ABSTRACT
Correspondence was central to how Polwhele navigated a far-flung network of collaborators, printers, and patrons, and depicting himself within this network was key to how he asserted his literary identity in his voluminous memoirs. The chapter considers the motivations behind, and the implications of, Polwhele’s decision to present his life through the correspondence he received from others. The chapter considers how these acts of self-fashioning simultaneously suggest both the importance of a non-urban, decentralised, and dispersed associational world and the limitations, frustrations, and cultural inferiority complex that haunts it.
