In 2015, a robust strain of slash fiction began to explore the nature of the intimacy shared between aides-de-camp Alexander Hamilton and John Laurens during the American Revolution. Comparing this vast body of writing to popular genres of eighteenth-century fiction, this chapter frames the phenomenon known as "Historical Lams" (Lams being a portmanteau formed by fusing the first syllables of each surname) as the great queer epistolary novel that got away. More precisely, I examine how literary fandom surrounding the Hamilton-Laurens bond ultimately theorizes the cultural function of fiction through eighteenth-century discourses integral to the rise of the novel. I conclude by arguing that this literature offers a valuable framework for reconsidering the world-building potential of reception in the making of queer pasts.

This chapter explores the form and practice of correspondence between Britain and India, uncovering the social and affective worlds of British non-elite families. Many of these correspondents had low levels of literacy and did not write for private audiences, but relied on others to read and transcribe their correspondence. Intimate details of private lives became public knowledge. Letters transported information about India back to Britain and spread it throughout communities of origin, far beyond the reach of a single letter. Correspondents based in India maintained ties to their communities at home as they consumed everything from family gossip to political news. Correspondence was central to maintaining the economic health of a family. But the same mechanisms that sustained families and communities could disrupt them as well. Scorned spouses shared their grievances with neighbors. Mothers relied on daughters to convey their intimate feelings to their husbands. The form of correspondence and the practicalities of writing across long distances determined how relationships were sustained or disrupted, how information about the empire was disseminated, and how the empire shaped family life.

Frederick Douglass’s correspondence emerges in the wake of his self-emancipation and occupies a singular place in nineteenth-century American letters. It is a body of work unprecedented in its scope and its capacity to provide an anchor to the networks of activism in which Douglass wielded such influence. It marks a turn in African American letters in which the epistolary is repurposed as a tool of emancipation and of radical archival practice. His correspondence mobilizes the letter as an instrument of emancipation, able to establish political community and map cartographies of freedom that challenged the limitations placed by the United States on African American autonomy. At the same time, his letters provide a glimpse behind the scenes of a life lived to a great extent in the public eye, confirming the importance of family and home as concrete realities, and of domains of intimacy normally kept out of historical sight.