This I Beg my Aunt may not Know: Young Letter-Writers in Eighteenth-Century England, Peer Correspondence in a Hierarchical World

Abstract

Correspondence between youthful peers – particularly siblings – in eighteenth-century England reveals young people learning, experimenting, and even resisting the epistolary conventions espoused in letter-writing manuals. The eighteenth century saw a flourishing of letters and letter-writing manuals as sites for the teaching and learning of social protocol. Instead of seeing young people only as consumers of adult social mores, the letters allow a view of young people teaching one another as they played with standard correspondence practices. Letter-writing manuals imagined a hierarchical world where everyone knew their social, gender, and age niche, but young letter-writers pushed against the conventions as they simultaneously learned the parameters of polite society. The article uses correspondence from three middling and gentry families: the Jacksons of Gloucestershire, the Sharps of Northumberland and Durham, and the Edwards of Surrey. These letters, covering the middle decades of the eighteenth century, show young people confronting the competing eighteenth-century notions of equality and hierarchy and negotiating peer relations within a culture and society that prized status and rank.