Title: Louise Curran, Samuel Richardson and the Art of Letter-Writing
Abstract:In 1726, a selection of youthful letters between Alexander Pope and the recently deceased Henry Cromwell were published, without Pope’s permission, by Edmund Curll. Their publication was mortifying to...In 1726, a selection of youthful letters between Alexander Pope and the recently deceased Henry Cromwell were published, without Pope’s permission, by Edmund Curll. Their publication was mortifying to the would-be English Homer, whom they revealed to be ‘vain, bawdy, and trivial’ (6), and the incident seems to have prompted his increasingly urgent requests for the return of letters sent to others. At the same time, Pope apparently began thinking seriously of his correspondence as an autobiographical tool. Selections from his letters made up the final two volumes of his six-volume Works, published in 1737. These ostensibly private writings were thereby formally incorporated into his official literary canon. As Louise Curran discusses, the publication of Pope’s letters indicates that ‘letter-writing had emerged as a distinct literary form’ in the eighteenth century (4). At the same time, their unauthorized publication by Curll called attention to issues that were, increasingly, as vexed for eighteenth-century readers as they were inherent to letter writing itself. In the context of the ‘rise of the novel’, letters seemed to offer psychological realism and a unique insight into the mind of the writer. In an age of sociability, they were ‘the pre-eminent written art of converse’ (2). At the same time, their claim to authenticity was problematic in a literary world that increasingly accepted the letters of the famous as a marketable asset. Towards the end of the century, Laurence Sterne, more explicitly calculating than Pope, worked out the market value of his correspondence archive, which ‘wd make 4 Vols the size of Shandy’ (192).Read More
Publication Year: 2020
Publication Date: 2020-07-03
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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