Description
Book SynopsisThis 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.
James How's Epistolary Spaces [contains] a fascinating discussion of the ways the rise of the postal system created what he calls epistolary spaces'
Temma Berg, The Lives
Table of Contents
Introduction, 1. Glimmerings of epistolary space in Dorothy Osborne’s Letters to Sir William Temple (1652-54), 2. ‘I have been so long absent from Court9: Sir George Etherege’s personal and business letters, a courtly enclave in epistolary space (1685-89), 3. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters and the ‘Whig schism’ under George I (1716-18), 4. An epistolary redoubt: the correspondence between the Countesses of Hertford and Pomfret (1738-41), 5. Petitions and memorials from the edge: the letters of the Rev. Dr Lucius Henry Hibbins to the Duke of Newcastle (1741-58), 6. Clarissa’s cyberspace: imaginations of epistolary space in Richardson’s Clarissa.
