How did people learn to write letters in the eighteenth century? Among other books, letter-writing manuals provided a possible solution. Although more than 160 editions can be traced for the eighteenth century, most manuals were largely intended for men. As a consequence, when The Ladies Complete Letter-Writer was released in London in 1763, it was the first manual to be exclusively destined for women in eighteenth-century Britain. Even though it was published anonymously, several elements tend to show that it must have been edited by Edward Kimber. It was reprinted in Dublin in 1763 and in London in 1765 and largely circulated. The reasons for its success may have come from its concern in epistolary rhetoric, its original organisation, or the entertainment provided by examples coming from different sources, among which letters by Eliza Haywood, Samuel Richardson, Mary Collier, or the Marquise de Lambert. It also provided women with a variety of subjects which were supposed to be part of their sphere of interest, and others which were not, thus questioning a number of pre-conceived ideas on women and their way of writing with or without propriety. Unedited since 1765, the manual is now presented with introduction, notes and two indices focusing on the issues of sources, society and epistolary writing.

This collection of fourteen essays highlights both the singularity of personal reading experiences and the cultural conventions involved in reading and its perception.

Among the numerous letter-writing manuals which were printed in eighteenth-century Britain, a few were authored by such famous novelists as Samuel Richardson or Daniel Defoe. The present volume is a first-time edition of an autograph manual devised by William Gilpin, commonly known as one of the theoreticians of the picturesque, which he intended either for individual use in the schools he was teaching or for publication. The manual was exclusively devised for boys and men. Although its primary purpose was to provide models of letters on various occasions (at school, in apprenticeship, in debts, in mourning), its content is also partly fictional, since several groups of letters provide short stories about the lives of young soldiers writing home, reformed rakes making a fortune in India or fathers trying to correct their sons’ misdemeanours. The whole tone is highly moral, since the manual was also conceived as a work of edification. As such, it is an excellent counterpart to the correspondence which William Gilpin exchanged with his grandson, William Writes to William: The Correspondence of William Gilpin (1724–1804) and his Grandson William (1789–1811) (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014). The manual is presented with an introduction, notes, index and appendix of a list of eighteenth-century letter-writing manuals, focusing on the issues of sources, society and epistolary writing.