The postal reforms of 1845 and 1851, which included the introduction of the first United States postage stamp in 1847 and the universal rate of 5 cents for a half-ounce letter travelling under 300 miles, did not transform letter-writing on their own, but it was a good start. Combined with the expansion of the railroads, great westward migration and increased literacy, the communication advances of 1850s set in motion the postal notion we entertain still: an organised, trusted, state-run prepaid delivery service that brings letters to our door at great speed and great frequency at minimal cost.* For the majority of people in the United States, the postal service was the first regular contact they had with the administration of government beyond taxation. And it was this new common conversation – whereby ordinary people could maintain reliable contact with people they couldn’t see – that made the modern world modern.
How did the country celebrate? By writing more letters. In 1851–52, a woman called Mary Wingate wrote regularly from Connecticut to her gold-prospecting husband Benjamin in California, and noted that ‘when the new postage law takes effect I shall be selfish enough to want to hear from you by every Steamer.’ We don’t know how well he heeded this request, but on at least one occasion his wife thought it necessary to pull tighter on his heartstrings by including an emotional appeal from their daughter: ‘I want you to come home as soon as you can for we are very lonely without you. I hope I shall learn to write soon so that mother wont have to hold my hand next time I want to write to you. From your own Lucy.’
The great social mobility in the US in the middle third of the nineteenth century benefitted greatly from an efficient and affordable postal service; one could argue that it made great dislocations bearable. But the new postal privileges were not confined to what one may consider the writing classes: there is much evidence of slaves writing to their absent masters, and not always through an amanuensis. ‘I hope to write more satisfactory than I have done heretofore,’ wrote Lucy Skipworth from Hopewell, Alabama in 1863. ‘[T]he white people who have stayed on the plantation are always opposed to my writeing to you & always want to see my letters.’ Literate or not, slaves swiftly came to appreciate what novelists and playwrights had long known: letters are ripe for subterfuge. Harriet Jacobs, a slave in North Carolina, had escaped from her master, a certain Dr Flint, and was holed up in a nearby house. With the probable help of the homeowner, she managed to send a letter to New York, ensuring it was then mailed back to Flint with a New York postmark to bamboozle his search.
Observing these new freedoms from Edinburgh, Blackwood’s Magazine expressed a combination of envy, pride and horror at what the postal reforms had unleashed. Young women in America enjoyed concessions not yet seen in Great Britain, and their parents thought nothing of providing them with ‘the privilege of a latch-key if she stays out late at the theatre’. The post provided yet further opportunities for loose living.
She has the privilege, if she chooses to exercise it, of her own private box or pigeon-hole at the post office of the town where she resides, where she can have her letters addressed, and whither, by a ‘Ladies’ Entrance’ where no profane male can intrude, she can resort when she pleases and unlock her box from the outside, and take away her letters without observation.
To young women at the susceptible age, only half educated, and whose favourite reading is the trashy novels that are reprinted from the English penny papers . . . novels in which there cannot be too much love, or seduction, or bigamy, or murder, for the prevalent taste of a class – the post office system offers a facility for clandestine correspondence which no respectable father or mother on the European side of the Atlantic would think of without a shudder.
So how would a woman conduct herself if she wanted to unlock her box in high-minded Edinburgh? ‘They cannot do it easily. They must take the neighbouring pastrycook or stationer into their confidence.’
The number of letters crossing the US annually in the middle third of the century increased from about 27 million in 1840 to about 160 million in 1860. And is it possible, with the flourishing of the mail, to detect also a new blossoming of the spirit of America? In 1855, a Post Office ‘special agent’ named James Holbrook wrote a book entitled Ten Years Among the Mail Bags in which he wrote of how it was now quite impossible to envisage a thriving American life without the post. ‘Imagine a town without a post office!, a community without letters!, “friends, Romans, countrymen, and lovers”, particularly the lovers, cut off from correspondence, bereft of newspapers, buried alive from the light of intelligence, and the busy stir of the great world! What an appalling picture!’
Certainly we have a large amount of epistolary evidence in this period of widespread optimism and opportunism, and not a little despair. The country was on the move – migration increased dramatically year on year, particularly westward; the gold rush was on, but so was a general boom in trade and geographical expansion exemplified and made possible by the railways. There was inevitably a burgeoning personal development on display in the nation’s correspondence: there was a greater need to maintain contact with family members and friends in more far-flung locations, and it was clear that writers increasingly trusted the mail with their confidences. At the end of July 1849, Henry Thoreau wrote from his home in Concord, Massachusetts, to the 10-year-old daughter of his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson; Ellen Emerson was staying with her cousins in Staten Island for the summer, and Thoreau took on a mentoring role just as her father had done with him. The publication of Walden, his influential spiritual journey of self-reliance and self-discovery, was still five years away, but there is evidence from the reflective tone of the letter that it was already mostly complete.
Dear Ellen,
I think that we are pretty well acquainted, though we never had any very long talks. We have had a good many short talks, at any rate . . . I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it. You love to write or to read a fairy story, and that is what you will always like to do, in some form or other. By and by you will discover that you want what are called the necessaries of life only that you may realize some such dream.
. . . Children may now be seen going a-berrying in all directions. The white-lilies are in blossom, and the john’swort and goldenrod are beginning to come out. Old people say that we have not had so warm a summer for thirty years. Several persons have died in consequence of the heat, Mr. Kendal, perhaps, for one. The Irishmen on the railroad were obliged to leave off their work for several days, and the farmers left their fields and sought the shade. William Brown of the poor house is dead, the one who used to ask for a cent – ‘Give me a cent?’ I wonder who will have his cents now!
I found a nice penknife on the bank of the river this afternoon, which was probably lost by some villager who went there to bathe lately. Yesterday I found a nice arrowhead, which was lost some time before by an Indian who was hunting there. The knife was a very little rusted; the arrowhead was not rusted at all.
You must see the sun rise out of the ocean before you come home. I think that Long Island will not be in the way, if you climb to the top of the hill – at least, no more than Bolster Island, and Pillow Hills, and even the Lowlands of Never-get-up are elsewhere.
Do not think that you must write to me because I have written to you. It does not follow at all. You would not naturally make so long a speech to me here in a month as a letter would be. Yet if some time it should be perfectly easy and pleasant to you, I shall be very glad to have a sentence.
Your old acquaintance,
Henry Thoreau
A few days later Thoreau wrote to Harrison Blake, a publisher friend in Worcester, Massachusetts, with whom he corresponded for 12 years. His tone had changed: he was now preachy, transcendental and idealistic, and his admonitions and instruct
ions appeared to reflect the confidence of a new nation. After opening pleasantries, he launched into a woody version of ‘Desiderata’.
Be not anxious to avoid poverty. In this way the wealth of the universe may be securely invested. What a pity if we do not live this short time according to the laws of the long time, the eternal laws! Let us see that we stand erect here, and do not lie along by our whole length in the dirt. Let our meanness be our footstool, not our cushion. In the midst of this labyrinth let us live a thread of life. We must act with so rapid and resistless a purpose in one direction, that our vices will necessarily trail behind. The nucleus of a comet is almost a star. Was there ever a genuine dilemma? The laws of earth are for the feet, or inferior man; the laws of heaven are for the head, or superior man; the latter are the former sublimed and expanded, even as radii from the earth’s centre go on diverging into space. Happy the man who observes the heavenly and the terrestrial law in just proportion; whose every faculty, from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, obeys the law of its level; who neither stoops nor goes on tiptoe, but lives a balanced life, acceptable to nature and to God.
In Blake’s later memoir, Thoreau’s correspondent said that he never tired of re-reading his letters, and ‘I am apt to find new significance in them, am still warned and instructed by them, with more force occasionally than ever before; so that in a sense they are still in the mail, have not altogether reached me yet, and will not probably before I die. They may well be regarded as addressed to those who can read them best.’ That’s us, in a way. But there is a mild irony that hovers perennially over Thoreau’s letters. Famously in Walden he wrote of how he had ‘received no more than one or two letters in my life that were worth the postage’ and that he ‘could easily do without the post-office’. He was writing in 1854, at precisely the time when everyone else with even the most basic way with ink and paper was beginning to feel the opposite.
Emily Dickinson began writing letters in 1842, when she was 11, and it took her just three years to find her literate and numinous voice. In 1845 she wrote to a school girlfriend about her absent male crush, imagining him ‘changed into a star some night while gazing at them, and placed in the constellation Orion between Bellatrix and Betelgeux’. And she tells her friend she is delighted at the prospect of keeping up a steady stream of correspondence: ‘Old Time wags on pretty much as usual at Amherst, and I know of nothing that has occurred to break the silence; however, the reduction in the postage had excited my risibles somewhat. Only think! We can send a letter before long for five little coppers only, filled with the thoughts and advice of dear friends.’
We may hardly find her as happy again: in subsequent years her correspondence resounds with desolation and a strong sense of separation: Dickinson famously became a recluse in later life, and in her letters she revels in the concept of absenteeism and longing. A letter is necessarily a note of absence, but Dickinson took it further, often describing the mail as a sort of heavenly ordained link as it travelled through time and space. Not that she wasn’t sometimes up for a bit of divine subversion, as she admitted in a letter in 1852 addressed to her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert, a letter which echoed the steamy transactions of Abelard and Heloise in the thirteenth century: ‘When [the pastor] said Our Heavenly Father,’ I said “Oh Darling Sue”; when he read the 100th Psalm, I kept saying your precious letter all over to myself, and Susie, when they sang . . . I made up words and kept singing how I loved you.’
Emily Dickinson, founder of the epistolary book group.
Eroticism intensified many of her letters, the sort of sentiments one would expect to discover, if at all, in a secret journal; she clearly trusted the postal service with her heart. Other letters to Gilbert express further desires, and strengthen speculation that they were lovers (or put another way, it favours speculation that they were physical lovers; their correspondence leaves no doubt that they were lovers at a distance):
Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say – my heart is full of you . . . yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me, If you were here – and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language.
Dickinson was 31 before she made her blazing talent for poetry semi-public, and the revelation came in the form of a letter to a man called Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson had enjoyed a varied career – abolitionist, civil war soldier, literary critic – and Dickinson soon came to regard him, in his words, as her ‘literary counselor and confidant’. But the confidence only lasted so long: in 1891, five years after Dickinson’s death and at the height of her fame, he decided ‘with much reluctance’ to spill the beans. Writing in the Atlantic, where he had previously advised hopeful young writers, Higginson explained that his first contact from her came unexpectedly one day in April 1862 when he ‘took from the post office in Worcester, Mass’ a letter enquiring whether he was ‘too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?’ He wasn’t, and it was. The letter was postmarked Amherst. Higginson found her handwriting ‘so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town. Yet it was not in the slightest degree illiterate, but cultivated, quaint, and wholly unique. Of punctuation there was little; she used chiefly dashes.’
He regarded the poetry as alluring beyond measure, later claiming that he knew from the first that she was ‘a wholly new and original poetic genius’; in one poem of eight lines he found ‘a truth so searching that it seems a condensed summary of the whole experience of a long life.’ In a letter since lost he sent back a gentle critique, something Dickinson regarded as ‘surgery’, and asked for more details of the poet. He received a reply that was mystical and coy, and so plainly flirtatious that it was difficult to believe she had been in self-imposed seclusion for the last few years, rather than swishing her skirts in town.
Mr Higginson,
Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude, but I was ill, and write today from my pillow.
Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed. I bring you others, as you ask, though they might not differ. While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb.
You asked how old I was? I made no verse, but one or two, until this winter, sir.
I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying ground, because I am afraid.
You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he never returned. Soon after my tutor died, and for several years my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more, but he was not contented I be his scholar, so he left the land.
You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise in the pool at noon excels my piano.
I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them, because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious, except me, and address an eclipse, every morning, whom they call their ‘Father.’
But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or witchcraft?
You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told that it was disgraceful.
I read Miss Prescott’s Circumstance, but it followed me in the dark, so I avoided her.
Two editors of journals came to my father’s house this winter, a
nd asked me for my mind, and when I asked them ‘why’ they said I was penurious, and they would use it for the world.
I could not weigh myself, myself. My size felt small to me. I read your chapters in the Atlantic, and experienced honor for you. I was sure you would not reject a confiding question.
Is this, sir, what you asked me to tell you?
Your friend,
E. Dickinson
The pair maintained their correspondence, initially frequently and then less so when he fought in the civil war and she underwent treatment for her eyes. Dickinson often signed off as ‘Scholar’, and responded to his request for a photograph with a request of her own: ‘Could you believe me without? I had no portrait, now, but am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur; and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves.’
She once wrote revealingly how, to her, ‘A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend’. To make matters more material she occasionally invited Higginson to visit, and finally in August 1870, eight years after their correspondence began, he did. He found the event uncomfortable and slightly disappointing, writing later that he found her face ‘without a single good feature’ and her character diffident and enigmatical.
‘When I asked her if she never felt any want of employment, not going off the grounds and rarely seeing a visitor, she answered, “I never thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to such a want in all future time” . . . She told me of her household occupations, that she made all their bread, because her father liked only hers; then saying shyly, “And people must have puddings”.’
Higginson found her rather like her poems: elliptical, compressed and inverted. He continued to admire her work, but it appears that he preferred her letters to her reality. But in reality, her true character was hard to define. Biographers have combed her letters for clues (just over 1,000 remain, many more were burned or lost), but it is rarely clear when she was genuinely writing as herself, and when she was writing poetically and for effect. She enclosed many poems in her letters, and scholars have long argued that there wasn’t much of a gulf between the themes of her mail and her verse. Certainly her poems addressed the art of letter-writing and letter receiving in a personal way: ‘This is my letter to the World,’ she wrote ruefully in a poem published in 1890, ‘That never wrote to Me’. Lest we take this at face value, she later wrote of how she treasured the many letters she did receive:
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