Correspondence Culture

Godfrey Frank Singer’s and Frank Gees Black’s bibliographical studies of the epistolary novel show that the nineteenth-century literary marketplace was not conducive to the epistolary novel; see Godfrey Frank Singer, The Epistolary Novel: Its Origin, Development, Decline, and Residuary Influence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1933)Google Scholar

Frank Gees Black, The Epistolary Novel in the Late Eighteenth Century (Eugene: University of Oregon Press, 1940).Google Scholar

James Raven, ‘The Market for Novels — Some Statistical Profiles: Britain, 1750–1830’, in The Novel, ed. Franco Moretti, vol. 1 (Princeton University Press, 2006), 429–54Google Scholar

Nicola J. Watson, Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 193.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Amanda Anderson, ‘The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity’, Victorian Studies 43.1 (Autumn 2000): 43–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Anna Maria Jones, Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), 6.Google Scholar

Richard R. John, ‘The Political Economy of Postal Reform in the Victorian Age’, in The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia: Select Papers, 2006–2009, ed. Thomas Lera (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2010)Google Scholar

Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (1948, Westport: Greenwood Press, 1970), 157.Google Scholar

Qtd in F. E. Baines, Forty Years at the Post-Office: A Personal Narrative, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1895), vol. 1: 118–19.Google Scholar

Qtd in Brian Austen, British Mail-Coach Services: 1784–1850 (New York: Garland, 1986), 354.Google Scholar

F. George Kay, Royal Mail: The Story of the Posts in England from the Time of Edward IVth to the Present Day (London: Rockliff Publishing, 1951), 68.Google Scholar

Duncan Campbell-Smith offers a fine explanation of the general social and political as well as Post Office specific conditions that helped the 1840 postal reforms to become a reality; see Campbell-Smith’s Masters of the Post: The Authorized History of The Royal Mail (London: Penguin, 2011), 113–23.Google Scholar

Rowland Hill, Results of the New Postage Arrangements (London: Henry Hooper, 1841), 7.Google Scholar

David Allam, Social and Economic Importance of Postal Reform in 1840 (Leeds: Arthur Wigley and Sons, 1976), 27.Google Scholar

Nigel Hall, ‘The Materiality of Letter Writing: A Nineteenth-Century Perspective’, in Letter Writing as a Social Practice, ed. David Barton and Nigel Hall (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000), 83–108CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Catherine J. Golden’s Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

J. Lawrence Hammond, ‘A Liberal View of Education’, in Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men (London: Cassell and Co., 1897), 175–217Google Scholar

W. H. Ashurst, Facts and Reasons in Support of Mr. Rowland Hill’s Plea for a Universal Penny Postage, 2nd edn (London: Henry Hooper, 1838), 67.Google Scholar

James Fitzjames Stephen, ‘Liberalism’, Cornhill Magazine 5.25 (January 1862): 70–83Google Scholar

Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey and Poems (1847, London: Everyman’s Library, 1985), 60.Google Scholar

John Wilson Croker, Review of Post-office Reform: Its Impor tance and Practicability, by Rowland Hill, Quarterly Review 64.128 (October 1839): 513–74Google Scholar

For the most comprehensive histories of pre-nineteenth-century British letter-writing manuals see Martin Camargo, Ars Dictaminis, Ars Dictandi (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 17–28Google Scholar

Complete Letter-Writer, title page. As did a host of its 1820s and 1830s progenitors, Reverend Thomas Cooke’s 1841 text, in a manner followed by other contemporary manuals, advertised its grammar instruction in its title; see Reverend Thomas Cooke, The Universal Letter Writer; or, New Art of Polite Correspondence; To Which Are Added the Complete Petitioner, Forms of Law, etc.; Also A New English Grammar (Edinburgh: T. Nelson, 1841).Google Scholar

William Kingdom’s text was republished in 1850 and again in the 1880s, suggesting how valuable the nineteenth-century public found these manuals. It was also common for mid-to-late-century manuals to provide information on the orders of knighthood and the line of succession, as well as guides for preparing letters directed to Members of Parliament; see William Kingdom, The Secretary’s Assistant; Exhibiting the Various and Most Correct Modes of Superscription, Commencement, and Conclusion of Letters to Persons at Every Degree of Rank, Including the Diplomatic, Clerical, & Judicial Dignitaries: with the Lists of Foreign Ambassadors & Consuls, also the Forms Necessary to be Used in Applications or Petitions to the Queen in Council, Houses of Lords & Commons, Government Offices & Public Companies, with a Table of Precedency and the Abbreviations of Several British & Foreign Orders of Knighthood, 8th edn (London: Whittaker and Co., 1842).Google Scholar

In a sense, Samuel Richardson’s Pamela offers proof of the assertion of letters’ moral powers. This novel developed from letters contained in Familiar Letters, specifically letters nos 138–9, and the manual itself promised to ‘mend the heart, and improve the understanding’ of its users; Samuel Richardson, Familiar Letters on Important Occasions, 1741, ed. J. Isaacs (London: Routledge and Sons, 1928), xxviiGoogle Scholar

Catherine Hall, ‘Macaulay: A Liberal Historian?’, in The Peculiarities of Liberal Modernity in Imperial Britain, ed. Simon Gunn and James Vernon (Berkeley: global, Area, and International Archive, 2011), 19–36Google Scholar

Thackeray, ‘Dignity’, 4. See Ian Bradley, The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), 29–30Google Scholar

Charles Dickens, ‘Prospectus for the Guild of Literature and Art, April 1851’, in The Letters of Charles Dickens, ed. Graham Story, Kathleen Tillotson, and Nina Burgis, vol. 6: 1850-2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 852–7Google Scholar

M. J. Daunton, Royal Mail: The Post Office since 1840 (London: Athlone Press, 1985), 46.Google Scholar

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography (1883, London: Fontana Library, 1962), 90.Google Scholar

Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 169.Google Scholar

In June 1844, MP Thomas Duncombe, speaking on behalf of Joseph Mazzini and several other correspondents, revealed to the House of Commons that these petitioners’ ‘letters had been detained by the Post Office, their seals broken, and that they had been opened and read’; Robinson, British Post Office, 337. Duncombe stressed that these letters were sent ‘for no political purpose, and contained no libellous matter or treasonable comments upon the Government or country’; qtd in Robinson, British Post Office, 337. Ultimately it was confirmed that’ since the beginning of March [1844] sixty or seventy letters addressed to me [Mazzini] have been opened, ... every care being taken to avert suspicion, impressions of the seals taken, the cut sometimes so delicate that it almost required a magnifying glass to follow its trace’; qtd in Robinson, British Post Office, 340. In ‘Post-Office Espionage’, the North British Review offered shocking details concerning Mazzini’s discovery that his letters had been tampered with; ‘Post-Office Espionage’, North British Review 2 (1844–45): 257–95, 258. Compounding the shock was the fact that the intrusions into Mazzini’s correspondence were not the acts of errant postmen, but ones sanctioned by Home Secretary Sir James Graham. Though there had been previous denunciations of the Post Office’s practice of opening letters, this 1844 scandal incited massive public indignation. However, the committees investigating the scandal judged that a dedication to the’ safety of the State’ inspired the Post Office’s letter-reading practices; William Lewins, Her Majesty’s Mails: History of the Post-Office and an Industrial Account of its Present Condition, 2nd edn, revised, corrected, and enlarged (London: Sampson, 1865), 216.Google Scholar

Stefanie Markovits, ‘Rushing into Print: “Participatory Journalism” in the Crimean War’, Victorian Studies 50.4 (Summer 2008): 559–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar

George Seton, Gossip about Letters and Letter-Writers (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1870), 160.Google Scholar

Charles Dickens, ‘The Begging-Letter Writer’, Household Words 1 (18 May 1850): 169–72Google Scholar

Madeleine Smith’s letters continued to be discussed long after questions of class bias and easy access to poison — issues central to her case — fell silent. In 1896, 39 years after Smith’s trial, J. B. Atlay would still write: ‘her letters showed as extraordinary a frame of mind and as unhallowed a passion as ever appeared in a court of justice’; J. B. Atlay, ‘Famous Trials: The Queen Against Madeleine Smith’, Cornhill 1.5 (1896): 639–53Google Scholar

Ginger S. Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 120.Google Scholar

P. H. J. H. Gosden, Self-Help: Voluntary Associations in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Batsford, 1973), 239.Google Scholar

Walter Besant, London in the Nineteenth Century (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1909), 310.Google Scholar

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty and The Subjection of Women, ed. Alan Ryan (London: Penguin, 2006), 15.Google Scholar

David Thomas, Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 94.Google Scholar

Bradley Deane, The Making of the Victorian Novelist: Anxieties of Authorship in the Mass Market (New York: Routledge, 2003), 30.Google Scholar

See Jane Jordan, ‘Ouida: How Perceptions of the Popular Reader Contributed to the Making of a Popular Novelist’, in A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel, 1850–1900, ed. Beth Palmer and Adelene Buckland (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 37–54Google Scholar

As early as the 1850s, telegraph services had been available to the British public, but the rates were prohibitive. Evelyn Murray concisely reviews the telegraph’s use before 1870 and the circumstances surrounding the Post Office’s takeover; see Evelyn Murray], The Post Office (London: Putnams, 1927), 67–72Google Scholar

See Frank Staff, The Penny Post: 1680–1918 (London: Lutterworth Press, 1964), 126–40Google Scholar

Qtd in Mrs Adrian Porter, The Life and Letters of Sir John Henniker Heaton (London: John Lane, 1916)Google Scholar

T. A. Jenkins, The Liberal Ascendancy, 1830–1886 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 130.Google Scholar

J. A. J. Housden, ‘Civil Service Institutions: The Post Office Library and Literary Institution’, Blackfriars: The Post Office Magazine 5 (September 1887): 91–100Google Scholar

See W. F. Lovell, ‘Civil Service Institutions: The Post Office Building Societies’, Blackfriars: The Post Office Magazine 4 (April 1887): 49–60Google Scholar

A. Belcher, ‘Civil Service Institutions: The United Kingdom Postal and Telegraph Service Benevolent Society’, Blackfriars: The Post Office Magazine 4 (June 1887): 145–51Google Scholar

Walter Montagu Gattie, ‘What English People Read’, Fortnightly 46 (September 1889): 307–21Google Scholar

Edmund Gosse, ‘The Decay of Literature’, North American Review 161 (July 1895): 109–18Google Scholar

Ouida, ‘The Tendencies of English Fiction’, The North American Review 141.346 (September 1885): 213–25Google Scholar

Daniel Hack, The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 88–100Google Scholar

Victor Bonham-Carter, Authors by Profession, vol. 1 (London: Society of Authors, 1978), 168–9.Google Scholar

A. Arthur Reade, ‘Brain-Tapping’, Gentleman’s Magazine 274 (July 1898): 362–7Google Scholar

Sheila E. Braine, ‘The Complete Letter Writer’, Littell’s Living Age 210 (1896): 58–61Google Scholar

Edith Sichel, ‘Women as Letter-Writers’, Cornhill 6 (January 1899): 53–67Google Scholar

Sometimes the space provided was even more constricted. In 1893, John Henniker Heaton denounced the Post Office’s ‘clipping’ of postcards, that is, the practice by which the Post Office physically decreased the size of postcards destined for foreign outposts. This act obviously undercut the usefulness of this cheap form of correspondence, which, as Heaton stressed, might be ‘the poor man’s only vehicle of communication with his friends in the colonies’; J. Henniker Heaton, ‘Post-Office Plundering and Blundering’, Nineteenth Century 33 (1893): 994–1008Google Scholar

James Payn, ‘Penny Fiction’, Nineteenth Century and After: A Monthly Review 9.47 (January 1881): 145–54Google Scholar

Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 29. Stephen, ‘Liberalism’, 78–9. See Patricia O’Hara, ‘Knowing Hodge: The Third Reform Bill and the Victorian Periodical Press’, Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers, ed. Laurel Brake and Julie F. Codell (New York: Palgrave, 2005), 103–16Google Scholar