Anxiety in Action : Letters of Advice Between the Constables of East Bergholt in the Early Nineteenth Century

This is a repository copy of Anxiety in action : Letters of Advice between the Constables of East Bergholt in the early nineteenth century.. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/113312/ Version: Published Version Article: Broughton, Trev orcid.org/0000-0003-1513-1647 (2017) Anxiety in action : Letters of Advice between the Constables of East Bergholt in the early nineteenth century. Nineteenth-Century Studies. pp. 101-118. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ Anxiety in Action: Letters of Advice between the Constables he correspondence of John T Constable (1776–1837), edited for the Suffolk Records Soci- of East Bergholt in the ety by R. B. Beckett in the 1960s, has been thoroughly trawled for the evidence it offers of the evolution of, and chang- Early Nineteenth Century ing influences on, his life and work as a landscape artist, as well as for the touch- ing picture it affords of his prolonged and ultimately successful courtship of the local rector’s granddaughter, Maria Bicknell (1788–1828).1 Here, I examine the TREV BROUGHTON letters through a different lens, focusing on that portion of the family correspondence radiating from the family home in East Bergholt, and asking a series of ques- tions at the interface of the biographical, the literary, and the historical. What do these letters do, and how do they do it? What do they suggest about the role and practice of correspondence in everyday family life in the early years of the nineteenth century? What part does the epistolary circulation of advice play in the maintenance of the correspondence and of family ties? Much scholarly work on letters has taken as its starting point the history and ubiquity of the letter-writing manual, an approach that neglects the study of letter writing as a social practice.2 The impact of this branch of conduct literature on ordinary letters has largely been Nineteenth Century Studies 26 (2012): 101–114. © 2012 Nineteenth Century Studies Association. All rights reserved, 0893-7931/2011. Nineteenth Century Studies 101 taken for granted or ignored, and stud- CONDUCTING CORRESPONDENCE ies of ordinary correspondence that do There is now a well-established corpus take letter-writing manuals into account of scholarly work attentive to the signifi- tend to find that their influence was cance of letter manuals and model letters relatively modest. Here, I investigate the within various literatures of conduct and practice rather than the theory of letter pedagogy, notably the French and An- writing, construing practice in two ways. glophone. Educational texts in a range First, I see the Constable family corre- of genres, including but not restricted spondence as transaction – that is, as the to letter-writing manuals (or so-called virtual enactment of quotidian relation- secretaries), have been shown to stress ships. In this context, letter-writing con- the importance of correct habits of cor- ventions might be said to matter insofar respondence and of familiarity with rel- as they can accommodate contingency evant conventions, as part of the wider and negotiation. Secondly, I suggest that project of disseminating what Dana C. the correspondence is pragmatic: it is Elder dubs an “ethics of obligation.”3 The about making things happen. One thing exemplary letter as featured in letter- the letters bring about is the correspon- writing manuals not only illustrates for dence itself, since correspondence needs its reader rhetorical competence and the to be self-perpetuating, so much rhetori- correct relations between classes, gen- cal effort goes into achieving that end. ders, generations, and even nations;4 it Finally, I suggest that letter writing in the may also model more aspirational quali- Constable family is concerned with in- ties, such as wit, financial probity, sensi- fluencing conduct, not because the let- bility, confidentiality, and integrity.5 Nor ters are in thrall to the advice literature is correspondence between intimates ex- on letter writing, but because the letters empt from the battery of recommenda- in themselves constitute a literature of tions. Written communications between advice. I argue that the Constable family family members and between friends – correspondence is an evolving conduct often called familiar letters – are, accord- literature, in which key members offer, ing to the letter-manual paradigm, as not just advice, but models of advice- hemmed about by rules and ideals as are giving, striving in this way to perpetuate communications between employee and both the familial and the correspondent employer, client and patron. Even when elements of the textual transaction. The the ideal in question is naturalness, it re- family-in-writing is understood by its mains a learned, and normative, value. members as work in progress, and that While scholarship increasingly takes understanding forms a part of their on- account of social change and competi- going work. tion between constituencies, the cur- I will illustrate this argument by ex- rent scholarly concern with the letter ploring Ann Constable’s (1748–1815) self- as part of print culture’s armory of man- construction as an anxious mother, a ners tends to foreground the ideologi- persona that legitimizes her advice-giv- cal element of correspondence. Seen in ing role in her children’s lives long after this context, letters are primarily about they have attained adulthood, and that conforming and confirming, about gen- leaves traces in their own interactions erating, reproducing, and regulating an once she is gone. Combining affect with assumed social consensus.6 Given what authority, this disposition is intelligible we now recognize as the longevity, popu- as a site of tender vulnerability, but also larity, multiplicity, and attention to detail as an exercise in persuasion and power. of conduct literature, and especially of As such, her expressions of anxiety illu- the letter manual, everything about cor- minate how epistolary advice-giving, like respondence, from the choice of paper to other apparently ritualized conventions the manner of folding it, from the pitch of letter writing, were key to family cor- of a compliment to the layout of the ad- respondence not just as genre but as dy- dress, from the appearance of spontane- namic social practice. ity to the rhetorical organization,7 would appear to be predetermined by deeply 102 Anxiety in Action ingrained standards of propriety and convention. When one adds to this the ual mean that it may lend itself to a range recognition that, until at least 1840, the of readings, from the pleasurably compli- British postal service was itself a matrix ant to the consciously transgressive. She of surveillance and counter-insurgency,8 goes on to hypothesize “resistant read- any idea of the letter as self-expressive, as ings of [eighteenth-century] conduct lit- subjective rather than subjected, seems erature which might have emerged from, utterly quaint. Insofar as letters conform and contributed to, that atmosphere of to well-established epistolary conven- family negotiation and public debate tions, offer formulaic advice to their around issues of desire, pleasure, duty recipients, and model decorum on the and property.”10 If the impact of prescrip- part of their senders, they can appear to tive writing on any particular behavior function as a transparent medium of so- or belief is seldom straightforward or cial regulation. According to this way of predictable, and in any case difficult to thinking, the maxims and pious sayings prove in retrospect, the case of letter we find in the Constable family’s cor- writing is especially refracted. Even the respondence do little more than regis- survival of a tenet or protocol derived ter their successful interpellation by an from print culture in a given familiar inescapably conservative letter-writing letter does not guarantee its impact on regime. the letter’s addressee and hence on the The existence, or even the consump- correspondence. The relationship be- tion, of a letter manual does not, how- tween epistolary dogma and actual cor- ever, mean its advice is followed. The in- respondence – between the normative fluence of conduct literature in general, and the normal – is thus complicated, to and of a body of letter-writing conven- say the least.11 For an epistolary ideal to tions and exempla in particular, is noto- make its mark on human interaction it riously difficult to gauge.9 For one thing, must take its chances in a disconcerting letter-writing guides were not as inter- bagatelle of incommensurate interests nally consistent with their own prin- and forces, including competing ideals ciples as their authors pretended and as and pragmatic (and therefore nonideal) some commentators imply. Extraneous negotiations. Needless to say, the stock values – such as celebrity, tradition, cu- figures and standard exchanges of the riosity, excitement, and fun – frequently letter manuals – “an officer in the army, overrode morality in the selection of ex- to his son at a boarding school, recom- empla. Recent scholars have noted the mending diligence in his studies,” or “a consequent moral divergences between young woman, just gone to service in the exemplary letters offered for imita- London, to her mother in the country”12 tion by secretaries and manuals, and the – seldom survive the complex situations exemplary correspondents the readers and shifting relationships that real corre- are supposed to aspire to be.

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