“Pen and Ink Communion”: Evangelical Reading and Writing in Antebellum America mary kelley RITING to his mother and sister on 31 January 1834, W minister and moral reformer Samuel Francis Smith highlighted the crucial role that evangelically oriented read- ing and writing played in the lives of his family. “You will re- ceive,” he told Sarah Smith and Susan Eleanor Smith Parker, “a Waterville Journal Feb. 1, & another by Sat. following, each contains 2 of my articles—also, perhaps, a Zion’s Advocate pretty soon, with another. The Watchman soon has one from me, & Temperance Journals.” In addition to contributing to various newspapers and magazines, Smith, who had taken a Baptist pulpit in Waterville, Maine, and had begun teaching at the local college, was circulating among his parishioners other popular forms of print, including the tracts his family was sending him from Boston. In his reading and writing, he also depended on and made reference to “steady sellers,” devo- tional works in which he had immersed himself as a student at I am indebted to the Huntington Library and, in particular, to Director Roy Ritchie, now retired, for the funding that supported the research for this essay. I am grateful to readers whose particular interests helped me to frame an essay that reaches across various disciplines and fields. Special thanks to Michael Ermarth, Dena Goodman, Robert Gross, Christine Heyrman, Carol Holly, Susan Juster, Steven Mullaney, David Nord, Daniel Ramirez, and Sidonie Smith. At the University of Michigan, Marie Stango has defined the exemplary research assistant, responding to a host of queries with a readiness that was matched by insight and imagination. I also wish to thank Michigan’s Howard Brick, who in organizing a session at the 2010 annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians gave me the opportunity to share my ideas about evangelical reading and writing practices. Philip Pochoda posed larger questions about legibility and significance. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIV, no. 4 (December 2011). C 2011 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 555 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00130 by guest on 25 September 2021 556 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Harvard College and Andover Theological Seminary as well as, more recently, popular titles such as Harriet Newell’s memoir and Lyman Beecher’s sermons.1 “‘Pen and Ink Communion,”’ as Smith, on 15 January 1834, christened the letters he exchanged with his family, marries the field of cultural history and the analytic of book history, par- ticularly the latter’s concern with the hermeneutics of reading and writing practices. It asks, as Janice Radway has, whether there might be an alternative to Robert Darnton’s communica- tions circuit, which treats authors, publishers, booksellers, and readers as discrete entities. Authors, as she remarks, are always readers, and during the process of creation they work with phrases, narrative conventions, character types, and plot de- vices they have encountered in other texts. And, as she reminds us further, readers engage texts from their own perspectives, raiding and revising them to suit their purposes.2 The letters written by Smith, Sarah Smith, Susan Parker, and Mary White, the woman Smith would marry after he had settled in Waterville, are themselves a narrative, a story about 1Samuel Francis Smith to Sarah Smith and Susan Eleanor Smith Parker, 31 January 1834, Samuel Francis Smith Papers, Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. All further citations to the Smith family’s correspondence will be to this collection and will be cited by date in the text. I wish to thank the Huntington Library for permission to quote from the Samuel Francis Smith Papers and Olga Tsapina, the collection’s curator, and Karen Lystra for valuable information about the collection. “Steady sellers” is the descriptor used for religious books that remained in print for several decades. For an analysis of their significance in devotional practice, see David D. Hall, Cultures of Print: Essays in the History of the Book (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), pp. 61–64, 66–68. 2I have chosen the term “analytic” to suggest that the history of the book as it is currently pursued brings together particular theoretical premises, research agendas, and bodies of evidence. In this formulation, I am indebted to the introduction to American Studies: An Anthology, ed. Janice Radway, Barry Shank, Penny Von Eschen, and Kevin Gaines (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), pp. 4–5. In “What’s the Matter with Reception Study? Some Thoughts on the Disciplinary Origins, Concep- tual Constraints, and Persistent Viability of a Paradigm,” in New Directions in Reception Study, ed. Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 327–51,esp.338–39, Janice Radway responds to Robert Darnton’s now classic circuit, which appeared originally in “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus (Summer 1982): 65–83 (the essay has been reprinted most recently in Darnton’s The Case for Books [New York: Public Affairs, 2009], pp. 175–206). For an introduction to the scholarship on reading, see Hall, “Readers and Reading in America: Critical Per- spectives,” in Cultures of Print, pp. 169–88, and, more recently, Leah Price, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2004): 303–20. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00130 by guest on 25 September 2021 EVANGELICAL READING AND WRITING 557 deeply committed evangelicals who relied on reading and writ- ing to meet the double mandate of Protestant piety—preparing oneself as well as preparing others within reach to meet the promise of salvation. Their story intertwines with antebellum America’s book trades and benevolent societies, which pro- duced and disseminated the books, magazines, tracts, and news- papers that called Americans to national conversion and global millennium. Much of the correspondence took as its subject the letters that filled the books the family was reading. This, then, is a related narrative, a story about letters within letters. It is a tale about how individuals used epistolary writing for mu- tual enlightenment. “Letters mingle Soules,” poet John Donne tells us, as indeed they did for Smith and his correspondents. Their shared examination of lived experience through the lens of doctrine served not only to mark their progress on the jour- ney toward salvation but also to instruct others in the ways of faith. The “pen and ink communion” the Smiths practiced involves three dimensions of reciprocity. First, pen and ink, two inan- imate objects, when applied to a third, paper, establish the necessary material conditions for the epistolary act. With the intervention of human intelligence, which both stirs those inan- imate objects to their task and sends their productions into the world, the epistolary exchange is set in motion: letters are writ- ten, and letters are received and read. In this second dimension of reciprocity, reading and writing, writing and reading, as the doubling suggests, function as mutually constitutive acts. For many antebellum Americans, these practices, which continually intersected and reinforced one another, were fundamental to articulating an identity with which to act upon the world. In the final, symbolically powerful dimension, “pen and ink commu- nion” takes on a spiritual character. In the extended metaphor of communion, Smith and his family were partaking of the host in the form of reading and writing. This communion, like the sacrament itself, drew individuals into a congregation, in this case a virtually, not a literally, gathered body of believers. Writing letters, as Konstantin Dierks has noted about British Americans’ use of the epistolary forms of communication, was Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/TNEQ_a_00130 by guest on 25 September 2021 558 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY in the “many ways of making history, by many kinds of people [a]lways the common denominator.” Itself a social practice, letter writing was situated within and given its character by a particular historical context. Like their eighteenth-century predecessors on both sides of the Atlantic, Smith and his family penned the familiar letter, a form that depended on a body of shared knowledge and presumed both the ability to recognize and to place in context allusions and passages taken from other texts. Considered an appropriate form of sociability for men and women in the middling and elite classes, the familiar letter sustained bonds across geographical space in an increasingly mobile society at the same time as it sanctioned emotional expression and connection between its practitioners.3 Reading and writing the print that cascaded from the presses on both sides of the Atlantic was an equally common denom- inator for Smith and his correspondents, all of whom claimed membership in early-nineteenth-century America’s “evangelical subculture.” Defined by Joan Jacobs Brumberg as “a complex of behaviors, values and institutions that were deliberately pro- moted by antebellum evangelicals as an alternative to secular culture,” this community was nonetheless very much engaged with the larger American culture. Print, which was the lifeline connecting Smith and his correspondents to this subculture, was also the means they employed to achieve their “righteous empire,” as Martin Marty has labeled Protestant expansion at 3Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. xvi, and “The Famil- iar Letter and Social Refinement in America, 1750–1800,” in Letter Writing as a Social Practice, ed. David Barton and Nigel Hall (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2000), pp. 31–41. The shift from the familiar to the personal letter that occurred in the United States in the 1840sand1850s was given its impetus by the reduction in rates charged for letters, which made it feasible for literate individuals in all classes to use the postal system.