The Letter-Writing Manual and the Epistolary Novel

The relationship between real and fictional letters in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries has been the source of much critical debate. Disagreement surrounds the extent to which the increasingly popular genre of the epistolary novel drew on the practices and techniques of actual correspondence. On the one hand are those who see epistolary fiction as developing out of real-life letters, with some literary-stylistic additions. On the other hand are those who reject this teleological approach in favour of one that emphasizes the functional versatility of the letter in the period, and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of drawing a distinction between its real and fictional incarnations. This relationship between real correspondence and epistolary fiction is brought into sharp focus by the genre of the letter-writing manual, which rose sharply in popularity from the last two decades of the seventeenth century onwards. Concentrating on John Hill's The Young Secretary's Guide (1689), Thomas Goodman's The Experience's Secretary (1699), and G. F.'s The Secretary's Guide (1705), in particular, in this article, I suggest that the style of the letter-writing manual from this period can, with caution, be compared with that of the epistolary novel. I pay particular attention to the ways in which letters in these manuals respond to and quote from each other and the often subtle ways in which they thus incorporate different voices. This polyvocality is taken further in Samuel Richardson's manual Familiar Letters (1741), which, as is well known, provided the raw material for his first novel Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1741). I demonstrate that some of the stylistic techniques which would prove crucial to the great epistolary novels of the later eighteenth century, including Richardson's, can be found, at least in embryonic form, in the letter-writing manuals of the Restoration period.