‘I have made this letter longer than usual, as I have not had time to make it shorter’ – Blaise Pascal
‘Every morning my train is eleven minutes late. This is infuriating. This morning I took a later train. That was also eleven minutes late. This also was infuriating. Why don’t you re-time all your trains to arrive eleven minutes late? – then they will all be on time’. – Reginald Iolanthe Perrin
‘On the 24th of August, about one in the afternoon, my mother desired him [her brother] to observe a cloud which appeared of a very unusual size and shape.’ Pliny the Younger to Tacitus – referring to the Pompeii eruption – 108 BC
Some of the earliest events in recorded history are found in letters. A letter, by definition, is a communication between two people (or to a group), using an intermediary as the means of delivery. Libraries, mine included, have books full of people’s letters; usually those of famous writers or historical figures, but some of us, the lucky ones, have old family letters.
Although I was a voracious reader in my youth, I was a terrible letter writer. I attribute this to several factors: my embarrassingly childish handwriting and the fact that I was made to write thank-you letters to my relatives (before I could play with my presents). My parents were the kindest and most tolerant people imaginable, but in this, they were immovable. As a result, I foolishly concluded that letter writing was a form of child torture.
My mother, in a secretarial capacity, would transcribe my father’s outward mail, complaining that he should have been a doctor with such an illegible scrawl. In my family, the further back you go, the better the handwriting gets.
To the historian and genealogist, a trove of letters is an invaluable source of information. Old letters should be examined with care, because a shared confidence, written long ago, can become a revelation to modern eyes.
Horace Walpole, the dilettante son of an 18th-century British Prime Minister, was a prolific letter writer. He wrote letters for posterity, and with that in mind, he chose each recipient carefully. He selected them from across the political spectrum and from a range of geographical locations. And as he learned of Europe’s affairs from them, they learned of England’s affairs from him. On receiving a reply, he would attach it to a copy of his letter, and file both by date (and if he’d forgotten to keep a copy of his outward letter, he would send another letter asking for it to be returned).
This was more than just a friendly exchange of letters. He elicited the information with a view to publication and to provide a historical record for later generations. His letters are now a prime source of information about 18th-century politics and scandals. He is the only example that comes to mind of a man of letters whose occupation was ‘true to label’. I have a complete set of Horace Walpole’s letters, all 16 volumes of them. (edited by Paget Toynbee).
The history of letters is the history of writing, and they are valued because they are often unfiltered. Business letters, though, can be dreadfully uninteresting, but they do improve with age, especially if written in cuneiform. The Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Phoenicians and the Romans all wrote letters. Many have survived, the Pauline letters being the most famous.
The ancient historian Hellanicus credits Queen Atossa of Persia (500 BC) with inventing letter writing. While there’s no way to verify his claim, it’s a lovely story, and I like to think that a woman began the practice. Moved by that story, Edmund Gosse, a ‘man of letters’ with a fondness for cats, named his favourite feline Atossa. She would sit regally beside him on a cushioned chair as he wrote.
In my library there are many books written by ‘men of letters’ like Gosse. It is a term seldom used today as it sounds a bit pompous and sexist. It did not, however, mean that there was a class of men who spent every waking moment writing to people (Horace Walpole excepted); it merely meant that they were literary scholars of note.
Novelists often weave correspondence into the narrative too, and in many cases, the entire novel can be an exchange of letters. These epistolary novels came about in the 18th Century and quickly gained popularity. Some of the more famous examples are Samual Richardson’s ‘Pamela’, John Cleland’s erotic novel ‘Fanny Hill’, and ‘Les Liaisons Dangereuses’ by Choderlos de Laclos. A more recent example, and one bibliophiles are fond of, is ’84 Charring Cross Road’ by Helene Hanff.
The Cross-Hatched Victorian Letters
In a small room, adjacent to my library, sits a lacquered wooden case. It is not in the best condition; the corners are chipped, and the interior silk compartments are woefully detached, but when it’s opened, old family wills and other documents spill out. Under them, in disarray, are hundreds of old letters, most written in beautiful copper-plate script.
The writing box belonged to my great-grandmother Mary Louise. She died when I was young, but she left behind lots of photographs, assorted memorabilia and interesting stories. We lived in Clevedon village at the time, and she would join my family on shopping excursions to Papakura (a small country town then). On one such visit she said despairingly, ‘Papakura gets more like London every day’. She was a keen correspondent, and her letters take us back to the heart of the Victorian era. As a child, she was called Marie (as in Marie Antoinette).
Writing boxes were commonplace in the 1800s, but few survive today. They survive in our house along with old sea chests and other such receptacles. They survive because our forebears loved history and the receptacles were stories in themselves. My family were always collectors – which is to say, history hoarders.
Many of the letters in the case are cross-hatched, and that style of writing, along with triple hatching, can defeat modern archivists; and as I was to learn, defeat open language AI, too. For the agile minds of Victorian women, cross-hatched writing presented no such challenge. This was common practice in the Victorian era, because paper was scarce and because postage was determined by weight. Because it’s hard to read a cypher over someone’s shoulder, sisters could exchange confidences with a degree of privacy.
The readable letters are often affectionate and bursting with news. One letter from a friend reads like an excerpt from a Jane Austen novel. It concerns Mary’s upcoming marriage and begins, ‘My dear Mary, you must think Sarah and I the meanest of creatures… but we have suffered a loss of funds, and as our affairs are not yet settled, we have not a penny to spend. I regret that you are so far away, as I should have liked to see your pretty things.
The letter and the envelope are black-edged, which signals bereavement. The black edging warns those of delicate sensibilities that there’s distressing news inside. That particular letter made only a vague reference to such an event – the mention of settling our affairs.
Mary Louise Phillips was born in Paris, but spent her childhood in London. She arrived in New Zealand with her mother Frances Ann Codner Phillips (nee Ford) on the barque Fern Glen. She turned 12 the day after disembarking from a 101-day voyage. Her father George Newell Phillips preceded them.
Many of her New Zealand letters date from 1884, when she was studying to be a ‘pupil’ teacher. Her father was head teacher at a Thames high school, and while he taught in Thames, Mary’s mother Frances, terrified by the prospect of living in a gold mining town with 140 hotels, set up house in Ponsonby Road, Auckland.
Among Mary’s letters are those to (and from) her mother, sister, father, friends in England and a persistent suitor; and intriguingly, letters from a London solicitor named Alexander Pope. The solicitor’s letter concerns a bequest to her made by a Miss S B Evens of Trafalgar Square – which, according to Mr Pope, required several lengthy cases in the Chancery Court to settle.
When I read that, I immediately thought of ‘Bleak House’. Was the eponymously named Alexander Pope of Grecian Chambers a version of Mr Jarndyce? After the drawn-out Chancery Court proceedings, the remainder of the bequest amounted to €325. As Mary’s grandmother was named Ann Evens, the bequest likely came from an Aunt.
The names Evens and Ford are both associated with the ‘mail packet’ trade, and to a related family tragedy. Seeing Miss Evens’ name on the will had triggered a memory, and I knew where I’d seen the name before. Inside a Victorian leather calling card case. I carefully teased out the cards, and after spreading them out and doing a little research, things came together. The names connected families in the shipping trade and the Trafalgar Square address clinched it.
No. 60 was the business address that captains and the merchants used.
Mail Ships and the Victorian ‘Packet Trade’
Captain Ford was Mary’s grandfather. He was a master mariner and cloth merchant. One of his earlier commands was the merchantman Thomas Laurie, a 300-ton barque-rigged ship which took the first lot of direct mail from Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) to London.
His next command was a barque named Memnon. It left Liverpool in 1841 and foundered on the rocks just outside of Bombay harbour. The Bombay Gazette states that all hands survived, but the entire cargo of fine cotton was lost (Captain Ford died months later of hypothermia – perhaps during a later wreck).
The number of ships that went down at that time was astounding. One report blames the ‘packet trade’ for this. Packet sailing vessels took terrible risks to meet postal schedules, and were seldom fitted out as well as a naval ship or a dedicated merchantman.
The Mail Packets were a specific type of vessel. They followed set routes and adhered to strict timetables. Because the mail services were poorly remunerated, the ships carried cargo and passengers as well, and due to the quick turnaround, often ignored adverse weather warnings. British ‘packet ships’ were covered by the Postage Act of 1779, which legally obliged captains to deliver the mail to the postmaster at their port of destination, in a timely fashion.
I have lots of books which reference the packet ships, and many writers complained about them. Rudyard Kipling wrote about them with fondness, as did Somerset Maugham, but Byron moaned about the cramped conditions and wrote a satirical poem about the experience. Dickens was also unimpressed, and Conrad thought them inferior craft, while Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), who was a pilot on river packet boats, loved them. Daniel Defoe (1660- 1731) wrote the first book featuring packet ships.
In New Zealand, inland mail services by train and road did not supersede the sea-mail services until the late 19th century. Practically all overseas mail came by sea until the 1940s, after which Air Mail gained in popularity. In 1914, 110 million letters, 5 million postcards and numerous packages and newspapers arrived by sea.
With 1914 in mind, I will include photographs of three items from the writing box. Letters from (and about) Mervyn Leigh Waters. They relate to the 1914-1918 war and the Gallipoli campaign.
The first is an appallingly clinical letter from the NZ Military Records office, received by my great-grandfather in 1916. It informed him that his son Mervyn had been killed in Palestine. In addition, I will add a letter sent by Mervyn, just before his death. Owing to vagaries of mail at the time, the letter announcing that he had been killed in action arrived before his postcard saying that he was in good health.
I hope that we will continue writing letters, and write better ones than the NZ military wrote, but I fear it’s a dying art. The last words on letter writing are about Mary’s father, George Newell Phillips, who, according to a newspaper item, became a public speaker after he retired. A local paper praises his comedic turns of phrase and writes that he taught the art of letter writing long into his retirement. And the last, and somewhat disparaging words about packet mail ships go to Joseph Conrad.
‘three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our [European] civilisation wither and die’
Joseph Conrad
Photographs, items and books referenced: ‘The Letters of Pliny’ trans. Melmouth, ‘The Faber Book of Letters’ ed.Felix Pryor, ‘Letters of Travel’ by Rudyard Kipling, Traffics and Discoveries’ by Rudyard Kipling, ‘Lord Jim’ by Joseph Conrad, ‘The World Over’ by William Somerset Maugham, ‘About Ships’ by Syd Nicholas, ‘Pamela’ by Samual Richardson, ‘Bleak House’ by Charles Dickens, ‘84 Charing Cross Road’ by Helene Hanff, ‘Fanny Hill’ by John Cleland, ‘Liaisons Dangereuses’ by Choderlos de Laclos, ‘The Letters of Horace Walpole’ ed. Paget Toynbee, ‘The Bombay Gazette’, a shipping report from The True Briton (1808), three WWI letters concerning Mervyn Waters, various letters to and from Mary Louise Mellsop, the settlement of a will sent by Alexander Pope, solicitor, the Victorian writing box, portable inkwell (18th century), pen nibs and case, Mary Louise Mellsop.
