Susan E. Whyman
Historian, Author, and Scholar of Early English Culture
Exploring British society, letter writing, and everyday life in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through acclaimed historical research.
BOOKS & PUBLICATIONS
Acclaimed works published by Oxford University Press exploring British culture and society.
The Useful Knowledge of William Hutton
Culture and Industry in Eighteenth-Century Birmingham
Sociability and Power in Late-Stuart England
The Cultural Worlds of the Verneys 1660-1720
Mentorship & Educational Access
Guiding students and supporting educational opportunity through the Frank Whyman Scholarship and personal mentorship.
Public Engagement & Talks
Invited lectures, academic conferences, and presentations bringing historical scholarship into conversation with wider audiences.
Reviews & Recognition
Praise from scholars, publications, and academic organizations recognizing Susan’s contributions to historical research.
The Biography of
Susan E. Whyman
Susan E. Whyman is an independent historian and researcher specializing in early English letter writing and British cultural history. Formerly of Princeton University, she received both her MA and PhD degrees and has lectured widely in England and the United States.
A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Whyman is the author of several acclaimed books published by Oxford University Press, including:
• The Useful Knowledge of William Hutton
• The Pen and the People: English Letter Writers 1660–1800
• Sociability and Power in Late Stuart England
• Walking the Streets of Eighteenth-Century London (co-edited)
Her work explores everyday life, communication, and cultural networks in early modern Britain, offering new perspectives on how ordinary people shaped historical change.
Testimonials / Endorsements
Betty A. Schellenberg
Enlightenment and the Writing Self in Eighteenth-Century Britain
Susan Whyman’s The Pen and the People, highlights her research methodology and makes the carefully cumulative structure of her argument explicit. She provides four appendices detailing the family archives, the individual writers, and the manuscript letters upon which her study is based, and explains her decision to focus on a few relatively in-depth case studies rather than create a “kaleidoscope of fragments” (234) drawn from all of the sixty-three family archives she originally analyzed. The book itself builds sequentially from an overview of the material conditions that enabled letter writing, to an examination of worker and middlingsort writers, and finally to a study of the development of “literary” elements in the letters of middling writers.
ANTHONY FLETCHER
South Newington
Susan Whyman’s project is based upon a massive archival investigation It revealed an unexpected wealth of surviving correspondence from the period 1660 to 1800. So rich was it that she decided to exclude gentry archives and focus upon thirty-five previously unknown collections from middling sort families. Hence the theme of the pen and the people. The book is triumphantly successful. It reveals a series of private and personal worlds, showing why people wrote to each other and what letters sent and received meant to them. Our understanding of the culture and mentality of late Stuart and Georgian England is both broader and deeper after her work.
Whyman’s argument is aided by her addition of a new concept to historical discourse which she calls ‘epistolary literacy.’ She cuts through some rather confused debate about literacy. Her term refers to layout, spelling and grammar as well as content and literary technique. Her documentation is so extensive that she is able to make useful comparisons between the epistolary literacy of individuals.
The book is in three sections which seem a little disparate but finally cohere. Whyman is good on learning among young people about the useful art of writing a proper letter. She explores copybooks and letter writing manuals, emphasising youthful pride in this kind of literacy with thoughtful case studies. She establishes that nationally the mail, previously seen as backward before 1800, was actually well organised. Jane Fairfax’s remark in Emma that ‘the post-office is a wonderful establishment’ with hardly one of the thousands of letters ‘constantly passing about the kingdom’ going astray makes sense in this context. The central chapters concern specific groups. She discusses farmers and workers in the North of England struggling for economic advancement. She depicts their inner worlds. Case studies from Dorset and Manchester show the middling sort confronting problems in business through letters seeking advice. Letters in Quaker and evangelical families reveal the ponderings and resonances of ardent faith as a guide to every aspect of daily life and relationships. Dissenters, she observes, as a distinct minority had a heightened need to stick together. Time and again she finds exchange of letters being used to cope with anxieties. In the final section, Whyman tackles the connections between letter writing and a developing literary world of periodicals, bookshops and libraries. Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novels Pamela and Clarissa are an obvious point of entry here. She is able to show that after 1750 there was an epistolary moment when real letters and fiction became closely intertwined.
Twenty-three illustrations provide many insights into the art of penmanship, contemporary instruction on how to hold a pen and maps of great roads which confirm the argument about postal efficiency. Whyman’s conclusion that letter writing allowed men, women and children to give each other succour and develop independent opinions in an arena that was never threatening is fully established in this deeply researched volume Overall this is a highly satisfying book.
Penelope J. Corfield, Professor of History,
Royal Holloway, University of London
“This path-breaking study, written with verve and learning, shows convincingly that Georgian England’s new postal services encouraged an expansive culture of letter-writing among both rich and poor—with improved communications then, as today, heralding wider social changes.”
John Barnard, Emeritus Professor of English
Literature, University of Leeds
“This is an important and ground-breaking book. Dr Whyman’s research, largely drawn from the under-used resources of local record offices, radically extends the body of evidence for exploring the uses and effects of literacy in the long eighteenth century into the working and middling classes.”
Susan E. Whyman’s book on letter-writing is reviewed by James Daybell
February 18, 2010
Susan Whyman’s impressive new book comes amid a flurry of recent publications on letterwriting during the period from the 16th to the 18th centuries, including Clare Brant’s Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture, Eve Tavor Bannet’s Empire of Letters, my own Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England and most recently Alan Stewart’s magisterial Shakespeare’s Letters. Whyman’s study breaks significant new ground,…