Many readers who pick up this hefty volume will be tempted to turn first to someplace in its second half, which features more than two dozen essays on the epistolary writings of an all-star cast of American authors and thinkers spanning the nineteenth century: Thomas Jefferson, Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Lydia Sigourney, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Henry Adams, William James, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Stephen Crane.

That list of names – and the contributors, too, comprise an impressive roll call of scholars – should give the lie to any supposition that “letters and letter-writing” is a minor or ancillary subject. Yet it is the eighteen essays in the volume's first half, marked by few canonical figures, that are most apt to surprise and challenge scholars and students of nineteenth-century American literature, culture, and history.

Part of this volume's genius is to put the canon second (in Parts III and IV, respectively headed “Politics, Reform and Intellectual Life” and “Literary Culture”), where assiduous readers can encounter it anew, on the heels of the first half's thoroughgoing exploration of the letter as a form and genre (in Part I, “Material, Social, and Institutional Contexts,” and Part II, “Travel, Migration, and Dislocation”). In this way, the Edinburgh Companion follows the structural logic of William Merrill Decker's foundational book in this field, Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications (1998). There, too, analysis of the epistolary medium provides the eye-opening prelude to studies in the letters of individual writers.

Some of the contributors in the first half, as they articulate methodologies for epistolary study, make precisely this case for the editors’ organizational wisdom. Janet Floyd suggests that “letters written by ‘obscure people’” – in the case of her essay, migrants to the western US – are even riper subjects for study qua letters than “the more evidently artful missives of educated writers or historically significant actors.” The reason is that “there are no pressing, broader historical debates to distract the scholar of emigrant letters from the consideration of their epistolarity” (217). That is, a letter by a canonical figure may be quickly swept up in the flow of long-running critical or historiographical streams, but a careful reading of that letter requires first perceiving it as an iteration of forms evolved through countless less artful, less significant examples. The evolution of those forms remains relatively poorly understood in part because, as Emma Moreton observes, readers and editors have often disregarded “what has been viewed as ‘uninteresting’ or ‘irrelevant’ material.” Some published volumes of historical letters simply omit “ritualized pious reflections” and “endless lists of persons to whom the letter-writer wishes to send his or her best regards” (phrases Moreton quotes from editors who have made such deletions). But, as Moreton insists in framing her linguistic analysis of Irish immigrants’ letters, “The everyday, the typical, and the mundane … provides the fullest insight into how letters in the nineteenth century embodied, defined, and modified human relationships” (198–99).

That “fullest insight” is bodied forth in vivid glimpses of “the everyday” – from the geese that grew quills to the ragpickers that supplied paper mills, in Graham Thompson's essay – and shrewd theories about “the typical,” like David Henkin's careful tutorial on the differences between “mail” and “letters” (63) and Decker's meditation on what makes a distance “long” (173). Contributors sort the vast archive of letters by ordinary Americans and noncanonical writers into fascinating subgenres that most readers will probably never have considered, such as threatening letters (Leon Jackson), scientific letters (Tina Gianquitto and Robin Vandome), “cross-regional” letters (Sarah R. Robbins), and “Old Master letters,” or letters between freed people and their former enslavers (Sarah Meer).

The essays in the book's second half, even if they revolve around canonical figures, are far from conventional. Insightful and carefully researched, they reveal the nineteenth-century American canon from new angles opened to view by the approaches the first half recommends. In Michael Jonik's nimble essay on Henry David Thoreau, it is precisely those “mundane” qualities of letters to which Moreton called our attention that reveal Thoreau “anatomizing the near and the ordinary, and … distilling from them an enduring ethics of everyday living” (348). The taxonomical impulse necessary in scholarship on vast troves of ordinary letters takes a hilarious turn when Wyn Kelley brings it to Herman Melville's letters, which are filled (by Melville's own admission) with “flummery,” “moonshine,” and “gibberish.” Kelley sorts “Melville's Flummery” into distinct epistolary varieties that include “The Ill-Advised Rant,” “The Awkward Compliment, or Clumsy Attempt at Flirtation,” and “Blustering Blasphemy” (573).

A wonderful cluster of essays by Meer, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Ben Schiller, and Fionnghuala Sweeney makes an important contribution to the study of slavery and abolition (it also helps puncture any romanticized notions readers may hold about letters as vehicles of unmediated sentiment; the moment in Ed Folsom's essay when a young Walt Whitman compares the composition of a letter to an overdue bowel movement may puncture such notions, too). Although no single essay focusses on the important subject of the gendering of epistolary writing – including the divergent pedagogical approaches to, and cultural attitudes about, the purposes and proprieties of letter writing for women and men – numerous essays, such as those by Gianquitto, Melissa Homestead, Judie Newman, Elizabeth A. Petrino, and Robbins connect epistolary studies with scholarship on gender in the nineteenth-century US. Even in as unlikely a place as Kelley's essay on Melville – in which Kelley speculates that the (incomplete) archive of Herman's letters is partly a product of his sister Augusta's effort to “preserve a record of the family's female writers” (570) – one finds telling reminders of the signal roles women played in producing and curating the archives of manuscript and epistolary culture.

Replete with first-rate critical work, The Edinburgh Companion includes something of interest to virtually every scholar and teacher of nineteenth-century American literature, as well as anyone who works in the letter-rich archives of that period. It should prove a lasting resource and a catalyst of new scholarship, helping lend definition to a field that deserves to grow even more robust during our own time of transformations in written communication.