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      Introduction. Speaking Letters

      The letters Peter Collinson received spoke to him. For this London merchant and ardent botanist, letters held more than inked words on a page. They contained the voices of his friends and acquaintances, and when he cracked open the seal of a letter, they escaped and filled the room. As he wrote to his fellow botanist John Bartram in Pennsylvania in 1762, “I am here all alone and yet I have the Company of my Friends with Mee. This will be no paradox when I tell thee on the Table lays their Speaking Letters in that Silent Language which Conveys their most intimate thoughts to my Mind.”¹ Simply by dipping his quill into his ink, Collinson joined a conversation. He might address Bartram first, but his letter responded to and created other conversations. He urged Bartram to go read the letter he had sent to Benjamin Franklin about mysterious animal skeletons found near the Ohio River and he passed on thanks to Bartram’s wife for her postscript. While he may have not realized it at the time, Collinson was doing more than carrying on an extended conversation with his friends and associates. He, and the scores of letter writers like him, used their pens to maintain and extend the social networks that were increasingly tying together the wider British world.

      The letters Collinson read and penned with such joy reveal how one eager correspondent used his letters to maintain relationships with individuals across the wider British world. But he was only one man, and the meaning of his epistolary efforts only comes into focus when his letters are considered alongside those of his contemporaries, for Collinson was not the only one who listened to letters. They spoke to men and women across the early modern British world. By the eighteenth century, members of the elite from England, Ireland, Scotland, and the colonies needed letters like never before. They used them to conduct business, plumb intellectual concerns, discuss family matters, run distant estates, exchange news, and ask for advancement. Changing social, economic, and geographic circumstances made face-to-face communication more intermittent and sparse at the same time that personal networks of support and exchange became more critical to the navigation of their world. The answer lay in letters. The scribbled notes scattered across their tables were the threads of the social networks they needed to survive.

      Individual sets of correspondence reveal the personal passions of their creators, but when set beside, and intertwined with, the letters of multiple correspondents—when a few hundred letters become a few thousand—larger patterns of dependence and exchange surface. Then letters truly begin to speak, and they whisper of the need for large, elaborate, and multipurpose networks. This book analyzes such networks, and the letters that created them, at the critical period between the establishment of a permanent national postal system in 1660, which provided many Britons with a new and more constant way to keep in touch, and the flourishing of the newspaper press in the middle of the eighteenth century, which gave the British another way to monitor their world. More specifically, I reassemble and listen to the hum of a number of individual and interlocking epistolary networks constructed by a disparate group of letter writers whose collective efforts illuminate the structure and workings of the British world socially, geographically, and communicatively at a time when the nation was becoming a dominant world power. It was during this period that the British elite truly became a networking society.

      Networks in the Early Modern World

      The way Britons thought about the word “network” was shifting subtly. When John Hawkins published The ENGLISH School-Master Compleated in 1692, he included the word “network” in his “Tables of Common English Words,” right after the term “neighbour.”² But while “neighbour”

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