To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  Goodness knows what Comstock would have made of the brilliantly seditious work of Willie Reginald Bray. In 1898 Bray, a 19-year-old cycling enthusiast living in south London, obtained a copy of the Post Office Guide, a weighty quarterly manual published by the British Post Office to update its clients on its many services. For six old pence one learnt the proper way to address a letter, and that all manner of things could be entrusted to the mail if properly packaged and stamped. You could, for example, send creatures through the post, including a single live bee ‘if confined in a suitable receptacle’ and ‘special arrangements may be made as to dogs’. Liquids could be sent ‘provided the bottles are properly closed’. Most enticing was this line, which showed how nicely things had advanced since the Penny Black of 1840: ‘Postmasters may arrange for the conduct of a person to an address by an Express Messenger.’

  Reginald Bray decided to push these possibilities to the limits. He began modestly by posting a rabbit skull and a turnip, and when they arrived safely back at his house (he addressed the rabbit skull along its nasal bone, and put the stamps on its cranium), he mailed, with no wrapping, a bowler hat, a frying pan, a bicycle pump, dog biscuits, onions, and a handbag (with stamps inside).

  Reginald Bray (and bicycle) delivered home.

  Looking back a few years later in the Royal Magazine, he explained that ‘this course I did not enter upon without much consideration and hesitancy, for it would be most unfair, to say the least of it, to cause a lot of unnecessary trouble, merely for the sake of playing a senseless prank. My object from the beginning was to test the ingenuity of the postal authorities, and, if possible, to vindicate them of the “charges of carelessness and neglect.”’*

  But of course it was only a matter of time before he grew ambitious. On 10 February 1900 he mailed his Irish terrier Bob; in practice this meant paying the Post Office to get a postman to walk him home at a cost of three pence a mile, but Bray explained it could be doubly useful if you had to get him to a friend or vet. But objects and pets were mainly for show – his main challenge involved letters and postcards. Again he claimed this was to keep the Post Office, and specifically the Dead Letter Office, on its toes: items would be addressed ‘To the Post Offices around the World’ and to ‘Any Resident in London’. In 1902 he sent a postcard with a picture of the Old Man of Hoy in the Orkneys and addressed it to ‘The Resident nearest this rock’. Another went to ‘The Proprietor of the most remarkable hotel in the world on the road between Santa Cruz and San Jose, California’.

  It was only a short trip from Santa Cruz to ‘Santa Claus, Esq’, the destination of a Bray postcard in December 1899 (he may not have been the first to try to reach him, but his biographer John Tingey has been unable to find an earlier example). Certainly Bray may claim originality for another stunt: in 1900, he succeeded in mailing himself, paying the Post Office to walk him home. He repeated the exercise in 1903, obtaining a registration form that included, in the line allotted for the word ‘letter’ or ‘parcel’, the description ‘Person Cyclist’. He did this again in 1932, but by then it was old hat, and the Post Office was getting annoyed. The posting of bees is still acceptable, but the ability to mail a dog or a person has since gone the way of all flesh. Which is a shame, for it was useful, as Bray explained. ‘Once on a very foggy night I could not find a friend’s house so instead of wandering about for hours I posted myself and was delivered in a few minutes.’

  The Suffragettes are mailed to Downing Street.

  If the Post Office was used for personal stunts, why not also for political stunts? At the end of February 1909, two suffragists, Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClellan, presented themselves for human postage at the West Strand post office and requested delivery at 10 Downing Street to campaign for votes for women. They were escorted on foot by a telegraph boy and a considerable crowd of well-wishers and journalists, but, refused entry by Prime Minister Asquith, were officially declared ‘dead letters’ and returned to their headquarters.

  All a Housewife Should Be

  14232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 30 WING, 1 COY., 9 AIR FORMATION SIGNALS, M.E.F.

  31st May and 11th June 1944

  Dear Bessie,

  As I have managed to secure an hour, I hope to be able to convey something of the time I am having in Alexandria, although only three days remain and separate me from the desert.

  American-like, I have ‘done’ the Acropolis, Aquarium, Museum, Gardens, Zoo, Catacombs. I can’t get worked up about these B.C. dug-outs, but the gardens are really lovely; I sat in them the other day, reading ‘The Good Companions’, and around me there were purple flowers, thousands of them; above me, a mass of mauve blossoms. Exotic is the word I suppose, but it sounds pretty hackneyed. I saw dates growing, bananas, cotton. The cactus needs to be seen to be believed. Have seen Waldini and His Gipsy Band, a fair entertainment, not smutty.

  The shops were full of ‘the wealth of the Indies’. They were chock-full of all kinds of goods, but generally the prices were very high indeed for imported goods, although watches, cameras, refrigerators (things that are difficult to get in U.K.) were in much profusion here. In Alex. you can get what you want if you like to pay for it. Two chaps in our party had nights out which cost them £3 apiece each time. They assured me it was well worth it. Almost anywhere you go, little boys, old men, or the women themselves will say ‘Want a woman?’ ‘Want a –?’ ‘Hello dearie.’ I must say that I shudder somewhat at the thought. A boy about 6 in one street invites you to buy a preventative, with as much loud enthusiasm and as little discretion as the chap who sells newspapers at Oxford Circus. ‘Lady Chat’s Lover’, ‘The Well of Loneliness’ and other items are on sale everywhere, but although they are advertised as un-expurgated, judging by the disappointment of a chap in the train who had bought one, they are pretty much like tracts.

  The Alexandria ‘peaches’ were mainly Greek or French, and some were really fine-looking. The Egyptian women are horrible after age 30, and many are even horrible at birth. The Greek and French specialise in good figures, no great wonder as they do little work. The South African women – at least the ones I saw – impressed me with the excellence of their figures and looks. Again, they do not lift a finger for themselves, the blacks doing all the work at very little wages. The chaps stationed in the towns have a fine time, though it must be expensive. I do not think the atmosphere is half so good as the desert. I fancy there is quite a ‘Bloomsbury’ outlook, ‘fraightfully intellectual’.

  I am sorry, but I don’t think I shall be home for Christmas, though with a bit of luck providing ‘the divinity’ does not pack me off to the Far East, I may manage Christmas 1945. The lap of the Gods is an uneasy resting place.

  I am sorry about your gumboils. I should leave your private dentist and pay at least one visit to the Dental Hospital at Leicester Square, which is concerned with saving teeth, not making money through extractions and dentures. Don’t have your teeth out before you need to, and without seeing the Dental Hospital. They are good people.

  I give you my glad sympathy at your efforts to abate the smoke nuisance. You are a good girl, Bessie. I must again say I don’t want you to think of me as a superior. Of course I kid myself I have a sharper perception of some (maybe unimportant) things than most others. But you are better than me at French, Algebra, Arithmetic, and I am confused (and remaining so) about Morse and Electricity and Magnetism. You and I are a couple, a man and a woman. Whatever inequalities of knowledge and ability exist between us they are our responsibility.

  You ask me if I want you to be a modern woman par excellence, and you ‘rather hope I am the least bit old-fashioned’. Well, I am sufficiently old-fashioned not to want you to work after marriage. I want your main job to be looking after me. But, as I have said earlier, I do not want you to go house-mad. I want you to take an interest in other things, and if necessary, join up with people like yourself who may be sim
ilarly interested. I have seen (theoretically!) a woman stop being useful to the world upon marriage. I want you to develop, say, something that the circumstances of your working life have prevented you following. I can therefore be, not the bloke who bangs the Harem gate shut, but the one who gives you the chance to do something; obviously I am marrying you because I am selfish, not because I think a little leisure may make you another Van Gogh.

  You amuse me when you say you don’t think managing money is my strong point. (I haven’t got any strong points except those you make.) I expect you will find me a horrible old skinflint, but I hope you’ll agree to have pocket-money, as I shall have it, and that should enable you to be at least independent in little things. In any case, you will be doing the housekeeping, and I shall assist only at your invitation.

  I’ve never really asked you, have I – Will you marry me, Bessie (for better or for worse)? There are no good reasons, but the only excuse I can offer is that I will love you always, my fashion. Reply by ordinary L.C. won’t you?

  I am sure you will find me easy to cook for; we shall have a fine time making you ‘all a housewife should be’. With our understanding of the needs of the other, I haven’t any doubt about our happiness. We shall get along well. Yes, we dovetail nicely. It is wonderful how the distance has not prevented our easy flow of meaning. You certainly have made a very large and grand contribution to the union which is ‘us’.

  Yes, I got those corduroy trousers a few months after the war started, and long before everyone adopted them. When I got them home, my Mother said, ‘You silly young ass, only artists wear them!’ She was approximately correct. They are grand trousers, though, and wonderful material. I am glad about your non-puritan thoughts based on their contents.

  Yes, my Mother will be a bit of a nuisance to her prospective daughter-in-law. Not because she is mine, but because in-laws are nuisances. But I shall be able to help you where necessary and when the time comes. My attitude in similar circs. would be ‘Blow the lot of them’. I am not over-fond of relations myself.

  I had strawberries today, pal, they were grand. I need hardly say I prefer you to all the strawberries yet or to be.

  Thinking of you. Love.

  Chris.

  Chapter Eleven

  How to Write the Perfect Letter, Part 3

  The golden age of letter-writing was not like the golden age of ballooning or the golden age of Leeds United: it is neither easily definable nor much celebrated. But it is a good conversation piece. Madame de Sévigné has already made a case for the seventeenth century, while Lord Chesterfield and the guardians of the epistolary novel have staked out the eighteenth. At the turn of the nineteenth century, John Keats waits coughing in the wings. Amongst the educated public, each decade from 1680 has brought new postal freedoms and delight.

  And what of the decline of the English letter? This too has a debatable history. Certainly it began before the fax or email; for many it started in 1840, with the first adhesive stamp. The snobbish and the well-to-do believed cheap postage would lead to the equivalent cheapening of an art form best left to the professionals. When the Victorian writer George Saintsbury considered the history of letter-writing for an anthology, he used a phrase that had already become a cliché: ‘the Penny Post killed it’.

  And it has apparently been dying ever since. In January 1919, when the Yale Review reported that ‘the art of writing letters has been lost’, it was able to assign other reasons for this sad fact: ‘Some lay the blame upon the telephone, the typewriter, the telegraph, upon the railroad that benumbs a letter-writer with the knowledge that his letter, which should ripen in a postboy’s bag, will be delivered a thousand miles away at 2.45 tomorrow. Some say the art went out with the goose-quill. But most ascribe the loss to the modern art of leisure.’ The theory, sounding somewhat familiar at the beginning of the twenty-first century, ran as follows: we were too busy with work, travel and the pressures and demands of modern life to sit down for a minute, let alone think and write a letter.

  Or as Henry Dwight Sedgwick had it at Yale, ‘Hurry has been set on a pedestal, and Scurry has been set on a pedestal, and the taste for leisure has been snuffed out.’* There was still some hope: ‘There are, and always will be, convalescents, cripples, confirmed idlers, guests marooned in country houses on Sunday mornings’ – and it was to them that we should entrust the future art of letters. Was there anyone else to blame for this death of letter-writing just after the Great War? Yes: schools. ‘Oddly enough, teachers of literature teach almost anything other than the art of letter-writing. Boys and girls from twelve to twenty are set writing essays, theses, compositions, as if Tom, Dick, Molly and Polly were going to write essays throughout their lives to their parents, lovers, husbands, wives, children, and old cronies.’ The teaching of English, alas, was ‘dominated by the grammarians who desire passionately that every boy and girl shall recognize at sight and call by name a “partitive genitive” or an “adverbial clause”, and by educational reformers who regard speaking English and writing English as machinery and not an art. Both sets despise the loafer, and the art of letter-writing.’

  In 1927, in the introduction to an anthology of English Letter Writers, the compiler R. Brimley Johnson also wondered whether letter-writing wasn’t already a subject for mourning. And what a loss that would be: ‘Letters we value reveal the impulse to share beauty and sorrow with another; to give all we have learned and gained from life; to lift a little from the burdens, that, borne alone, would crush and kill; they are of the vision and the understanding which is art.’

  In 1929 the Prairie Schooner journal in Nebraska was writing a similar obituary. ‘It has been said, and with some reason, that the art of letter-writing is to be numbered among the lost accomplishments,’ wrote Gilbert H. Doane. ‘Certainly there has been a decided decline in the writing of letters. As I go home year after year, and meet old friends and acquaintances, the question is always the same: “Why haven’t you written?” And it is always answered: “I’m such a poor correspondent, I’m so busy, and so rarely have the leisure to write a decent letter”.’

  No one actually used the phrase ‘the golden age of letter-writing’ in these doomy dispatches, but it was certainly ‘golden age’ thinking – that bemoaning aura that descends on culture when its once-influential practitioners become aware of their own failing powers. By most sensible standards, or at least quantifiable ones, letter-writing had never been healthier as the nineteenth century drew to a close: more people were writing more regularly over greater distances at lower cost than ever before. Mail volume per head of the population in Great Britain rose steadily throughout the century, from 3.1 items sent in 1839 to 13.2 in 1850, 47.5 in 1880 and 116.7 in 1910.* From 564 million in 1860, the number of letters delivered by the Post Office had roughly doubled every 20 years.

  Another indicator of health came from a still booming literary sub-genre: the letter-writing instruction manual. These still consisted of standard lists of correct forms of address and farewells, and their abundance and titles could take up half a market stall: The Secretary’s Assistant: Exhibiting the Varied and Most Correct Modes of Superscription, Commencement and Conclusion of Letters to Persons at Every Degree of Rank (1842); The Art of Letter-Writing Simplified; by Precept and Example; Embracing Practical Illustrations of Epistolary Correspondence of Every Age, in Every Station and Degree, and Under Every Circumstance of Life (1847). It wasn’t long, of course, before Punch began to rip its way through them with delight. Less parody than reality, the oft-used template of a letter from a regretful son to a father asking for paternal assistance received the reply: ‘All your long letter may be boiled down like spinach, into three words: “Pay my debts”.’*

  Just as they struggled for novelty in their titles, the contents of the Victorian manuals showed about as much originality as their predecessors from earlier centuries. In the 1890s, for example, about two-thirds of the exampl
es in The Favourite Letter Writer consisted of letters culled directly from Samuel Richardson’s Familiar Letters for Important Occasions published 150 years earlier, including such popular examples as ‘From an Uncle to a Nephew, on his keeping bad Company, bad Hours &c. in his Apprenticeship’. But the manuals were now appealing to a new class of letter-writer, a cohort made larger by cheaper postage, economic expansion brought on by industrialisation, and greater literacy.

  In the United States, there was much strict and practical guidance regarding paper and ink, and a consideration of what may be considered gaudy. ‘For all formal notes, of whatever nature,’ wrote Richard Alfred Wells in Manners, Culture, and Dress of the Best American Society in 1891, ‘use heavy, plain, white, unruled paper, folded once, with square envelopes to match. A neat initial letter at the head of the sheet is allowable, but nothing more than this. Avoid monograms, floral decorations and landscapes. Unless of an elaborate and costly design they have an appearance of cheapness, and are decidedly in bad taste.’ Another etiquette guide, Miss Leslie’s Behavior Book by Eliza Leslie offered further assistance: ‘If the tint is bluish, the writing will not be so legible as on pure white. The surface should be smooth and glossy.’

  As with Samuel Richardson in the 1740s, the genre was not short of well-known authors willing to join the fray. In 1888, Lewis Carroll produced an item he deemed so indispensible to a fulfilling and creative life that he couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly manage without it. ‘The Wonderland Case For Postage-Stamps’ consisted of a simple folding wallet with 12 pockets marked for various denominations of stamps from half a pence to one shilling. Not a huge revolution in postal technology, but Carroll claimed he invented it after many frustrating encounters with letters to be sent overseas, and other packages requiring irregular postage rates: with a fully stocked ‘Wonderland’ one would never be short of the correct sums again. It was named, of course, after the Alice books, and it was Alice that would ensure the Wonderland’s success. ‘Imitations of it will soon appear, no doubt,’ he wrote. ‘But they cannot include the two Pictorial Surprises, which are copyright.’ The surprises were two new illustrations of Alice, one holding a baby, one holding a pig. But there was another reason for buying the case – a booklet entitled Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing.