Necessary American Fictions: Popular Literature of the 1950s Book

Sarah Pearsall's Atlantic Families explores the tensions of family life in the late eighteenth century Atlantic world by examining the conventions and content of letters. The book focuses on how letter-writers developed and employed the qualities of familiarity, sensibility, and credit to maintain functional and fulfilling family relationships. The need to bolster the core family was especially important in the Atlantic world because families were frequently separated from each other for long periods of time. Pearsall's grasp of the topic is impressive, and her vivid narration gives readers a vibrant view into family life strained by dislocation. However, in the conclusion Pearsall attempts to tie her book to the history of the self, which creates inconsistencies in her central argument and falls outside this book's purview. Despite these problems, Pearsall's work helps us see many aspects of the Atlantic world, the eighteenth century family, and the significance of letters in a new light.
Pearsall's book relies on a key conceptual shift in how historians think about the family. She contends that historians of the family have conflated the family with the household. The household is "stable and grounded in a single locale" and can include members such as slaves who usually were not considered family (13). Pearsall notes that the family is a much more fluid concept that is not bound to a specific place. The family can stretch across the Atlantic world and still be the family. One of her main goals is to see how the geographical stretching of the family influenced the way people thought about and acted towards their kin. This historiographical intervention gives us a fascinating new way of conceptualizing the family and allows her to consider the family as a simultaneously disparate and coherent unit.
Pearsall contends that Atlantic families coped with the stress of dislocation by "invoking happy families" in their letters by expressing familiarity and sensibility (7). Familiarity was a private mode of speech between family members that expressed their closeness in an informal but earnest way. Pearsall cites Samuel Johnson definition of familiarity as "affable; not formal…unceremonious; free…unconstrained" (57). Familiarity played a number of roles in binding geographically detached families. It ameliorated loneliness, sustained family bonds, simulated the informality of household relations, and allowed families to enjoy 'ease, freedom, and friendship' even when separated (79).
Sensibility was a complementary quality to familiarity that helped sustain family bonds over long separations. A sensible letter writer employed the language of the heart in order to project her emotions through ink across long distances. She would also emphasize the emotional manifestations of her emotions for her family members. As Pearsall puts it: "The bosoms of lovers heave with rapturous love; scorned lovers writhe in agony, and hearts pound and flutter with palpable emotion" (93). Pearsall concludes that the growing sentimental view of the family in this period strongly connects to the dislocation of the Atlantic world. Family members emphasized their familiarity and sensibility to their loved ones as a reaction against distance's efforts to estrange them. This discussion of familiarity and sensibility further enhances our understanding of the late eighteenth century family by showing the shift from patriarchy to paternalism through letter writing. Moving away from the rigid, hierarchical formality of the patriarchal family, paternalistic men used the language of familiarity and sensibility to show their fondness and intimacy with their family members even if they did not surrender the helm of the family.
The third major quality of letter writing that Pearsall presents is credit. If familiarity and sensibility were coping mechanisms that bound the dismembered family together, credit was the more public, realistic quality that helped maintain the family as a functional and respected socio-economic unit. Trade and social relations over long distances required a great deal of trust as opposed to direct regulation, which rested on the reputation, influence, honor, and reliability of the men involved. The sum total of these traits was a man or a family's credit. A family had to build its credit by years of assiduity, virtue, consistency, and literally the payment of debts. The shortcomings of one family member could discredit the entire family. In the highly gendered Atlantic world, men undermined the family credit through irresponsible business practices or dissolute behavior while female credit connected more closely to sexual purity. Pearsall cites dozens of letters featuring anxious patriarchs excoriating their sons for undermining the family's credit. Her discussion of credit shows us that Atlantic letters not only bound families through sentimental affection, but also imposed duties and created tensions.
Unfortunately, Pearsall concludes this enlightening book by overstretching her argument in order to comment on the history of the self. She writes that in order for the more individualistic and reflective self to emerge, other structures around the self had to be "stripped away" and "chief among these attenuated entities was the family" (243). The problem here is that most of the book shows how qualities like familiarity, sensibility, and credit as well as the practice of letter writing did bond and sustain the family in spite of the disruptions of the Atlantic world. The book ends without Pearsall addressing this contradiction, creating unnecessary confusion in an otherwise clear and compelling work.