Over the last two months, I have been overwhelmed with friends discussing The Correspondent, Virginia Evans’ debut novel. I requested it from my library’s audible book app and just finished it this week. What a treat. I have written here before about aging, and there is much to be said about the themes of growing older in The Correspondent. But the book is above all an epistolatory novel, and so I want to reflect here on the decline of letter writing and how this may impact the study of history.
For historians who study almost anything over the last five hundred years, letters are a very useful way of getting at the human element of what occurred. I study the seventeenth century Atlantic world, and while printed pamphlets and books, laws, court cases, accounting records, newspapers and institutional records are all important to me, when I want to get at the heart of what I’m studying, I search for letters. Right now, I’m writing a history of Catholic persecution in England via the emotional impact it had on families. Letters between family members are vital to discovering how parents and siblings were processing what was happening to them and what meaning they made of it.
What makes letters different from other forms of documentation is in fact that last statement: letters make meaning. And they make meaning from the perspective of the writer, who has a particular audience in mind. They aren’t necessarily more thorough, accurate or even personal than other sources of information. But they require the person at the time to function as a sort of historian, explaining what they think of the information they are passing along and choosing to engage topics that are important to them.
In today’s world, with letter writing not just in decline, but almost completely missing from our personal communication, we might think that we could get similar sorts of information from text messages or emails. And while those missives may eventually yield golden insights for historians of the future, they are missing what letters almost always contain: reflection. Handwritten letters, especially, by their very nature, preclude immediacy. The writer has to obtain the time and resources that aren’t needed for a quick text. Thus, a letter might still steam with emotional energy, but its very creation is going to force the author to decide what to say and what not to say and how much information to include along the way. Again, the content may or may not be accurate, but it will reveal more of what the writer was wanting to convey than text messages all to frequently do.
There are reasons to think that people still care about writing letters, and for many of the reasons I provided above. Some teachers seem to still require them, and they allow students to construct their ideas and to think about an audience in a way that an essay or research paper do not. They call out for a personal “voice” and for opinion and (not to belabor the point) meaning. I enjoy reading the few Christmas letters I get, even though they aren’t targeted at me alone. And for a generation that never had to use the mail, letters can be a novelty that they choose to indulge in.
I’ve been sorting through the twenty-six boxes of letters, papers and memorabilia that I’ve collected since I was ten years old. A very large section of these are correspondence. While it shouldn’t have, it still surprised me how many people I wrote letters with all through the 1990s, even with the invention of email. In fact, I think it was the popularity of the cell phone, rather than email, that reduced the number of letters I wrote and received.
My personal letters (I only have the ones sent to me, not the ones I wrote, alas) have similarities with the letters from the seventeenth century that I read for my scholarship. They often have a great deal of assumed knowledge, the information they contain is often trivial to someone decades later, and their handwriting isn’t always great. Still, getting a letter meant someone invested time and energy in thinking about you. Perhaps text messages or emails function the same way now, but I think not. Time matters. A quick happy birthday text message to my childhood best friend is not at all the same as organizing correspondence to her.
I don’t mean to romanticize the communication of the past, just to think about how it shapes the way we remember, especially as historians. It is much harder to gather the millions of data points we have and make meaning of them, with apologies to AI whose meaning making skills (as opposed to summarizing skills) have yet to impress me. I want the figures of the past to tell me what they meant by something after they had some time to reflect on it. Letters allow people to do this. Even letters to the editor, arguably the most popular part of the newspapers we still have, have an audience and bit of reflection that text messages and online posts do not.
Glancing through the hundreds of letters I’ve collected over my life reinforced in me the desire to do more reflective writing to my friends and family. Less immediacy and more time-intensive thinking about what they might find interesting in my life or to ask them about what they have going on in their life in ways that ask them to sit and think. They might not write back. But something happens when a person sits down to write to a particular other person. And historians of the twenty-first century might regret that they have so little of that to work with.
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