To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  * The title may have derived from The Image of Idleness (1555), a fictional account of letters between a bachelor and a married man written by ‘Olyver Oldwanton and dedicated to the Lady Lust’.

  * The old English grammar and spelling are retained here for flavour, although the ‘v’ has been replaced with our now-familiar ‘u’, and the letter ‘j’ has been substituted for ‘i’ when the occasion merits it. As quoted in The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries by Jean Robertson, University Press of Liverpool, 1942.

  * A maulkin was a harlot.

  * Chris Barker lived in Tottenham; Bessie Moore in Blackheath.

  * Country in this context means county. A few months later, Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, led the Lancastrian faction in the invasion of Northumberland.

  * Breasts.

  * Not that the carrier system didn’t continue to compete against the state monopoly. In 1637, just after the then-postmaster Thomas Witherings and the king’s principal secretary of state John Coke laid down the first principles of the post office and new post roads, The Carriers Cosmographie by John Taylor listed many hundreds of unofficial routes and schedules.

  * The play Vortigern and Rowena caused so much initial excitement that it even received a performance at Drury Lane. A long run it wasn’t: in the manner of The Producers, the play seemed destined to close on page four, but it staggered on gamely, finally closing on the same night it opened. The actors left the stage to widespread laughter.

  These days, a bit of forensic work on the ink would have consigned it to the dustbin before it hit the boards. Unlike the ink available in the late eighteenth century, which was made from squid, soot and turpentine, Shakespeare’s fluid derived predominantly from ground ‘gall nuts’, the product of the gall fly on oak trees. These would then be soaked in red wine, and mixed with iron sulphate and gum Arabic while being dried in the sun. A cut-down goose quill was the favoured writing tool, and the ink would be dried on the parchment or rough paper by dusting with a fine powder of ‘pounce’, made from pumice stone or salt; a letter would thus be judged ‘done and dusted’.

  * Casablanca had been released in London the previous year.

  * In a letter to her daughter in September 1680 she implored, ‘Speak . . . about your machines, the machines which love, the machines which make an election of someone, the machines which are jealous, the machines which fear. Now go on; you are mocking us. Descartes never should have tried to make us believe this.’

  * Understandably, Madame de Sévigné’s moods revolved to a great extent around the performance of the postal service. Occasionally she would complain about tardiness, particular regarding mail from Italy. But she could also praise, and, because it wasn’t her most common attribute, her approval strikes one as a memorable thing. Elsewhere in France (as in England), one read mostly complaints. ‘I cannot but wonder at the skill of those gentlemen – the postilions – who spend their lives racing back and forth carrying our mail,’ she wrote to her daughter in June 1671. ‘There is not one day in the week, nor a single hour in the day when they are not on the road. Those wonderful people! What a wonderful invention the postal service is!’

  * This sign-off ‘&c’ is an abbreviated and alternative form of ‘etc’.

  * Which shaved eleven days off the prevailing Julian calendar, reduced the length of the year by 10 minutes and 48 seconds, and established a new system of February leap days.

  * The figure, as with all sums mentioned here, includes buyer’s premium.

  * This was the highest price paid for a letter by Napoleon, but far from the highest price ever paid for a letter at auction. This honour attached itself to a letter written by George Washington in 1787 to his nephew Bushrod Washington, fetching $3,218,500 (£1,932,600) in December 2009 at Christie’s, New York. The letter urges the ratification of the newly adopted constitution.

  * The bill attempted to introduce a reduction in the land tax for the gentry, and an increase in salt tax; it was defeated as much by public opposition as parliamentary.

  * A letter from Einstein to Roosevelt from August 1939 in which he suspects that the element uranium may soon be turned into a ‘new and important’ source of energy.

  * George and Edward’s mother (Jane Austen’s sister-in-law) had just died, and Jane is looking after them. Within this context, her observations on their spirits and games are caring and touching.

  * Fielding also wrote The Letter Writers, a Whitehall-style farce in which two hapless men try to protect their shaky marriages with a plot involving letters, hiding in closets and other buffoonish antics. And alongside his novels, Samuel Richardson also wrote an influential letter-writing manual titled Familiar Letters, in which he combined grammatical with moral guidance. Richardson believed strongly that letters were vehicles not just for communication but for education, and most of his template letters had a message, including ‘To a Father, against putting a Youth of but moderate Parts to a Profession that requires more extensive Abilities’.

  * The form is not quite dead, of course. Although the epistolary novel is still out of favour for its unreliable narrators and limited perspective, the letter and postal service have been star performers in countless contemporary novels – a list that includes Saul Bellow’s Herzog, L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, A.S. Byatt’s Possession, Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. A letter reliably means ‘New information; things are bound to change after this’. As yet, emails don’t have quite the same narrative effect, as emails are rarely discovered in lofts or under floorboards, or in boxes when people die. At the moment, emails in fiction often perform the same role as texts, usually alerting the reader to infidelity.

  * This was part of a long letter about work, Goethe and health, and at the foot of it Carlyle wondered, ‘Have I involved you in double postage by this loquacity?’

  * In much the same way as telephone charges would be saved when a caller hung up after a ring or two, the code arranged in advance to indicate that all was well.

  * The birth of universal penny postage is discussed in greater detail in The Error World by Simon Garfield (Faber, 2008), from where these quotations are taken.

  * I am grateful for this letter trail to Richard D. Brown, as related in Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America 1700–1865, OUP, 1989.

  * The bulk of surviving letters from colonial America did, by and large, betray their British roots. Most are respectable, god-fearing and dull, and one is grateful for the occasional flash of desperation and emotion. Newly settled in Massachusetts Bay in 1631, a man called John Pond writes to his father William Pond across the pond. ‘I pray, father, send me four or five yards of cloth to make us some apparel, and loving Father, though I be far distant from you, yet I pray you remember me as your child, and we do not know how long we may subsist, for we cannot live here without provisions from ould eingland.’ As was to be the case with postal reforms, New England relied on the old. Quoted in Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America Before Telecommunications by William Merrill Decker, University of Carolina Press, 1998.

  * See The Postal Age: the Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America by David M. Henkin, University of Chicago Press, 2006.

  * Osgood was by all accounts a big-brained and generous man, vacating his grand house in Manhattan so that President Washington could live there when the seat of government was still in New York, making this early executive mansion a popular and unexpected stop on the Manhattan city tour.

  * She was almost certainly rather near, probably in Boston. When she replied, Hawthorne went nuts. ‘Belovedest . . . I have folded it to my heart, and ever and anon i
t sends a thrill through me; for thou has steeped it with thy love – it seems as if thy head were leaning against my breast.’

  * Steamboats, canals and the introduction of the (relatively costly) telegraph service in 1844 also contributed. The domestic delivery of mail was still some way off; for most of the second half of the century the population collected their letters from the nearest post office.

  * She’s written better.

  * The term gained currency when postal workers, driven mad by the monotony and inexorable nature of their task, went on gun rampages in the 1970s. Delivering letters, or in Bartleby’s case not delivering them, is seldom a task that rewards efficiency; no matter what you do, the pile never diminishes (an affliction now transferred to the email inbox).

  * This was not always the case: in the 1830s the postmaster general banned abolitionist tracts from the mail, and Abraham Lincoln encouraged the opening of mail during the civil war; as in London, the mail became a focus for intelligence.

  * See John Tingey, The Englishman Who Posted Himself and Other Curious Objects, Princeton University Press, 2010.

  * In a family association of which one imagines he would have been proud, H.D. Sedgwick was a distant relative of the Warhol protégé Edie Sedgwick, who did write the occasional letter, most famously to Warhol after he was shot: ‘I am saying prayers for you . . . don’t know how much good they do, but at least you will know I care, and care tremendously.’

  * These were all postal items apart from parcels.

  * As quoted in Laura Rotunno, ‘The Long History of “In Short”: Mr Micawber, Letter-Writers, and Literary Men’ in Victorian Literature and Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

  * All The Year Round was established and edited (or ‘conducted’) by Charles Dickens since its birth in 1859. Following his death in 1870, the task was continued by his son Charles Dickens Jr. There is no doubt that Dickens himself had a keen interest in the development of letter-writing, and it was something he pursued in his novels. The letter-writing styles of Micawber in David Copperfield and Alfred Jingle in The Pickwick Papers were distinguishing features of their characters, and their author clearly revelled in them. ‘I believe he dreams in Letters!’ Betsey Trotwood said of Micawber, who considered himself something of an epistolary aficionado and endeared himself to readers with his ‘in short’ catchphrase, something that invariably heralded the long-winded and exhausting.

  Dickens was a great supporter of the new penny post, and a year after it was introduced he wrote to Basil Hall, the naval officer and author, in the style of Alfred Jingle’s harried style (signing it with his pen-name):

  My Dear Hall.

  Post just going – compression of sentiments required – Bust received – likeness amazing – recognizable instantly if encountered on the summit of the great Pyramid – Scotch anecdote most striking and most distressing – dreamed of it – babbies well – wife ditto – yours the same, I hope? – Seaport sketches, one of those ideas that improves in promise as they are pondered on – Good I am certain – Ever faithfully, and at present hastily –

  Boz

  * Upside down, top right corner = Write no more.

  Upside down in line with surname = I am engaged.

  Centred on right edge = Write immediately!

  At right angle, top left corner = I hate you.

  * The stamp-tilting tradition is maintained today in situations where mail is subject to external scrutiny and censorship, in particular in prisons and in the military.

  * Vanessa addressed the letter to ‘James’, and signed off ‘Eleanor Hadyng’, a childhood game they had.

  *Woolf's novel Orlando was described by Saville-West's son Nigel Nicholson, who edited Woolf’s letters, as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.

  * I’m not sure why we consistently use ‘suicide note’ rather than ‘suicide letter’; it may have something to do with the anticipated brevity, although this is often far from the case. One of the two letters Virginia left for Leonard read, written perhaps 10 days before she died, in edited form: ‘Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came . . . If anybody could have saved me it would have been you . . .’

  * Her last novel Between the Acts.

  * Madame de Sévigné was Woolf’s epistolary heroine, if not her inspiration. In The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, published posthumously in 1942, she wrote: ‘This great lady, this robust and fertile letter writer, who in our age would probably have been one of the great novelists, takes up presumably as much space in the consciousness of living readers as any figure of her vanished age.’

  * In later life, Woolf wrote frequently to Ethel Smyth, a composer and prominent member of the suffrage movement who became infatuated with her, although it is clear that Woolf found her partly insufferable, in one letter calling her ‘a catastrophe’.

  * Quoted in the introduction to Leave The Letters Till We’re Dead: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol VI, edited by Nigel Nicholson. Nicholson, the son of Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West said of Woolf, ‘A letter was a wine glass to hold her delights, or a sump for her despair.’

  * When we spoke, Glenn Horowitz was negotiating with Gerd Stern to sell his archive; the letter is still believed to be overboard, alas, and is not part of it.

  * The letter is also dated May 1960.

  * Although one could also argue that a more representative picture of the way things would turn out could be gleaned from the ‘Celene’ bar letter three years later.

  * The misquote may not have been entirely accidental. A few days before her death, The Times had run a hostile editorial entitled ‘The Eclipse of The Highbrow’ condemning the ‘esoteric parlour games’ and inefficiency of high intellectualism during the war, aiming its arrows specifically at the Bloomsbury group; subsequent replies to the editorial, by Kenneth Clark and others, likened this criticism to the book burning of the Nazis in 1933. This dispute is tracked well in Afterwords: Letters on the Death of Virginia Woolf, edited by Sybil Oldfield.

  * John Farrelly Jr.’s son George kindly passed on to me the following story: ‘My father wrote a letter to Virginia Woolf a few years before the one to Leonard. He was perhaps 18 or so. I was told by one of his brothers that he was uncertain whether or not to send it. In the end he decided not to send it, and threw it out the window of the family car as they were driving into St Louis from their home in the country. Someone must have found it and posted it, because it did in fact reach Virginia Woolf (who I think replied to him).

  * Leigh Hunt, the English writer and poet, a close friend of Keats.

  * The most accessible collection is Selected Letters of John Keats edited by Grant F. Scott, Harvard, 2002.

  * A highly popular epistolary novel by Jean-Jacques Rousseau from 1761, Julie or the New Heloise documented the correspondence between two lovers and referred directly to the letters of Abelard and Heloise.

  * The couple chose Italy for the same reason Keats did: she had a lung condition, probably tuberculosis, and sought the warmth of the air in Florence and Rome.

  * On Valentine’s Day 2012, in a joint venture between Wellesley College and Baylor University, a facsimile of all the Browning/Barrett love letters were made available online for the first time.

  * Not that they didn’t carry on writing to everyone else (about literary matters, the Crimean War, the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace).

  * Miller’s letters to Lawrence Durrell, the poet James Laughlin and the
painter Emil Schnellock also make worthwhile reading, tracing (as with the Nin letters) a proper arc from searing young iconoclasm in Europe to an eventual acceptance of the world (he writes less, paints more, and, only in late-middle age, finds the pleasures of solidity and domestication: ‘When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist.’).