Naming the Un-'Familiar': Formal Letters and Travel Narratives in Late Seventeenth- And Eighteenth-Century Britain

Abstract

Seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century writers recognized a rhetorical distinction between epistolary forms that our current critical vocabulary does not acknowledge: the implied readership for letters can be either individual or communal. The former type we call the familiar letter; we lack an expression for the latter. As a result, critics and scholars tend inaccurately to employ ‘epistolary’, ‘letter’, and ‘familiar letter’ as interchangeable terms. This article (a) demonstrates that not all seventeenth‐ and eighteenth‐century letters were ‘familiar’; (b) proposes the expression ‘formal letters’ to describe works rhetorically constructed to accommodate a community of implied readers; (c) identifies the influence of the Royal Society on formal letters; (d) characterizes the specific distinctions between formal and familiar; and (e) clarifies how recognizing (or failing to recognize) the distinctions influences our readings of epistolary works. Distinguishing between formal and familiar letters refines our vocabulary and, more important, allows us to re‐examine long‐standing theoretical commonplaces about the nature of letters as private, subjective, or ‘feminine’ documents.