The Court Case of 1741

In 1741, according to Irene Tucker's "Writing Home:  Evelina, The Epistolary Novel, and the Paradox of Property," a court suit was filed against someone for the ownership of letters.  The judges subsequently ruled that "a letter constitues a gift from sender to receiver" (Tucker 419).   When looking at Humphry Clinker, this makes the letters within the novel a paradox within themselves, for they have all been given to another individual.  Additionally, according to the previously noted Samuel Johnson, the letters are part of a man's soul, and the concept of giving one's soul away is not an easy idea to grasp.  Therefore, according to Tucker, the letter now, after the court case of 141, represents "the creation of a new form of property--immaterial, intellectual property" (Tucker 419).  Humphry Clinker was published in 1771, thirty years after this court's decision, making Smollett obviously aware of the implications of letter writing.  Here lies the complications of the concept of an epistolary novel:  "if the relationship among the writing self, the letter, and the recipient of the letter are complex, the complexities of those relationships multiply exponentially when the selves and the letters in question are part of an epistolary novel" (Tucker 422).  Though the author is speaking of another epistolary novel, Frances Burney's Evelina, published three years prior to Humphry Clinker, the same implications of letter writing are true.  Each of the letters within the novel, if taken literary, would have been gifts from one person to the next, and would have represented their intellectual being.  However, who is to know the editing process that occurs before one is willing to "publish" himself to another individual.