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This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women and men's letters in Britain, North America and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite.
List of contents
Introduction
Part 1: Imagined Bodies and Imagining Touch 1. Absent Bodies? Gouty Brethren and Sensitive Hearts in William Constable's Letters from the Grand Tour 1769-1771 2. Imagining Youth: Epistolary Representations of the Eighteenth-Century Adolescent and Youthful Body 3. Touch Me if You Can: Paper Bodies in Letter to and from the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean
Part 2: Material Bodies/Material Letters 4. Sympathy in Practice: Eighteenth-Century Letters and the Material Body 5. "Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing": Pain, Play and the Material Text in Jonathan Swift's
Journal to Stella 6. Blackness, Whiteness and Bodily Degeneration in British Women's Letters from India 7. P. S. Ten Thousand Kisses: Postscript, Appendices and Desire in
The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley, Late of Drury Lane Theatre Part 3: Bodies Deployed 8. I "never had the happeness of Receivin one Letter from You": Unlettered Letters from Jamaica, 1756 9. Constructing the Body in English Pauper Letters, 1780-1834 10. Labouring Bodies: Work Animals and Hack Writers in Oliver Goldsmith's Letters 11. Sons of Liberty: Epistolary Bodies and the Early American Revolution
About the author
Sarah Goldsmith is a Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. She researches the histories of masculinity, bodies and travel. Her first monograph was
Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour (2020). She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker and consulted on the V&A's 2022 Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear
exhibition.
Sheryllynne Haggerty is Honorary Research Fellow at WISE, University of Hull. She has published extensively on the economy and networks of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, including
'Merely for Money'? Business Culture in the British Atlantic 1750-1815 (2012) and
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Living the British Empire in Jamaica, 1756 (2023).
Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham. She has published extensively on the history of gender, masculinity, sexuality, the home and material culture, including
The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012) and
The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England (2020).
Summary
This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women and men’s letters in Britain, North America and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite.
