An elegy for the dying art of writing delightful letters
i. t is a rare day when I do not write a letter or at least a postcard. But they are all brief and to the point, seldom discursive, never 'literary'. None will
be of interest to posterity: I envy the skill of Byron, who could make even a peremptory note to his bank manager fascinating, or of Dickens, who as an editor could turn a rejection slip into a work of art (and kindness). The last real correspondence I carried on for the pleasure of writing was with Lady Pamela Berry (later Hartwell), herself a letter writer of genius, and that ended with her death a quarter century ago. Hard to think of any swapping of letters nowadays that really merits publication. The Kingsley ArnisPhilip Larkin exchanges, lasting their adult lifetimes, are a notable exception. Being a historian, I keep all the letters I receive which are likely to be of the smallest interest in the future, stuffing them unsorted into the red leather dispatch box I was given for serving on a royal commission. I also have folders of letters from certain prime ministers, such as Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, and one from Princess Diana. But all told, they do not amount to an archive.
What a contrast to the 18th and 19th centuries, or even to the 20th until the telephone cut out the need for most personal letters! I am an avid collector of printed volumes of correspondence, to my mind the perfect form of reading, better even than diaries. They overflow my shelves and are becoming a serious problem. For instance, the presumably definitive edition of the letters of Jane and Thomas Carlyle, both prolific correspondents, which is being put together by Duke University in North Carolina (it is actually a joint work of scholarship with Edinburgh) already numbers 29 volumes but only goes up to June 1855. Jane lived another 11 years, until 1866, and Carlyle himself did not die until 1881. At this rate there will be 50 or 60 volumes, and I will be long dead before they are all out. The National Library of Scotland alone has 4,780 letters of the Carlyles, and there are 26 other major holdings, ranging from the Marquess of Northampton's, which has 282, to libraries all over America, and in Australia and New Zealand. New letters are turning up all the time. Carlyle wrote 1,009 letters to his brother John alone, and these are just the ones that survive. Carlyle also wrote 949 (surviving) letters to Jane. What other husband was so assiduous? In the years 1841-45, Carlyle's yearly average was 169 letters, most of them substantial, many long. Jane, in the last six years of her life, despite continual illness and much suffering, produced 62 letters a year which have survived. Is not this a form of heroism?
Letters bring a man or a woman before us more clearly than any other kind of document, a really intimate diary alone excepted. In the great Pilgrim edition of Dickens's letters, now complete, the man is brought before us almost as if he were in the room, scintillating and reflecting the light from a hundred different angles, as we follow his activities in the smallest detail from day to day, almost from hour to hour. There are 14,252 letters in the 12 massive volumes, 235 of which came to light while the edition was in preparation. The cost, alas, is huge, beyond most of us, though the Folio Society has now arranged for its members to get the set at a much reduced price. On the other hand, the editing is so meticulous and the footnotes so copious — and Dickens's activities spread
over so wide a field that this great enterprise gives us a penetrating window into midVictorian society.
Was Dickens our greatest letter writer? Many people would give the accolade to Horace Walpole. He had the advantage that his principal correspondent, Sir Horace Mann, was in Italy, so he had the incentive to write at length describing the events and retelling the gossip of the day. Unfortunately, I do not possess the great multi-volume American edition of his works, which does the same job on his age as the Pilgrim has done on Dickens's. My edition, though beautifully bound in full leather, is of 19 volumes, 12 of them letters, but it dates from 1840 and is under-edited and scarcely annotated at all. Some 18thor early 19th-century letter writers disappoint. My edition of Dr Johnson's letters is the 1984 reissue of R.W. Chapman's compilation in three volumes, which the OUP put out to mark the 200th anniversary of his death. (A superior one in five volumes is now available.) Most of them date from the last period of his life, when he was so famous that recipients kept them, and are chiefly concerned with his health. They can be very moving, though. Take this, dated 17 June 1783, to Edmund Allen:
Dear Sir, It hath pleased Almighty God this morning to deprive me of the powers of speech; and, as I do not know that it may be his farther good pleasure to deprive me soon of my senses. I request you will, on the receipt of this note, come here and act for me, as the exigencies of my case may require. I am, Sincerely Yours, S. Johnson.
An amazing missive, is it not, to be penned by an old man in pain, alarm and no doubt, despite his heroism, fear? Johnson, by Chapman's count, wrote 1,515 surviving letters, and a choice few of them are, by any standards, masterworks of sense and feeling.
Of the great Regenc-y figures, Jane Austen and Byron are outstanding as letter writers. Jane Austen's disappoint many, including some who love her novels, because they seem so trivial and concerned only with minor domestic matters. The truth is, they were suppressed in toto or heavily censored, on principles we do not know but which seemed designed to exclude anything of general interest (such as politics) and most remarks which might conceivably offend anyone. Her niece Caroline wrote, 'Her letters to Aunt Cassandra (for they were sometimes separated) were, I dare say, open and confidential — My Aunt looked them over and burnt the greater part (as she told me) 2 or 3 years before her own death. . . . Of those that I have seen, several had portions cut out.' In the current (1995) complete edition, there are 164 printed but many have cuts indicated. The rest, though, to my mind carry the true voice of this author, and are a delight. Byron's voice comes over even more strongly in the fine 11-volume edition which Leslie Marchand, greatest of Byron scholars, edited for Jock Murray. It has the formidable total of 14,252 letters, 235 of which turned up while the edition was in preparation, a huge amount considering that Byron died comparatively young. On the other hand, he lived half his life abroad, and had to write. He wrote to shock and annoy his wife, knowing that his publisher Murray, to whom a large number were addressed, would read them out aloud in his famous Albemarle Street drawing room (now abandoned, alas).
The lost letters I most regret are Lamb's, a peerlessly funny and tender correspondent, who must have sent out several thousand. But only 1,027 appear in the three-volume edition of E.V. Lucas (1935) and even in the superbly annotated Cornell edition of the 1970s — of which I have only the first three volumes — there are just 1,150. But then I read the best ones over and over again. How grateful I feel to these long-dead correspondents! I suspect, when I come to die myself, a book of letters will be found slipping from my cooling hand.
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