Heaving this importunity:

The survival of opening formulas in letters in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

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Frances Austin (contact)

(HSL/SHL 4, received February 2004)

Dear Molly,

Heaving this importunity, I send my love to you and Saul, being in good health, and hoping to hear the same from you; ... (ed. Knapp 1966:7.

Thus Win Jenkins, the Welsh lady’s maid in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), to a fellow servant. Smollett clearly had some knowledge of the opening formulas used in the letters of the lower classes in the second half of the eighteenth century, and also, more importantly, expected his readers to know them. The letters of Win Jenkins with their constant malapropisms are part of the comedy of this rumbustious epistolary novel. Win’s mistress, Tabitha Bramble of Brambleton Hall, on the other hand, does not use any of the standard opening formulas even though her letters are no more literate than those of her servant girl. Nor does Smollett repeat this opening joke, at least, not exactly, although he does hint at other parts of the formulas. If Win Jenkins had been a real person, it is almost certain that she would have used the same formula more than once, but Smollett was writing a novel, not aping reality, and a literary joke cannot be repeated. The point is that these formulas were widely enough known at the end of the eighteenth century for the joke to be understood. A question to be asked, therefore, is: to what extent were the formulas still used and how far up the social or educational ladder did they reach?

This paper attempts to answer this question (in part), by looking at a selection of letters from the late eighteenth century to the early nineteenth century. The letters are not a recognised group, nor were they extracted from any of the recent corpora of texts. They have been chosen from various classes of writers – servant and artisan class, literary circles, women writers, seamen and, notably, one business family. There are also comparisons with letters in model letter-writers of the eighteenth century, some editions of which were reprinted well into the nineteenth century. Some letters from eighteenth-century novels have also been included, as with the opening quotation from Smollett. All have been chosen for the light they can shed on the use of and attitudes towards the formulas in different levels and types of society.

Salutations, which have been examined in several recent papers, are not considered here. The paper concentrates on the formulas that follow immediately after the salutation. The bridge between the salutation and the main content that the writer wishes to convey presents a problem to writers even today, and it is not surprising that formulaic phrases developed very early to cover this space between the formal address to the recipient and the start of the letter proper. These phrases are the epistolary equivalent of openings in conversation when two people meet, such as “How are you?”, “I haven’t seen you for a long time”, and so on. They constitute an element of polite acknowledgment of the recipient’s presence and sometimes a more specific reason for writing at the time. The politeness element follows on directly from the salutation and varies considerably in accordance with the respective social standing of writer and recipient. This is probably more especially true of an earlier period than that considered here and could be examined further.

There were several opening formulas, which were used in different combinations. Their origins go back very far indeed and Tony Fairman has found evidence of them, with wording similar to that still in use in the eighteenth century, in Latin letters written during the Roman occupation of Britain in the third and fourth centuries.[1] However, Davis (1965) has traced the English versions directly to the French formularies of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Very often a writer would combine several parts, each a formula in its own right, but so often found together that the combination becomes itself a formula. It is an expanded form of that used by Win Jenkins:

I have taken (embrace) this opportunity to write these few lines hoping they find you in good health as it leaves me at present thanks be to God for it.

The lack of concord – they combined with it – is regular. This combination of formulas had virtually died out of literate use by the end of the seventeenth century, but was still found in the letters of ordinary working people a century later. It can be divided for the purposes of examination into several parts:

1. an intimation of the intention to write.

2. a wish, originally a prayer, for the recipients’ health.

3. a statement of the writer’s health at the time of writing.

4. “thanks be to God for it” - or an equivalent phrase.  

Numbers 2 to 4 constitute what Davis (1965:236) calls the “health” formula. The wording is surprisingly rigid, both in order and detail. Even the use of present participles to link the various parts was strictly observed and, according to Davis, may have been partly responsible for the proliferation of participial phrases in early prose writings, such as the Wycliffite Bible.^2[2]

The statement of “intention to write” has several variations, each recognisable as a formula in itself. In the wording used in Humphry Clinker, which includes the word opportunity, it occurs, although only very occasionally, in model letter-writers of the time. A rather shortened example of it in an early English model letter writer is to be found in Angel Day’s sixteenth-century The English Secretorie: “Good father having the opportunity of this bearer ...” (Day 1586, quoted from Hornbeak 1934:62). In the late seventeenth century, John Hill’s letter writer, The Young Secretary’s Guide (1696), has one instance of the formula, although with occasion instead of opportunity: “I take this occasion to write to you’ (Hill 1696:88).[3] George Fisher also has a similar wording in one of his letters in a 1763 edition of The Young Man’s Best Companion.[4] In a letter from a “Son to his Father”, we find

Honoured Father,

As I have not had a letter from you since your favour of the 8th of October last, which I answered by the next post, I take this opportunity of inquiring after your health, and that of my Sister; (Fisher 1763:47) .  

To which the father’s reply is:

Dear Son,

I received your letter of the 6th instant, and thank you for inquiring after my health, which, I thank God, I perfectly enjoy at present, as I wish and hope you do yours (Fisher 1763:47).

These two letters were still being printed in the 1853 edition of Fisher with the date adjusted to 1845. Samuel Richardson has one variation on the formula in his Familiar Letters for Important Occasions (1741). It is from a “sea officer to his wife”, and also includes part of the “health” formula:

I take the opportunity afforded me by Captain Copythorne, who is returning to England, to let you know, that I am in perfect health at present, God be praised (ed. Downs 1928:150).

Evidence of actual usage in real letters of the artisan class is amply demonstrated in The Clift Family Correspondence 1792–-1846 (ed. Austin 1991), in which five of the six writers use it – all, in fact, except the eldest brother (b.1759). In addition, the formula occurs in a letter of one of the Clifts’ cousins as late as 1819. I have dealt with this particular family’s use of it at some length elsewhere (Austin 1973). The Clift family owned a copy of Fisher’s Young Man’s Best Companion, although which edition they had is not known. Another group of fairly regular users of the formula was, as already indicated, seamen. The formula is found mostly in the letters of the lower ranks.[5] Frequently, one seaman, more literate than the others, would write letters for several men (a practice that continued in the armed forces in World War II), and so it is not surprising that many of these letters are very similar in wording and expression. Robert Clift, the youngest Clift brother, had at least one letter written for him by a fellow sailor, as his eldest brother disgustedly noted:

his letter was not wrote by himself it was wrote by a very masterly hand but very illiterate spelling (ed. Austin 1991:55).

Robert’s letter, dated January 1793, uses the full opening formula:

Dear Brothers and sisters I now take the Oppertunity of wrighting these few lines to You hoping the [sic] will find you all in Good health as I am at present thanks be to God for it ... (ed. Austin 1991:54).

Robert was an Able Seaman, but the “intention to write” formula was not confined to the lower decks. Examples can be found in the letters of midshipmen and a variation of it appears in a letter of Captain Hardy in 1801:

This is the first opportunity I have had of writing to you since we left Yarmouth (ed. Moorhouse 1910:236).

That this part of the formula was used not only by working-class writers is borne out by its appearance in the letters collected by Mason (1968). These are “the Papers from their Counting House for the years 1750 to 1795”. Since various members of the Norton family were employed in the business, some of the letters are partly family letters, although the majority are to do with the business. The family came on the maternal side from Virginia, and practically all the letters are literate. John Norton, the owner of the business, does not use the formula at all, but in the edition there are some half dozen examples, not all from the same writers or by members of the family. The latest instance comes in a letter of one of John Norton’s sons, written in 1818:

I embrace the favourable opportunity of writing a few lines ... (ed. Mason 1968:505).

Strangely, perhaps, none of the letters of the women contains any vestige of the formula. However, in the literary world, it seems to be the women who occasionally make use of it. Steele’s daughter, Mary, has an instance, which includes part of the health formula, in 1729/30:

I could not omit this opportunity of letting you know that I have my health much better (ed. Blanchard 1941:411).

Nearly a century later, Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, has an adaptation of it in a letter of 1819: “As I have the opportunity of sending you a few lines ...” (ed. Coburn 1954:170). She may have been aware that the formula was slightly old-fashioned or even comic, for she writes in a letter of the following year, 1820:

I have been perfectly uncomfortable for the last week in consequence of your nonperformance of the promise to write to me “at an early opportunity ...” (ed. Coburn 1954:214).

The inverted commas indicate that she at least regarded the phrase as formulaic. A still later use comes in letters written by Julia Miles, the daughter of an Excise Officer in Dorchester. She was engaged to (and later married) the poet William Barnes (1801-1886), whose origins were similar to those of the Clifts. The son of a smallholder in Dorset, he was almost certainly familiar with the formulas in his childhood and early teens. By the time he met Julia, when he was eighteen or nineteen, he was a solicitor’s clerk and had risen above his humble beginnings both in education and in social aspirations. None the less, Barnes uses the formula twice in his letters to Julia. When Julia uses it in a letter of March 1825, he replies by quoting it back at her. The tone of both letters is light-heartedlymocking, and the exchange is worth quoting (see also Austin 1990). Julia wrote:

I Embrace this first opportunity of writing these few lines merely to let you know I am still in existance [sic] and well and as you know how prone we all are to procrastinate I shall make no further excuse but proceed briefly with my epistle (ed. Lindgren 1986:49).

Barnes’s reply takes up Julia’s challenge of procrastination:

I take this opportunity of writing a few words to you, and if I have procrastinated again, my excuse must be ...(ed. Lindgren 1986:51).

The wording that includes “opportunity” is the most usual form of the “intention to write” formula but there are variations:

1. this comes with my kind love to you

2. I take up my pen to write

3. I received your kind letter (favour) of (+ date)

4. to let you know. 

The first of these occurs sufficiently often in the Clift letters to be considered a formula, although it is not used with this exact wording in any of the model letter-writers examined so far. It occurs once in a letter from a marine of 1805, which begins without preamble: “Comes with my kind love to you” (ed. Moorhouse 1910:299). All the other formulas can be found at least once in Richardson’s Familiar Letters.