[Miriam_Dobson,_Benjamin_Ziemann]_Reading_Primary_(BookZZ.org)

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the front daily, and 6.8 million came the other way, with free postage in both directions.11 Ordinary lives were thus leaving a written record as never before.

Yet recognition of the richness of ordinary people’s letters was rather slower than might have been expected, despite the pioneering work of social historians such as Starobin. One reason might have been social historians’ preference for statistical ‘hard’ evidence.12 Another might be that on close examination the actual content is not necessarily as path-breaking as the historian might hope. With reference to love letters, Roland Barthes summarized their key message as being: ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you, but it’s to you I want to say this nothing.’13 Private letters are often full of ‘nothingness’: descriptions of ill-health, family gossip, the passing on of greetings – all about people of whom little other record is left, and whose lives still remain opaque. The moment of finding and opening a letter is exciting for the historian, but the content does not always match expectation. It might perhaps appear odd, then, that the study of family correspondence has undergone a boom over the last decade or so. Ironically, it is in fact the rather humdrum nature of many letters that has been drawing scholarly attention. Increasingly historians have become interested to know why people exerted such effort – and letter-writing was an effort for those whose literacy was still basic and budget constrained – to articulate what was sometimes fairly mundane information. The philosophical roots of this development are examined below.

Private correspondence and identity

One approach to family or private letters is to assume that as correspondents have a close emotional tie they essentially tell ‘the truth’ about their lives. Following this logic, their letters should therefore give us a window onto the private experiences and inner thoughts of the author. Letters are often praised for the ‘human dimension’ they bring to history, allowing the scholar to capture the raw experiences and emotions of actors in the past.14 Yet are historical subjects really so transparent? Can we really hope to capture ‘hidden aspects of a man’s psyche’ and ‘his secret motivations and objectives’ (to return to Keep’s terms)?

More recently scholars have begun to question the assumption that letters are the true record of the writer’s inner world. Instead, letter-writing is seen to be part of an individual’s attempt to establish the meaning of their life (rather than just reflect or communicate existing truths). A clear example of this kind of construction can be found in cases where an individual devotes significant energy to preserving, and perhaps doctoring, their collection of personal correspondence. In his study of the utopian feminist and polemical journalist, Céline Renooz (1849–1928), James Smith Allen argues that the attention she paid to the careful collection and reconstruction of her letters represented a ‘sustained effort to shape a stable discursive identity’. Renooz, who wrote articles and speeches on evolutionary embryology, scientific epistemology and visionary feminism, corresponded with nearly every intellectual leader in France (though they did not always respond) and in her will she arranged for her papers to be turned over to an established archival collection on French feminism. A total of 7,400 letters were preserved, though it transpires

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that many of them are in fact copies and re-creations that she made long after the originals were sent.15 In creating her own personal archive, Renooz was acutely aware that her correspondence was one of the prime ways that future generations would know of her and her ideas, and for Renooz it was desperately important that she personally crafted the story of her life.

Not all letter-writers are quite as concerned with their posthumous reputation as Renooz, of course. Often the preservation of correspondence is far more haphazard. In the case of immigrants’ letters, for example, their survival depends primarily on the recipients filing them away, and then on future descendants eventually deciding to deposit them in an archive.16 Yet even if the letters are not intended for preservation, the act of corresponding itself helps to shape certain forms of identity. The acquisition of literacy changes the way people think about themselves and their lives. The ability to write provides a forum in which the individual reflects on his or her life in a distinct manner; in the case of letters, in the form of a solitary written reflection which is also part of a dialogue with the reader or readers.17 To be able to write a letter requires the author to be able to narrate and order their experiences. Reading is an essential part of this process, for the texts a person reads – be they newspapers, novels, or indeed other people’s letters – shape their thoughts and suggest to them the appropriate way to express their feelings.18 As theorists such as Michel Foucault have persuasively argued, self-reflection does not happen in a vacuum, but is prompted, guided, and directed by powerful discourses within a given society.19 The survival of written sources (such as letters) is therefore not just a handy means to access people’s experiences, but rather the record of a new kind of cognition. New theoretical approaches thus suggest highly productive ways of reading letters: first we shall examine letter-writing as opportunity for selfreflection through dialogue; second, we shall explore how reading other texts shape and condition this introspective act.

As we see in David Carlson’s chapter on autobiography in this volume, scholars from a range of disciplines including neuropsychology, sociology, and literary criticism, as well as history, increasingly stress the role that memory and narrative play in shaping a person’s identity. To make sense of who they are at the present moment, human beings tell stories about their past. For those who are physically separated from close ones, the act of letter-writing can provide a medium for reconciling past and present and fashioning a workable sense of self.

Such ideas shape David Gerber’s study of the letters Protestant immigrants to the USA and Canada sent back home to England, Scotland and Ireland in the nineteenth century. For immigrants there was a particular need to reflect on the nature of their community and their place within it.20 In part this was to do with ethnic identity, for arrival in the new world brought them into contact with people unlike themselves and into a new kind of public culture, but, Gerber argues, this was not the primary feature of their letters. Reflection on identity was more the result of a fundamental need to shore up an imperilled sense of self, for immigrants risk ‘a radical rupture of the self, a break in their understanding of who they are’.21 For example, even a man whose new life in America was materially successful admitted he was ‘starving’ for letters from back home, while those emigrant men who seemed

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to embrace a formless and chaotic existence, moving from place to place and repeatedly deserting wives and children, often chose to re-establish contact with relatives even after a break of several years; while the transitory nature of their lives implied a refusal to build for a stable future, they nonetheless felt the psychological need to nurture a link with their past.22 Gerber’s study of letters has important implications for the history of immigration, for he is arguing that this desire for continuity with the past challenges the significance scholars often attach to group identity. Neither assimilation to the new American nation nor membership of an ethnic community proved sufficient to heal the internal rupture experienced in leaving the homeland behind.

The study of epistolary exchanges thus remind us that modern identity is not, as sometimes assumed, overwhelmingly individualistic, nor solely about identification with ‘imagined communities’ such as ethnic group or nation.23 Recent work on the First World War letters suggests that the maintenance of family values became increasingly important during war. Arguing not only that French soldiers’ letters were disarmingly honest about their experiences, Martha Hanna has claimed that as the war worsened and exhaustion reduced soldiers’ letter-writing time, so their circle of correspondents narrowed. She suggests it was ‘the ultimate irony’ that letter-writing sustained intimacy within the immediate family and created greater alienation beyond it, thus unsettling the common assumption that war incites passionate patriotism and a strong sense of belonging to the ‘nation’.24 Letters often seem to suggest that family or local ties are at least as important in shaping an individual’s sense of self as collective forms such as nationalism or ethnicity.

Whilst this first approach focuses primarily on the existence and meaning of correspondence networks, a second method instead concentrates on the text of the letter itself. Influenced by the ‘linguistic turn’ this scholarship examines the power of existing discourses and their reproduction in personal writings. If we stay with First World War letters for a moment, we can see why such issues are important. Scholars of front-line correspondence have often disagreed about the efficacy of wartime censorship, and the extent to which it inhibited soldiers’ freedom of expression.25 At the very least, it seems certain that soldiers would not have written about every aspect of life at the front, and their letters at best give a partial life in the trenches.26 However, a discursive approach to these letters suggests that the fact that they do not give an entirely ‘truthful’ or total account of the author’s experience does not mean such letters are useless. In fact where they remain silent on a certain topic, or chose what might seem like clichéd formulations, letters tell us something of how the individual author responded to society’s expectations.

European culture has a long tradition of letter-writing manuals which seek to educate people about the correct way to correspond, meaning that letter-writers rarely sit down to a truly blank sheet.27 In the First World War the authorities were particularly keen to ensure that troops were not left without guidance in their correspondence, and published collections of letters became a flourishing sub-genre of wartime literature. In producing model forms for such letters, the authorities crafted a socially acceptable version of combat that suggested to soldiers the

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correct way of interpreting their experiences. The question is: how far did soldiers follow these models?

According to John Horne’s work, the letters that appeared in French published collections in the first year of the war were – unsurprisingly – rich with heroism and bravura, drawing on notions of chivalry that had been central to the canon of national literature developed in the nineteenth century.28 As the suffering of the war intensified over coming years, the published correspondence evolved: although the heroics did not disappear, a discourse of ‘sacrifice’ emerged, relying on the resonance of this concept in a predominantly Catholic country. Soldiers who wrote letters home were certainly influenced by these models. Even in the spring of 1917, amidst a severe political crisis exemplified by the mutinies of French troops that followed the failed Nivelle offensive, ordinary letters depicted the Germans as barbarians and criminals, the French as chivalrous heroes. Yet as the losses piled up, it was the concept of sacrifice that was called into question. The sacrifice trope suggested death had meaning, but soldiers explicitly and repeatedly wrote that the war of attrition, and the huge body-count it created, was without meaning.29 Horne’s work alerts us to the fact that letter-writers are in dialogue not only with the actual recipient of their letter, but also with imagined readers. The soldier was aware of what was expected from a soldier’s letter, but rebelled, implicitly rebuking the imagined reader for expecting his ready sacrifice.30 This suggests the power, but also limits, of nationalistic, heroic, discourse in First World War France.

At the same time not only German and Austrian soldiers but also their wives at home were instructed in the art of patriotic letter-writing. Women were told they must send upbeat and positive letters, for they bore responsibility for maintaining morale at the front. They were not to speak of suffering, despite worsening food shortages at home. Christa Hämmerle’s close study of one Austrian couple’s correspondence again suggests that although the idealism trumpeted in published correspondence shaped how soldiers and their wives wrote to one another, it ultimately fractured under the ongoing pressure of war and separation.31 Leopold and Christl Wolf, a young bourgeois couple whose fledgling courtship was interrupted by the outbreak of war, used their correspondence to nurture their sense of a shared identity, referring constantly to everyday matters rather than the atrocities of war. Initially Christl’s letters fitted with the models provided: she created a picture of the marital bliss to which she hoped Leopold would eventually return. Yet increasingly war encroached on this comfortable life. According to Hämmerle, Christl reacted to this change with two contradictory narrative strategies: she condemned any changes to the class system (from which she benefited), while at the same time often expressing sympathy for the burdens carried by working-class women. Christl’s letters suggest that the idealized domestic hearth propagated in the media continued to appeal to her, but she also criticized aspects of a social system she had previously accepted unthinkingly. For this young Viennese woman, war produced confusion about what the ideal ‘married woman’ from her background should be like, and, according to Hämmerle, female identity became more ‘contradictory’ as a result of war.

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To conclude this section: it would be naïve to think that letters allow us to know the thought-patterns immigrants, soldiers, their wives back home or any other letter-writer pursued inside their heads when entirely alone, for the way they articulated their thoughts on paper was shaped by what they thought the reader expected and the conventions of letter-writing. Yet human beings also create identity through this kind of interaction with others. As Paul John Eakin and others have convincingly argued, identity is relational, even if Western culture’s cult of the individual sometimes blinds us to this.32 Narrative forms (such as autobiography) have often been associated with the existence of an autonomous author, but the practice of letter-writing shows that life-stories can also be created through dialogue with others. The study of private correspondence thus allows the historian to examine how people in the past have used the epistolary form to establish images of themselves through their relations with others. With close attention to the text, moreover, the historian can examine how a particular culture imposed certain interpretative models or social ideals onto its subjects. Letter-writing manuals, published letters, and (on occasion) censorship, help to set certain parameters to the epistolary dialogue and to the writer’s conceptualization of his or her self. However, historical studies show that these parameters can also be challenged or fragmented. The study of letters therefore enriches our understanding of past mentalities, allowing us to understand more fully the way in which individuals create their own place in the world, influenced by – but not perhaps prisoner to – existing discourses.33

Public letters and the writing of citizenship

Some people choose to write to figures they have never met: to political leaders, or to the editors of newspapers. Letters to figures in authority can act as a forum for ‘self-analysis and self-exploration’ just as much as the private correspondence examined above, yet here the letter-writer is reflecting not only on their place in the community or family, but also their role in the wider world.34 Through the act of writing, the author establishes their status as a citizen, inscribing themselves into the political system he or she inhabits.

In the Soviet Union the authorities were particularly keen to encourage their citizens to compose letters. Although accused of being ‘faceless’ and inhuman – and of course in many ways it was – the Soviet system was also an oddly personalized one: the right to housing, release from prison, membership of the party, a stint in a holiday home and many other benefits were all dependent upon writing the correct ‘petition’ letter.35 Moreover, the regime also encouraged its citizens to write letters to leading members of the Communist Party or to newspaper editors, on topics ranging from key political events in the country’s political life to local affairs.36 In part this was to do with surveillance: paranoid about possible dissent, the Soviet state was desperate to find any clues that might lead them to detect possible enemies.37 Yet this was not the only reason, for by writing, it was hoped, workers and peasants would also become active participants in the life of the Soviet polity. Encouraged by the state to take up their pens, thousands of citizens dispatched

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letters, some simply addressed to ‘The Kremlin, Moscow’, and the state bodies to whom they were sent carefully packed them away, ensuring that today every archive in the former Soviet Union contains hundreds of files of handwritten letters. For historians this is, of course, an incredibly rich find. Without the results of democratic elections or the kind of writings found in countries with a free press, scholars of the Soviet Union have always lacked the kind of evidence that would allow them to explore the crucial question: what did people think about Soviet power? The letters that were uncovered when the doors of the archives opened in the late 1980s and early 1990s seemed to offer some way around this, apparently offering the means for historians to trace ‘popular opinion’.

Yet many of the questions raised above in relation to wartime correspondence are significant here too: how free were people to express their views? To what extent did the existence of the censor and fear of the secret police distort the way in which letter-writers expressed themselves? Certainly, when citizens articulated their views about Soviet life in a letter meant for the eyes of a high-ranking party or government figure, or the editor of a party-run newspaper, they chose different words and expressions than they might when speaking to their husband in the privacy of their bedroom, or after a beer with close friends. Writers would be deeply influenced by what they knew to be expected of them. Soviet citizens had to adopt the language of the regime, or, as Stephen Kotkin has put it, learn the ‘rules of the game’. Kotkin’s term ‘speaking Bolshevik’ has been widely adopted in the literature on Soviet mentalities, for it seems to neatly convey the widespread pervasion of official rhetoric into all kinds of unofficial and personal writings.38 His approach has serious implications, though. If we accept that letter-writers are merely gameplaying, what use are their texts? Kotkin argues that what is significant is that this process of acquiring political literacy happened at all; in other words, the very fact that an ordinary worker could now produce a letter in Bolshevik language indicates the state’s success in shaping the minds of its citizens.

Can we go further than this? Can we hope to unpick something of the letterwriter’s mindset? The approach taken in the example given below recognizes that these sources are artefacts purposefully created and intended for a specific audience, but suggests that we can nonetheless glimpse into the author’s worldview through a close reading of the text. Soviet citizens’ letters are clearly shaped by the textual world they inhabited, for they reproduced the language they read in newspapers or heard at party meetings. However, they do not always get it quite right. Their ability to ‘speak Bolshevik’ was rarely perfect, and this makes their letters all the more interesting. Firstly, we get a sense of these letter-writers’ understanding of the discursive boundaries of the system in which they operated: we have a record of what ordinary people felt was an acceptable interpretation or commentary on their lives and on political events occurring. Secondly, we can, by reading between the lines, get a sense of how their own ideas and beliefs departed from the official script. In seeking to adopt the Bolshevik-speak they found in the newspapers, citizens often went wrong, but these transgressions and re-workings of the authoritative text allow us important insight into their worldview. In their written texts, Soviet citizens displayed a broad range of dialects and idiosyncrasies as they tried to ‘speak Bolshevik’.

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The concept of ‘speaking Bolshevik’ can of course be thought-provoking for countries and periods other than the Soviet Union. In essence ‘speaking Bolshevik’ is simply a short-hand for the terms and concepts that prevail in a given culture. The important – and disputed – question here is the extent to which these are authoritative. When individuals speak or think, can they use alternative concepts or terms? Or can they perhaps use established ones in original or innovative ways? How far are we bound by the semantic web in which we live?

A letter to Molotov

The source to be interpreted in this chapter was located in the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History in Moscow, in the personal fond of the Soviet statesman Molotov. Here, file upon file of handwritten letters from ordinary citizens – many anonymous – have been preserved. The example below dates from the spring of 1953, just a few weeks after Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953.

Deeply respected Viacheslav Mikhailovich [Molotov], Forgive my audacity in daring to write to you, but I can’t hold myself back any more. I ask you to defend us simple people from the persecution and terror of thieves. They go about stealing in the broad light of day, they walk about with knives and razor blades, and if anyone tries to stand up to them, they start on him. This happened to tram conductor Grigor’eva from the Krasnaia Presnia district. You go to work, and you don’t know if you’re going to make it home OK or not. The police are powerless, and when you call for help – for example on the train – all the passengers keep quiet because they’re scared of being stabbed. Such disgraceful horrors happen in Moscow, without even speaking about the Moscow suburbs, where the bandits reign, especially with their lairs in Nikitovka and Obiralovka, stations on the Gor’kii railway line.

Indeed this dirty water, these Russian ‘gangsters’ are without conscience or honour. We conquered Germany when she was armed to the teeth, can it really be that our state is without the strength to conquer these parasites?

We beg you to write a law which says that any thief who is caught has five fingers chopped off his left hand and is branded, so that everyone knows that he is a thief and keeps away from him. Merciless and strict measures must be taken. We’ve had enough of being ‘humane’ with these weeds. Only the grave corrects the hunchback. Only then will us honest workers get the peace and security, knowing that they’ll make it home safe each night.

Take any tram conductor from the Krasnaia Presniia district, and they’ll be able to tell you a lot. It is impossible to bear this situation any longer.

Yours sincerely,

Antonova.39

What then can we learn from this letter? The first temptation is to assume that this source can tell us something about crime-levels in the Soviet Union. According to

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this Moscow tram-driver, the spring of 1953 had experienced an unprecedented crime-wave with ordinary people living in daily fear of violent assault. But is she right? She might, after all, be nothing more than a hysterical scare-monger, perhaps frightened by the death of Stalin and the political uncertainties that followed. In fact, other sources, such as government reports on crime, seem to corroborate her perceptions about increased criminality. Three weeks after Stalin’s death an extensive amnesty had been decreed, and over a million prisoners released over the coming months. In the spring and summer of 1953 the number of thefts, rapes, and murders had increased significantly in comparison with the previous year.40 However, by itself the letter only tells us of an anxiety regarding law and order.

A close reading of the text can tell us something more about Antonova’s identity and beliefs, however. Antonova is keen to present herself as a respectable Soviet citizen: she claims to write on behalf of us ‘simple people’ and us ‘honest workers’ and she invokes their collective heroism against Germany in the Second World War. Appealing to Molotov, a long-standing member of the Soviet government, she wants to convince him that she is a reliable spokesperson for the Soviet people. Yet in several places inconsistencies or idiosyncrasies in her letter suggest that she has experienced problems in finding the words to articulate her views effectively. In discussing this problem, it was not easy for her to ‘speak Bolshevik’, however much she might be trying.

In the Soviet Union, the first years after the 1917 revolution had seen almost obsessive discussion of crime, but since the mid-1930s, the official media had largely drawn a veil of silence over this social ill, with relatively few references to crime and punishment in the press. Faced with this dearth of terminology, Antonova draws on foreign, early Soviet, and even pre-revolutionary sources. Let us take the first line of the second paragraph: ‘Indeed this dirty water, these Russian “gangsters” are without conscience or honour.’ This odd sentence mixes its metaphors – referring both to nature and American films – as if the author is struggling to find a coherent way to approach the problem. In labelling them as ‘dirty water’, Antonova picks up on earlier tropes in Soviet culture which had identified criminal offenders as sources of contagion: these had been common currency in the 1920s, but largely dropped out of official texts since.41 With the term ‘Russian gangster’ (russkii gangster), however, she obviously takes inspiration not from the Soviet lexicon, but from overseas, for the word ‘gangster’ was an American borrowing and still had the feel of a foreign word in the 1950s.42 Antonova thus cast these criminals not as citizens of the Soviet Union, but as dangerous outsiders. (It is also significant that she denotes them as Russian and not the contemporary term Soviet: in the old Russian past there had indeed been thieves and bandits, she implies, but these should not be part of the new Soviet world.) In the final paragraph, her solution to the crime problem draws on a third source. In begging for a law that ‘says that any thief who is caught has five fingers chopped off his left hand and is branded’ her text suggests pre-revolutionary concepts of crime and justice.43 These three figures of speech thus tell us something about Antonova’s feelings towards criminals: she fears they are contagious, she wants them repudiated as outsiders to the Soviet community, and she readily proposes corporal punishment.

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Drawing on metaphors from the early 1920s, American words and even prerevolutionary concepts, her language is varied, pointing to the failure of Stalinist culture to provide an effective language with which to discuss this problem – a problem the leadership claimed did not exist.

In the first months following Stalin’s death, the new leadership had already begun to break this silence, however. Following the amnesty decree of 27 March 1953, a newspaper editorial written by the Minister of Justice, Gorshenin, encouraged Pravda readers to view the amnesty decree, and the promises of further criminal justice reform that accompanied it, as evidence of ‘Soviet humanity’.44 Gorshenin also argued that the amnesty decree was evidence of the fact that Soviet laws helped those who committed errors ‘to correct themselves’ and then return to the ‘path of honest labour’, ideas that had once been important themes in discussions of criminal justice, but like other terms relating to crime and punishment disappeared from official texts from the mid-1930s onwards. Antonova is clearly aware of these new developments, yet explicitly rejects them, writing ‘we’ve had enough of being “humane” with these weeds’. Her brash assertion that ‘only the grave corrects the hunchback’ also rejects Gorshenin’s claim that beneficiaries of the amnesty had been ‘corrected’ by their time in the Gulag. Her use of this old Russian proverb again demonstrates the survival of traditional beliefs to rival Soviet concepts. What is interesting is that she uses this alongside established Soviet terms, suggesting that her attempt to ‘speak Bolshevik’ was a blend of the old and the new.

Before summarizing what this study of Antonova’s language can tell us, let us think a little more about the significance of this act of letter-writing in itself. Antonova begins her letter with an apology: ‘Forgive my audacity in daring to write to you, but I can’t hold myself back any more.’ Using such a convention, Antonova demonstrates to her reader she is aware that in addressing Molotov she is appealing to someone at the very apex of the hierarchy of power. Yet she also believes that the government should be interested in what ordinary people think: ‘Take any tram conductor from the Krasnaia Presnia district, and they’ll be able to tell you a lot.’ Whether or not this is the case, her letter suggests she believed that the Kremlin leaders cared about the views of the ordinary citizen and would revise policy in light of their views.

Several conclusions can therefore be reached. In the spring of 1953 Antonova was highly concerned about law and order and believed that government policy was failing to deal with the problem. She was distressed and confused. She sought to present herself as a loyal citizen, but found the Stalinist lexicon did not provide effective ways to express her concerns about crime. She also rejected the postStalinist solutions as inconsistent with other views she held dear, and which – even though they might in fact draw from pre-revolutionary sources – she did not consider at odds with her identity as a good Soviet worker. Her letter points to some of the difficulties following Stalin’s death: it alerts us not only to the social issues resulting from new policies such as the release of prisoners, but also to the state’s difficulty in imposing new ways of conceptualizing such issues. This text suggests that in 1953 there was no fixed or authoritative ‘Bolshevik-speak’ – or at least not

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one that was meaningful to Antonova or that she could reproduce effectively. This led her to criticize the failings of the police, though it did not push her towards outright rebellion. The very act of writing a letter to a Soviet leader suggests her faith that the government, if correctly informed, was indeed willing and able to remedy the situation.

Finally, we cannot assume that Antonova was ‘typical’. Although the archives contain many similar letters, this only tells us that other people were also sufficiently anxious about crime to compose a letter: it does not mean that such worries were universal, or even widespread.45 Here again the key is to look to other sources. At a plenum of the party’s Central Committee held in July 1953 several highranking party members discussed the sudden tide of letters regarding crime received by official bodies.46 The letter therefore has a ‘reality effect’ (as described in the introductory chapter). The letter is not only of interest because of what it tells us about Antonova’s concerns, but also because letter-writing was a phenomenon that had serious political implications, creating the sense of a ‘moral panic’ and at least indirectly feeding into the elaboration of new criminal justice policies in August 1953.47

Conclusion

This chapter has focused particularly on two different kinds of letter: first, personal correspondence sent between family members; second, texts written by citizens intended either for publication or for consideration by the country’s political leaders. They clearly serve quite different purposes, and have distinct effects. What, then, makes them a genre in their own right? The feature that distinguishes letters from other texts is that they identify not just the author, but also the intended audience. Whether a petition, business correspondence, a weekly letter to a relative, or an appeal to Molotov, they all begin ‘Dear so-and-so’; they all have a reader (or readers) in mind. This encourages us to think about texts in terms of dialogue, and to remember that the act of writing can never be a fully solitary act, for the writer is always responding to previous interactions and earlier exchanges. In addition to the specific reader addressed moreover, the letter-writer is aware of what society expects from a letter both in terms of the form and the content, expectations that were aided by letter-writing manuals, education, the press, and in some contexts censorship. Letters can therefore help us to explore both social conformity and – when the norms are broken or distorted – individual inventiveness. As such, they do not offer a transparent window into the mindset of the author, but they do allow the careful historian to examine the complex web of relationships between individual, family, and society that shapes a person’s sense of self and their understanding of the world they inhabit.

Notes

1In eighteenth-century America, for example, correspondence between merchants might be read loud or excerpts pinned on bulletin boards in the coffee houses where they liked