The popularity of this character-based approach, as well as its ecumenical view to the definition of “business,” possibly inspired the early English novelists like Samuel Richardson, whose first novel Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded, concerned a young maidservant’s correspondence with her parents as she tries to fend off the dishonorable advances of her employer. Many of Pamela’s letters reproduce closely such frequent exemplars of the letter-writing manual as “A Letter of Thanks from a Daughter to her parents” and “A Daughter’s petition to her Mother that She Might Marry.” Although the novel later became the high bourgeois genre of leisure time, it was for a time the natural extension of learning how to write polite letters, a pursuit for which the wealthy had no real need of instruction.

Chesterfield’s obsession with a clarity so crystal that it could be understood by the “dullest fellow in the world” had a lot to do with the fact that to a greater extent than ever before, a letter-writer addressing a correspondent might not know much about his potential reader. Not only was the Industrial Revolution producing more commerce and more businessmen than ever before (not to mention the servants that they required to press their snappy business suits and feed them), but a possibly self-reinforcing combination of rising literacy and reformations of the mail service was also producing more correspondents, generally speaking. In 1680 a merchant named William Dockraw found that the expense of a postal service that charged by the sheet and the distance traveled—an expense that was furthermore charged to the recipient not the sender—inhibited commerce. He invented the Penny Post, which made sending letters in the greater London area a reasonable business expense. Although the service, which conveyed any letter or parcel under a pound within London for the aforementioned penny, ultimately ran afoul of the Duke of York in his capacity as collector of postal revenues, the 18th century continued to usher in both improvements to the cost and quality of postal service. Think email in the 1990s, or social media nowish, and you would come close to imagining the revolution in business communication that occurred in Philip’s youth. Letters, which had up to this point been an intimate communion of rich, artistic, and connected people well known to each other, underwent a dramatic democratization.

The subtitles of the business correspondence manual reveal this new instability in the idea of an audience. The Young Secretary’s Guide to Polite Epistolary Correspondence (1778) announces on its title page that it is appropriate for “persons in low or middling states of life”; The Complete Art of Writing Letters (1779) claims that it is “adapted to all Classes and Conditions of Life.” An introductory epistle in the form of a poem to the sixth edition to the original Young Secretary’s Guide commends the book for teaching the “plain Countryman” his “sense to recite.” Even Adam Smith, teaching rhetoric and belles lettres to young lawyers up in Scotland, weighed in: he praised Jonathan Swift, the early 18th-century satirist, for a style that one “half-asleep” could comprehend. Smith and others liked him embraced the idea that one should write as if one had the sloppiest, least energetic audience imaginable, figuring the rhetoric they recommended to their students in accordance with their beliefs about the low abilities and imperfect education of potential readers. “In letters concerning trade,” said Every Man His Own Letter-Writer, “the subject matter must be constantly kept in view, and the greatest perspicuity and brevity observed.”

The comprehensiveness of the manuals—some run to over 500 sample letters—is in fact a response to the lack of the formal education of their potential readers. These working-class readers (male and female) were perhaps literate enough to read but not literate enough to craft wholly original letters for their situations. So every potential situation received its own easily-adaptable template.