SOURCE: Smith, Amy Elizabeth. “Travel Narratives and the Familiar Letter Form in the Mid-Eighteenth Century.” Studies in Philology 95, no. 1 (1998): 77-96.

In the following essay, Smith examines British reviews of travel narratives from 1749 to 1780, concentrating on the epistolary form many travel writers used to gain approval for the personal details they often added to their descriptions of foreign lands and customs.

How does epistolary form affect the content of a narrative? While no two modern critics of the eighteenth-century novel answer this question precisely the same way, all agree that it did have an influence; one can hardly imagine a reading of Clarissa, Humphrey Clinker, or Les Liaisons Dangereuses that disregards epistolarity. Novels were not, however, the only narratives “told in letters.” The epistolary form was “standard in travel literature long before it was used widely by novelists.”¹ Critics of the travel genre have nonetheless been slow to benefit...