Reviewed by Sarah M. S. Pearsall | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4

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Reviewed by Sarah M. S. Pearsall | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Northwestern University

Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820. By Eve Tavor Bannet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 371 pages. $90.00 (cloth).
"What can bespeak the Gentleman, the Scholar, or the Man of Business, better than a well wrote Letter? How very persuasive it is! how anxiously it pleads its Master's Cause!" So declared a 1789 edition of the most popular letter-writing manual of the eighteenth century, The Complete Letter-Writer. Targeting the concerns that drove many to wish to master the "well wrote Letter," letter-writing manuals proliferated in Great Britain and its American colonies in the eighteenth century. Though such mamals was popular and many works were reprinted throughout the century, few scholars have devoted much attention to them. This was true in 1934, when Katherine Gee Hornbeak published her pioneering study of this genre, and until lately, little had changed.¹ More recently, however, historians and literary scholars have begun to focus much more on this genre and the place of letters in eighteenthcentury life more generally.	1
In Empire of Letters, literary scholar Eve Tavor Bannet devotes sustained attention to letter-writing manuals, their publication histories, and their lessons. Her coverage—from England to Scotland to the North American mainland colonies and states—is commendable. The book is well organized and offers fine-grained analysis of the complex, wide-ranging genre of the letter manual. Moving beyond the epistolary novel, Bannet looks to numerous manuals, some canonical texts that include letters, and an occasional unpublished (at the time) letter to make her persuasive claim that "letter manuals provide a heretofore largely untapped box of tools, which change the ways in which we can understand and read manuscript, printed and 'literary' letters" (313).	2
After all, in the eighteenth century, learning to write letters well was an essential skill for many gentlemen, scholars, and men of business, as well as their wives and daughters, especially if their ventures immersed them in ever-burgeoning empires. Bannet suggests the interconnectedness of letters and empire, arguing that manuals encouraged their readers to imagine transatlantic families, friends, businesses, and nations and to consider correspondents "beyond the Sea" (41). Relying on notions of Anglicization and exceptionalism, Bannet contends that "the extension of letter-writing to all manner and ranks of people in late seventeenthand eighteenth-century Britain and British-America by means of manuals ... coincided with the expansion of empire, and was its sine qua non" (4). According to Bannet, the kinds of conventions marketed by the manuals informed the letters of many writers, allowing them to begin to participate in imperial networks of communication.	3
The first part of the book deals with the context of letter writing, the "letteracy" of individuals in this period, and the "architectonics" of letter-writing manuals. This section includes basic coverage of the postal system, literacy, and the use of standardized English as well as concerns about the range of classes addressed. Bannet might have done more to trace the circulation of the manuals (full library catalogues and probate inventories would have supplied more concrete evidence for her claims about their popularity). Nevertheless she does look briefly at these issues, arguing on the basis of the sheer number of editions that manuals were, in David D. Hall's words, "steady sellers" (22) on both sides of the Atlantic. She pays close attention to the various forms of letters offered in these manuals, making clear the formulaic nature of a number of key epistolary types (letters of condolence, for instance). This provides a useful corrective to scholars who have too often used such letters as evidence of "genuine feelings." There was a long tradition of writing letters in which even the spaces left near the superscription and subscription were significant, and Bannet is attentive to these textual subtleties. She also ably details how letters might have been read and shared.	. . .

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