Epistolary Spaces

English Letter-writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson's "Clarissa"

James How

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781138712027
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351774154
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This title was first published in 2003. The author explores and describes the nature of what he terms "epistolary spaces", phenomena that came into being as a result of the foundation during the 1650s of a Post Office available to the general public. He focuses on the history of letter-writing by English men and women, and in so doing he shows how the imaginations of letter writers were affected by the increasingly cheaper, faster and more efficient postal services that were developed throughout the time period covered. The book makes a detailed study of five "real" correspondences, reading the letters in terms of their social and political interest and addressing such concerns as class, gender, collections of model letters and the importance of London to English epistolary spaces. How portrays epistolary spaces variously as arenas in which to explore the new urban culture of London, in the love letters of Dorothy Osborne (1652-4); courtly enclaves, in the diplomatic letters of the dramatist Sir George Etherege (1685-9); and aristocratic redoubts, in the correspondence between the Countesses of Hertford and Pomfret (1739-41). Finally, How examines the letters that constitute Richardson's novel "Clarissa", showing how the artistic achievement of Richardson's greatest novel was aided by almost a century of just such imaginations of epistolary spaces as are to be found in the letters of Clarissa Harlowe, Anna Howe and Robert Lovelace.

Chapter 1
Glimmerings of epistolary space in Dorothy Osborne's Letters to Sir William Temple (1652-54)

Blest be the man! his memory at least,
Who found the art thus to unfold his breast,
And taught succeeding times an easy way
Their secret thoughts by letters to convey;
To baffle absence and secure delight
Which, till that time, was limited to sight.
From Anne Finch's 'To a friend in praise of the invention of letters' (1987, 29)

In the spring of 1655 about 200 royalists, led by a former colonel named John Penruddock, seized the assize judges in Salisbury, It was an attempt to rally the royalist cause by means of a single audacious act; but it failed. Not only did Penruddock fail to gain support for his act from the local populace, or indeed from anyone else in England, but also his men began almost at once to be split by internal divisions. His plans in ruins and morale in tatters, Penruddock gave it all up and decided on a dash for the west. But flight turned out to be yet another mistake as even worse was yet to come, for the kidnappings had quickly, it seemed almost impossibly quickly, drawn Oliver Cromwell's baleful eye upon Salisbury. Instead of escape there lay to the west only an ambush, manned by a large body of alert troops. 'Penruddock's Rising' was over almost before it had begun.

Attempting to account for what was behind this very rapid suppression of a potentially damaging revolt, Ivan Roots (1992) looks to Cromwell's icily capable Secretary of State, John Thurloe. Specifically, Roots points to two of Thurloe's most successful innovations: the intelligence and interception system that he had set up and the establishment of the Post Office that allowed for a good deal of this intelligence and interception to take place. The existence of the Post Office ensured that plotters and government alike had no choice but to be always aware of epistolary as well as other spaces. Of course, ad hoc dispatches and pieces of correspondence had always been sent in times of war. The running of the original marathon is only the most famous of examples. But here was a government-sponsored network of connections which was always there and which in terms of speed, reliability and sheer extent could rival any private form of communication. Moreover, it was sanctioned and policed by the government. It was thus wholly unlike private forms of correspondence, which were in effect made illegal and hence subject to stop and search procedures, and which were for this reason unreliable. Whoever had control of epistolary space and the ability to use it with impunity had a mighty advantage in times of conflict.

The Letters to Sir William Temple of Dorothy Osborne, daughter of the last royalist to remain fighting for Charles I, were written during this period of the establishment of the Post Office. For although Thurloe was not officially made Postmaster General until the summer of 1655, by this time he already had absolute power over the posts and could examine letters at will. This control had begun as early as December 1652 when Thurloe, shortly after he had become Secretary of State, also became a member of the Council of State and thus took his place at the head of the Department of Intelligence. As he famously chose to muster much of this intelligence by means of the perusal of intercepted letters, the early 1650s may at first appear to be an inauspicious moment for the production of a set of love letters between members of a royalist and parliamentarian family. Alternatively, it may be seen as no more than a coincidence that Cromwell made Thurloe his head of intelligence in exactly the same month as Osborne wrote the first of her letters to Temple.¹ This chapter, however, argues that Osborne opportunistically took advantage of her imaginations of epistolary spaces in order vicariously to experience the emergence of a new and vibrant metropolitan culture. The opportunity was a result of the prolongation of her courtship that was made necessary by the opposition of both the Temple and Osborne families to a marriage. In her taking of this opportunity Osborne will be seen as uncomfortably similar to the sinister Thurloe, who took advantage of construction and control of the Post Office in order to suppress Penruddock's abortive attempt to rally the royalist cause.²

Private carriers vs the Post Office

If the epistolary spaces set up by the Post Office were public and did give the level of connectivity and the kind of access to London described in my introduction, then it is scarcely surprising that Osborne's family would have preferred her to use their own private carriers for the delivery of her letters. This, as Ν. H, Keeble points out, was as a result of the prevailing view during the seventeenth century of 'Woman's innate wilfulness, deceitfulness, cunning and lasciviousness' (1994, 71). In opposition to these womanly vices were placed the enforced virtues of obedience and submissiveness to masculine authority. This was an authority that was transferred from father to husband as directly as possible, with the result that for women the family and the domestic were supposed to represent the sum total of their concerns.³ In this scheme of things there would have been no reason at all in the minds of her family for Osborne to dally either in reality or in imagination about the streets of London; nor indeed would there have been any reason to engage in a lengthy courtship by letters with the unsuitable Temple.

For large parts of her correspondence Osborne did not make use of the new Post Office. She relied instead for the sending and receiving of her letters upon a system of private carriers that operated between the Osborne family estate, at Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, and London. The two carriers, Harrold and Collins, made one return trip to London every week. They arrived at Chicksands every Thursday and left for London every Monday. The distance between Chicksands and London was roughly forty miles and the carriers' route took them through Shefford, Hitchin, Welwyn, Hatfield, Barnet, Highgate, Holloway and Islington. Letters sent by the carriers would therefore have allowed Osborne a reasonable level of contact with both Temple and with London. Indeed, it is unlikely that such a regular and reliable system of carrying could have been in operation much before the 1630s and the improvements to the coach-roads that took place during those years. Nor would Osborne have been able to resort to a reliable postal service, when the carriers were not convenient, much before 1653.⁴ And it is quite clear from a reading of her letters that this is exactly what she very frequently did. These then are transitional letters-written on the cusp of the emergence of epistolary spaces. I have chosen to look at them precisely as a result of Osborne's ambiguous relationship to these new and unfamiliar spaces. What did they mean to her? And what was the difference for her between sending letters on the one hand by private carrier and on the other by the Post Office?

Osborne's use of the Post Office is demonstrated after she had made a visit to London in November 1653. Henry Osborne, her domineering brother, recorded the following in his diary at this time: 'This day my sister went to St Albon's where our Coach met her' (quoted in Parker 1987, 340). Clearly, whilst she was waiting for the family coach to return her to Chicksands, Osborne took advantage of the availability of postal services in that place, for in her next letter she asked Temple: 'Had you the bitt of paper I sent you from St Albon's [?]' (149).⁵ This is interesting for three reasons. First, because Osborne's needs were clearly not being satisfied by the carriers Harrold and Collins; who did not even travel through St Albans on their route to London and in any case were not available to make sudden and unexpected deliveries. The weekly trips they made were not enough for Osborne: she wanted to be in touch with Temple on a more regular basis than they allowed. Second, because the letter she sent from St Albans was in her own words only a 'bitt of paper'. It was not a well thought out missive in the old style: it was a conversational scrap. Osborne wanted to stay in contact with Temple in the manner of a casual conversation rather than a well thought out letter, pondered over for the best part of a week. And third, because the letter she sent from St Albans would not have been known about by her family, as very likely would a letter that had been sent by one of the family carriers.

These then were some of Osborne's likely motives for making the transition whenever she could from private carrier to public Post Office. Taken together they pinpoint Osborne's desire to open up the kinds of epistolary spaces between herself and Temple that had only been hinted at to her in her earlier once-a-week letters.

Once Temple had removed to Dublin—which he did early in 1654— transition to use of the Post Office became essential, for the Osborne family carriers could only deliver letters as far as London. At first Osborne was unaware of how her letters would be carried thence, merely carrying on writing to Temple under cover of her close friend Nan Stacy: 'You bid mee write Every week and I am doeing it without considering how it will come to you, let Nan look to that with whome I suppose you have left the orders of conveyance' (187). But once Osborne herself had removed to London, after the death of her father, she became of necessity quickly acquainted with the workings of the new postal services—as she revealed in a letter of June 1654:

Why doe you say I failed you indeed 1 did not Jane is my witnesse she carryed my letter to the White-hart by Snt Jameses, and twas a very long one too; 1 carryed one thither since my self and the woman of the house was soe very angry because I desyr'd her to have a care ont that I made the Coachman drive away with all posible speed least she should have beaten mee. (198)

The collection of letters from the 'White-hart by Snt Jameses' was evidently some part of the organisation of the weekly packet service with Ireland that John Manley had promised to effect in order to secure the farm of the Post Office in 1653.⁶ Interestingly, this service was still available to Osborne, if perhaps less directly, even after she had removed from London to her uncle's house in Kent. For once there she excused the shortness of a letter as follows: 'my Brother told mee hee did not send his till ten a clock this morning and now hee cal's for mine at seven, before I am up' (204). Thus it is clear that by 1653 at the very latest Osborne was able to send letters to Temple by these various means pretty much wherever he was and pretty much wherever she was, without any significant delay. Consequently, as she herself noted in an attempt to convince herself that Temple's being in Dublin rather than in London did not mark a worsening of her situation, 'my heart has failed me twenty times since you went ... though I know 30 miles distance and 300 are the same thing' (187). This was not a situation which could have occurred for a woman in Osborne's position before the 1650s.

The letter in which Osborne described barely escaping a beating in the 'White-hart' also evidences just how much the writing and the reading of a letter is affected by awareness of the period of the transmission of that letter. This is an awareness which, when a letter is sent by the Post Office, fosters imaginations of epistolary spaces. An illustration of how this is so occurs in the letters from Madame de Sévigné to her daughter, Madame de Grignan, written in France between 1671 and 1694. In the midst of a melancholy contemplation of the 'thousands and thousands of miles' between herself and her daughter—a frequent topic of discussion in their correspondence—de Sévigné remarked:

You put it very well: we talk to each other and see each other through a thick piece of crape. You know Les Rochers, and your imagination knows more or less where to find me. For my part, I do not know where I am; I have made a Provence for myself, and a house at Aix that is perhaps more beautiful than yours really is: I can see you and find you there. (Quoted in Barnwell 1960, 61)

The 'thick piece of crape' is clearly an effect of the time it takes for letters to be delivered over long distances. But the point here is that if you know precisely where a letter that you have sent is, at any given time and because you yourself have arranged for it to be sent and received, then you are not imagining epistolary spaces. Epistolary space is somewhere abstract and not precise to you because it was there before you even sent your letter. It can be a vaguely but never a specifically comforting or threatening place. De Sévigné's imagination of a ghostly social space within which the addresser and addressee of a letter can meet each other and walk about, although seeing each other through a 'thick piece of crape', is as such a powerful and significant metaphor; but it is nothing if not abstract.

The clandestine nature of the correspondence by private carriers that Osborne was forced to as a result of familial interference must only have served to increase her desire for an abstract and public space into which she could send as many letters as she liked. For example, on the reverse of the very first letter in the sequence of her letters published by Parker are the words: 'For Mrs Painter/ In Covent Garden/ Keep this letter till it bee calld for' (39). This evidence demonstrates that Osborne was at this time writing under cover to a Mrs Painter who would hold the letter until Temple, by prior arrangement, arrived to pick it up. The effect of such an arrangement was to bring down an immediate and deadening portcullis on Osborne's imagination of any epistolary spaces. For when Osborne invited further correspondence from Temple ('But if you please to Confirme it to mee by another, you know how to dirrect it' [39]) she affirmed that the letter she had just sent would remain at Mrs Painter's until Temple got the chance to retrieve it. In effect her correspondence and her involvement with London and Temple was shut down until Temple could manage to pick up this letter.

The Covent Garden arrangement also involved Osborne in complex but specific imaginations of the progress of letters to and from Temple and herself about the streets of London. For to ensure that Osborne had his letters on time Temple had to deliver them to Mrs Painter's house very early in the morning:

In Earnest I am troubled that you should bee putt to it, and have chid the Carrier for comeing out soe soone. He sweares to mee hee never comes out of Towne before eleven a clock, and that My Lady Painters footman, (as he calls him) brings her letters two howers sooner then hee needs to doe. I told him hee was gon one day before the letter cam, hee vowes hee was not, and that your old freind Collins never brought letters of my Lady Painters in's life. (50)

These are details about the progress of a letter that those who send their letters via a Post Office can never know. Later directions on the outsides of letters give more information as to where Mrs Painter's house was to be found: 'For Mrs Painter at her house/ in Bedford Street next the Goate/ In Coven Garden' (78). Above all, then, Osborne at this stage in her correspondence had no chance to imagine the abstract space I have described. She was far too concerned with arranging herself the specific mechanics of the delivery and receipt of each of the letters.

Nor was Osborne forced to imagine the specific progress of her letters only across London. By far the most dangerous stage that early letters of the correspondence had to cross was in the immediate vicinity of Chicksands. At first Osborne's anxiety in respect of the violation of her letters was directed at the carriers. For example, in May 1653 she revealed that she had 'chid' one of the carriers 'most unreasonably' for:

when hee gave mee your letter I found the uper seale broake open, and underneath, where it uses to bee only Closed with a litle waxe there was a seale, which though it were an Anchor & a heart, mee thoughts it did not looke like yours, but lesse, and much worse cutt. This suspition was soe stronge upon mee, that I chid till the Poore fellow was redy to Crye, and Swore to mee that it had never bin Touched since hee had it. (86)

To my mind the excessive anger directed towards the carrier here (which only came to an end when the carrier revealed he was illiterate) was an effect of the way in which, as Barry Reay notes, gentry of the period were involved in 'maintaining their social position by spatial separation from the labourers' (1985, 16). If this were so, then it is understandable that she would have felt insecure about relying entirely upon labourers who were known to her personally for the maintenance of her imaginations of epistolary space. What she must have desired above all was again an abstract space supported by anonymous officials.

An examination of the manuscripts of Osborne's letters, held in the British Library, reveals just how much the mechanics of preparation for a specific and difficult transmission affected them. Figure 1 shows a representation of the still visible—and incredibly intricate—foldings on the letter the British Library terms 'BL 2-3' (which Parker terms 'Letter l' of the sequence). When fully folded the letter would have been very small indeed: showing only the tiny square upon which the ad...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Editor's Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Glimmerings of epistolary space in Dorothy Osborne's Letters to Sir William Temple (1652-54)
• Chapter 2. 'I have been so long absent from Court': Sir George Etherege's personal and business letters, a courtly enclave in epistolary space (1685-89)
• Chapter 3. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Turkish Embassy Letters and the 'Whig schism' under George I (1716-18)
• Chapter 4. An epistolary redoubt: the correspondence between the Countesses of Hertford and Pomfret (1738-41)
• Chapter 5. Petitions and memorials from the edge: the letters of the Rev. Dr Lucius Henry Hibbins to the Duke of Newcastle (1741-58)
• Chapter 6. Clarissa's cyberspace: imaginations of epistolary space in Richardson's Clarissa
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index