-to guide
for the aspiring businessman, Daniel Defoe employed a rich language of
‘hands’ to explain what young men needed to do in order to succeed. He
began the book by observing that a good tradesman should acquire a suffi­
cient general knowledge of business that he could change his trade as
needed: ‘he should not be at a loss to turn his hand to this or that trade, as
occasion presents’.55 This might include any number of transformations of
his business, among them deciding to move from ‘a single hand into a
partnership’; from one hand to multiple hands, that is.56 And in all of this,
hands were the source of wealth and success. ‘The diligent Hand makes
rich’, he put it succinctly – which appeared, tellingly, in a section about how
a ‘Tradesman … is never too low to rise.’57 Or, as he put it in more highly
theorised terms, ‘Money begets Money, Trade circulates … one hand
washes the other hand, and both hands wash the face.’58
The New York Sons of Liberty’s frequent reference to letters ‘coming to’
their ‘hands’ gave a particular flavour and meaning to their correspondence.
To those in the know, that language clearly branded their letters as missives
among merchants – albeit newly politicised merchants. But the ‘hands’ also
operated as a metaphor, as a metonym for the correspondents themselves,
which imbued them with the characteristic qualities of the mercantile and
tradesmen’s ethos. As individuals who were ‘all hands’, the Sons suggested
they imagined a relative lack of hierarchy among themselves: ‘hands’ were
 Sons of Liberty 245
the mark of a common mode of production and a shared (if lower) social
status among artisans and merchants. As ‘hands’, too, the Sons fashioned
themselves as individuals who were interdependent and mutually engaged,
just as were the businessmen and tradesmen for whom ‘one hand’ always
‘washes the other’.
The Sons completed the picture of their collective selves by imbuing their
epistolary persons with powerful feelings, echoing the affective language
visible in other letters and discussed in the chapters by Raapke and Hagg­
erty, for example, in this volume. Some of the most common language in
these letters was emotional language associated with masculine virtues, such
as steadiness, vigour, heartiness, and zeal. In their first letter to the New
York City Sons of Liberty (addressed personally, as was typical, to two of
its members, Isaac Sears and Joseph Allcocke), the Albany Sons of Liberty
declared themselves ‘steadfast’ allies in the ‘glorious cause’ and offered their
‘hearty concurrence’ to future measures. ‘Our unanimity and resolution
transcend the most raised expectations’, they concluded on an ecstatic note,
before ‘beg[ging]’ for the New York Sons’ ‘commands’.59 Henry Bicker of
New Brunswick, writing to the New York Sons the following month,
declared himself a ‘zealous member’ of the Sons and assured that he ‘heartily
concur[red]’ with them ‘in sentiments’. He had no doubts, he added, about
the ‘spirited … disposition’ of the people in his town.60 The Providence Sons
of Liberty, in a circular to other Sons groups, were even more emphatic. In
the first paragraph alone, they described themselves as ‘resolute’ and ‘vigor­
ous’ in defending against a loss of liberty that would leave them ‘in posses­
sion of a bare miserable existence’.61
A number of the Sons’ letters went a step further, tapping into languages
of affection and hatred that analogised the opposition to the Stamp Act to
an affair of the heart. The New York Sons, writing to correspondents in
Fairfield, Connecticut, wrote of their ‘pleasure’ in receiving a letter from
them and finding them ‘so firmly fixt’ in agreement. They let their Con­
necticut brethren know that they had received ‘reviving accounts … that the
hydra the Stamp Act was giving its last gasp’.62 In another missive, to the
New York City Sons, the Connecticut Son of Liberty John Durkee declared
himself ‘highly pleased’ by the New Yorkers’ spirit, which would ‘endear’
them to ‘all the lovers’ of liberty. ‘We will not in the least abate from our
ardour’, he wrote in words that echoed the language of physical passion,
until the Act was repealed.63 When Jonathan Sturge, another Connecticut
Son, wrote to the New Yorkers about the repeal of the Stamp Act, he con­
gratulated them on the ‘happy event’ which would ‘rejoice the heart of every
lover of his country’.64 Was it a government act or the birth of a baby, one
might wonder, that Sturge was celebrating?
For the recipient of a typical letter from a Sons of Liberty group, the
picture of the senders that it limned was hard to mistake. The senders, the
members of the Sons group, presented themselves as individual gentlemen
acting in their personal capacity. They portrayed themselves as emotional
246 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
beings – passionate ones, even – who were enmeshed in relations of mutual
interdependence with one another and with the recipients.65 And in all of
their exchanges, the group members insistently marked their physical pre­
sence by signing their letters with their own hands and passing the physical
missives to one another through known intermediaries.

The politics of sympathy

The Sons of Liberty used this corporealised inter-colonial correspondence to
fashion a distinctive brand of politics. Unlike most other political organisa­
tions, the Sons made the pursuit of symbolic unity rather than coordinated
action their main political goal. Studiously avoiding efforts at formal coor­
dination between colonies, the Sons of Liberty groups focused almost all of
their efforts on securing expressions of mutual support and proclaiming
their unity of purpose with an almost ritualistic zeal. Another way of put­
ting this is that the Sons’ main political aim was to foster mutual political
sympathy between Sons groups in distant towns and colonies. Because
sympathy is a quality of individuals, and in the eighteenth century it had
become newly linked to the body, the Sons’ success in creating this politics
of sympathy rested in no small measure on their diligent insistence that they
were loosely associated individuals rather than an aspiring body politic.
This chimes with the ‘sympathetic practice’ that Harvey sees in familiar
British letters.66
The quality of sympathy – feeling or imagining oneself in similar (emo­
tional) circumstances to another person – was a central element of a new
culture of sensibility that had conquered the Euro-Atlantic world in the
eighteenth century.67 The culture of sensibility, grounded in philosophical
and medical advances of the late seventeenth century, viewed the self as an
essentially social creation.68 Sympathy, as a mode of connection through
feeling what others felt, was one of the essential mechanisms by which
individuals were understood to be formed by one another.69 Like the culture
of sensibility more broadly, sympathy was intimately tied to the physical
body. To feel sympathy was to experience the other in oneself: not merely to
describe fear or pity, for instance, but to have the physical sensation in one’s
own gut as well. The Albany Sons could not have put it better than they did
in one of their 1766 missives to their New York City brethren: ‘Your own
feelings’, they wrote, ‘will give you the best sense of the emotions excited by
your most welcome express … We return your congratulations and sensibly
feel your joy.’70
Affirmations of unity and mutual agreement were one of the main ingre­
dients in virtually all of the letters written by Sons of Liberty groups. Writ­
ing in early 1766, for instance, the Baltimore Sons group assured their
correspondents in New York City that ‘we firmly unite with you for the
preservation of our constitutional rights, and liberties’.71 The New York
Sons, for their part, praised their counterparts in Fairfield for ‘firmly …
 Sons of Liberty 247
72
uniting with the sons of liberty throughout the colonies’. And writing to
other counterpart groups in Connecticut, they congratulated them on their
‘spirit of liberty and union’.73
These affirmations of unity functioned, performatively, as a way to create
sympathetic bonds among the correspondents. This phatic function is
apparent in the letter that John Durkee sent to the New York City Sons in
March 1766, in which he reported on a meeting of Sons held in Preston,
Connecticut. Durkee admitted in the course of the letter itself that the
Connecticut Sons had ‘nothing new to communicate to you’. But this lack of
news – or indeed anything actionable – did not stop him from writing a long
missive in which he extolled the virtues of ‘the union of the colonys’ and
reported that the Sons had declared that neither they ‘nor none of their
friends shall be enslaved by any power on Earth’. He communicated the
meeting’s ‘hearty and unfeigned thanks’ to the New Yorkers for their cor­
respondence and expressed a hope for the ‘continuation of same’.74 Clearly,
corresponding in this instance was an end in itself.
The crucial role that such phatic communications played in the inter­
colonial politics that the Sons were creating becomes especially clear when
one looks at the cases in which such an expression of unity or solidarity was
missed. This was briefly the sorry situation of the Sons of Liberty group in
Newport, Rhode Island. The Newport Sons group had written to the Boston
Sons in April 1766, to complain that they had not yet received a message
from New York City. They seem to have feared that they had done some­
thing wrong or offensive that had led the New Yorkers to refuse them a
correspondence. When the Boston Sons forwarded this complaint to New
York, it elicited a prompt and telling reply. The New York Sons wrote that
they were ‘very sorry’ to have ‘omitted’ the Newport Sons from their cor­
respondence. They found their ‘conduct’ to have ‘been highly meritorious’
and suggested that any failure to make contact had been the result of a letter
that ‘fail’d’ (was lost in transit).75 Both the Newport Sons’ reaction when
they thought they were being excluded and the New York Sons’ haste to
reassure them testify to the importance that the Sons groups attached to
affirmations of unity and mutual agreement.
A second key way in which the Sons established bonds of political sym­
pathy was by stating and re-stating their shared political sentiments and
principles. These statements of political principle, unlike the Sons’ expres­
sion of unity, have long been an important source for scholars of the Stamp
Act crisis. These statements have typically been examined as ideological
documents that offer a window into the political thought of the patriot
movement.76 Yet there are reasons to be sceptical about this approach. For
one, the sentiments they express are both brief and vague. They were hardly
the stuff of serious, persuasive argument. More seriously still, these state­
ments of principles were entirely redundant. By the time the Sons were
exchanging letters in late 1765, patriots across the colonies already agreed
on the broad principles of the resistance movement. The resolves of the
248 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
Stamp Act Congress, from October 1765, had already made those principles
widely known and agreed upon.77
In spite of already being in substantial agreement, the Sons of Liberty
groups nonetheless continued to reiterate their principles to one another in
letter after letter. Many of these statements did nothing more than reiterate
universally shared first principles about the British government. The New
Hampshire Sons began one 1765 missive to the New York Sons by declaring
their ‘highest detestation’ of the Stamp Act, which they attributed to the
‘enemies to his Majesty & the British Constitution’ and declared ‘opposite
to the fundamental privileges of British subjects granted and secured by
Magna Charta’.78 Similarly, the Baltimore Sons announced near the begin­
ning of a March 1766 missive that they were determined to ‘prevent the
execution of that most unconstitutional act commonly called the Stamp
Act’.79 These statements of principle, carefully placed at the outset of their
letters, offered nothing that was new from an ideological point of view. But
they did effectively express the sense of solidarity that the Sons craved, per-
formatively enacting their much-discussed ‘union’.
Even statements whose language suggested that their authors were
arguing novel or significant political points are nothing of the sort when
examined in context. The Sons of Oyster Bay, for instance, began a letter to
the Sons of New York City by proclaiming that ‘the late Stamp Act is
destructive of these our liberties [and] is by us deemed to be arbitrary &
unconstitutional’.80 Likewise, when the Providence Sons of Liberty sent a
circular to the other Sons groups in March 1766, they began with a rather
lengthy statement about why they found the Stamp Act ‘tyrannic and
oppressive’.81 At first blush, the language of these letters – especially the
Oyster Bay Sons’ use of ‘deemed’ – might seem significant, suggesting a
change of heart or a bold political choice. Yet by the first months of 1766,
the idea that the Stamp Act was ‘unconstitutional’ or ‘tyrannic’ was already
received wisdom among the Sons. These were invocations of a shared poli­
tical faith, not hard-edged political negotiations.
The phatic function of the Sons’ letters comes through perhaps most
clearly when one realises the one thing that the Sons did not do in their
missives – namely, coordinate action across the colonies. As a rule, the
individual Sons groups never asked one another to adopt a particular course
of action. Two examples of this principle in action, though hardly offering
exhaustive proof, can illustrate the point. In February 1766, William Brad­
ford of Philadelphia wrote to the leaders of the New York City Sons to
congratulate them on the ‘proper use’ they had made of ‘the infernal
stamps’. (They had burned a pile of the stamped papers.) He reported that
the Philadelphia Sons had set fire to their own batch of stamps a few days
earlier. But he took pains to emphasise that they had done so before receiv­
ing word of the New Yorkers’ action, and that their decision had not been
shaped by New York’s influence.82 The following month, the Baltimore
Sons announced to their counterparts in the other colonies that they had
 Sons of Liberty 249
‘endeavoured lately to have [the public offices] opened that business might
be carried on as usual’ (i.e. without the use of stamped paper). But although
they clearly regarded this as an effective tactic against the Act, the Baltimore
Sons did not so much as suggest that the other Sons groups do the same.83
To do so would have put the lie to the illusion, carefully constructed by all
of the Sons, that they were no more than groups of individual gentlemen
exchanging friendly notes.

Conclusion
The body-centred, sympathetic epistolary strategy that the Sons of Liberty
adopted in their struggle against the Stamp Act had much to recommend it.
The Sons faced daunting obstacles in their efforts to counter the unwelcome
law coming from Whitehall. The colonies were fundamentally divided poli­
tically and quite mistrustful of one another. There were stark divisions
between more urban and more rural areas of the same colony. The lack of
pre-existing political ties among the colonies made any effort to create a
common cause or policy among these fragmented pieces of the empire risky
at best, and likely impossible. Added to this was the profound reluctance
that even the members of the Sons groups felt about setting themselves in
opposition to the British government, which as recently as 1763 they had
regarded as their military saviour and a beacon of political stability in a
turbulent world.
The Sons sought to circumvent these quandaries through an epistolary
strategy that encouraged, affirmed and provided mutual moral support
among likeminded groups of gentlemen across British North America. Using
a variety of techniques in their letters, the Sons crafted an image of them­
selves as groups of independent men who found themselves in agreement
about the political struggle over the Stamp Act. They solidified this self-
image by projecting images of their individual bodies, and by sending mes­
sages that insistently disaggregated their groups into individual people. The
Sons’ correspondence then fashioned each of these local groups – indeed,
each of the individual members of the local groups – as autonomous, acting
on their own responsibility and of their own volition. This frame neutralised
the threats posed by inter-colonial coercion or by the creation of a dangerously
unauthorised new body politic – a body, such as ‘the people’, that was at once
collective and disembodied. Coordinated actions, if they happened, were
almost a happy accident. The Sons’ carefully managed correspondence was, at
bottom, an exercise in the creation of a politics of sympathy that extended
across North America.
In the short term, the political strategy instantiated in the Sons’ corre­
spondence proved a roaring success. The intercolonial opposition to the
Stamp Act succeeded in preventing the British government from implement­
ing the Act and stimulated sufficient opposition within Britain itself that the
government was forced to withdraw the Act. It did not take long, however,
250 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
for the weaknesses of the Sons’ innovative epistolary strategy to become
evident. A mere year and a half after the withdrawal of the Stamp Act,
Parliament enacted the so-called Townsend Acts, which levied an expansive
series of new duties on American trade. The resistance to these Acts, by
means of a boycott, demanded a high level of inter-colonial coordination,
which the Sons proved ill-equipped to offer.84 In the end, it was not until the
1770s, nearly a decade after the Stamp Act crisis, that American patriots
finally turned the page on the Sons of Liberty’s politics of moral sympathy
and embraced the substantive inter-colonial union that they had so long
resisted.

Notes
1 The main collections containing Sons of Liberty letters from this period are the
John Lamb Papers, New-York Historical Society, New York; Samuel Adams
Papers, New York Public Library, New York; William Palfrey Papers and Arthur
Lee Papers, both Houghton Library, Cambridge, MA; Jeremy Belknap Papers
and Miscellaneous Bound Documents, both Massachusetts Historical Society,
Boston, MA. These six collections contain more than 100 of these letters, with
the remaining ones scattered across many other collections and archives. How­
ever, very few of the letters in these collections are complete exchanges, meaning
that they represent roughly double this number. The roughly 400 letters that we
can infer were part of these correspondences primarily represent the activity of
the New York and Boston Sons. Relatively few letters survive from the very
active Sons groups in Philadelphia and Charleston (as well as other centres such
as Newport and Baltimore). It is likely that these other groups produced at least
as many letters.
2 The chapter draws on Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, ‘Corresponding Republics: Letter
Writing and Patriot Organizing in the Atlantic Revolutions, circa 1760–1792’
(Unpublished PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2011).
3 On the troubles caused by lack of coordination in the patriot movement, see
Ibid., chs. 2 and 3; David Ammerman, In the Common Cause: American
Response to the Coercive Acts of 1774 (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of
Virginia, 1974). More recently, Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause:
Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: Uni­
versity of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American
History and Culture), has argued that White colonists’ fears of the enslaved and
Indians were instrumental in creating unity in spite of the colonies’ deep
divisions.
4 On the Stamp Act Crisis, see the still-classic Edmund S. Morgan and Helen M.
Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution, New, rev. ed. (New
York: Collier Books, 1963). For arch-patriotism, see Brendan McConville, The
King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of
Early American History and Culture), ch. 2.
5 For the general context of the imperial struggle leading up to American inde­
pendence, the most comprehensive study remains Charles McLean Andrews, The
Colonial Period of American History, 4 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1934). For political paranoia, see especially Bernard Bailyn, The Ideologi­
cal Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992).
 Sons of Liberty 251
6 On the inter-colonial response, see Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise,
Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution: Interspersed with Bio­
graphical, Political, and Moral Observations (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Classics,
1988), 1:17–18; and Robert Middlekauff, The Glorious Cause: The American
Revolution, 1763–1789 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 70–76. For a
good analysis of why there was such wide opposition to the acts among the
different strata of society, see Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary
Massachusetts, 1765–1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 90–91.
7 On the Stamp Act Congress, see Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 106–121.
8 On the Sons, see Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radi­
cals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New
York: Knopf, 1972), ch. 4, esp. 78–87, as well as the local monographs cited
below.
9 On Philadelphia and New York, see The Old Revolutionaries: Political Lives in
the Age of Samuel Adams (New York: Knopf, 1980), 58–59; Gary B. Nash, The
Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the
American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 303;
Richard Alan Ryerson, ‘The Revolution Is Now Begun’: The Radical Commit­
tees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1978), 68–71. For Boston, see Nash, Urban Crucible, 296; Stephen E. Patterson,
Political Parties in Revolutionary Massachusetts (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1973), ch. 3, esp. 63–64.
10 See Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., The Colonial Merchants and the American
Revolution, 1763–1776 (New York: F. Ungar, 1957 [1918]), 27; and Carl Bride­
nbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Capri­
corn Books, 1964), ch. 7.
11 Leading patriot-planters included Virginians George Washington, Thomas Jef­
ferson, Patrick Henry, Peyton Randolph and the Lee family, South Carolinian
John Laurens, the Pacas and Carrolls of Maryland and John Dickinson of Penn­
sylvania. For a summary of the mercantile entanglements of Chesapeake planters,
see Laura Croghan Kamoie, ‘Planters’ Exchange Patters in the Colonial Chesa­
peake: Toward Defining a Regional Domestic Economy’, in Peter A. Coclanis
(ed.), The Atlantic Economy during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries:
Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel (Columbia, SC: University of
South Carolina Press, 2005), 323–343, esp. 323–324.
12 The classic work on Anglicisation was done by John Murrin: see John M. Murrin,
‘Anglicizing an American Colony: The Transformation of Provincial Massachusetts’
(Yale, 1966); Ignacio Gallup-Diaz, Andrew Shankman, and David J. Silverman
(eds), Anglicizing America: Empire, Revolution, Republic (Philadelphia, PA:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and John M. Murrin, Rethinking
America: From Empire to Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
An important addition is T. H. Breen, ‘An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization
of Colonial America, 1690–1776’, Journal of British Studies, 25:4 (1986).
13 Carlo Botta, History of the War of the Independence of the United States of
America, 9th edition, trans. George Alexander Otis (Cooperstown, NY: Phinney,
1845), 1:74.
14 See Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, ch. 11, esp. 197.
15 Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 77–78, 87. Maier may have been follow­
ing Carl Becker, who described the early Sons organisation as ‘formal’. See Carl
L. Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–
1776 (Madison, WI: Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin History Series, vol. 2,
1909), 43. This assessment of the Sons as a formal organisation has been widely
influential in the literature. See, for example, Edward Countryman, The Amer­
ican Revolution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 91, which cites Maier by
252 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
name and describes the Sons as ‘knit into an intercolonial correspondence union.’
The most recent studies have begun to move away from this view: Benjamin L.
Carp is close to the mark when he describes the Sons as having a ‘tavern net­
work.’ Benjamin L. Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95; see also the astute observations
in Jeremy A. Stern, ‘The Overflowings of Liberty: Massachusetts, the Town­
shend Crisis and the Reconception of Freedom, 1766–1770’ (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University, 2010), xiv–xv.
16 On voluntary associations, see Jessica Roney, ‘“First Movers in Every Useful
Undertaking”: Formal Voluntary Associations in Philadelphia, 1725–1775’
(Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2008), 10–11; and
Jessica C. Roney, Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American
Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia, Studies in Early American Economy
and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2014), 4, ch. 3, and 209, n28, which felicitously
describes formal associations as a ‘civic technology’. See also John H. Elliott,
Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830 (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 134–136 and 41–44; as well as
Andrews, Colonial Period, 1:Ch. IX and Richard Bushman, King and People in
Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1985), 11–13 and works cited therein.
17 Even relatively informal organisations, such as the Forensic Club of Annapolis,
Maryland, created a set of formal rules to govern themselves: see ‘Rules and
Minutes of the Forensic Club [Annapolis, MD]’, entry for 26 Oct 1759, mssHM
546, Huntington Library, San Marino.
18 New York Mercury, 13 Jan 1766, 3. For the association, see Roger J. Cham­
pagne, ‘The Sons of Liberty and the Aristocracy in New York Politics, 1765–
1790’ (Unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1960), 102–104.
Champagne, however, is committed to the notion of the Sons as a ‘formal orga­
nization’ after this point (102).
19 ‘The Proceedings of the Sons of Liberty, 1 March 1766’ [Evans 41656], 1. See also
the description of the constantly shifting cast of leaders in Rosemary Niner Estes,
‘Charles Town’s Sons of Liberty: A Closer Look’ (Unpublished PhD Disserta­
tion, University of North Carolina, 2005), ch. 2.
20 Committee of Baltimore to New York Committee, 8 Mar 1766 and Baltimore
Sons to New York Sons, 5 Apr 1766, both in Papers of John Lamb, New-York
Historical Society (hereafter NYHS), New York.
21 For discussions of the shifting leadership in Boston, see Hoerder, Crowd Action,
138–141; Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 85–86 and Appendix; and ‘An
Alphabetical List of the Sons of Liberty who dined at Liberty Tree, Dorchester, Aug.
14 1769’, Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 11 (1871), 140–142.
22 See New York Sons to Jonathan Sturge, 25 Mar 1766; Trenton Committee to
New York Committee, 28 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS. Mott and Isaac Sears
were frequently the addressees of letters: see, e.g., Albany Sons of Liberty to
Joseph Allicocke and Isaac Sears, 15 Jan 1766; Maj. John Durkee to Isaac Sears,
10 Feb 1766; Henry Bicker to New York Sons [Mess Sears &c &c], 23 Feb 1766,
all in Lamb Papers, NYHS. For their centrality to the movement in New York,
see Old Revolutionaries, 63.
23 Of course it may be, as some scholars have suggested, that the practice of calling
meetings to discuss correspondence was a deliberate strategy to attach a mod­
icum of popular assent from the ‘body of the people’ to the actions of the patriot
elite. My interpretation complements this view: rather than seeing their use of
public appeals as a free choice, I would argue that they represented a successful
effort to make a virtue out of necessity.
 Sons of Liberty 253
24 Draft letter from New York Sons to Connecticut Sons, 20 Feb 1766, Lamb
Papers, NYHS.
25 Trenton Committee to New York Committee, 28 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
26 See Committee of Baltimore to New York Committee, 8 Mar 1766; Durkee to
Sons of Liberty in New York, 19 Mar 1766; Henry Bicker to New York Sons, 23
Feb 1766; all in Lamb Papers, NYHS.
27 Connecticut Courant, 31 Mar 1766, 3.
28 See Boyd Stanley Schlenther, Charles Thomson: A Patriot’s Pursuit (Newark,
DE: University of Delaware Press, 1990).
29 The Samuel Adams Papers at the New York Public Library is one of the most impor­
tant. See fn. 1 for a list of the main collections, most of which were personal collections.
30 My thinking about epistolary form and strategy is informed by a voluminous,
excellent literature, for which see especially: Konstantin Dierks, In My Power:
Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: Uni­
versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2009); Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives
and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press,
2008); Eve Tavor Bannet, Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic
Correspondence, 1688–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Dena Goodman, Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2009); Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau, and Cécile Dauphin,
Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nine­
teenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). For a compre­
hensive discussion of this scholarship, including work in literary studies, see
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, ‘Private Letters and Public Diplomacy: The Adams Net­
work and the Quasi-War, 1797–1798’, Journal of the Early Republic, 31:2 (2011);
and Perl-Rosenthal, ‘Corresponding Republics’.
31 ‘Proceedings of the Sons of Liberty’ [Evans 41656], 1.
32 Baltimore Sons to New York Sons, 5 Apr 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
33 New York Sons to Jonathan Sturge, 25 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
34 William Bradford (Philadelphia) to New York Committee, 15 Feb 1766, Lamb
Papers, NYHS.
35 Committee of Oyster Bay to New York Committee, 22 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers,
NYHS.
36 Library Company to John Penn, 31 May 1735, Leonard Woods Labaree et al.,
(eds), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1959–), 2:33.
37 There has been little work on this issue specifically in the colonies or in the
eighteenth century British Atlantic. For a very good illustration of the uses of
authenticating seals and stationery in another British imperial context, see Miles
Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India
Company (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 39–46.
38 See Valentin Groebner, ‘Describing the Person, Reading the Signs in Late Med­
ieval and Renaissance Europe: Identity Papers, Vested Figures, and the Limits of
Identification, 1400–1600’, in Jane Caplan and John Torpey (eds), Documenting
Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15–28. See also Charlotte Gui-
chard, ‘Signatures, Authorship and Autographie in Eighteenth-Century French
Painting’, Art History 41:2 (April 2018), 274–275, which shows how the eight­
eenth-century art market increasingly connected signatures to the physical pre­
sence of the artist’s hand on the work.
39 Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 81–82.
40 Sons of Liberty to John Adams, 5 Feb 1766, John Adams, Papers of John Adams,
ed. Robert Joseph Taylor, 14 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1977–), 1:170–171.
254 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal
41 New York Mercury, 10 Mar 1766, 2 and Newport Mercury, 3 Feb 1766, 3. See
also Philadelphia Sons to New York Sons, 15 Feb 1766; and Baltimore Sons to
New York Sons, 5 Apr 1766, both in Lamb Papers, NYHS.
42 Durkee to Sears, 10 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
43 Durkee to Sears, 10 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
44 Albany Sons of Liberty to Allicocke and Sears, 15 Jan 1766; Henry Bicker to New
York Sons, 23 Feb 1766 (this letter is addressed to ‘Mess Sears &c &c’); New
York Sons to Jonathan Sturge, 25 Mar 1766 (collectively signed but addressed to
Sturge individually; the reply was from Sturge alone) all in Lamb Papers, NYHS.
See also New York Committee to Nathaniel Williams, 7 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers,
NYHS.
45 Philadelphia Sons to New York Sons, 15 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
46 Durkee to The Sons of Liberty in New York, 19 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
47 Philadelphia Sons to New York Sons, 15 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
48 William Bradford to Lamb, Sears, Robinson, Welley & Mott, 15 Feb 1766, Lamb
Papers, NYHS.
49 William Bradford to Lamb, Sears, Robinson, Welley & Mott, 15 Feb 1766, Lamb
Papers, NYHS. Emphasis mine.
50 Henry Bicker to New York Sons, 23 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
51 New York Sons to Richard South, 29 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
52 See William Goddard to Unknown recipient, 16 Dec 1773 and Thomas Young to
John Lamb, 18 Mar 1774, both in Lamb Papers, NYHS.
53 Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, Or, The History of a Young Lady, 3rd ed. (London:
printed for S. Richardson, 1750), 8, 223.
54 For a very useful parallel discussion of the meaning and construction of ‘white
hands’ among eighteenth-century British elite women, see Kate Smith, ‘In Her
Hands: Materializing Distinction in Georgian England’, Cultural and Social
History, 11:4 (2014), 489–506.
55 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman, 3rd ed. (London: Charles Riv­
ington, 1727), 1:35.
56 Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (Dublin: George Ewing, 1726),
29.
57 Ibid., 182–183.
58 Ibid., 118.
59 Albany Sons of Liberty to Allicocke and Sears, 15 Jan 1766, Lamb Papers,
NYHS.
60 Henry Bicker (New Brunswick) to NY Sons, 23 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
61 Circular from Providence Sons of Liberty, 19 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
62 New York Committee to Sons of Liberty in Fairfield, 17 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers,
NYHS.
63 Durkee to The Sons of Liberty in New York, 19 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
64 Jonathan Sturge to New York Sons of Liberty [Isaac Sears?], 26 Mar 1766, Lamb
Papers, NYHS.
65 See Matthew McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Poli­
tics in Georgian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 92–
100, who characterises the self-presentation of North American gentlemen during
the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s as a republicanised version of the Georgian
ideal of the ‘independent man’ in politics. He argues that this American version of
the ‘independent man’, grounded in ‘smaller freehold[s], a receptive sensibility and
simple virtues’ (100), contributed to reshaping notions of ‘independence’ among the
British Isles elites during the 1790s and early nineteenth century.
66 See Karen Harvey, ‘Sympathy in Practice: Eighteenth-Century Letters and the
Material Body’, in this volume.
 Sons of Liberty 255
67 J. Lamb, The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (London:
Pickering & Chatto, 2009), Introduction; and Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the
American Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: Published for the Omohundro Institute
of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina
Press, 2009), 50–51.
68 Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution, 4–14.
69 On this metaphor, see ibid., 79–81.
70 Albany Sons to New York Committee, 24 May 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
71 Committee of Baltimore to New York Committee, 8 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers,
NYHS.
72 New York Committee to Sons of Liberty in Fairfield, 17 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers,
NYHS.
73 New York Sons to Connecticut Sons, 20 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
74 Durkee to Sons of Liberty in New York, 19 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
75 New York Sons to Boston Sons, 2 Apr 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS. Once the
New York Sons wrote to them, they replied with great enthusiasm: see Silas
Downer to New York Sons of Liberty, 21 Jul 1766 in Carl Bridenbaugh, Silas
Downer, Forgotten Patriot: His Life and Writings (Providence, RI: Rhode Island
Bicentennial Foundation, 1974), 87–95.
76 See Maier, From Resistance to Revolution, 100–105.
77 Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 110–119.
78 New Hampshire Sons of Liberty to [New York Sons], n.d. [1765], Lamb Papers,
NYHS.
79 Committee of Baltimore to New York Committee, 8 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers,
NYHS.
80 Committee of Oyster Bay to New York Committee, 22 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers,
NYHS. Emphasis mine.
81 Circular from Providence Sons of Liberty, 19 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS.
See also the statement of principles in the letter from Silas Downer to New York
Sons of Liberty, 21 Jul 1766 in Bridenbaugh, Silas Downer, 87–88.
82 Bradford to New York Committee, 15 Feb 1766, Lamb Papers, NYHS. For the
burning, see Joseph S. Tiedemann, Reluctant Revolutionaries: New York City
and the Road to Independence, 1763–1776 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1997), 84.
83 Committee of Baltimore to New York Committee, 8 Mar 1766, Lamb Papers,
NYHS. For other instances of not making suggestions, see New York Committee
to Nathaniel Williams, 7 Mar 1766; Trenton Committee to New York Commit­
tee, 28 Feb 1766; New York Sons to Connecticut Sons, 20 Feb 1766, all in Lamb
Papers, NYHS.
84 For a discussion of how patriot leaders in the American colonies adapted their
epistolary strategy to the new challenges posed by the Townshend Acts, see Perl-
Rosenthal, ‘Corresponding Republics’, ch. 2.
Bibliography

Alberti, Fay Bound. ‘Bodies, Hearts and Minds: Why Emotions Matter to Historians
of Science and Medicine.’ Isis, 100:4 (2009): 798–810.
Amato, Joseph. ‘Thoughts on a Cultural History of Touch. Review Essay.’ Fides et
Historia, 46:1 (2014): 76–84.
Aravamudan, Srinivas. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Arnold, David. ‘Race, Place and Bodily Difference in Early Nineteenth-Century
India.’ Historical Research, 77:196 (2004): 254–273.
Arnold, David (ed.). Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of
Tropical Medicine, 1500–1900. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.
Baker, Naomi. Plain Ugly: The Unattractive Body in Early Modern Culture. Man­
chester: Manchester University Press, 2010.
Bannet, Eve Tavor. Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Corre­
spondence, 1688–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Barclay, Katie. Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2021.
Barker-Benfield, G. J. The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth
Century Britain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
Barnett, Louise. Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women. Oxford: Oxford Uni­
versity Press, 2007.
Barton, David and Nigel Hall (eds). Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam:
John Benjamin, 2000.
Beckers, Christina. ‘Bridging the Gap: Techniques of Appresentation and Familiar
(izing) Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Transmaritime Family Correspondence.’
In Daniela Hacke, Hannes Ziegler and Claudia Jarzebowski (eds), Matters of
Engagement: Emotions, Identity, and Cultural Contact in the Premodern World.
London: Taylor & Francis, 2020, 17–47.
Beebee, Tomas. Epistolary Fiction in Europe 1500–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999.
Begiato (Bailey), Joanne. ‘“Think Wot a Mother Must Feel”: Parenting in English
Pauper Letters c.1760–1834.’ Family and Community History, 13:1 (2010): 5–19.
Begiato (Bailey), Joanne. Parenting in England, 1760–1830. Emotion, Identity &
Generation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994.
 Bibliography 257
Berry, Helen. ‘Lawful Kisses? Sexual Ambiguity and Platonic Friendship in England
c.1660–1720.’ In Karen Harvey (ed.), The Kiss in History. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2005, 62–79.
Bevan, Amanda and Randolph Cock. ‘The High Court of Admiralty Prize Papers,
1652–1815: Challenges in Improving Access to Older Records.’ Archives, 53:137
(2018): 34–58.
Black, Jeremy. The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century.
Stroud: History Press, 2018.
Blackwell, Mark. The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-Narratives in
Eighteenth-Century England. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007.
Bloom, Edward A. Samuel Johnson in Grub Street. Providence, RI: Brown University
Press, 1957.
Boiger, Michael and Batja Mesquita. ‘The Construction of Emotion in Interactions,
Relationships and Cultures.’ Emotion Review, 4:3 (2012): 221–229.
Boulton, James T. and T. O. McLoughlin. News from Abroad: Letters Written by
British Travellers on the Grand Tour, 1728–71. Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press, 2012.
Brant, Clare. Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2006.
Brant, Clare. ‘“I Will Carry You with Me on the Wings of Immagination”: Aerial Letters
and Eighteenth-Century Ballooning.’ Eighteenth-Century Life, 35:1 (2011): 168–187.
Bray, Joe. The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousnes. Abingdon: Routledge,
2003.
Britton, Jeanne M. Vicarious Narratives: A Literary History of Sympathy, 1750–1850.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Brockliss, L. W. B. Calvert’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in
Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Brockliss, L. W. B. ‘Consultation by Letter in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris: The
Medical Practice of Etienne-François Geoffroy.’ In Ann La Berge and Mordechai
Feingold (eds), French Medical Culture in the Nineteenth Century. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1994, 79–110.
Burnard, Trevor. ‘“The Countrie Continues Sicklie”: White Mortality in Jamaica,
1655–1780.’ Social History of Medicine, 12:1 (1999): 45–72.
Burnard, Trevor. ‘“Not a Place for Whites”? Demographic Failure and Settlement in
Comparative Context, Jamaica 1665–1780.’ In Kathleen E. A. Monteith and Glen
Richards (eds), Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture.
University of West Indies Press, 2002, 73–88.
Burnard, Trevor. ‘“Rioting in Goatish Embraces”: Marriage and Improvement in
Early British Jamaica, 1660–1780.’ History of the Family, 11:4 (2006): 185–197.
Burton, Antoinette and Tony Ballantyne (eds). Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colo­
nial Encounters in World History. Durham, NJ: Duke University Press, 2005.
Bushaway, Bob. “‘Things Said or Sung a Thousand Times”: Customary Society and
Oral Culture in Rural England 1700–1900.’ In Adam Fox and Daniel Woolf (eds),
The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain 1500–1850. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2002, 256–283.
Callander, Julia K. ‘Cannibalism and Communion in Swift’s “Receipt to Restore
Stella’s Youth”.’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 54 (2014): 585–604.
Calvert, Leanne. ‘“What a Wonderful Change Have I Undergone … So Altered in
Stature, Knowledge & Ideas!”: Apprenticeship, Adolescence and Growing Up in
258 Bibliography
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Ulster.’ Irish Economic and Social History,
45 (2018): 70–89.
Carey, Brycchan. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Chartier, Roger, Alain Boureau and Cécile Dauphin. Correspondence: Models of
Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, trans. Christo­
pher Woodall. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997.
Chatterjee, Indrani. Unfamiliar Relations: Family and History in South Asia. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004.
Clarke, Norma. Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Classen, Constance. The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch. Chicago, IL:
University of Illinois Press, 2012.
Cohen, Michéle. Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the
Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 1996.
Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn. Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eight­
eenth-Century Republic of Letters. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Crawford, Patricia. Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England. London:
Routledge, 2014.
Csengei, Ildiko. Sympathy, Sensibility and the Literature of Feeling in the Eighteenth
Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
Culley, Amy. British Women’s Life Writing 1760–1840. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014.
Curran, Louise. Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter Writing. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016.
Dalton, Susan. Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting the Public and
Private Spheres. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Daybell, James. The Material Letter in Early Modern England: Manuscript Letters
and the Culture and Practice of Letter-Writing, 1512–1635. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012.
Dierks, Konstantin. In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early
America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009.
Ditz, Toby L. ‘Formative Ventures: Eighteenth-Century Commercial Letters and the
Articulation of Experience.’ In Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and
Letter Writers, 1600–1945. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999, 59–78.
Douglas, Aileen. ‘Mrs. Dingley’s Spectacles: Swift, Print and Desire.’ Eighteenth-
Century Ireland / Iris an DáChultúr, 10 (1995): 69–77.
Earle, Rebecca (ed.). Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter Writers, 1600–1945.
Abingdon: Routledge, 1999.
Finn, Margot. ‘Presidential Address: Material Turns in British History: III. Collect­
ing: Colonial Bombay, Basra, Baghdad and the Enlightenment Museum.’ TRS, 30
(2020): 1–28.
Fitzmaurice, Susan M. The Familial Letter in Early Modern English: A Pragmatic
Approach. Amsterdam: John Benjamin, 2002.
Flynn, Carol Houlihan. The Body in Swift and Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­
versity Press, 1990.
Forget, Evelyn L. ‘Evocations of Sympathy: Sympathetic Imagery in Eighteenth-Cen­
tury Social Theory and Physiology.’ History of Political Economy, 35:5 (2003):
284–288.
 Bibliography 259
Forman-Barzilai, Fonna. Adam Smith and the Circles of Sympathy: Cosmopolitanism
and Moral Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Forrest, Alan. The Death of the French Atlantic: Trade, War, and Slavery in the Age
of Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
Frazer, Michael L. The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiment­
alism in the eighteenth century and today. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
French, Henry and Mark Rothery. Man’s Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities 1660–
1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive.
Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Garraway, Doris. The Libertine Colony. Creolization in the Early French Caribbean.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005.
Gaughan, Joan Mickelson. The ‘Incumberances’: British Women in India, 1615–1856.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Ghose, Indira. Women Travellers in Colonial India: The Power of the Female Gaze.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Ghose, Indira. Sex and the Family in Colonial India: The Making of Empire. Cam­
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Giovanopoulos, Anna-Christina. ‘The Legal Status of Children in Eighteenth-Cen­
tury England.’ In Anja Müller (ed.), Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth
Century: Age and Identity. London: Routledge, 2006, 43–52.
Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Let­
ters, 1680–1750. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.
Goldsmith, Sarah. ‘Making the Body Beautiful.’ In Karen Harvey (ed.), A Cultural
History of Beauty in the Age of Enlightenment (1700–1800). London: Bloomsbury,
forthcoming.
Goldsmith, Sarah. ‘Nostalgia, Homesickness and Emotional Formation on the
Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour.’ Cultural and Social History, xv (2018): 333–360.
Goldsmith, Sarah. Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour.
London: University of London Press, 2020.
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French
Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Greig, Hannah. The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013.
Griffin, Dustin. Authorship in the Long Eighteenth Century. Newark, DE: University
of Delaware Press, 2013.
Guest, Harriet. Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism 1750–1810. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Gurkin Altman, Janet. Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form. Columbus, OH: Ohio
State University Press, 1982.
Gust, Onni. ‘The Perilous Territory of Not Belonging: Exile and Empire in Sir James
Mackintosh’s Letters from Early Nineteenth-Century Bombay.’ History Workshop
Journal, 86 (2018): 22–43.
Gust, Onni. Unhomely Empire: Whiteness and Belonging, c.1760–1830. London:
Bloomsbury, 2020.
Gust, Onni. ‘Mobility, Gender and Empire in Maria Graham’s Journal of a Resi­
dence in India (1812).’ Gender and History, 29:2 (2017): 273–291.
Gustafson, Katherine. ‘Life Stage Studies and the Eighteenth Century: Reading Age
in Literature.’ Literature Compass, 11:8 (2014): 528–530.
260 Bibliography
Haggerty, George E. Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth
Century. New York: Colombia University Press, 1999.
Haggerty, Sheryllynne. ‘Merely for Money’? Business Culture in the British Atlantic,
1750–1815. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012.
Hallam, Elizabeth. ‘“Speaking to Reveal: The Body and Acts of “Exposure” in Early
Modern Popular Discourse.’ In Catherine Richardson (ed.), Clothing Culture
1350–1650. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, 239–262.
Hancock, David. Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of
the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995.
Hannan, Leonie. Women of Letters: Gender, Writing and the Life of the Mind in
Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.
Harrison, Mark. Medicine in an Age of Commerce & Empire: Britain and its Tro­
pical Colonies 1660–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Harrison, Mark. Climates and Constitutions: Health, Race, Environment and British
Imperialism in India, 1600–1850. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Harvey, Karen. ‘Epochs of Embodiment: Sex and the Material Body in the Eight­
eenth Century.’ Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 42:4 (2019): 455–469.
Harvey, Karen. The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eight­
eenth-Century Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Harvey, Karen. ‘Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eight­
eenth-Century England.’ Journal of British Studies, 54:4 (2015): 797–821.
Harvey, Karen. ‘What Mary Toft Felt: Women’s Voices, Pain, Power and the Body.’
History Workshop Journal, 80:1 (2015): 33–51.
Hitchcock, Tim. English Sexualities 1700–1800. London: Macmillan, 1997.
Holloway, Sally. The Game of Love in Georgian England: Courtship, Emotions, and
Material Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Hudson, Geoffrey. ‘Arguing Disability: Ex-servicemen’s Own Stories in Early
Modern England 1590–1790.’ In Roberta Bivins and John Pickstone (eds), Medi­
cine, Madness and Social History. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007.
Hurren, Elizabeth, and Steven King. ‘Begging for a Burial: Death and the Poor Law in
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century England.’ Social History, 30:3 (2005): 321–341.
Ishiguro, Laura. Nothing to Write Home About: British Family Correspondence and
the Settler-Colonial Everyday. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
2019.
James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins. Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo
Revolution. New York: Dial Press, 1938.
Jones, Cecily. Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados
and North Carolina, 1627–1865. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
Justice, George. The Manufacturers of Literature: Writing and the Literary Market­
place in 18th Century England. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2002.
Kennedy, Catriona. ‘“Womanish Epistles?” Martha McTier, Female Epistolary and
Late Eighteenth-Century Irish Radicalism.’ Women’s History Review, 13:4 (2004):
649–668.
King, Steven. Writing the Lives of the English Poor, 1750s to 1830s. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.
Laitinen, Lea and Taru Nordlund. ‘Performing Identities and Interaction through
Epistolary Formulae.’ In Marina Dossena and Gabriella Camiciotti (eds), Letter
Writing in Late Modern Europe. London: John Benjamin, 2012, 65–88.
 Bibliography 261
Lamb, Jonathan. The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century.
London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009.
Lamikiz, Xabier. Trade and Trust in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic: Spanish Mer­
chants and Their Overseas Networks. Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Royal
Historical Society, 2010.
Lane, Joan. ‘The Diaries and Correspondence of Eighteenth-Century Patients.’ In
Roy Porter (ed.), Patients and Practitioners. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1985, 205–248.
Lowenthal, Cynthia. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Eighteenth-Century
Familiar Letter. Athens, GA: Georgia University Press, 1994.
Lupton, Christine. ‘The Knowing Book: Authors, It-Narratives, and Objectification
in the Eighteenth Century.’ A Forum on Fiction, 36:3 (2006): 402–420.
Lyons, Martyn. The Writing Culture of Ordinary People in Europe c.1860–1920.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Maclaren, Kym. ‘Touching Matters: Embodiments of Intimacy.’ Emotion, Space and
Society, 13 (2014): 95–102.
McCormack, Matthew. ‘Tall Histories: Height and Georgian Masculinities.’ Trans­
actions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (2016): 79–101.
McCormack, Matthew. The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in
Georgian England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
Mercer, Christia. ‘Seventeenth-Century Universal Sympathy: Stoicism, Platonism,
Leibniz, and Conway.’ In Eric Schliesser (ed.), Sympathy: A History. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2015, 107–138.
Mills, Sara. Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and
Colonialism. New York: Routledge, 1991.
Morgan, Gwenda and Peter Rushton. ‘Visible Bodies: Power, Subordination and
Identity in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.’ Journal of Social History, 40:1
(2005): 39–64.
Morris, Marilyn. Sex, Money and Personal Character in Eighteenth-Century British
Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015.
Mullan, John. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth
Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Newton, Hannah. Misery to Mirth: Recovery from Illness in Early Modern England.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Newton, Hannah. The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580–1720. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012.
Nussbaum, Felicity. ‘British Women Write the East after 1750: Revisiting a “Femi­
nine” Orient.’ In J. Batchelor and C. Kaplan (eds), British Women’s Writing in the
Long Eighteenth Century: Authorship, Politics and History. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005, 121–139.
Nussbaum, Felicity and Helen Deutsch (eds). Defects: Engendering the Modern
Body. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002.
Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cam­
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
O’Brien, Karen. Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cam­
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
O’Neill, Lindsay. ‘Dealing with Newsmongers: Trust and Letters in the British
World, c.1670–1730.’ Huntingdon Library Quarterly, 75:2 (2013): 215–233.
262 Bibliography
O’Neill, Lindsay. The Opened Letter: Networking in the Early Modern Period. Phi­
ladelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.
O’Neill, John P. and Mark D. Greenberg (eds). Europe in the Age of Revolution and
Enlightenment. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1987.
Palmer, Jennifer. Intimate Bonds. Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. Phila­
delphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.
Pearsall, Sarah M. S. Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth
Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [2008], 2010.
Perl-Rosenthal, Nathan. ‘Atlantic Cultures and the Age of Revolution.’ William and
Mary Quarterly 74:4 (2017): 667–696.
Pilloud, Séverine and Micheline Louis-Courvoisier. ‘The Intimate Experience of the
Body in the Eighteenth Century: Between Interiority and Exteriority.’ Medical
History, 47 (2003): 45–72.
Porter, Roy. Patients and Practitioners. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009.
Porter, Roy. Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World. London:
Penguin, 2000.
Porter, Roy. and G. S. Rousseau. Gout: The Patrician Malady. New Haven, CT:
Yale University Press, 1998.
Porter, Roy. and Dorothy Porter. Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in
Eighteenth-century England. Oxford: Polity, 1989.
Powers, Anne M. A Parcel of Ribbons: The Letters of an 18th Century Family in
London & Jamaica. London: Lulu, 2012.
Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York:
Routledge, 1998.
Raapke, Annika. ‘In Gelb! Selbstentwürfe eines Mannes im Fieber.’ In Dagmar Freist
(ed.), Diskurse-Körper-Artefakte. Historische Praxeologie in der Frühneu­
zeitforschung. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2015, 243–263.
Raapke, Annika. Dieses verfluchte Land: Europäische Körper in Brieferzählungen aus
der Karibik, 1744–1826. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2019.
Raapke, Annika. ‘The Pain of Senses Escaping. 18th Century Europeans and the
Sensory Challenges of the Caribbean.’ In Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite
(eds), Empire of the Senses. Sensory Practices and Modes of Perception in the
Atlantic World. Leiden: Brill, 2017, 115–139.
Raza, Rosemary. In Their Own Words: British Women Writers and India, 1740–
1857. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Reeve, Patricia. ‘The “Bone and Sinew of the Nation”: Antebellum Workingmen on
Health and Sovereignty.’ In Timothy Light (ed.), Bodily Subjects: Essays on
Gender and Health, 1800–2000. London: McGill-Queens University Press, 2014,
25–52.
Rivers, Isabel. Vanity Fair and the Celestial City: Dissenting, Methodist, and Evangeli­
cal Literary Culture in England 1720–1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Robinson, Howard. The British Post Office: A History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1948.
Rogers, Pat. Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture. London: Methuen, 1972.
Roney, Jessica C., Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American
Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia, Studies in Early American Economy
and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2014.
 Bibliography 263
Roulston, Christine. Virtue, Gender, and the Authentic Self in Eighteenth-Century
Fiction. Richardson, Rousseau, and Laclos. Gainesville, FL: University Press of
Florida, 1998.
Rublack, Ulinka. ‘Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions.’ History
Workshop Journal, 53:1 (2002): 1–16.
Scheer, Monique. ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is that What Makes Them
Have a History?) A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding.’ History and
Theory, 51 (2012): 193–220.
Schneider, Gary. Vernacular Letters and Letter-Writing in Early Modern England,
1500–1700. Newark, DE: University of Delaware, 2005.
Seth, Suman. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century
British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
Sharpe, Pamela. ‘Poor Children as Apprentices in Colyton 1598–1830.’ Continuity
and Change, 6:1 (1991): 53–70.
Shepard, Alexandra. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Shepard, Alexandra. ‘Gender, the Body and Sexuality.’ In Keith Wrightson (ed.), A Social
History of England, 1500–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017, 330–351.
Siena, Kevin. Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in 18th-Century Britain. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019.
Smith, Sean Morey. ‘Seasoning and Abolition: Humoural Medicine in the Eighteenth-
Century British Atlantic.’ Slavery & Abolition, 36:4 (2015): 684–703.
Smith, Simon D. Slavery, Family, and Gentry Capitalism in the British Atlantic: The
World of the Lascelles, 1648–1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Stanley, Liz. ‘The Epistolarium: On Theorizing Letters and Correspondences.’ Auto/
Biography, 1 (2004): 201–235.
Stolberg, Michael. Experiencing Illness and the Sick Body in Early Modern Europe.
Basingstoke: Springer, 2011.
Stuber, Martin, Stefan Hächler and Luc Lienhard (eds). Hallers Netz. Ein euro­
päischer Gelehrtenbriefwechsel zur Zeit der Aufklärung. Basel: Schwabe, 2005.
Sweet, Rosemary. Cities and the Grand Tour, The British in Italy c.1690–1820.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Tadmor, Naomi. Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household,
Kinship and Patronage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Tadmor, Naomi. ‘The Concept of the Household-Family in Eighteenth-Century
England.’ Past and Present, 151 (1996): 111–140.
Tavor Bannet, Eve. Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Corre­
spondence, 1688–1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Taylor, James. ‘Voices in the Crowd: The Kirkby Lonsdale Township Letters 1809–
36.’ In Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe (ed.), Chronicling Poverty:
The Voices and Strategies of the English Poor, 1640–1840. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1997, 109–126.
Taylor, Richard C. Goldsmith as Journalist. Toronto: Associated University Presses,
1993.
Teltscher, Kate. India Inscribed: European and British Writing on India, 1600–1800.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Tomkins, Alannah. ‘“Labouring on a Bed of Sickness”: The Material and Rhetorical
Deployment of Ill-Health in Male Pauper Letters.’ In Andreas Gestrich, Elizabeth
264 Bibliography
Hurren and Steven King (ed.), Poverty and Sickness in Modern Europe. London:
Bloomsbury, 2012, 51–68.
Turco, Luigi. ‘Sympathy and Moral Sense, 1725–1740.’ British Journal for the His­
tory of Philosophy, 7:1 (1999), 79–101.
Turner, David M. ‘The Body Beautiful.’ In Carole Reeves (ed.), A Culture History of
the Human Body in the Enlightenment. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2010:
113–132.
Turner, David M. Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical
Impairment. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Turner, David M. and David Blackie. Disability in the Industrial Revolution. Man­
chester: Manchester University Press, 2018.
Turner, David M. and Alun Withey. ‘Technologies of the Body: Polite Consumption
and the Correction of Deformity in Eighteenth-Century England.’ History, 99:5
(2014): 775–796.
Van der Waal, Marijke J. and Gisbert Rutten. ‘Ego-Documents in a Historical-
Sociolinguistic Perspective.’ In Marijke J. Van der Waal and Gisbert Rutten (eds),
Touching the Past: Studies in the Historical Sociolinguistics of Ego-Document.
Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2013, 1–19.
Van Engen, Abram. Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New
England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
van Sant, Ann Jessie. Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in
Social Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Vincent, David. Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Warhman, Dror. The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eight­
eenth-Century England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004.
Watt, James. British Orientalisms, 1759–1835. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2019.
Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-
Century British Culture. Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia University Press, 2010.
Whitley, E. M. ‘Contextual Analysis and Swift’s Little Language of the Journal to Stella.’
In C. E. Bazell et al. (ed.), In Memory of J. R. Firth. London: Longman, 1966, 475–500.
Whyman, Susan. The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009.
Wild, Wayne. Medicine by Post: The Changing Voice of Illness in Eighteenth-Cen­
tury British Consultation Letters and Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006.
Williams, Abigail. ‘“I Hope to Write as Bad as Ever”: Swift’s Journal to Stella and
the Intimacy of Correspondence.’ Eighteenth-Century Life, 35:1 (2011): 102–118.
Williams, Abigail. ‘The Difficulties of Swift’s “Journal to Stella”’, The Review of
English Studies, New Series, 62:257 (November 2011), 758–776.
Wilson, Erin. ‘The End of Sensibility: The Nervous Body in the Early Nineteenth
Century.’ Literature and Medicine, 30:2 (2012): 276–913.
Withers, Charles. Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographical About the Age
of Reason. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Withey, Alun. Concerning Beards: Facial Hair, Health and Practice in England, c.
1650–1900. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
Woods, Kathryn. ‘“Facing” Identity in a “Faceless” Society: Physiognomy, Facial
Appearance and Identity Perception in Eighteenth-Century London.’ Cultural and
Social History, 14:2 (2017): 137–153.
 Bibliography 265
Woods, Kathryn. ‘The “Fair Sex”: Skin Colour, Gender and Narratives of Embodied
Identity in Eighteenth-Century British Non-Fiction.’ Journal of Eighteenth-Century
Studies, 40:1 (2017), 49–66.
Wynne Smith, Lisa. ‘The Body Embarrassed? Rethinking the Leaky Male Body in
Eighteenth-Century England and France.’ Gender & History, 23:1 (2010): 26–46.
Wynne Smith, Lisa. ‘“An Account of an Unaccountable Distemper”: The Experience
of Pain in Early Eighteenth-Century England and France.’ Eighteenth-Century
Studies, 41 (2008): 459–480.
Yallop, Helen. Age and Identity in Eighteenth-Century England. Abingdon: Routledge,
2015.

Websites
‘Mapping the Republic of Letters’, http://republicofletters.stanford.edu
‘Material Identities, Social Bodies: Embodiment in British Letters c.1680–1820’, https://
socialbodies.bham.ac.uk/
‘The Prize Papers’, https://www.prizepapers.de/database
‘Unlocking History’, http://letterlocking.org/about
‘Unlocking Mary Hamilton’s Papers’, www.projects.alc.manchester.ac.uk/maryham
iltonpapers/about/
Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.

absence and distance from family/friends modesty 150

1, 7–8, 9, 41, 73, 74, 88, 171 portrait by Reynolds 154
actresses 146–9, 156, 161 relationship with Hanger 159
Adams, John 242 relationship with Melbourne 152–3
Adams, Robert 239 relationship with Steele 158, 159
Addison, Joseph 32 reputation defended in Steele’s
alcohol consumption 181 memoir 157–8
Alexander, Robert 239 Bainbridge, Ann 197, 198
Allcocke, Joseph 245 Bainbridge, George 196–7
Allen, Julia 214 Barclay, Katie 156
Allen, Kieran 143 Barker-Benfield, G. J. 86
Almeroth-Williams, Thomas 219 Bates, Richard 17
Amory, Thomas 219 Batoni, Pompeo 55, 56
Anderson, David 85–6, 89, 95 beauty see under men; women
animals Beck, Eleanor 198, 203, 204
domestication of 214–15, 225–6, 229 Beck, Robert 204
as metaphor for foreigners 227 Beckers, Christina 65, 67
as metaphors for labour 4, 10, 212, Bentinck, William Bentinck, 1st
213, 214–15, 219–20, 221–2, 224–5 Count 55
as metaphor for poor 210 n66 Bernard, Louise 75, 76
as luxury goods 225, 228 Bicker, Henry 245
as machines 222 Bickford, J. A. R. 19
see also dogs, turnspit; horses; Black, Noah 98
monkeys bodies
animal studies 214, 215 accidents and injuries 195
Anne, Queen of Great Britain 6, 103, adolescent and youthful development
105–7 4, 9, 41–2, 46–7, 48–9, 58
Aravamudan, Srinivas 228–9 and animal metaphors 4, 10, 210 n66,
Atkinson, John 195–6 212, 213, 214–15, 219–20, 221–2,
Atkinson, Thomas 203 224–5, 227, 229, 230
Aubin, François 67 arms and touching 73
and cleanliness 192
Bacon, Francis 46–7 and climate, effects of 122, 129–30,
Baddeley, Sophia 5, 6, 10, 142, 144, 146, 135, 181
147, 148 and confinement 196–8
beauty 149 and consumption 224
as courtesan 151–2, 153 and delicacy 199–200
 Index 267
and emotions, effects of 8, 31, 96, Chatelard, Julie 70
98, 107 Chilton, Anne 218,220
failing/decaying bodies 198–200 Chippendale, Thomas 19
hands connoting activity, transaction Cicero 32
and exchange 243–4 Clarke, Norma 218
height, concerns about 53–4 Clift, Elizabeth 91
and illness and health 3–4, 5, 18, Clifton, Francis 20
19–20, 21, 27, 89–90, 92–5, 106–7, climate theory 130
108, 110, 180–1, 184, 191 colchicum/colchine 36 n34
and labour 222–3 colonialism 6, 7, 9, 123–4
legs 47, 49, 52, 114, 195, 197 Constable, Cuthbert 19
as machines 222 Constable, William 4, 5, 6, 9, 17–34
measurement of 47–8,49 alternate identity 22, 24, 34
and physiognomy 134 as Catholic 23, 30
physical decline reflecting moral education 19
decline 122–3, 134 feelings 23, 27, 30, 31, 34
racialised 123, 124, 131–2 gout 18–19, 25, 26
and sympathy, effect of 95–6 Hannah, friendship with 26, 30–1
and touch 4, 9, 64–5, 70, 71–2, 73, illness, mentioned in letters 26
77–8, 154 illness, omitted in letters 20, 21, 22, 25
weight, concerns about 54–7 opium medication 23
see also men; women portraits 18, 28, 29, 32–4, 33
Bondeson, Jan 222 Rousseau, friendship with 25–30
Booth, Wayne C. 229 Constable, Winifred 5, 6, 9, 17, 18,
Boothman, George 194, 201 19–20,22, 23, 25, 26, 32, 33, 34
Boothman, Rachel 198, 199–200 consumption and production 224
Boswell, James 212 Cook, Elizabeth Heckendorn 5, 92,
Botta, Carlo 238 160, 216
Bradford, William 241, 243, 248 Cooke, Willliam 218
Brant, Clare 5, 72, 94, 229 Cornwallis, Lord 127
Brasewell, Henry 195 courtesans 151–3, 156, 157
Breitnall, Joseph 241 Cowan Brian 148
Brockliss, Laurence 68 Coxe, William 43, 44, 47, 48
Brook, Christopher 27 Cranston, Maurice 26
Brown, Colin 156 Crone, Rosalind 192
Bryanton, Robert (Bob) 212, 221 Culley, Amy 142, 144, 147,151, 157,
Buccleuch, 3rd Duke of 49–50, 51, 52 160, 161
Buffon, Comte de 131, 132 Curll, Edmund 219
Burgh, James 51 Curran, Andrew 130
Curran, Louise 145
Caribbean
British letters from 7, 169, 170–1 Dalkeith, Charles, earl of 49, 51–2, 54
French letters from 7, 9, 66–8 Dalton, Richard 90
Carroll family 251 n11 Dartmouth, 2nd earl of 43, 44, 46, 48,
Case, Sue-Ellen 149 52, 53, 54
Cathelin 28 Dartmouth, Lady 48, 53
Catholicism 23, 30 Davies, Edward 197
Cato 32 Davis, Jim 148
celebrity 146–9, 154–5 Defoe, Daniel 106, 244
Chaigneau, William 24 Descartes, René 222
Chambers, Lady 134 Désinçay, A. M. 73
Charnier, L. 239 Dickinson, John 251 n11
Chase, Thomas 239 Dierks, Konstantin 2, 4
Dingley, Rebecca 5, 9, 103, 109, 111
268 Index
Ditz, Toby 186 n20 work animals, rhetorical use of 4,
Dockwray, Katherine 89–90 215, 221–2, 224–5, 228, 229, 230
Dodgson, George 204 Gonnal, John 203
Dodson, Thomas 204 Goodman, Dena 123
dogs, turnspit 222, 224, 225, 230 Gornall, William 196
Donoghue, Emma 142 gout 4, 17, 18–19, 25, 26, 106
Douai, English College 19 Grainger, James 216
Downer, Silas 255n81 Grand Tour 40–58
Dunn, John 19 as coming-of-age process 9, 40, 42, 43,
Dupont, Louise 71–2 44–5, 57
Durkee, John 242, 243, 247 effeminacy as possible result of 51
Dyson, George 98 and family, separation from 41
letters by Tourists 50
East India Company 122, 124, 125, 126–7 letters from parents 6, 44, 45, 46, 48,
Eliot, John 93–4 49, 58
Eliot, Mariabella 93–4 letters from tutors 4, 43, 54, 58
emotions 8, 23, 27, 28, 30, 31, 86, 87, 89, portraits 41, 55, 56
95, 150, 157–8, 246; see also sensi­ Greig, Hannah 150
bility; self-control; sympathy Grenville, George 237
epistolary fiction 88, 92,144,160, 216, Griffin, Michael 213, 216, 218, 220
218, 225, 229 Griffiths, Ralph 220
Grime, Christopher 197, 201, 205–6
Falconer, William 130 Grime, Mary 200
Farmer, George 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, Grouchy, Sophie de 88
178–9, 183, 184 Grundy, George 197
Fay, Eliza 124, 125, 126, 132, 133, Grundy, Samuel 205
134–5, 136 Guadeloupe 76
feelings see emotions; sensibility; Guiscard, Antoine de 107
self-control, sympathy
Ferguson, Adam 88, 129, 130 Hächler, Stefan 65
Findley, Christina 85–6 hack writers 10, 216, 217, 219, 221, 223,
Floyd, John 44 224; see also literary marketplace
Flynn, Carol Houlihan 104 Haider Ali 126, 132
Foote, Samuel 135, 149 Haley, John 199, 202, 206
Fraizer, Joseph 171, 172, 173, 175, Hall, Harriet 196
176–8, 179, 182, 184 Hall, James 203
French, Henry 46 Hamilton, Alexander 242
Hamilton, Sir William 57
Galen 19, 130 Hanger, John 155, 159
Garlick, Richard 195 Hanley, Ryan Patrick 87
Garnett, John 200 Hannan, Leonie 2
Garnett, Steven 191, 194 Hardwick, Julie 156
Garnett, William 200 Hare, Ann 91, 94, 95
Garrick, David 212 Hare, Elizabeth 91–2, 95
Ghose, Indira 127, 129 Harley, Robert 6, 103, 107, 108
Gibbes, Phebe 135 Harvey, Karen 191
Gikandi, Simon 133 Hastings, Warren 85
Gill, Margaret 204–5 Hazlitt, William 227
Goa, Claudine 70–1 Heaton, Dorothea 204
Goldsmith, Oliver 10, 24, 212–31 Hebert, Thaurin 78
animals, writings on 214–15, 226 Henry, Patrick 251 n11
epistolary fiction 216, 218, 219, 225, Herbert, Agnes 90–1
226–7, 229 Herbert, Edmund 90, 93
letters 216, 217, 218, 224, 230 Herbert, Lord George 43, 44, 47, 48, 53, 54
 Index 269
Holland, Lady 55 Lamb, Peniston see Melbourne, Lord
Holland, Lord 21 Laplace, M. 72
Holloway, Sally 3 La Tour, Maurice Quentin de 28
Holroyd, John 52 Laurens, John 251 n11
horses 18, 214, 219, 220 Lee family 251 n11
as metaphor for labour 10, 216, Le Fevre, Dr 20, 24, 27
219–20, 224–5, 230 Legge, Charles 43, 44, 53, 54
Howard, William 239 Legge, William 43, 44, 47
Howell, George 92 Leighton, John 93
Hull, Richard 172, 173, 180, 183 Leighton, Mary 93, 94
Hume, David 28, 87, 88, 222, 223 letters
and blackmail 145
identity as conversation 4, 90, 110
and the alternative self 22 copies and duplicates 69, 123–4
femininity see under women delivery unreliable 69, 174
and gender 5 as embodiment of the writer 3
and interaction with the ‘other’ 7, 124 and gender 5
and letter-writing 5 hand-writing 116–117, 176–7
masculinity see under men and health and illness 3–4, 5, 18, 20,
social identity 5 89–90, 92–5, 96–7, 106–7, 108, 110,
and sympathy 88 180–1, 184, 191
see also racial difference as historical record 105
illness and health see under bodies love letters 85, 86, 96
India and paper bodies 65, 72, 77
British letters from 122, 124, 125–7 and politics 6, 10, 106–7, 236, 241, 246
climate, effects of 122, 129–30 and pseudonyms 242
racial difference 131 publication of 145, 160, 161
receiving letters, metaphors for 244
Jamaica 175, 179–80, 181,183 as rehearsal site for literary ideas 216,
Jarzebowski, Claudia 73 217–18
Jay, John 242 seized from captured ships 66, 69, 170
Jefferson, Thomas 251 n11 and sexual innuendo 113–14
Jeffrey, Francis 144 as shared space 113
Jews 132 sharing of 171, 184, 216
Johnson, Esther 5, 9, 103, 109, 111 and signatures 4, 241–2
Johnson, Samuel 46, 88, 214, 216, 230 and social space 72
Johnston, John 18, 19, 20, 24 as speech, near to 67, 110–12, 171, 184
Jones, Cecily 135 and spelling errors 161, 170
Jones, Vivien 159 and standardised/formulaic phrases
65, 67, 68, 91, 172
Kant, Immanuel 131 structure and style 68
Karim-Cooper, Farah 134 and touch, evocations of 4, 9, 64–5,
Kearsley, George 24 70, 71–2, 73, 77–8, 154
Kelly, Patrick 169, 171, 172, 174, 180,182 and violence 76–7
Kenrick, William 213 see also epistolary fiction
Kildare, William Robert Fitzgerald, letter-writing 64
Lord 52, 55 advocates, use of 194, 195
Kindersley, Jemima 124, 125, 126, 129, and courtship 85, 86
131, 132–3, 135, 136 informality, increasing 21
Kirkby Lonsdale pauper letters 193–4, 207 as labour 223
kisses, in letters 57, 70–75, 154–6 and literacy 67, 68, 169–70, 192
kissing 77 and maintaining contact across
Kitchen, Ruth 198–9 distance 7–8, 10, 64, 169, 171,
Koselleck, Reinhart 66 173–4, 184
270 Index
manuals 65, 68, 91, 96 letters published against his will 144,
as networking device 2, 10, 240–1, 145, 160
242–3, 246 letters reframing relationship as
and parental guidance 73–5 romantic 152, 153
reflecting emotional and physical letters revealing controlling behaviour
states 22, 25, 103, 111–12, 113, 152, 156
115–18, ridiculed in Steele’s memoir 160
116–117, 196 spelling errors and poor education 161
shift from elitist to populist 2 men
and social identities 5 adolescence and coming-of-age 40–1,
and sympathy 4, 8, 85, 86, 88–98, 204, 42, 44–5, 46
246–7, 249 and beauty/attractiveness 6, 41, 42,
and writing professionally 217–18 52, 53–7
see also Republic of Letters and clubbability 153
Lewisham, George Legge, Viscount 43, and illness 20–1, 22, 23
44–5, 46, 48, 51–2, 53, 54, 55–7, 56 masculinity 23, 51
Lienhard, Luc 65 masculine virtues 245
Linnaeus, Carl 131 and portraits 41
Liotard, Jean-Etienne 18, 28, 29 and self-control 41, 47, 54
literacy see under letter-writing and shaving 47
literary marketplace 219, 223, 224, 228; see also Grand Tour
see also hack writers Minivelle, Stéphane 73, 75
Locke, John 42, 222 Molyneux, Dr 19
Lofthouse, Matthew 206 monkeys 228–9, 230
Loftus, John 204 Montesquieu 129, 130
Long, Edward 131 Morgan, Edmund 239
Lowry, William 200 Morritt, John and Anne 18, 21, 27
Lucy, George 53 Mott, Gershom 240,241
Lux, William 239 Mould, Samuel 90
Lyon, John 108–9
Lyons, Martyn 192 Nechtman, Tillman 125
Needham, John Turbeville 19, 24, 28
McCormack, Matthew 54 Nelson, Betty 201–2
Mackenzie, Henry 87 Nelson, Elizabeth 206
Mackintosh, Lady (Catherine) 122, Nelson, Grace 201
124–5, 130, 131, 133, 135, 136, 137 Nelson, ‘Old Joseph’ 199
Mackintosh, Sir James 122, 127, 133 Nelson, Robert 170, 171, 172, 180,
McWilliams, William 194 182¸184
Madison, James 242 Nelson, Sarah 206
Magnar, Edward 171, 172, 173, 175, Newton, Hannah 21
178, 180, 183, 184 Nickell, James 173, 182
Maguire, Richard 179 Nickell, William 171, 172, 173, 182, 184
Maier, Pauline 239 North America (British)
Mandeville, Bernard 222–3 resistance to Stamp Act 236, 237–8
Mann, Sir Horace 18, 20, 21, 24 Stamp Act Congress 238, 248
Marana, Giovanni Paolo 218 see also Sons of Liberty
Maron, Antoine von 18, 32, 33 Nussbaum, Felicity 127, 136, 146, 147,
Marouby, Christian 224 149, 156
Marshall, Edmund 20, 24
Martinique 71, 72, 73 Ogle, Ewbank 170
Melbourne, Lord 5, 10, 142, 161–2 Old Poor Law (OPL) 193, 194, 207
anxiety regarding scandal 155–7 ONeal, Edward 182–3
attracted by celebrity 154–5 O’Neill, Lindsay 2, 3, 170
opium 23
 Index 271
orientalism 127–8, 227 Reebkomp, Augustus 47
O’Shaughnessy, David 213, 216, 218, 220 Republic of Letters 2, 64, 216, 217
Ourtevan, Mlle 76–7, 78 Reynaud, M. 75
Ovid 67 Reynolds, Joshua 154, 231, 232 n18
Rich, Mary 125
Paca family 251 n11 Richardson, Samuel 87, 144
Paine, Thomas 242 Roach, Joseph 147
paupers and poverty 2, 3, 4, 10, 191–207 Robinson, Thomas 241
Pearsall, Sarah 2, 75, 95 Rockingham, Lord 26
Pearson, John 191, 197, 200 Rogers, Pat 223
Pelham, James 45 Rosenthal, Angela 150
Pelham, Thomas (later Earl of Chiche­ Rosenthal, Barbara 134
ster) 45 Rosenthal, Laura 147, 149, 153
Pembroke, 10th earl of 43, 45, 47, 53 Rossignol, Monsieur 73–4
Pembroke, Lady 47, 48, 51 Rothery, Mark 46
Penn, John 241 Rousseau, G. S. 18, 223
Perry, Gill 148 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 4, 17, 18, 21,
Phillips, Ambrose 106 25–31, 228
Pitt, William 127 Roux, Victoire 67, 71
Plutarch 32 Rozenstein, Linda W. 34
Plymouth, Other Hickman Windsor, 5th Rutten, Gijsbert 67
Earl of 55–6
Poitevin, Kimberly 134 Safdar ‘Ali, Nawab 124, 128
Poor Law see Old Poor Law (OPL) Said, Edward 127
Pope, Alexander 51, 217, 219, 223 sailors 171, 174, 180–4
Porter, Roy 18, 87, 225 Saint Domingue 70, 73, 75
portraits 18, 28, 32, 33, 41, 55, 56, 148, Schneider, Edgar W. 67
154–5 Scott, Sir Walter 88
poverty see paupers and poverty Sears, Isaac 241, 242, 245
Pratt, Isabella 203 Seigneux, Jean de 44
Pratt, Mary Louise 2 self-control 31, 34, 41
Price, Robert 50, 51 sensibility 8, 27–31, 68, 86, 88, 95, 144,
print culture 148 157–8, 171, 215, 246
Prior, James 220 and race 131
prize money 183 sex work see under women
Prize Papers, High Court of Admiralty Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 146, 147
(HCA) collection 66, 170, 185 n14, Sheridan, Thomas 104
186 n15 Shuttleworth, Christiana 94
production see consumption and sibling relationships 34
production signatures see under letters
prostitutes see courtesans Smart, Jane 124, 125, 128, 134, 136, 137
pseudonyms 242 Smith, Adam 87–8, 131, 221, 223–4
Puget de la Serre, Jean 68 Smith, John (fl1726) 90
Smith, John (fl1756; sailor) 171, 172,
racial difference 123, 124, 127, 129, 136, 173, 175, 181, 183
226 see also; sensibility (and race) Smith, Rebecca 90
blackness 130–2, 133, 136 Smith, Robert 170
whiteness 131, 132–6 Smollett, Tobias 88, 223
Radcliffe, John 106 Sokoll, Thomas 192
Ramsay, Allan 28 Sons of Liberty 4, 8, 10, 236, 238–49
Randolph, Peyton 251 n11 as informal network/organisation
Rawlinson, John 92 238–40
Rawlinson, William 96 letters signed by individuals 241–2
Raza, Rosemary 127 letters signed with pseudonyms 242
272 Index
mutual support through sympathy
Thomson, Charles 240

246–9
Thoresby, Ralph 89–90

references to hands in letters 243–4

Tillyard, Stella 148

references to masculine virtues in let­ Traquair, Lady 23–4

ters 245
Tunstall, Marmaduke 18, 21, 22, 23–4

Southey, Robert 222

Turner, David 150

Spencer, Lord Henry 51, 52

Stamp Act crisis (1765–6) 8, 10, 236–8

Vanhomrigh, Esther 116

Stanley, Liz 123

vegetarianism 215

Steele, Elizabeth 5, 6, 10,142–5, 148,

Villiers, George Bussey 45, 54

149–50, 152, 157–8, 160, 161

Vincent, David 192

Steele, Richard 223

Voltaire 27

Sterne, Laurence 87

Stevenson, David 43, 44, 46, 47, 51, 53, 55

Waal, Marijke van der 67

Stoerck, Baron Von 36 n34

Walpole, Sir Horace 20, 21

stoicism 27, 31, 34

Wanko, Cheryl 148

Stolberg, Michael 18
Ward, Thomas 90

Stuber, Martin 65
Warner, Ferdinando 23

Sturge, John 254 n44

Washington, George 251 n11

Stutterd, Jabez 95, 97

Wesley, Susanna 96

Stutterd, John 95, 96–7, 98

Wesley, William 241

Stutterd, Thomas 95,96–8

Westacott, Charles A. 214

sympathy 4, 8,86–98, 246

Wheeler, Roxann 130

causing physical reaction 96, 98, 107

Whitehead, William 54

and discussion of health 92–5

Whyman, Susan 21, 72, 169–70

and epistolary novels 88, 92

Williams, John 147

mutual sympathy 95–8, 237

Wilson, James 202

political sympathy 236, 246–9

Wilson, John 180

and role of letters in creating 86, 89–92

Wilson, William 204

as substitute for love 87

Winder, William 198

and unity of purpose, creation of 246–7,

Withey, Alun 47

249
women

see also emotions; sensibility

and beauty 6, 52–3, 74, 132–5, 150

Swift, Jonathan 5, 6, 9, 103–18

childbirth and motherhood, effects of

‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to

122, 135–6

Bed’ 104
and climate, deleterious effects of

Gulliver’s Travels 104

122, 130

hand-writing 116–18, 116–117

and cosmetics 134, 149, 150, 151

Journal to Stella 103, 104, 105, 106,

and courtship 87

109, 112, 116, 118

and femininity 124, 136

‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ 104

and sex work 149, 151–3

little language (baby talk) 111–12

and travel writing 127–8

A Modest Proposal 104

and whiteness 132–6

on Queen Anne’s health 106–7

see also actresses; courtesans

on Robert Harley being stabbed 107–8

Wood, John George 222

shingles attack 115–16

Woolf, Virginia 220–1

A Tale of a Tub 224

Wordsworth, William 88

Swords, Martin 171, 172, 174, 182, 183

Wortley Montagu, Lady Mary 128

Wright, Catherine 90

Tague, Ingrid 214

Wright, Dorothy 90

Taylor, James 192

writers, hack see hack writers

Teabay, Bettey 206

Thistlethwaite, Anne 196

Yate, John 93

Thistlethwaite, John 204

Yorke, Philip 54–5