Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres by Rachael Scarborough King

Abstract

Reviewed by: Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres by Rachael Scarborough King Hilary Havens Rachael Scarborough King, Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2018). Pp. 272; 6 halftones, 3 maps. $44.95 cloth. The past few decades have produced a number of studies on interactions between manuscript and print during the long eighteenth century that overturn long-held notions of print’s preeminence. Margaret J. M. Ezell’s Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (1999) and David McKitterick’s Print, Manuscript, and the Search for Order, 1450–1830 (2003) are two of the earliest studies to observe that the emergence of print was “less a revolution than an accommodation . . . partly defined by the employment of older techniques having their roots in the manuscript tradition.”1 Betty A. Schellenberg’s more recent Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print in England, 1740–1790 (2016) focuses on late eighteenth-century manuscript exchanging coteries, arguing that they “bridged” the gap between scribal and print cultures, which “collaborated or came into conflict” and used forms “adapted from manuscript practice to serve the ends of the print medium.”2 Some of these studies, particularly Eve Tavor Bannet’s The Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (2005) and Clare Brant’s Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (2006), focalize manuscript and print interactions through letter manuals and the letter form itself, demonstrating not only that the epistolary form held central importance for multiple genres, but also the continuing interaction between print and manuscript through the end of the long eighteenth century.3 One of the newest contributions to this conversation on manuscript, print, and epistolarity in the eighteenth century is Rachael Scarborough King’s lucid and engaging Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres, though King does not clearly situate her book among previous studies on manuscript and print until the concluding “bibliographical essay.” King’s main contribution is her conceptualization of the “bridge genre,” “a genre that facilitates change by providing writers and readers with paths across shifting media landscapes” (2), to [End Page 401] illustrate how the letter not only served as a transition from manuscript to print during the long eighteenth century, but also aided in the formation of several new genres—newspapers, periodicals, biographical “lives,” and novels—concurrent with the expansion of postal and communication networks, print publications, and literacy. The book is divided into five chapters that focus on these four new genres (two of them on the novel) and related interactions between manuscript and print. Chapter one discusses the London Gazette, the only English newspaper from 1666 to 1678 and the primary one until 1695, to demonstrate how “written and printed media worked in tandem and in addition to the traditional oral circulation of news” (25). While examples from other newspapers that extended into the mid-eighteenth century would have broadened King’s argument, her claim that the London Gazette—and thus the newspaper as a genre—took its structure from the letter form is completely convincing: “from the sense of an ongoing, unfolding exchange with no determinate ending, the need to traverse space and time to deliver information, the formatting of news into short and separate items, and the conceit of a particular reader or community of readers to whom the writing is pertinent” (38). Specific examples—such as how manuscript newsletters persisted in the time of printed news and were bundled together through the mail, and how newspaper articles were essentially letters divested of epistolary markers—bolster King’s case for the epistolary origins of newspapers. King’s other two chapters on non-novel genres contain similar revela-tory finds. Chapter two discusses the function of letters in three periodicals: John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury, Daniel Defoe’s Review, and Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator. King contends that as with newspapers, letters served as the structural model of the earliest periodicals, though as the genre developed, there was a shift from authentic to fictionalized letters while editors assumed more expansive roles. Dunton’s Athenian Mercury was made up...