Writing for Strangers: Structural Transformations of the Public Letter, 1640-1790
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2017 Writing for Strangers: Structural Transformations of the Public Letter, 1640-1790 Shang-yu Sheng The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2399 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] WRITING FOR STRANGERS: STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE PUBLIC LETTER, 1640-1790 by SHANG-YU SHENG A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York 2017 ii © 2017 SHANG-YU SHENG All Rights Reserved iii WRITING FOR STRANGERS: STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE PUBLIC LETTER, 1640-1790 by SHANG-YU SHENG This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date Carrie Hintz Chair of Examining Committee Date Eric Lott Executive Officer Supervisory Committee: Rachel Brownstein David Richter Nancy Yousef THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iv ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION WRITING FOR STRANGERS: STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE PUBLIC LETTER, 1640-1790 by SHANG-YU SHENG Advisor: Carrie Hintz This dissertation examines public letters in England during the period spanning the English Civil War to the French Revolution, showing how authors employed the printed epistolary form to imagine different relations with the “stranger readers” who constituted the nascent reading public. I employ a formalist approach to analyze the various rhetorics made possible through the public letter’s framed structure, focusing on the assemblages of the narrative positions of letter writer, addressee, and reader. Each chapter describes a mode of the public letter in socio-spatial terms: spectacle, network, community, and public. Building on studies in book history and print culture, this dissertation revises the concept of the public sphere by arguing that the letter, as a popular form of public discourse in the early stages of print culture, reveals communication models which diverge from the Habermasian ideal of critical-rational debate, and visions of community other than Benedict Anderson’s nation state. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My advisor, Carrie Hintz, has my utmost thanks for her unfailing humor, support, and friendship over the past eight years. Throughout this journey, she has been my pillar. Carrie has shown me how to be a true teacher and mentor in every sense, and I can only hope to one day to approach her example. I am forever grateful to my dissertation committee, Rachel Brownstein, David Richter, and Nancy Yousef, for their generosity with their time, advice, and wisdom. My coursework with Al Coppola, Michael McKeon, Mary Poovey, and Alexander Schlutz has shaped my understanding of the literature and culture of the long eighteenth century, and I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to learn from such wonderful scholars. The City University of New York generously funded my graduate studies with fellowships and grants. Together CUNY and NYC provided a stimulating intellectual community, challenging me to grow as a scholar, teacher, and individual. I thank the Folger Shakespeare Library, the British Association for Romantic Studies, and the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies for their financial support to attend seminars and conferences, without which this dissertation would not take its current form. The Ministry of Education of Taiwan also deserves my gratitude for partially sponsoring my graduate studies. My students at Queens College taught me as much as I taught them, if not more so. Special thanks must go to the English department at Queens College for supporting me with teaching fellowships during the last two years. To my friends, furry and human, in the U.S. and Taiwan, I am so grateful to have you in my life. Finally, to Dumpling and his human Hwa-Yen, thank you. I could not have done it without you. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Public Letters I. Why Public Letters? 3 II. Print Culture and Imagined Communities 10 III. The Affordances of Epistolary Forms 13 IV. Public Letters and What They Do 19 CHAPTER ONE Spectacles of the Public Familiar Letter I. Letters in a World of Print 22 II. Positioning the Third-Person Reader 30 III. Writing for a Public 37 IV. James Howell and the Performance of an Epistolary Community 45 V. The Inward Sociability of Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters 59 CHAPTER TWO Reassembling the Public: Epistolary Networks in the Spectator I. The Social World of the Spectator 70 II. Mr. Spectator, Empty Node 76 III. An Expanding Network 85 vii IV. An Alternative to the Social Vision of the Club 93 V. Rank and Order 105 CHAPTER THREE Swift’s Drapier and the Making of His Community I. The Pseudonymous Political Letter 111 II. Community as Aggregate through Epistolary Address 120 III. The Drapier’s Rhetorical Moves 129 CHAPTER FOUR Writing Privately, Publicly: the “Public” in Burke’s and Williams’s Open Letters I. Open Letters, the Public, and Natural Feeling 149 II. “To love the little platoon we belong to . .” 161 III. “The general sympathy which is caught from heart to heart . .” 180 CONCLUSION Musings on Public Sphere Theory 195 WORKS CITED 201 viii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Title page to Epistolae Ho-Elianae, first edition (1645) 49 Figure 2. Frontispiece to The Spectator, London edition (circa 1750) 104 Figure 3. William Wood’s copper half-pence 120 Figure 4. First page of “A Letter to the Shop-keepers, Tradesmen, Farmers, and 125 Common People of Ireland” (1724) 1 INTRODUCTION Public Letters This dissertation offers a methodology for close reading the English public letter and placing it within the literary history of the long eighteenth century. I grapple with making sense of the period’s wide-ranging epistolary writing, which includes texts like Margaret Cavendish’s Sociable Letters (1664), Voltaire’s Letters on the English (1733), The Letters of Junius (1768- 72), Catherine Macaulay’s The History of England from the Revolution to the Present Time in a Series of Letters to a Friend (1778), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796). Despite their dissimilar topics and purposes—extending from personal correspondence, cross-cultural commentary, political polemics, historiography, to travel writing, and more—these texts share the form of the public letter, whose parameters I will outline in this introductory chapter. The popularity of the epistolary mode in eighteenth-century England is evident not just in its use across genres, but also in its prevalence as a medium through which authors expressed ideas about a variety of subjects including philosophy, history, education, sociability, and politics. Indeed, authors writing for publication in the period seemed to find something useful in epistolarity, even when their chosen subject matters do not appear to require the use of the letter. The various uses of epistolary writing comprise a major mode of public discourse in England during the period between the English and French revolutions, a period which coincides roughly with the rise and fall of the epistolary novel—dating from Aphra Behn’s Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (1684) to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: the Modern Prometheus (1818). Just as the epistolary novel fell out of fashion, replaced by narrative devices 2 such as free indirect discourse and the third-person narrator of the realist novel, the public letter also became less ubiquitous, as well as a less varied form, towards the turn of the century. By the end of the eighteenth century, the diverse forms of the public letter were replaced by the singular form of the open letter, a genre which continues to be relevant in our present day, and the rise of which must be understood in correlation to the solidification of the idea of a mass reading public, comprising heterogeneous and anonymous individuals—“stranger readers”—as the primary audience for whom authors know themselves to write. My approach to the public letter may be broadly understood as formalist, while seeking to avoid the ahistoricity that is often attached to the term. I find an affinity for Marjorie Levinson’s description of the movement that she calls “new formalism”: literary scholarship that attends to “the processes and structures of mediation through which particular discourses and whole classes of discourse (literary genres, for example) come to represent the real, in the same stroke helping establish that empirical domain as the real.”1 Using Levinson’s terms, this dissertation examines metamorphoses of the public letter as “the processes and structures of mediation” through which eighteenth-century authors both “represented” and “established” the reading public for whom they write. I am primarily interested in the evolution of the public letter as a mode of discourse during the development of the print market and public sphere in the long eighteenth century, and I argue that different manifestations of the public letter correlate to different conceptualizations of what constitutes a “public.”2 This argument is based on the observation that a public letter necessarily complicates the basic epistolary discursive dyad of the I-you relationship. When a letter is made public, this dyadic narrative structure becomes triadic, 1 Marjorie Levinson, “What is New Formalism?” PMLA 122.2 (2007): 561. 2 The mention of that catchphrase, public sphere, inevitably invites questions about the work of Jürgen Habermas. Though public sphere theory is a point of reference throughout this dissertation, it plays only a minor role in my account of the public letter.