Victorian Love Letters in Literature and Art

Situating the Research Topic

In Britain, the middle of the nineteenth century saw the convergence of three particular circumstances that significantly shaped the culture of the next half-century. First, historically, it was the time of what Catherine Golden calls “the postal revolution”, a chain of administrative innovations concerning the postal system which started with a major reform in 1840 and that greatly affected the idea of letter writing as well as the scale of the phenomenon. In literature, these years witnessed a resurgence in the publication of novels after the relatively stagnant decade of the 1830s. Although the genre had already been popular for at least one century, starting from the 1840s, it experienced such an insurgence that in 1870, Anthony Trollope could say, “Novels are in the hands of us all; from the Prime Minister down to the last appointed scullery maid. We have them in our library, our drawing-rooms, our bed-rooms, our kitchens – and in our nurseries.”² Finally, in those mid-century decades, the British art sector also found new strength. Narrative painting, and in particular genre painting, which was becoming ever more appreciated not only on a national but also on an international level, came to be associated with the idea of Englishness itself while advances in the print industry made art less exclusive and more available to every class of society.

Following a red thread that runs through these three aspects of British culture, this study aims to reconsider the cultural relevance of letter writing and its impact on literature (especially novels) and the visual arts in the first half of the Victorian Age. The research span covers, more precisely, the period between the 1840s and the 1870s, two decades that, as the next chapter on the historical context will illustrate, represent two watersheds in the postal history of Britain.

Some scholars have suggested that following the postal reform of 1840, which transformed the postal system into a governmental service, letter writing seemed to lose some of its traditional sentimentality to acquire new political connotations.³ The fact that under the new system, letters had to pass through many unknown hands on their path to the addressee and were all equal and equally subject to the same authority, the postal one, would have given a more repressive connotation to the new system and caused a levelling of the genre. People then started to see them as potentially dangerous, especially when written by women. As repositories of the intimate desires of their correspondents, women’s letters had already aroused some anxiety in the previous century, hence the plethora of prescriptive manuals addressed to young ladies that were published not only in Britain but all over Europe. Now, their entering the public world of the new and more complex postal system would have strengthened the idea that women’s letters could represent a potential menace to social values and morality.

In addition, the postal system was often at the centre of scandal throughout the century. One of them, for instance, concerned espionage activities on the part of the British government against the Italian exile Giuseppe Mazzini (1844), raising the delicate issue of privacy, while another, the so-called “Cleveland Street Affair” (1889), sparked after the discovery of a male brothel where a number of telegraph boys worked as prostitutes and many aristocrats were involved as clients. A financial scandal on the English government’s takeover of the telegraph services (1870) and the news of the dismissal for drunkenness of almost 1,000 postal employees between 1873 and 1888 were two more examples. All these incidents made their way to the press and contributed to damaging the image of the postal system and the Post Office as the base of the British progress and civilization that the campaign for postal reform had created. All this, however, did not discourage people from using the post, as the number of letters posted continued to grow throughout the century⁴ (a century which also saw the introduction and proliferation of the postcard), but certainly changed the way they approached letter writing making them more aware of the critical aspects of this medium.

Mary Favret, in her book on romantic epistolarity, calls the nineteenth century “the post epistolary age” and defines it as

an age where one imagines the post where once there were letters, when one reads the movements of the mail coach not the vagaries of epistolary sentiment, and where one begs the postman, not the lover, for correspondence.⁵

This definition, which briefly yet vividly outlines the changes in the perception of letter writing in the nineteenth century, becomes, for Favret, a necessary premise for her famous declaration of “death” or “literary exhaustion” of the letter in literature.⁶

One of the aims of this study is to demonstrate that, although the postal and technical innovations altered the idea of (epistolary) communication and, consequently, how it was represented, to stick to the metaphorical image used by Favret, they did not kill the letter in literature.