Sympathy in practice: Eighteenth-century letters and the material body

This chapter draws on over 2,000 letters written by British men and women from a broadly-defined middling-sort and a range of Protestant denominations between 1670 and 1825; these include letters between courting and married couples, sisters, brothers and friends, sometimes over several years. It discusses the way in which letter-writers expressed and deployed sympathy in epistolary relationships and the role of the body in forging mutual sympathy through letters. Sympathy was a principal component of many familiar epistolary relationships and it was embodied. The chapter excavates the principal framework within which the expression and experience of an embodied feeling of sympathy could operate. The chapter shows that sympathy was made palpable through sympathetic expressions and practices which themselves had a material effect on the bodies of the recipient. First, the chapter discusses how sympathetic practice performed a critical role in the creation of bonds between people through letters. Secondly, it shows that discussion of the body was a principal subject over which sympathy was expressed and through which sympathetic practice was enacted. Finally, the chapter demonstrates that sympathy itself was experienced in the body, and that the repeated epistolary practices of sympathy connected people in material and embodied ways.