Letters

Over the 1640s a number of cabinets of private (friendship and love) letters were published, many without the permission of the authors. These publications divided traditional loyalties and established new ones. In the 1650s, during the Interregnum, the letter's association with classical stoicism (Cicero and Seneca) provided the ideal foundations for articulating covert royalism. At the Restoration, print letters served to document recent history with a personal twist. Over the 1670s and 1680s love letters came into vogue. These novelistic and digressive collections rework the passionate terms of the verse epistle to address contemporary political scandal. From the 1690s, letters in serialized journals drew readers into a public sphere of debate, and modelled their responsibilities within it. The following chapter surveys the epistolary subspecies that dominated the print marketplace. In closing, it spotlights three epistolary agents: a publisher (Humphrey Moseley), an author (Margaret Cavendish), and a reader (of the Tatler).