Correspondence Networks: Exploring Space, Class, and Gender through the Material Object

Between the early nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, contributions to knowledge about nature depended on correspondence networks as a means for exchanging information, ideas, and specimens. The importance of these networks to the most eminent figures in science has been widely acknowledged. Much attention has been paid to their cultivation of style, construction of personae, and conformity to set formulae for corresponding knowledge through the medium of the letter. This panel will explore some lesser known sites and actors. To do so, we consider the materiality of correspondence as a global practice. By framing letters as material objects, we locate letters and correspondence networks in continuous relationship to other spatial entities, in line with recent work on the geographies of books and other paper documents. We pay attention to the physical page, the use of postage stamps to pay for scientific labour, the mobilisation of botanical specimens for self-presentation, and the value of pencil and ink diagrams for communicating observations. We consider the nature of correspondence itself in shaping scientific disciplines and explore how it may help us integrate the histories of excluded groups. We look across different areas of science, from botanical knowledge to phrenology, and at different social contexts and genders, to interrogate the coherence of scientific correspondence practices. It is by taking seriously the places of paper, we argue, that we may investigate more fully the porosity of borders in science.