The folded familiar letter as material and chronotope

This essay offers a thick description of how folds were used, and what and how they signified, in the ‘fold, tuck and seal’ bifolium, a familiar epistolary format in long-eighteenth-century Britain. Manuscript letters sent by Dorothy Osborne and Hester Lynch Piozzi, epistolary novels, paintings and prints, and manuals of midwifery articulate folding as an action at once material and symbolic, in reciprocal relation with folding selves, spaces, and temporalities. The letter-locked letter does not simply enfold, like an envelope, but can unfold, reversing, revealing, developing; the bifolium conjures depths from its surfaces, and relinquishes neither.