Knowledge Bank

Letter writing is a necessity for communication in early America; thus, the history and culture of America is documented in letters. This project studies texts from 1790 to 1865 in order to examine the conventions, characteristics, and intimacy of letters that resulted from America’s reliance on correspondence in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although letters are not typically considered part of literary history, they significantly influence the early American novel and therefore need to be studied.

Chapter one looks at how the letter-writing manual defines letter writing as democratic. The genre of the letter-writing manual aims to educate American citizens on the specific tools needed for proper letter writing; however, this goal does not support the definition of letter writing as an egalitarian skill. The second chapter analyzes the employment of letters to protect young women and their virtue in the texts Charlotte Temple (1794) by Susanna Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette (1797). Chapter three examines Nathaniel Hawthorne’s letters to Sophia Peabody to evaluate the practical use of letter writing and its adaptation of conventional letter writing and romantic ideals in order to construct an intimate relationship.