This collection explores the multifaceted relationship between letters and bodies in the long eighteenth century, featuring a broad selection of women and men's letters in Britain, North America and the Caribbean, from the labouring poor to the landed elite.

Introduction Part 1: Imagined Bodies and Imagining Touch 1. Absent Bodies? Gouty Brethren and Sensitive Hearts in William Constable's Letters from the Grand Tour 1769-1771 2. Imagining Youth: Epistolary Representations of the Eighteenth-Century Adolescent and Youthful Body 3. Touch Me if You Can: Paper Bodies in Letter to and from the Eighteenth-Century French Caribbean Part 2: Material Bodies/Material Letters 4. Sympathy in Practice: Eighteenth-Century Letters and the Material Body 5. "Urge, urge, urge, dogs gnawing": Pain, Play and the Material Text in Jonathan Swift's Journal to Stella 6. Blackness, Whiteness and Bodily Degeneration in British Women's Letters from India 7. P. S. Ten Thousand Kisses: Postscript, Appendices and Desire in The Memoirs of Mrs. Sophia Baddeley, Late of Drury Lane Theatre Part 3: Bodies Deployed 8. I "never had the happeness of Receivin one Letter from You": Unlettered Letters from Jamaica, 1756 9. Constructing the Body in English Pauper Letters, 1780-1834 10. Labouring Bodies: Work Animals and Hack Writers in Oliver Goldsmith's Letters 11. Sons of Liberty: Epistolary Bodies and the Early American Revolution