1. From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens, and the Materiality of Letter-Writing

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Prologue: Networks of Nineteenth-Century Letter-Writing 1
4. Introduction: Epistolary Studies and Nineteenth-Century American Letters and Letter-Writing 11
5. Part I: Material, Social, and Institutional Contexts
6. 1. From Mind to Hand: Paper, Pens, and the Materiality of Letter-Writing 31
7. 2. The Business of Letter-Writing 46
8. 3. Name and Address: Letters and Mass Mailing in Nineteenth-Century America 62
9. 4. Paper Evidence: Handwriting, Print, Letters, and the Law 75
10. 5. Nineteenth-Century American Science and the Decline of Letters 89
11. 6. The Means and the End: Letters and the Work of History 103
12. 7. Letters, Telegrams, News 119
13. 8. Dead Letters and the Secret Life of the State in Nineteenth-Century 136
14. 9. The Spider and the Dumpling: Threatening Letters in Nineteenth-Century America 152
15. Part II: Travel, Migration, and Dislocation
16. 10. Longing in Long-Distance Letters: The Nineteenth Century and Now 171
17. 11. Working Away, Writing Home 185
18. 12. Letters from America: Themes and Methods in the Study of Irish Emigrant Correspondence 198
19. 13. The Usual Problems: Sickness, Distance, and Failure to Acculturate in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Emigrant Letters 216
20. 14. Indigenous Epistolarity in the Nineteenth Century 230
21. 15. Dueling Epistles: Enslaved Letter-Writers and the Discourse of (Dis)Honor 245
22. 16. Home and Belonging in the Letters of Sarah Hicks Williams 258
23. 17. ‘An Oblique Place’: Letters in the Civil War 271
24. 18. Social Action in Cross-Regional Letter-Writing: Ednah Cheney’s Correspondence with Postbellum Teachers in the U.S. South 287
25. Part III: Politics, Reform, and Intellectual Life
26. 19. Founding Friendship: John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the American Experiment in Republican Government, 1812–26 305
27. 20. Corresponding Natures: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Letters 319
28. 21. ‘This Epistolary Medium’: Friendship and Civil Society in Margaret Fuller’s Private Letters 332
29. 22. ‘Will You live?’: Thoreau’s Philosophical Letters 347
30. 23. ‘Frederick Douglass, the Freeman’ and ‘Frederick Bailey, the Slave’: Private versus Public Acts and Arts of Letter-Writing in Frederick Douglass’s Pre-Civil-War Correspondence 362
31. 24. Old Master Letters and Letters from the Old World: Julia Griffi ths and the Uses of Correspondence in Frederick Douglass’s Newspapers 377
32. 25. Letters from ‘Linda Brent’: Harriet Jacobs and the Work of Emancipation 391
33. 26. Abraham Lincoln: The Man through His Letters 405
34. 27. Between Science and Aesthetics: The Letters of William James 419
35. 28. ‘My Dear Dr.’: American Women and Nineteenth-Century Scientifi c Correspondence 435
36. 29. ‘A Chain of Correspondence’: Social Activism and Civic Values in the Letters of Lydia Sigourney 450
37. 30. A Fighting Platform: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Epistles 465
38. 31. ‘The Stamp of Truth’: Historiographical Dissent and Its Limits in the Letters of Jared Sparks 481
39. 32. Defenses and Masks and Poses in Henry Adams’ Letters 496
40. Part IV: Literary Culture
41. 33. The Letters of Charles Brockden Brown: Epistolary Performance and New Paths for Scholarship 511
42. 34. Publishing and Public Affairs in the Correspondence of James Fenimore Cooper 525
43. 35. The Transatlantic Village: The Rise and Fall of the Epistolary Friendship of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Mary Russell Mitford 538
44. 36. The Literary Professional and the Country Gentleman: The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe and Philip Pendleton Cooke 554
45. 37. Melville’s Flummery 568
46. 38. The Epistolary Romance and Rivalry of Sophia and Nathaniel Hawthorne 582
47. 39. Co-Responding with Walt Whitman 596
48. 40. ‘Rare Sparkles of Light’: Intimacy and Distance in Emily Dickinson’s Letters to Thomas Wentworth Higginson 612
49. 41. ‘Soul Friends’: Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lady Byron in Correspondence 627
50. 42. Louisa May Alcott’s Family Post Box 642
51. 43. Profanities, Indecencies, and Theologies: Mark Twain’s Letters to Joseph Twichell, William Dean Howells, and Henry Rogers 655
52. 44. Charles W. Chesnutt’s Letters: ‘The Vaguely Defi ned Line Where Races Meet’ 669
53. 45. Sarah Orne Jewett’s Foreign Correspondence 682
54. 46. ‘Too Intimate to Publish, Too Rare to Suppress’: Henry James in His Letters 696
55. 47. ‘Ill Correspondent’: Stephen Crane’s Trouble with Letters 709
56. Notes on Contributors 725
57. Index 733