SOURCE: “Writing Home: Evelina, The Epistolary Novel and the Paradox of Property,” in ELH, Vol. 60, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 419-39.

In the following essay, Tucker explores the epistolary nature of Evelina, concentrating specifically on the paradox of the ownership of letters.

On June 4, 1741, Alexander Pope filed suit against Edmund Curll, the prominent London bookseller who had just published Dean Swift's Literary Correspondence, for Twenty-Four Years, a volume comprised of letters written by Pope as well as those he received from such literary luminaries as Swift, Gay and Bolingbroke.¹ Pope claimed rights over not only his own letters, but also over the letters he had received from Swift, and, on the basis of this claim, sought to prevent Curll from continuing to sell the book. Because he had never relinquished his rights to his writing, authorial rights established thirty years earlier by the 1710 Statute of Anne, Pope argued that his...