Reviews for Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century

The average rating for Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-25 00:00:00 Aleks Nikolic As an English ship's purser, Mr. Esten believed that he was fulfilling familial obligations when he shipped out with His Majesty's Navy in 1789 to Jamaica and then St. Domingo to secure financial footing for his family. After he married Harriet Bennet in 1784 and had a daughter with her, he confronted dire financial circumstances that compelled him to earn money plying the waters of the Atlantic. Rather than returning to a happy wife and child, however, he discovered his wife in the arms of the Duke of Hamilton. Mr. Esten subsequently sued the Duke of Hamilton and only found himself incriminated for shirking his affectionate duty to wife and daughter. Because Mr. Esten did not write frequently and maintain an affectionate bond with his wife, the Duke's defense attorney argued that Mrs. Esten was "a loose fish" that "any body may strike" (53). While the Atlantic presented many with economic, political, and social opportunities, it simultaneously prompted anxiety about loosing ties to family'a fear of adultery and loss captured in Esten v. the Duke of Hamilton (1797). Sarah M. S. Pearsall illustrates in Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century how many elite Atlantic families wrote letters to mitigate the harsh realities of separation from kin flung across the Atlantic rim. Pearsall argues that letter writing was a strategy to maintain familial bonds by expanding familiarity, conveying sensibility and facilitating financial and social credit to "keep taut ties" between family members separated by the Atlantic Ocean (24). The later eighteenth century represented a flash point of familial anxiety as revolutions, migration, slavery, and imperial wars pushed and pulled family members across the Atlantic, sometimes indefinitely. With the intensification of migration came the parallel rise of literacy and commerce that made possible prolific letter writing among elite families and at least some slaves. Familiarity was the process whereby individuals "not related by family could achieve family-like relationships" (24). Familiarity was not synonymous with intimacy or politeness although it could encompass those qualities at different times. Whereas physical intimacy may occur between individuals occupying unequal social positions (e.g. a slave master and his female slave), familiarity implied a certain degree of equal footing between two people. Politeness was a social expectation of high formality between relative strangers, especially when one party was trying to claw his way into a highest social caste. Familiarity by contrast was an "ease, freedom, or friendship" one enjoyed in the daily rituals that reinforced familial bonds (79). Those migrating from England arrived in colonies like Virginia, New England, or Jamaica isolated from social circles. Crafting familiar letters could act out being part of a family despite physical distance by reinforcing a sense of belonging or what Pearsall defines as the "fictive family" (79). Letters might substitute for a laid-back conversation between two men while smoking cigars. Or, as one Pennsylvanian wrote: "Whenever I take my Pen in my Hand to write to you, I endeavor to work myself into a Notion that I am sitting by your Side, & relating those Things" (77). Those who enjoyed familiar relationships could write sensible letters that displayed a feeling heart. Writing sensible epistles constituted another important coping mechanism for estranged families in the Atlantic world. Pearsall delineates between the sensible letter and the petition as distinct epistolary forms that proceeded from different power relationships between the writer and recipient. A slave might petition their master for manumission through deference and the upmost formality'in those cases writers cast themselves in pitiful or helpless roles to persuade the recipient's benevolent action (106). A wife who enjoyed familiarity with her husband, however, could write a sensible letter that conveyed her affections and simultaneously impressed her domestic, social, or political concerns. When wives conveyed their love or emphasized domestic harmony they invoked "family feeling": a set piece that families used to make sense of a chaotic, dislocating, and atomizing Atlantic world. Through this common language wives, children, or others with familiar relations could couch their grievances in stories that provoked the recipient's sentiment (12). Not all letters evoked domestic tranquility. Those letters dealing with "credit" displayed the profound tensions that rippled through families whose economic base was constantly imperiled by vacillations in the Atlantic world. While familiarity and sensibility helped families cope with distance, credit allowed the family to function and maintain its respectability. Fathers used epistolary exchanges to mold their sons into "men of credit" (116). Men who possessed strong work ethic and integrity, who had a "good name and . . . honor in the community," and could secure financial credit for starting business and continuing the family legacy (116-117). Credit could sustain or break the family and the credit that took men years to acquire could vanish overnight because of a prodigal son, a shipwreck, or the eruption of imperial conflict. Thus, men practiced an art of reading and writing letters to either convey or judge an individual's credit and to scrutinize and discipline their sons who studied or traded abroad. Pearsall has crafted a well-written and persuasive account of the Atlantic family. Through her analysis of letters Pearsall demonstrates that the family is something distinct from and far more fluid than the household'the bastion of traditional family historiography. Pearsall attends to both the materiality and subjective content of letters allowing her subjects to convey how letter-writing sustained Atlantic families, lubricated the mercantile economy through private exchange of credit, and made possible the creation of an Atlantic world.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-10-23 00:00:00 William Vanderven 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.