Sent as a Gift: Eight Correspondences from the Eighteenth Century

The correspondence of the eighteenth century - one of the great ages of letter writing - has come to be regarded as a literary genre in its own right. Yet despite the appearance in recent years of authoritative editions of much of this correspondence, the genre itself has received limited critical attention. Addressing this shortcoming, the essays in Sent as a Gift suggest the many ways the eighteenth-century familiar letter can be read and appreciated in all its variety.
The eight correspondences discussed in this volume are among the most important and interesting of the period. Some are from one major literary or political figure to another: Samuel Johnson to James Boswell, Charles Burney to Johnson and to Hester Thrale, Robert Dodsley to William Warburton and David Garrick, Daniel Defoe to Robert Harley. Others are addressed to family members or lesser-known figures: Lord Chesterfield to his son Philip and to Henrietta Howard, Christopher Smart to Arthur Murphy and Paul Panton, Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra, Diderot to Mlle Jodin. The letters vary widely as well in style, subject, and emphasis - from Defoe's eyewitness political reports to Austen's private accounts of daily life, from Lord Chesterfield's courtly epistles to Diderot's dialogues exploring moral concerns.
Each essay opens with the text of two representative letters, which become the focal point for discussing an entire correspondence in terms of both its rhetorical qualities and its historical and biographical significance. Using a variety of critical approaches, the essayists seek to reveal what volume editor Alan T. McKenzie calls "the controlling particularities" of a given correspondence. Framing the eight essays are an introduction by the editor and an afterword by Janet Gurkin Altman that address larger theoretical concerns related to correspondence as a genre.
As McKenzie observes in his introduction, "not all epistolary windows open into the bosom." Some, he notes, afford glimpses of far different matters that can be equally instructive of the human condition in the eighteenth century: the difficulties of selling books by subscription, the irregularities of regional electoral practices, the politics of getting a play produced. Readers of this volume will gain insight not only into the ways letters were written, sealed, sent, and received but also into the purposes, private and public, explicit and implicit, for which they originally changed hands.