Epistolary Spaces : English Letter-writing from the Foundation of the Post Office to Richardson's 'Clarissa' (Routledge Revivals)

This 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 and Letters of an Eighteenth-Century Circle of Acquaintance (2006) "James How’s Epistolary Spaces … reconstructs in meticulous detail the history of the national postal system and its effects on letter writing, from the Renaissance to the 18th century … How also highlights the role of the new postal system in connecting all the people of England to the capital city of London …" Sonia De Angelis, ‘Status Quaestionis (2011) "According to James How, the foundation of a Post Office in England in the 1650s … [ensured that] the way was open to experiment in all that a correspondence could achieve: it opened up new forms of petitioning the state and the aristocracy; novels like Richardson's Clarissa … suggested that a whole life could be lived in an epistolary space." Martyn Lyons, Culture and History Digital Journal (2012) "… a pioneering work of literary and cultural criticism, well-researched, which renews scholarly debates about epistolary communication in early modern England."Jay Caplan, Eighteenth Century Book Rev