The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800 (review)

Reviewed by: The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800 Ann Van Sant (bio) Susan Whyman . The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660-1800. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xvi+348pp. £30. ISBN 978-0-19-953244-5. Everyone with an interest in eighteenth-century cultural history should read this book. Susan Whyman's "unexpected discovery" of many "non-elite correspondences" (76) allows her to demonstrate that popular literacy was far more extensive than has been generally thought. She further shows that literacy was important not only for its practical uses in trade and commerce but also for the ways in which people below the level of the gentry worked out a sense of identity in a changing world, sustained family networks, and created a sense of family history. The Pen and the People has been well received and widely praised. Whyman was awarded the 2010 MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, and the book is now out in paperback. Although I will here offer some criticisms, they do not alter my overall judgment that the book makes a major contribution to eighteenth-century studies. Whyman has divided her book into three parts: (1) "Creating a Culture of Letters," (2) "Creating a Culture of Literacy," and (3) "From Letters to Literature." In the first, she discusses how people acquired what she calls "epistolary literacy" and then shows the significance of the development of the Royal Mail. In the second, Whyman considers the correspondence of farmers, workers, and the middling sort, with the latter particularly as they dealt with problems of "business, religion, gender, and class," and constructs a number of case studies. In the third and last part, Whyman makes an argument about the importance of "epistolary literacy" to the rise of the novel and more generally about letter writing and literary culture. The careful archival work and the disciplined research procedures that underpin this study are continually in evidence, both in the case studies and in appendices 2 and 3, in which Whyman provides concise and conceptually vibrant information in tabular form about the archives available to her and about the collections of letters she uses. She also provides detailed notes about these collections, allowing readers to join her in intellectual discovery. By inviting readers to stay close to the archive, she invites them to deepen their historical sense of the project as a whole and of the examples she uses, preventing her case studies from tending towards the anecdotal. She also graciously makes this important material accessible to others who may wish to follow up on her work. Whyman's opening the window onto the existence of this material and her intellectual labour in making it accessible, which lead to her demonstration that literacy was a crucial element of early modern life well below the gentility divide, make this book invaluable. Further more, her history of the Royal Mail and postal reform is actually exciting, as [End Page 554] she creates a sense of multiple forces-for example, the government with its program of surveillance, merchants who wanted more efficient mail routes-that drove the development and improvement of the postal service. Whyman's view that "the Royal Mail encouraged a culture of letters and literacy" (47) is plausible, but many readers may find that her enthusiastic account exceeds the evidence she provides. Her vision of a "nation of letter writers" as a previously unrecognized public sphere (71) may seem excessive, but it certainly provokes thought. And because of her work, we will all become more alert readers of material that has become familiar to us, because we now have a new layer to add to our analytic frameworks. I want, however, to lodge a criticism of Whyman's key term, "epistolary literacy." It is handy rather than illuminating; it blocks rather than invites thinking. Letters have historically been a major form of literate expression as well as a literary form, able to incorporate other forms (for example, poetry) and open to incorporation in other forms. Isolating the increasing literacy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and giving it the name "epistolary literacy," even when these exciting collections of letters have been found, creates an...

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