ABSTRACT
In the eighteenth century, letter writing represented one of the most important channels of news and opinion formation, an arena of semi-public dialogue. Sealed letters represented personal messages, but the argument of this chapter will be that later ideas about private (handwritten) versus public (printed) texts do not fully capture the intention of the eighteenth-century letter, which was often written with more than one recipient in mind, often read aloud, circulated or even printed for its poetic or political qualities. This chapter deals with the changing control strategies of the Danish-Norwegian state towards letter-writing in the period 1784-1820. How were these strategies affected by notions of honour, ideals of monarchical rule and the faltering legitimacy of the regime? How were the borderlines between public and private spaces articulated in the crisis of the late absolutist political culture of Denmark?
