Authors
John Adams (1735-1826) and Abigail Adams (1744-1818)
Bibliography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
First the first time in the chronology of American letters, we have the pleasure of hearing two voices in dialogue – a man and a woman, a fierce, thoughtful patriot and his brilliant wife, writing back and forth in times of considerable peril. These were private letters that have become part of the public record: glimpses into day-to-day experience during the Revolution, and also into the intimacies and civilities that characterized marriage, and love, more than two hundred years ago. This was a marriage of mutual respect, of intellectual peers; and as we sample a few of these many letters, we can learn something about what abides, and what has changed, in the verbal interactions of domestic life.
1. How would you differentiate John Adams’s voice from Abigail’s? From the letters in NAAL and others you can access on-line, choose a few passages that seem to you especially characteristic of the voice of each, and then describe the word choices that achieve those differences.
2. As you read these letters of love, war, and statecraft, do John and Abigail seem real to you – or impossibly strange? What would you say was the etiquette of their “friendship,” their intimacy? As a culture, do we still want a measure of verbal skill, rhetorical polish, and decorum in the written, on-screen, or “texted” words we send to and receive from those we love? If so, what would you say are the differences between then and now in the use of the English language for these purposes – and what would you say we have gained, or lost, in those changes?