Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century. - Review - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1999 by Konstantin Dierks

Chapters Two and Three concern the tremendous difficulty of conveying letters from place to place prior to the emergence of modern postal service and railway transportation in the nineteenth century. Opening with an evocative account of the experiences of a French missionary nun in the seventeenth century, Chapter Two sets up the hook's leading theme of human resourcefulness in ferreting out ways to convey letters across an ocean from the New World to the Old. French colonists relied on the private favors of travellers and voyagers for the conveyance of letters, whereas, after 1763, Canadian subjects gradually patronized the public institution of postal service to convey their mail not only to Europe, but also to the United States. The book ends on the threshold of railway innovation in the 1820s, and only then did the post office manage to usurp the customary role served by personal favors in the conveyance of mail.

Just as the three authors of Correspondence describe prescriptive texts as an inhibiting influence on the social practice of letter writing, so does Harrison describe material resources likewise as an inhibiting factor. People's limited chances to convey mail from one place to another had a constraining effect comparable to limited opportunities to learn the art of letter writing. It is surprising, then, that while Harrison concedes in the introduction that her narrative is based on the experiences of the high end of the social spectrum, she nevertheless insists that such folk were somehow representative of the whole of society. Until Next Year limns a dynamic history of mail conveyance, yet Harrison's discussion of epistolary conventions is oddly static across 200 years, an image that does not square with the trajectory of cultural change described in Correspondence.

Together, these fascinating books depict a significant expansion of epistolary culture in the French-speaking world between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the lag between the 1991 French edition and the 1997 English translation means that Correspondence should be read in conjunction with other recent treatments of French epistolarity. One set of scholars has continued to plumb further the world of letter manuals and published literary correspondences, [1] while another has been examining the emergence of female epistolary authors as well as male representations of female letter writing.2 In the end, it must be said that all of this burgeoning work on letter writing in France as well as New France creates a need for comparative research into epistolary culture in England and its North American colonies.

ENDNOTES

(1.) In English, see Janet Gurkin Altman, "Political Ideology in the Letter Manual (France, England, New England)," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 18 (1988): 105--122; Elizabeth C. Goldsmith, Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (Philadelphia, 1988), Ch. 1; John Howland, The Letter Form and the French Enlightenment: The Epistolary Paradox (New York, 1991); Janet Gurkin Altman, "Epistolary Conduct: The Evolution of the Letter Manual in France in the Eighteenth Century," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 304 (1992): 866--869; Deidre Dawson, Voltaire's Correspondence: An Epistolary Novel (New York, 1994); Dena Goodman, "Epistolary Property: Michel de Servan and the Plight of Letters on the Eve of the French Revolution," in Early Modern Conceptions of Property, John Brewer and Susan Staves, eds. (New York, 1995), 339--364.