Val Walker’s correspondence, both inconsequential and profound, was doing what correspondence has so alluringly, convincingly and reliably done for more than 2,000 years, embracing the reader with a disarming blend of confession and emotion, and (for I had no reason to suspect otherwise, despite the illusory subject matter) integrity. His letters had secured what his former spiritualist medium colleagues could not – a new friend from beyond the grave. The folders now at auction not only prised open a subculture that was growing ever more clandestine with the cloaky passage of time, but presented a trove of incidental personal details that, in other circumstances, would have bordered on intrusion. I sat in that auction room and wondered: what else could bring back a world and an individual’s role within it so directly, so intensely, so plainly and so irresistibly? Only letters.
Letters have the power to grant us a larger life. They reveal motivation and deepen understanding. They are evidential. They change lives, and they rewire history. The world once used to run upon their transmission – the lubricant of human interaction and the freefall of ideas, the silent conduit of the worthy and the incidental, the time we were coming for dinner, the account of our marvellous day, the weightiest joys and sorrows of love. It must have seemed impossible that their worth would ever be taken for granted or swept aside. A world without letters would surely be a world without oxygen.
This is a book about a world without letters, or at least this possibility. It is a book about what we have lost by replacing letters with email – the post, the envelope, a pen, a slower cerebral whirring, the use of the whole of our hands and not just the tips of our fingers. It is a celebration of what has gone before, and the value we place on literacy, good thinking and thinking ahead. I wonder if it is not also a book about kindness.
The digitisation of communication has effected dramatic changes in our lives, but the impact on letter-writing – so gradual and so fundamental – has slipped by like an English summer. Something that has been crucial to our economic and emotional well-being since ancient Greece has been slowly evaporating for two decades, and in two more the licking of a stamp will seem as antiquated to a future generation as the paddle steamer. You can still travel by paddle steamer, and you can still send a letter, but why would you want to when the alternatives are so much faster and more convenient? This book is an attempt to provide a positive answer.
This is not an anti-email book (what would be the point?). It is not an anti-progress book, for that could have been written at the advent of the telegraph or the landline phone, neither of which did for letter-writing in the way that was predicted, certainly not in the way email has done. The book is driven by a simple thing: the sound – and I’m still struggling to define it, that thin blue wisp of an airmail, the showy heft of an invitation with RSVP card, the happy sneeze of a thankyou note – that the letter makes when it drops onto a doormat. Auden had it right – the romance of the mail and the news it brings, the transformative possibilities of the post – only the landing of a letter beckons us with ever-renewable faith. The inbox versus the shoebox; only one will be treasured, hoarded, moved when we move or will be forgotten to be found after us. Should our personal history, the proof of our emotional existence, reside in a Cloud server (a steel-lined warehouse) on some American plain, or should it reside where it has always done, scattered amongst our physical possessions? That emails are harder to archive while retaining a pixellated durability is a paradox that we are just beginning to grapple with. But will we ever glow when we open an email folder? Emails are a poke, but letters are a caress, and letters stick around to be newly discovered.
A story is told of Oscar Wilde: he would write a letter at his Chelsea home in Tite Street (or, looking at his handwriting, ‘dash off’ is probably more accurate), and because he was so brilliant and so busy being brilliant, he wouldn’t bother to mail it. Instead, he would attach a stamp and throw the letter out of the window. He would be as certain as he could be that someone passing would see the letter, assume it had been dropped by accident, and put it into the nearest letterbox. If we all did this it wouldn’t really work, but only people like Wilde had the nonchalant faith. How many letters didn’t reach the letterbox and the intended recipient we will never know, but we can be fairly sure that if the method didn’t work well, or if too many were neglected because they landed in manure, Wilde would have stopped doing it. And there are a lot of letters from Tite Street and elsewhere that have survived him to reach handy auction prices. There’s no proper moral to this story, but it does conjure up a rather vivid picture of late-Victorian London: the horse-drawn traffic on the cobbled street below, the bustle, the clatter and the chat, and someone, probably wearing a hat, picking up a letter and doing the right thing, because going to the postbox was what one did as part of life’s daily conversation.*
There is an intrinsic integrity about letters that is lacking from other forms of written communication. Some of this has to do with the application of hand to paper, or the rolling of the paper through the typewriter, the effort to get things right first time, the perceptive gathering of purpose. But I think it also has something to do with the mode of transmission, the knowledge of what happens to the letter when sealed. We know where to post it, roughly when it will be collected, the fact that it will be dumped from a bag, sorted, delivered to a van, train or similar, and then the same thing the other end in reverse. We have no idea about where email goes when we hit send. We couldn’t track the journey even if we cared to; in the end, it’s just another vanishing. No one in a stinky brown work coat wearily answers the phone at the dead email office. If it doesn’t arrive we just send it again. But it almost always arrives, with no essence of human journey at all. The ethereal carrier is anonymous and odourless, and carries neither postmark nor scuff nor crease. The woman goes into a box and emerges unblemished. The toil has gone, and with it some of the rewards.
Oscar Wilde writes to Mrs Wren in 1888.
I wanted to write a book about those rewards. It would include a glimpse of some of the great correspondents and correspondences of the past, fold in a little history of mail, consider how we value, collect and archive letters in our lives, and look at how we were once firmly instructed to write such things. And I was keen to encounter those who felt similarly enthused about letters, some of them so much so that they were trying to bring letters back. I was concerned primarily with personal letters rather than business correspondence or official post, though these two may reveal plenty about our lives. The letters in this book are the sort that may quicken the heart, the sort that may often reflect, in Auden’s much loved words, joy from the girl and the boy. I had no ambitions to write a complete history of letter-writing, and I certainly wouldn’t attempt a definitive collection of great letters (the world is too old to accommodate such a thing, and lacks adequate shelving; it would be akin to collecting all the world’s art in one gallery), but I did want to applaud some of the letters that managed to achieve a similarly gargantuan task – the art of capturing a whole world on a single page. To the Letter will begin its travels in Roman Britain, home of the earliest letters we have, with the discovery that the ancient method of opening and closing a letter – greetings and farewells – are those that we still use 2,000 years later. The letter hasn’t really changed much in all that time. But now we may be at risk of letting it change irreversibly.
The auction took place on an autumnal Thursday only a few weeks after the close of the Olympics. A few yards from the auction room people queued to check their email at the Apple Store. Nearby, in Bond Street, there was Smythson, the posh stationer and leather goods shop. Its creative consultant Samantha Cameron, wife of the prime minister, had presumably