The Atlantic represented a world of opportunity in the eighteenth
century, but it represented division also, separating families
across its coasts. Whether due to economic shifts, changing
political landscapes, imperial ambitions, or even simply personal
tragedy, many families found themselves fractured and disoriented
by the growth and later fissure of a larger Atlantic world. Such
dislocation posed considerable challenges to all individuals who
viewed orderly family relations as both a general and a personal
ideal.
The more fortunate individuals who thus found themselves "all at
sea" were able to use family letters, with attendant emphases on
familiarity, sensibility, and credit, in order to remain connected
in times and places of considerable disconnection. Portraying the
family as a unified, affectionate, and happy entity in such letters
provided a means of surmounting concerns about societies fractured
by physical distance, global wars, and increasing social
stratification. It could also provide social and economic leverage
to individual men and women in certain circumstances.
Sarah Pearsall explores the lives and letters of these families,
revealing the sometimes shocking stories of those divided by sea.
Ranging across the Anglophone Atlantic, including mainland American
colonies and states, Britain, and the British Caribbean, Pearsall
argues that it was this expanding Atlantic world-much more than the
American Revolution-that reshaped contemporary ideals about
families, as much as families themselves reshaped the transatlantic
world.
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