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The article discusses the embedded extempore verse in the intimate letters of John, Lord Hervey. It cites the claim by writer Clare Brant that the genre of letters was the most important kind of writing in the eighteenth century in her book "Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture." Also presented are the prose letters, verse epistle, and Hervey's book "Memoirs."

The verse epistle is a key eighteenth-century form that developed in the Renaissance but gained critical mass only during the Restoration. Despite increasing scholarly attention to the work of Aphra Behn, including her poetry, her verse epistles remain relatively little discussed, and the role she played in establishing the form has not been recognized. Once Behn's contributions to the form are identified, their importance in her work, as measured both by their number and their quality, becomes clear, especially when compared with the work of other writers of her period. She produced examples both of the Horatian familiar epistle and, in “Oenone to Paris”, a striking rewriting of an Ovidian heroic epistle, along with amatory epistles, satirical epistles and one complimentary epistle. Not only are her verse epistles important in their own right, but they influenced other writers, male and female. They are particularly distinctive for the turn she gave, as a woman writer, to a form previously practised chiefly by men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eighteenth-century Britain saw dramatic developments in travel and communications. As travel became easier, so too did correspondence by letter. This article explores the representation of various kinds of travel in the verse epistle, a kind of writing that has received little attention from travel historians. Discussing 25 examples written during the century, it argues that these offer evidence of particular value, partly because as letters they often engage in dialogic relationships with their addressees, and partly because they are also poems. The examples, some of which are very little known, represent all forms of travel at the period and over a striking range of distances. They demonstrate the development of a modern form of mobility and the adaptation of an existing literary form for its representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the subscription list for Jean Adam's "Miscellany Poems." Accounts of the subscription list for Miscellany Poems also suffer from factual inaccuracies. The earliest discussion, in 1818, reported a total of 123 subscribers, probably a misprint for the correct figure of 153. This was still being repeated at the end of the century,8 although DNB had by then achieved the closer approximation of 154. The publication of Miscellany Poems was therefore an unusual event. This may account in part for some striking qualities of its subscription list, especially the representation of many subscribers from the middling sort and even from the labouring classes.

The article comments on an article by Rhys W. Williams in a previous issue, discussing the place of Heinrich Boll's novel "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum" in a context of social and political debate in West Germany. Topics addressed include metaphor suggesting the novel's central issue is control of information and Boll's insight into the dangers of investigative methods whose objectivity is more apparent than real.