Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898

Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture

L. Rotunno

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137323798
• eBook ISBN: 9781137323804
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead. Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. Postal Plots explores how Victorian postal reforms unleashed a new and sometimes unruly population into the Victorian literary marketplace where they threatened the definition and development of the Victorian literary professional.

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Correspondence Culture

By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead.¹ Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. The luckless lover and frustrated writer, Edwin Reardon, of New Grub Street, the entire population of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, Thomas Hardy’s downtrodden Father Time as well as his bold Valentine writer: all compose letters upon which plots turn. Dorian Gray writes his first love letter to a dead girl; Roseanna Spearman’s love letter to The Moonstone’s Franklin Blake is read after her death. Jane Eyre, as well as Esther Lyon of Felix Holt, Sir Francis Levison of East Lynne, Leo Vincey of She, Little Dorrit – the list could continue – all learn of their inheritances by letter. Letters frame The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’s story; they litter Dracula and Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensational tales. Letters are torn up (though, as Wilkie Collins’s No Name assures us, they can be put back together by a team of experts). Tess Durbeyfield’s letter is lost under a rug. Letters are burned, sometimes even eaten, as Anthony Trollope graphically describes. They are dropped in pillar boxes and sometimes in the gravy, at least in the Jellyby home. In short, plot movement, characterization, and the ‘reality effect’ of letters are some of the reasons why novelists created fictional correspondents. These uses explain the literary functions of the letters, and writers continue using letters (and email) for the same purposes into the present. But these uses do not explain the special cultural and social role that the letter had for Victorian novelists and readers.

There are two reasons, I argue throughout Postal Plots, for the ubiquity of letters in Victorian fiction: (1) the rise of postal reform between 1840 and 1898 that inspired the lower and middle classes to read and write more frequently, that allowed this population a measure of social and political agency, and, that, in turn, led many of these people into the literary world as writers and readers, and (2) the professional and artistic anxieties plaguing Victorian novelists that were exacerbated by the burgeoning population of readers and writers shaped by such liberal reforms.

Postal Plots thus puts forth letters – that bring together and symbolize the increasingly literate and literary population of nineteenth-century Britain – as a vehicle by which to explore the Victorian literary marketplace. This book argues that, in the nineteenth century, letters stood literally as a site at which all Victorians could experience the effects of contemporary liberal reform. It further claims that the letters that are ubiquitous in Victorian novels – letters in their figurative manifestation – can be read as markers of novelists’ concerns about the reform-created hierarchies and mediocrities that threatened Victorian fiction’s contribution to artistic and social progress.

To explore these fictional letters’ political and literary resonances, I focus on novels from the Victorian period that exemplify key aspects of letter culture as it developed alongside the reforming nineteenth-century British Post Office. Specifically, I look at Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859–60), Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1878–79), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890), particularly letter-rich and anxiety-ridden novels that offer insight into some of the most renowned male Victorian novelists’ pursuit of professional integrity. I foreground these four novels, from the plethora of letter-filled Victorian fiction, because they best use pivotal developments in nineteenth-century British correspondence history – the institution of penny postage; the prevalence of letters in the legal arena; the increase of both professionalization and social welfare programs in the Post Office; and the nationalization of the telegraph alongside moves toward imperial penny postage – to explore the precarious position of the Victorian literary professional.

These novels also roughly follow the institution of uniform penny postage in the United Kingdom in 1840 and of imperial penny postage throughout the British Empire in 1898. These watershed years for the Victorian Post Office frame a period of significant reform within the Post Office and change within British correspondence culture. During these years, letters became a part of the daily lives of the majority of the British population. Not only were British citizens reading and writing their own letters, they read and potentially wrote letters to the editor. They read celebrations and critiques of epistolary style. They read about advances in postal technology. The years of 1840 to 1898 also umbrella a period of literary reform and change, marked by, for instance, the 1842 Copyright Act and the International Copyright Act of 1891 (the Chace Act), as well as the rise and fall of the three-volume novel, the surge of serialization, and the influx of bestselling genres like the sensation novel and detective fiction. The novels that I examine – composed by major male Victorian authors – were formed by, are illustrative of, and engage with the tensions arising from these postal and literary marketplace reforms and changes.

These particular novels further show how both readers and writers emboldened by correspondence culture pressed for changes in literary culture. David Copperfield and The Woman in White focus on those empowered by the Victorian letter to write, exploring this newly literary population variously portrayed as hacks, unskilled yet sincere authors, and literary artists never to be fully appreciated. John Caldigate and The Sign of Four focus on readers energized by Victorian correspondence culture to read widely but inclined to consume the most popular as opposed to the more artistically and ideologically sophisticated fiction of the day. The lens of Victorian postal culture complicates these reader–writer relationships because it brings with it the ideological beliefs upon which Victorian postal reforms were founded: most specifically the liberal ideal that all citizens should be allowed and encouraged to develop and express their beliefs, often through reading and writing. The letters within these Dickens, Collins, Trollope, and Doyle novels reflect struggles with that ideal as it entangles with visions of the Victorian literary professional. Those struggles constitute this book’s subject.

By addressing this fictional correspondence, Postal Plots also complicates the literary history surrounding letters in nineteenth-century British novels, a history many pass over. The epistolary novel is not a nineteenth-century innovation nor even a nineteenth-century fad. Samuel Richardson celebrated its heyday in the eighteenth century. His Pamela (1740), Clarissa (1748), and Sir Charles Grandison (1753) garnered huge readerships and spurred caustic attacks, most notably from Henry Fielding in Shamela (1741) and Joseph Andrews (1742), and Eliza Haywood in The Anti-Pamela (1741). Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771) and Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778) were huge epistolary hits. And these British epistolary novels were joined by European counterparts, most memorably Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie, or the New Héloïse (1761), Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons (1782), and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).

Mary Favret’s Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (1993) and Nicola Watson’s Revolution and the Form of the British Novel 1790–1825: Intercepted Letters, Interrupted Seductions (1994) are notable examples in the critical tradition dealing with eighteenth-century epistolary works. Favret and Watson identify calls for revolutions in gender, class, and national politics in the epistolary fiction they consider, attributing the essential disappearance of the epistolary novel by the century’s end to this revolutionary strain. Favret then shows that both the nineteenth-century Post Office and the literary establishment undertook the task of quelling revolutionary threats by adopting laws, such as the Traitorous Correspondence Bill, and formal structures, such as third-person narration. While Watson argues that the letter retains ‘something of its scandalously sexualized nature, something of its secretive ability to disrupt the smooth and public process of patrilineal history’, she agrees that Romantic British fiction betrays a consistent urge to discipline the letter.²

A few critics consider letters in nineteenth-century British fiction. Richard Menke in his Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information Systems (2008) takes the perspective that communication technologies exercised crucial influence over Victorian literature. Telegraphic Realism focuses on how communication technology’s delivery of information can be read as integral to the development of Victorian realism. He positions letters and telegrams at the heart of debates about how and if literary realism can ‘represent and interpret knowledge’.³ Catherine J. Golden, in Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (2009), reads the letters and letter-writing paraphernalia in Victorian literature as offering insight into Victorian utopian dreams, fears of fraud and slander, and approaches to familial, friendly, and romantic relationships. In Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters (2012), Kate Thomas posits that, in the Victorian era, ‘[e]pistolary fiction . . . gave way to postal plots’; this line captures her focus on the late Victorian Post Office’s physical interactions with letters, telegrams, and postcards as well as the influence of the Post Office’s reputation over that correspondence.⁴ These postal interactions mark letters, including those of Victorian fiction, whose writers, Thomas argues, use those markings as indicators of diversity in national, imperial, and sexual – including queer – relationships.

Like previous epistolary critics, I place the letters of Victorian novels, as well as their creators and consumers, in a particular historical moment. Methodologically, I thus take an historicist approach, to both literary history and how it intersects with cultural history. This prominent line of criticism includes the work of the new historicists as well as more politically motivated critics like Raymond Williams and Edward Said, and continues up to contemporary critics like Amanda Anderson. David Wayne Thomas’s Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (2004) and Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (2010) are also, for my work, standouts in this tradition because of their historically engaged, nuanced readings of liberal thought and how that thought influenced and was used by artistically minded Victorians. Like this line of critics then, I examine the relation of literature to society and, more specifically, to the rise of public cultural institutions like the Post Office and the Victorian literary marketplace. This strategy leads me to offer case studies that range not only through pivotal points within Victorian correspondence culture but also through increasingly pessimistic and market-driven manifestations of the Victorian literary professional.

This approach also aligns me with post-Foucauldian works such as Amanda Anderson’s ‘The Temptations of Aggrandized Agency: Feminist Histories and the Horizon of Modernity’ (2000), Judith R. Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992), and Anna Maria Jones’s Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (2007). All seek to complicate readings of culture’s influence over, for instance, the poorest of prostitutes to the most accomplished of authors. Anderson warns against the appeal of creating ‘aggrandized agen[ts]’ out of the subjects we study, describing the risk as one of creating ‘privileged and anomalous figure[s] . . . who are granted deeper insight into the workings of power, and who seem not simply to instantiate modern power but to manipulate if not inaugurate it’.⁵ Adopting such a tempered vision, Walkowitz writes of historical subjects who exert some power yet ‘make their own history . . . under circumstances they do not produce or fully control’.⁶ Similarly, Jones puts forth a vision of an ‘author [who] posits a reader who is both culturally embedded and sensationally susceptible, [while] he also explores a methodology for critical engagement with cultural texts, thereby simultaneously theorizing a critically empowered subject’.⁷ Postal Plots similarly pays attention to exemplary instances of Victorian novels that use contemporary correspondence technology to create portraits of writers embedded in and critically engaged with their society’s visions of class, gender, and literary artistry.

Taking Victorian letters’ link to liberalism as my contextual starting point, I refine letters’ ability to reflect, as Catherine Golden suggests, the ‘Victorian frame of mind’, and turn from Kate Thomas’s focus on the sexualized relationships borne of correspondence. I locate the letters of Victorian fiction in an era characterized by herky-jerky movements toward a more liberal government than Britain had ever seen before. This time period saw British civil servants – of whom British postal workers were one of the largest populations – and Victorian novelists struggling to establish their professional status. This struggle was complicated by an influx of people seeking these ostensibly easy and lucrative occupations, people inspired by liberal reforms, specifically the 1855 an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Correspondence Culture
• 2 Mr Micawber, Letter-Writing Manuals, and Charles Dickens’s Literary Professionals
• 3 Feminized Correspondence, the Unknown Public, and the Egalitarian Professional of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White
• 4 From Postmarks to Literary Professionalism in Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate
• 5 Telegraphing Literature in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four
• Conclusion: Undelivered
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index