All letters involve self-representation, even business letters. The elaborate opening and closing salutations adopted in France show the need for an acute awareness of the social positioning of writer and recipient, but also demonstrate that letters, like any literary form, have generic expectations. Most of Keats's letters are personal, written to friends or family, the idiom allowing for a playfulness, intimacy, and directness usually not appropriate for a business letter - though Keats's letter to his new publishers, Taylor and Hessey, 10 June 1817, is a wittily self-conscious performance to offset the awkwardness of immediately requesting an advance. Any letter is a performance addressed to an absent reader (or readers) at some point in the future. As such, it is a potentially dangerous form, since anyone writing a risk-taking letter (whether a request for a loan, an apology, or a declaration of love) must, if it is to succeed, accurately imagine its recipient's response both to the situation itself and to the words and tone chosen.