To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  This is not the fayth which thou didst promise me at thy departure: therefore thy mother continually weepeth, and thy two virtuous and honest Sisters lament without ceassing. But tell me, with what knyves thinckest thou that thou doest wounde the most secrete partes of our heartes: therefore be redy to amend thy errour, or else veryly cease to call me Father, and holde thy selfe assured (except thou amend) that neither of my goods nor money thou shalt ever have any parte hereafter.

  Thy Carefuull Father

  The Sonne Maketh Answere Unto His Father

  My dearly beloved Father, I have ben advertised by your sorowful letter of evill adventure of our merchandise: but bicause you are my Father & a prudent Father, it is lawfull for you without occasion, to reprehende and threaten me: howbeit he that who committeth not the fault, is always accompanied with sweete hope. Those that have tolde you that I give your clothes of Silke unto the dames of Lyons, peradventure have taken it in evill part, that I have not given some peece of silk unto their wives, & would peradventure have taken no care to have asked them from when ye garments have come, so that they spare theyr pens.

  I praye you therefore my deare father, be content & glad: for I consume not your goods, but I sell them aswel unto women as unto men. I send you by our Factour two thousand pounds for clothes of scarlet, & six hundreth poundes for clothes of silke: I will tary to finish the rest, & the cursed envie languishing shall fall unto the ground: and you shal finde me (God to frend) a good, just & faithfull Sonne &c.

  The other highly successful manual (nine editions in 50 years) was Angel Day’s The English Secretorie (1586). This contained more original material than Fulwood, not least when it came to guidance over love letters. And the specimens were convincing creations, often involving the resolution of conflicts between lovers or fathers and sons, a basis perhaps for the earliest epistolary novels. In English Elizabethan schools the most popular Latin manual, taught consistently alongside letters from Cicero and Erasmus, was Georgius Macropedius’s Methodus de Conscribendis Epistolis. The theory holds that it was this guide, more than any other, that influenced the style of letters in the works of Shakespeare.

  But not everyone subscribed to the wisdom of these guides. Writing in the 1570s, the progressive French essayist Montaigne claimed he was ‘a sworn enemy to all manner of falsification,’ (by which he meant inauthenticity), and in an essay entitled ‘A Consideration upon Cicero’ he took sceptical issue with Erasmus when it came to the formality of a letter. Montaigne rejected studiousness in favour of expressive spontaneity, and he believed his own style suited only ‘familiar’ letters rather than business ones. He thought his language ‘too compact, irregular, abrupt, and singular’ to suit formal composition, and he mistrusted letters that ‘have no other substance than a fine contexture of courteous words’. He said that he always wrote personally rather than employ a scribe, even though his handwriting was ‘intolerably ill’. And the less he thought about things in advance, the better the letter.

  I have accustomed the great ones who know me to endure my blots and dashes, and upon paper without fold or margin. Those that cost me the most pains, are the worst; when I once begin to draw it in by head and shoulders, ’tis a sign that I am not there. I fall too without premeditation or design; the first word begets the second, and so to the end.

  And there was another thing Montaigne didn’t like about the manuals with their ideal specimens: the beginnings and the endings. ‘The letters of this age consist more in fine edges and prefaces than in matter,’ he argued. He said he had deliberately avoided writing to ‘men of the long robe and finance’ for fear of making mistakes in addressing them. And for the closing niceties, ‘I would with all my heart transfer it to another hand to add those long harangues, offers, and prayers that we place at the bottom, and should be glad that some new custom would discharge us of that trouble’.

  Montaigne’s views would have received solid support from the satirists of the day. Almost as soon as it was born, the letter-writing manual was down on its knees begging for parody, and the only surprise was that it took until 1602 for the first hit to appear, A Poste with a Packet of Madde Letters by Nicholas Breton. Breton was an English pamphleteer and publishing opportunist, author of what we would today call toilet books. And he was very good at them. His Madde Letters was written with the intention ‘to pleasure many’, and he achieved this aim through many editions, an acknowledgment that his readers clearly regarded his targets as fair game. Because his letters were fiction, his work could also claim to be the first epistolary novel.

  He took aim against the begging letter, the letter dissuading a friend from marriage, and what is probably the earliest example of the Dear John letter. In this, a naive country bumpkin-type won’t quite admit defeat:

  The cause of my writing to you at this time is, that Ellen, I do hear since coming from Wakefield, when you knowe, that talk we had together at the sign of the blue cuckoe, and how you did give mee you hand, and swear that you would not forsake me for all the worlde, and how you made me buy a Ring and a Hart, that cost me eighteen pence, which I left with you, and you gave me a Napkin to weare in my Hat, I thanke you, which I will weare til my dying daye: and I mervaile if it be true as I heare, that you have altered your minde, and are made sure to me neighbour Hoblins younger sonne, truly Ellen you do not wel in so doing, and God will plague you for it, and I hope I shall live and if I never have you: for there are more maides than Maulkin, and I count myself worth the whistling.*

  Breton inspired further parodies. Conceyted Letters, Newley Layde Open was followed by Hobson’s Horse-Loade of Letters, A Speedie Poste and then A President for Young Pen-Men, or the Letter-Writer, the latter thought to be the first to include ‘letter-writer’ in a title. One of the best was the anonymous Cupids Messenger of 1629, and as its title suggested it was concerned primarily with love letters. But it is love in all its disarray, a comedy of cruelty, such as this cri de coeur from a man in prison to his former intended. He feels she was more than happy to take his money when he lavished it on her, but is less loving now that it’s gone, and the bile spits up a recipe for revenge that appears to draw directly from the cauldron of Macbeth’s Three Witches.

  If my paper were made of the skins of croking Toades, or speckled Adders, my inke of the blood of Scorpions, my penne pluckt from the Screech-owles wings, they were but fit instruments to write unto thee, thou art more venomous, more poisonous, more ominous than the worst of these: for do but descend into the depth of thy guilty conscience, and see how manie vows, promises, and deepe protestations, nay millions of oaths hast thou sworne thy fidelitie unto mee, which one day will witnesse against thee.

  The end of the page would surely bring a little respite, perhaps even a redemptive finale. Or not:

  Leprosie compared to thee is all health, and all manner of infection but a flea-biting, and all manner of diseases, though they were fetcht from twentie Hospitals, were but like the fit of an ague: for thou art all Leprosie, all diseases for neither thy bodie nor thy soule are free from the disease of shame and disgrace of the world . . . God amend and pardon thee.

  Once thy friend,

  I.P.

  The serious art of epistolary courtship received a boost in the seventeenth century from – where else? – France and the French. Le Secretaire à la Mode by Jean Puget de la Serre billed itself as a ‘refined way of expression in all manners of letters’, and indeed set a standard for the century to come. By 1640, when the book was translated into English by John Massinger, letters had attained both an elevated and popular status they hadn’t enjoyed since the days of Pliny the Younger: a status of widely practised and wholly indispensible daily traffic in words. The letter had moved from something written solely by the Church and the state, the fearsome and powerful, to the realm of middle-class art. And despite much scattered evidence that letter-writers chose to ignore the wisdom proffered in these guides, th
e how-to genre was clearly here to stay: in 1789, an inventory of a printer and bookseller in Troyes, north-central France, revealed 1,848 copies of a late edition of Le Secretaire à la Mode, and some 4,000 copies of similar manuals. The more the world wrote, the more it required guidance.

  Once you knew what to write, how should you display your new knowledge on paper? How should a letter be laid out?

  That largely depended on how wealthy you were, or what status you held. The specimen guides were rather strict in their presentations, suggesting that anyone should be able to glance at a letter and, without reading a word, be able to tell if it was addressed to a recipient inferior or a superior to the sender. In the opinion of Fulwood’s Enemie of Idlenesse, the opening of a letter should be designed ‘according to the estate of the writer, and the qualitie of the person to whom wee write’. ‘For to our superiors wee must write at the right side in the neither end of the paper, saying: By your most humble and obedient sonne, or servant . . . And to our equals we must write towards the middest of the paper, saying: By your faithful friend for ever . . . To our inferiours wee may write on high at the left hand.’

  Angel Day’s and de la Serre’s manuals also emphasised the minutiae – precisely how big a gap to leave between the name of the addressee and the main body of the text, and also how much to indent the first paragraph, the white space again depending on the level of submission and deference one intended to convey, referred to as ‘the honorary margin’. The historian James Daybell suggests that there is evidence from thousands of letters that what he calls ‘the social politics of manuscript space’ was widely adhered to. When John Donne wrote with great humility to his estranged father-in-law, he signed his name at the extreme bottom right-hand corner of the letter, thus stressing his insignificance, a tiny reverential afterthought. This practice was particularly visible in the letters sent by subjects to monarchs. Women writing to men in the seventeenth century almost always signed their name in the uttermost bottom right-hand corner, another miserable sign of flattened social standing.

  And the opposite was also apparent. When the second earl of Essex dashed off a note to his cousin Edward Seymour in 1598, he consciously chose the top of the letter to sign his name. The short six-line instruction left a huge amount of blank space beneath it on a large uncut sheet. It wasn’t a design statement, it was a statement of wealth; paper was costly, and the message surely was, ‘I’ve got reams of the stuff.’

  Paper size in early modern England was something we might regard as fairly standard for official correspondence today, if a little squarer. A ‘folio’ sheet was commonly either 30 by 35cm or 42 by 45cm, depending on the local mill. The sheet would then usually be folded in half, and the writing would cover one or two sides. The other two blank sides would be used to conceal the contents by folding and tucking, with one of them being used for the address and the other for the seal.

  Smaller Elizabethan letters often betrayed poverty, but in the middle of the seventeenth century the letter size shrunk from the folio size to the ‘folded half-sheet quarto’, significantly smaller and more rectangular at about 20 by 30cm. The smaller sheets left less blank space, but sometimes no blank space at all was desirable: it was common for writers to cross-hatch around their words to ensure that no one tried to add any further sentiments to the ones they had originally composed.

  But what happened then? You could write to almost anyone about almost anything, and you could lay it out according to the respectful customs of the day. But how on earth – before letterboxes, stamps and a regular delivery network – would a letter reach its intended recipient? And why did we ever assume that a personal letter containing important information would ever remain private as it battled gamely towards its destination?

  Trying to Impress

  21st and 27th February 1944

  Dear Bessie,

  I received your letter of 1st January on 7.2.44, since when I have been busting to send you a ‘smashing’ reply, yet feeling clumsy as a ballerina in Army boots, who knows that her faithful followers will applaud, however she pirouettes. I could hug you till you dropped! The un-ashamed flattery that you ladled out was very acceptable – I lapped it up gladly and can do with more! Yes, I could hug you – an action unconnected with the acute shortage of women in these parts, and mostly symbolic of my pleasure at your appreciation of qualities so very few others see, and which really I do not possess. I must confess that your outrageous enthusiasm banishes ‘acquaintance’ from my mind, and that I recognise the coming of a new-kind-of-atmosphere into our interchanges, and one which you will need to watch.

  To be honest, rather than discreet: Letters from home sometimes contain curious statements. ‘Paddling’ one of my own, I had told them of my first letter from you. Back came a weather forecast: ‘Perhaps she will catch you on the rebound.’ I, of course, have no such wish, yet I certainly haven’t told anyone of your latest letter, and was glad I was able to conceal it from my brother. I find myself engaged on the secretive, denying dodge that has marked the opening stages of all my little affairés since the first Girl Probationer crossed my path. I can see that willy-nilly I am having a quiet philander, and I want to warn you it’ll end in a noisy flounder unless you watch out. I haven’t a ’aporth of ‘rebound’ in me. I warm to you as a friend and I hope that remains our mutual rendezvous, although I feel that the more I write you, the less content you will be.

  I hope you will not think I regarded your letter as purely a back-pat for me. As I read yours I wha-rooped too. You’ll find this effort somewhat ‘forced’. I believe it is true that when you want to be natural, you aren’t. If you understand me, you have made me a bit ‘conscious’. I’m blowed if I am not trying to impress you. You say your mind is a rambling rubbish box, and your youthful desires for improvement remain unfulfilled. I don’t remember having many youthful desires (except that I do recall Madeline Carroll featuring in one of them). I am glad you accept my view on others not being informed of the contents of our letters. It will be much more satisfactory, we shall know each other much better through an ‘in confidence’ understanding.

  I do not share your views about the ‘waste of time’ involved in a crashed courtship.

  You say it is odd that I can be so ignorant about women, but apart from the important omission of never having slept with one, I regard myself as capable of detecting a wile when I see one, and I do not think women are so very different from men in any important aspect. If I were really plonking down what I did know, I should have to admit that I am puzzled very often by the behaviour of many of my own sex, and not a little quizzical about my own at times.

  I am sorry you felt the least bit ‘weepy’ at my chess, garden, pigs. The things your tears are best reserved for are beetles this size [small sketch], and fleas whose size is much less horribly impressive, but whose powers of annoyance are far greater. I exult in the possession of a sleeping sheet, which is very nice to have next to the skin compared with the rough Army blankets. At night, if the fleas are active and I cannot subdue them with my fevered curses, I take my sheet and my naked body into the open, and turn and shake the sheet in the very cold night air. Then I get back into bed and hold the ends of the sheet tight around my neck, to keep out my nuisance raiders. The last few months have been very pleasant as regards heat, and fleas have been few. I am not looking forward to the summer.

  So on to our pigs – yesterday came the day for the male (boar) to be sent away for slaughter. Half a dozen of us were detailed to hold various parts of the massive, dirty, unfortunate creature, while the man who knows all about pigs got a bucket firmly wedged over the poor thing’s head and snout. I was originally deputed to take hold of the right ear, but in the opening melee found myself grasping the right leg, which I held on to firmly as it lumbered out of the sty, and heaved on heavily as, somehow, despite a terrific struggle and the most heartrending screams, we got it on the lorry, which was to be
its hearse. Directly it got up there, it went very quiet and then started snuffling around for something to eat. In the afternoon it met its man-determined fate, and this morning as I came away from dinner, I saw its tongue, its heart, liver and a leg, hanging from the cookhouse roof. I had my doubts about eating it in the days when it was half the eighteen stone it weighed at death. But now I have none. I certainly can’t help eat the poor old bloke. The sow lives on, she has a large and sore looking undercarriage, and will be a Mother in three weeks. I suppose we shall eat her progeny in due course.

  Here am I, nominally a soldier, feeling tender hearted about a pig. And there, a couple of weeks ago, were four of our chaps deputed to shoot three of the camp dogs, no more than puppies, laughing, bright, happy, who had somehow got canker of the ear necessitating their destruction. The stomachs of these chaps were really affected, and they were thoroughly miserable.

  My eye on post-war arguments when I shall be accused of disloyalty and lack of patriotism because of my desire for changes, I recently made application for ‘The Africa Star’, which most chaps here are wearing. I have first heard that I am to get it.

  When you know that I arrived out on April 16th and the hostilities ceased May 12th, you can see how very easily medals are gained. It is the same very often with awards supposedly for gallantry.

  My Dad, a thorough going old imperialist, will be delighted that he can talk about two sons with the medal, and mentally they will be dangling with his – EIGHT altogether, though his nearest point to danger was really the Siege of Ladysmith (in a war maybe you would have condemned?). Since the war, my Dad has had medal ribbons fitted on most of his jackets and waistcoats, and goes shopping with them all a’showing! My Mother comes in bemoaning the fact that there is no suet to be had. Dad comes in with a valuable half-a-pound he extracted from a medal-conscious shopkeeper. Once, my Mother was not able to get any soda, and my Dad went out and ordered 56lbs, which actually arrived the same afternoon, to my Mother’s mixed joy and regret! I can tell you plenty about my Dad, who has many faults and the one redeeming virtue that he is all for his family, right or wrong.