24 - Personal letters

Summary

Alexander Pope secretly arranged the publication of his own heavily manipulated letters in 1735. Lord Chesterfield employed letters to provide advice to his illegitimate son, advice that, in published form, supplied a conduct book for succeeding generations. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu gained posthumous fame by evoking life in Turkey through a series of letters published immediately after her death; James Boswell acquired early notoriety for his frivolous epistolary exchanges with another young man, published shortly after they were written. Thomas Gray's letters and William Cowper's were published, at least in part, for wide readerships soon after they died, and a selection of Horace Walpole's correspondence, chosen by him, appeared the year after his death. The familiar letters of travellers, literary celebrities and public wits attracted increasing audiences as the eighteenth century progressed in Britain. Well-codified generic rules often shaped their production. Letter-writing manuals had proliferated for several centuries, establishing public conventions for personal utterance. Yet, reading eighteenth-century correspondences from a chronological distance of more than two centuries, one can note diversity rather than conformity, feel the vigour of individual personality and marvel at the range of self-representation.

Liminalities and paradoxes mark personal letters in published form. Such letters poise between the public and the private: emanations of a solitary self, yet incomplete without an external reader; expressing the thoughts and feelings of an individual, yet couched partly in conventional terms; written for one particular other, but read by numerous originally unimaginable others; declaring authenticity but marked by artifice. Eighteenth-century interest in such paradoxes of private and public may be suggested by the proliferation of ostensible letters serving ostensibly public purposes.