To the Letter. Simon Garfield
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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, the 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 crosshatch 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