The 'Words I in Fancy say for you': Sarah Fielding's Letters and Epistolary Method

Abstract

As letter writing became increasingly fashionable, an awareness of literary values in letters cultivated suspicion about sincerity in epistolary discourse in the eighteenth century.1 Samuel Johnson ( 709-84), while emphasizing that 'in a Man's Letters [ . .] his soul lies naked', cast doubt on the sincerity of other people's letters.2 He shrewdly detects the manipulative powers of published 'genuine' letters which take advantage of the reader's supposition that private letters reveal 'true' aspects of the self otherwise unknown. He maintains that 'there is, indeed, no transaction which offers stronger temptations to fallacy and sophistication than epistolary intercourse' and reads Pope's letters cautiously: it must be remembered that he had the power of favouring himself: he might have originally had publication in his mind, and have written with care, or have afterwards selected those which he had most happily conceived, or most diligently laboured.3