The Way I read a Letter’s – this –
’Tis first – I lock the Door –
And push it with my fingers – next –
For transport it be sure
And then I go the furthest off
To counteract a knock –
Then draw my little Letter forth
And slowly pick the lock –*
One cannot underestimate the value of letters to Dickinson and her circle in the nineteenth century, and for us they are valuable for other reasons. They display a relaxed creativity seldom seen before in this American century; again, these are not letters written with posterity in mind (unlike, say, some of Emerson’s, who copied letters before he sent them), and they carry a gentle playfulness that explodes all the formulas in the manuals. She wrote her final letter a few days before her death in 1886 at the age of 55, to be opened by her two cousins after she fell into a coma. In its entirety:
Little Cousins,
Called back.
Emily
And there is one other epistolary feature that makes Dickinson original: from her teenage years onward she conducted a postal – and virtual – book group. If it wasn’t the first it was certainly one of the strongest: a huge amount (perhaps even half) of her letters contained at least some reference to her current reading material or an oblique literary reference her middle-class friends would be sure to recognise. It is highly likely that she also attended what she may have called a ‘corporeal’ real-life book club in her early twenties (in one letter she writes to her brother how ‘Our Reading Club still is, and becomes now very pleasant’), but when she saw less of the real world she seemed happy to keep in touch with it through books and letters about books. Her first tentative steps towards this occurred in 1848 at the age of 18, writing to a friend ‘What are you reading now?’ before launching into her own list, and her regular book circle soon expanded to include her brother Austin and his wife Sue, her cousins Louise and Frances Norcross, and at least three friends. The Dickinson scholar Eleanor Heginbotham has observed that her ‘book club manners’ in her letters are still reflected in book club behaviour today: a sociability, a boastfulness, a competitiveness, a delight. Present-day book club members may well exhibit all of these in discussing the work and life of Emily Dickinson.
She read almost everything: We have seen from her first letter to Thomas Wentworth Higginson that she was reading Keats and the Brownings, but she loved Shakespeare, Milton and Byron too. She read the essays of Hawthorne, Emerson and Ruskin. She devoured Harper’s and the Atlantic. For contemporary novels, much against the wishes of her father she ranged from her fellow popular Americans Helen (Fiske) Hunt Jackson and Harriet Beecher Stowe to contemporary English stars George Eliot, the Brontës and Dickens. Dickens became famous with the publication of The Pickwick Papers the year after Dickinson’s birth, and his plots and characters became a frequent motif of her letters. ‘I will never desert Micawber,’ she wrote to her brother in reference to a domestic matter; elsewhere she commented on the manipulative nature of Little Nell, and in a reference to The Old Curiosity Shop she once signs herself off as ‘The Marchioness’.
The one thing she didn’t read was still a relatively experimental genre, at least in the United States: books of collected letters.
For all her preoccupation with longing and loss, the loss of Emily Dickinson’s own letters didn’t concern her unduly; the fact that a small percentage of mail wouldn’t make it through was a disagreeable but accepted feature of giving oneself up to the post, an occupational hazard. Where did they go, these lost or abandoned letters? Some may have been stolen, while a few perhaps are still awaiting delivery in a buried sack somewhere in the mud, anticipating their Vindolanda moment.
The postal reforms had improved the cost, efficiency and the geographical reach of deliveries without fuss, but when Dickinson’s letters hit upon the winds and didn’t find their way home, there was another place they could go, a venue in Washington DC that did a roaring and romantic trade from 1825: the Dead Letter Office. Put simply, this was an office where post went not to die but to be resuscitated. But it was also an office wracked with uncertainty. Was what happened in this place acceptable? Was it right to open other people’s mail?
In England, as we’ve seen, such a state practice was regarded as an obligation, a dark art, particularly for letters that were not lost or badly addressed. But in the United States such an action would keep those with a conscience awake at night.
Yet what romance was to be had in an undelivered or undeliverable letter! And what mystery and sadness too. As the New York Times reported in Shakespearian tones in September 1852, the most hopeless letters met the most conspicuous end, ‘transported for the last time to a place without the city, and there solemnly burned, no human being but their writers knowing how much of labor and of pain has been expended upon them, thus to perish by fire and be exhaled in smoke.’
Party in full swing at the DC Dead Letter Office.
That wasn’t the original idea at all. The main purpose of the Dead Letter Office (DLO), which began life in the 1770s, was originally as a repository for unclaimed mail, mail yet to be picked up. In the time before personal delivery, letters could languish at a post office for months awaiting their rightful owner. Our farmer Abner Sanger heard about his letter from his brother in good time at the start of this chapter, but what of other farmers in other fields? They would usually learn they had mail from very long lists pinned up in post offices or community halls – long alphabetical scrolls from a clerk doing his best with tricky handwriting. You usually had three months to make a claim, after which time it was sent to Washington for, in the worst scenario, incineration. In the best scenario your mail would be returned readdressed from Washington to find you through other means, or perhaps poor handwriting would be deciphered and redirected. And in the middling scenario items of value sent in letters and parcels that couldn’t be returned would be auctioned, with the proceeds passing to a delighted Treasury. The Dead Letter Office sale catalogue of December 1865 provided a handy snapshot of what some citizens would be getting for Christmas at the unwitting expense of others: alongside many pairs of socks, gaiters and gloves were quackeries named Cheeseman’s Pills, Rand’s Specific Pills, Dr Clarke’s Female Pills, Dr Harvey’s Female Pills and Culverwell’s Regenerator (not forgetting unguents for the hair and the cure-all Tennessee Swamp Shrub). Other items: ‘Syringe, Complete’, ‘False Bosoms’, ‘Soldier’s Writing Desk’, ‘President Lincoln’s Funeral Car’ (engraving of), ‘French Preventative’, ‘Hands for Watches’, ‘Copying Machine’, ‘Catechism of Steam Engine’, an item merely listed ‘Housewife’ and an item listed ‘Rejected Wife’. The most common items were watches and finger rings. The most intriguing was lot 42: ‘Destroyed’.
A portion of literate America received their first impression of the DLO not from the service itself but from a short story by Herman Melville called Bartleby, The Scrivener. Published in two monthly instalments in Putnam’s Magazine in 1853, two years after Moby-Dick, the tale is a fable of disillusion, recalcitrance and human empathy, and the moral is a grim one. Bartleby arrives at a law firm one day to smooth out the volatility of the other two staff members – one a drunk, the other afflicted with irritable bowels. Bartleby is employed as the others are, to copy out legal documents, but he soon tires of the work. Very soon he tires of the entire world, and becomes an immovable and ineffective object, his only contribution being his catchphrase ‘I would prefer not to.’
The narrator of the story wonders what could have possibly reduced him to his present state, tentatively concluding that it may be an early example of someone ‘going postal’.* He had heard a rumour: ‘Bartleby had been a subordinate clerk in the Dead Letter Office at Washington, from which he had been suddenly removed by a change in the administration.’
The story ends:
; When I think over this rumor, I cannot adequately express the emotions which seize me. Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men? Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames? For by the cart-load they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring: the finger it was meant for, perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity – he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more; pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!
In 1889, a woman named Patti Lyle Collins wrote an article in the Ladies’ Home Journal entitled ‘Why Six Million Letters Go Astray Every Year’, and she knew of what she wrote: she was head of the ‘blind reading’ department at the DLO, famed for her ability to detect an envelope’s address where others saw only scrawl and foreign phonetics. She was able, for instance, to detect that when someone wrote
M Napoletano
Stater Naielande,
Nerbraiti Sechem Street
No 41
The correct place to send it would be
Mr Napoletano
41 Second Street
New Brighton
New York
Her world was full of these examples, although none quite as satisfying as the mythic understanding that
Wood,
John,
Mass
should be delivered to
John Underwood,
Andover, Mass.
Patti Lyle Collins estimated that in 1898 about 6,000,000,000 (six billion) pieces of mail were posted in the United States, with about 6,312,731 ending their days at the Dead Letter Office. Of these, 32,000 were posted with no address whatsoever, 85,000 had insufficient postage or none at all, and some 200,000 were unclaimed from hotels; 30,000 contained photographs and 185,000 stamps, while 82,000 contained money or money orders to the value of $990,000.
Her article contained further mystifying addresses, an endearing combination of the ignorant and the inherently trusting. She recalled one that read ‘To my Son he lives out West he drives a red ox the rale rode goes By Thar’. Others had increasingly judgemental challenges: ‘Kindly address to largest dealer in old medical books’; ‘To the editor of the Best Paper’. The trickier the propositions, the more Patti Lyle Collins loved her job: ‘Harold Green and His Mother’; ‘on dykton Evnn No 17’ (17 Huntington Avenue); and an envelope addressed to a large firm in ‘New York, Chicago, Boston, St Louis’. ‘Not for one instant would this be regarded as difficult at the Dead Letter Office,’ Ms Lyle Collins cheered. ‘It is like the alphabet, absolutely simple when the art is once mastered.’
Four years later another insider at the DLO named Marshall Cushing offered a less forgiving analysis. In his book The Story of Our Post Office he was keen to berate his customers: ‘The total number of errors in the transmission of mail matter in the United States is very small compared with the correct deliveries,’ he observed. ‘Yet so long as the blundering public make voluntary contributions daily to this office of over 20,000 letters and packages, just so long will it be necessary for the Government to “exercise paternal functions” in the correction of those blunders, nine tenths of which are made by the people themselves. If those who use the mails would only be careful to observe a few simple requirements, trifles in themselves, but in the aggregate of vast importance, the work of the Dead Letter Office would soon be greatly reduced.’
The simple requirements (including putting an address on an envelope) were, however, not simple enough, and we continued to blunder. Cushing explained the intricacies of the daily toil – the Opening Division, the Property Division, the Money Division – and emphasised that the vast majority of dead letters were in fact ‘live letters’, those that lay unclaimed at local post offices as their recipients moved on. And then there was another category, something he connected with ‘green goods’, which in itself was connected with the 200,000 letters left unclaimed at hotels. They were green because they were dollars; they were left at hotels because they were part of a nationwide confidence trick.
The green goods postal scam of the late nineteenth century was the first great scandal of the modern mail service, the godfather of pyramid schemes and chain letters, the material precursor to Nigerian email phishing. Its success relied upon human fallibility and greed, but also on a more modern advance: the assured anonymity of the post. The Dead Letter Office made great play of the trustworthiness of its officers, not least those who slit open private correspondence. The men and women selected for this task were deemed above suspicion, and would, according to Marshall Cushing, anyway not have time to read anything beyond a return address.* But when the letter openers began to discover the frequent appearance of a printed circular and a large increase in the transmission of dollar bills, their mission changed: they called in the police.
The circular, printed in 1887, read as follows:
Dear Sir,
Your name was sent to me by a reliable person in your town. He said he knew you to be a man who was not adverse [sic] to making money in any way, manner, or form, and that he knew you were up to snuff. Well, to be plain, I am dealing in counterfeit money of the best material, so fine are these goods, no person dealing with me has ever been in the least trouble, but all have made fortunes fast and safe. I am dealing with prominent men in your county, but of course names cannot be mentioned, some of them holding high positions, but you can bet your last dollar they have made thousands of dollars using these goods, and no living soul need be the wiser as to how they obtained their money. The plates are very fine, also engraving, signatures, numbers, and coloring, in fact we can say it is the best and safest counterfeit money ever put on the market, and will fool all the detectives in the Government service. But to deal with our gang you must be a man who can keep his mouth shut, and you can bet your life if you ever get in trouble we will get you out all right. My terms are as follows:
Cash $75 for $1,500
$125 for $4,000
$180 for $6,000
$220 for $10,000
$400 for $30,000
If you cannot come here to do biz send me $20 in a common letter and I will send you $1,000. I will trust you for the balance until we meet face to face to show you I have the best of confidence in you, but if you want to come on and see me, stop at the Grand Union Hotel, Forty-second-street and Fourth-avenue, New York City, take a room, and telegraph me and say I am in room, (name the number). I will then call on you and we can do business, and no man on the face of the earth will ever know our business, so if you can’t send the money come or send a trusty pard. Direct all letters in square confidence as follows.
A. ANDERSON, care of A. Heltenbecker, 302 East Eleventh-street, New York.
The circular, or something worded very close to it, began to appear throughout the United States in the 1870s with a variety of handwritten addresses attached. Most recipients would not bother to risk corruption at a hotel if they could be corrupt at home, and so they sent money and received nothing in return. There were no stolen Government plates, and there were no counterfeit green goods. There didn’t tend to be any public complaints either, for who would want to be seen as corrupt, greedy and stupid?
Anti-counterfeiter Anthony Comstock.
The operation hit the rocks, at least temporarily, in October 1891, when the cops raided several addresses in New York and seized equipment, postal directories, opium and various individuals with Runyonesque aliases. The main swindlers were named as ‘Pretty’ Frank Brooks, Terence ‘Poodle’ Murphy and Sam Little (alias Goldstein), and they were found in possession of the personal details of 60,000 targets, 600,000 circular
s, and a great many copies of bogus newspaper reports suggesting that the counterfeit bills were indistinguishable from the real thing. Another New York bust that year yielded the men at the centre of the ‘Bechtold-McNally Gang’ of Hoboken, New Jersey, who, according to the Hartford Weekly Times, had defrauded a great many disappointed ‘gullible rustics’ of their savings.
The man in charge of the counter-counterfeit operation was a Post Office inspector called Anthony Comstock. Comstock was also secretary for the Society for the Suppression of Vice, a group determined to root out subversive material and stop its transmission through the mail. In the 1870s Comstock had made a name for himself by holding public displays of all the items he had seen travelling through the post that he deemed to be obscene: pornographic photographs and stories, pamphlets, song lyrics. He claimed that he had evidence of 15,000 letters from pupils in American boarding schools ordering such items, and his message was clear: the postal service was an agent of immorality, corruption, and vice. He stopped short of suggesting a complete cessation of the entire system, so he did the next best thing: prosecute and fume. Among the more literary items he campaigned against and seized were works by Zola and Boccaccio, and George Bernard Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. In September 1915, the New York Times reported that Comstock died aged 71 of pneumonia, a ten-day illness ‘brought on by over-work and over-excitement’.
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