The Opened Letter. Lindsay O'Neill

the Irish separately. Their situation was different and much less secure than those with land in England. John Perceval continuously griped about the way the English treated Irish absentee landowners and constantly justified his English residency.²⁶ Men like Boyle and Perceval attempted to increase their sense of belonging by emphasizing their sense of disconnect from their location; they were not Irish or Scottish landlords, but rather members of a larger elite whose values and concerns were the same as those in London.

      Those living in the colonies attempted to reaffirm their sense of belonging by expressing a desire for urban life as well. While, as a whole, the North American colonies were becoming more urbanized, Virginia and other colonies still lacked urban centers and letter writers settled there lamented the fact.²⁷ William Byrd II hoped that shifting the capital from Jamestown to Williamsburg would “give people a relish for cohabitacion.”²⁸ But during his lifetime urban life in Virginia remained mostly a dream and he continued to depend on letters for urban news. From another corner of North America another correspondent in Rhode Island complained, “We have passed the Winter in a profound Solitude on my farm in this Island, all my Companions having been a lured five or six months ago to Boston, the great place of pleasure and resort in these parts where they still continue.”²⁹ Just as writers in Norfolk, Cork, and Dundee sighed over their lack of amusement and converse, colonial writers longed for cohabitation and “places of pleasure and resort.” William Byrd II attempted to close the gap by sharing the gossip of Virginia as he would have shared that of London. In one letter he delighted in telling the story of a Venetian courtesan who caused a scandal at a Virginia ball when her artificially inflated breasts deflated. However, he prefaced the story by admitting that due to the lack of gossip he often had to “lard a little truth with a great deal of fiction” when sending stories back to England.³⁰ The lack of urban sociability in the colonies, especially in Virginia, made it harder for the colonists to participate in a culture that defined status and belonging by one’s social performance and polish.

      One way to counter this concern was to make rural existence a positive trait. William Byrd II, especially, drew an idealized picture of rural Virginia.³¹ He sighed over his lack of gossip and confessed, “But alas what can we poor hermits do, who know of no intrigues, but such as are carry’d on by the amorous turtles, or some such innocent lovers?”³² Unlike Irish correspondents, Byrd could paint Virginian dullness as a positive attribute. Virginians might live like hermits, but they were innocent of many of the follies that enveloped urban dwellers. More often in Byrd’s letters it was London that was the dirty and dangerous spot. He exclaimed to a correspondent there, “Tis miraculous that any lungs can breath in an air compounded of so many different vapours and exhalations, like that of dirty London.” Virginia on the other hand had “pure air.”³³ It was in this same letter that Byrd famously declared, “Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flock and my herds, my bond-men and bond-women, and every soart of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independence on every one, but Providence.” Here was the ultimate pastoral retreat, detached from the pressures of the modern world and from the dependence on others that so marked the lives of Englishmen at home. The Irish could not follow suit. When John Boyle attempted to declare himself a patriarch, his friend in England replied, “Contend, my dear Lord, as much as you please for the justness of your simile, yet you are not at all like one of the old patriarchs.”³⁴ Byrd’s British correspondents lived so far distant from Virginia that they could not puncture his images as easily.

      Byrd pushed the old city and country divide farther by layering colonial rhetoric about the age of America on top of it. Virginia was an untouched virgin landscape, new and innocent. The age of the Americas was long debated, but there was a sense that even if the land itself was as old as that of Europe, it had not faced intense cultivation and that the society itself was in its infant state.³⁵ Peter Collinson believed that in 1762 the colonies were just starting “to Walk alone.”³⁶ Forty years earlier, Byrd insisted in his letters that if his correspondent could but smell the ground he would see it was “as if it newly came out of it’s makers hands.” On the other hand, English ground “has been tortured, and torn to pieces some thousands of years.” In his account no one in Virginia got consumption, the water was sweeter, the fire clearer, the plants more digestible, and the fruits “more sprightly flavoured,” the meats “more savoury,” and he declared that when they found them he was sure that the metals would “prove all ripened into gold and silver.”³⁷ He pushed his lavish praise to the point that Virginia became another Eden where colonists even avoided the curse of hard labor.³⁸ All this was hyperbole. The death rate in Virginia was high, they never found gold and silver, and Byrd’s slaves certainly did not think they had escaped the curse of hard labor.³⁹ But Byrd’s purpose was not to sell a true portrait of Virginia but to entertain his correspondent, and he also knew that since very few of them would ever come out to Virginia “larding the truth with a little fiction” was a safe venture. Due to the distanced and stylized communication provided by letters, Byrd could emphasize the better and, perhaps unconsciously, smooth over the differences between his two worlds.

      When Irish letter writers used the same images, the optimistic spin was missing. When one of Perceval’s correspondents declared that Ireland was a nation “in its nonage” he did not declare its land sweeter, rather he used the metaphor to bitterly portray the English as guardians “who do every thing for us, and leave us the liberty of transacting nothing material our selves … yet for all that we are not free from faction and discord any more than our neighbours.”⁴⁰ This was not an image meant to draw souls to Ireland. Virginia was distant enough and shrouded in enough colonial rhetoric to allow Byrd to use his distance to his advantage, but doing so in Ireland was more difficult.

      Still, those residing in Ireland and those settled in the colonies often saw the links between their situations. When an acquaintance of John Perceval’s aired his ideas on colonial policy (he thought that the ignorance of the inhabitants, religious or otherwise, was “Englands Security”) he lumped the Irish in with the Americans, but what incensed Perceval was not his linking of the two, but his condemnation of learning.⁴¹ In fact, one of the threads that tied Byrd to Perceval was their peripheral origin. After congratulating Byrd on his success with the Council of Trade and Plantations, Perceval sighed, “How happy are you in your World compared with the Inhabitants of Ireland,” as he reflected on the recent loss of the right of appeal by the Irish House of Lords.⁴² Both Byrd and Perceval wanted to be enmeshed in elite social networks, but each saw themselves as protectors of the lands of their birth.⁴³ Byrd and Perceval were not internally torn between their colonial and English identities; they emphasized both in their letters. They saw themselves as members of a broader British elite even if they feared that they sat upon its periphery. To a degree this was a product of the greater Anglicanization of the British elite, but rather than simply a story of colonial acculturation it should be seen as one of elite formation that encompassed the entire British World.⁴⁴ Regional identity mattered, but how their location affected their relationship within larger networks mattered more. Belonging to the “world” had more to do with presenting urban polish and maintaining active social networks than with the exact location of one’s residence. This is why most correspondents emphasized the city and country divide when discussing place. They knew their world was one of urban centers and rural peripheries and that letters allowed them to reconnect with the heart of their social circle.

      Stability and Mobility

      Urban centers and rural peripheries defined how letter writers saw their world, but their stability or mobility defined the nature of their networks. Being a stable epistolary link on the periphery could give one power in a network, even if mobile correspondents maintained more connections. Examining the stability and mobility of ties reveals the differences between most kinds of colonial connections and most types of continental ties. The majority of letters from those in the colonies came from individuals who had settled on distant shores, purchased estates, and remained tied to that place. Their letters to England nurtured constant ties. William Byrd II expected letters yearly from John Perceval and his other English correspondents. Here quality trumped quantity. Twice as many letters came from and went to those across the English Channel, but usually these letters were the product of mobile British