Letters as a way of understanding the city: Dickensâ Bleak House
It must be a strange state to be like Jo! To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows! To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not, to have the least idea of all that language â to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb! [Dickens, Bleak House , 257]
Letters are prominent artefacts in Charles Dickensâ Bleak House (1853). Throughout the text letters fall, to borrow Inspector Bucketâs phrase, âlike a shower of ladybirdsâ (835), concealing secrets, establishing hidden connections and becoming precious tools for blackmail. The focus on letters in Bleak House is also specifically related to the novelâs urban setting. Indeed, an archive provides a suitable metaphor for Dickensâ city (see Tambling, Going Astray, 139-144), crammed with papers, documents and written communications most of which have become redundant by the narrativeâs conclusion, thrown in âbagsâ and âbundlesâ (974) upon the pavements of the metropolis.
By 1851 London was not only the most literate area of England (Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West, 79-80), the city also stood at the âmighty heartâ (Dickens, Valentineâs Day at the Post Office, 84) of Britainâs postal system â the headquarters of the General Post Office were actually located in the centre of the capital, on St. Martinâs-le-Grand just north of St. Paulâs. As Jo, Dickensâ illiterate crossing-sweeper, underlines, systems of communication â namely reading, writing and receiving letters â control both social and imaginative access to the city. Unable to read, Jo is excluded from society and is restricted in his response to his urban environment; the passageâs insistent alliteration â âstrange stateâ, âshuffleâ, âstreetsâ, âshapesâ, âsymbolsâ, âshopsâ, âseeâ, âscrapâ and âstoneâ â conveys Joâs monotonous experience.
Proceeding chronologically, this essay will trace the evolution of communications (mainly the post and the telegraph) in London during the nineteenth century to consider how literary visions of the city emerge alongside these technologies. What types of tropes and forms develop and what sorts of arguments are pursued? Examining how writers and artists respond to these changes will reveal how modern communication systems shaped the landscape of the metropolis in literature as much as in life throughout the nineteenth century.
The fashion for letters in nineteenth-century literature
Critics generally acknowledge that the eighteenth-century vogue for the epistolary novel was in decline by the start of the nineteenth century; in the âyears between revolution and reformâ, claims Mary Favret, âwe find the metaphorical death or literal exhaustion of the familiar letter in literatureâ (Romantic Correspondence, 200). Communication by letter was neither a regular occurrence â nor a particularly welcome event â for middle- and working-class families in 1800 (Golden, Posting It, 43). Although Londoners had the privilege of door-to-door deliveries postage was paid by the recipient and high rates generally deterred less wealthy individuals from using the postal service frequently.
Remarking upon the popularity of blackmail plots in late-Victorian literature, Alexander Welsh questions whether âa literary fashion is ever merely literaryâ; such an extended focus, Welsh concludes, is likely to reflect a âphenomenon of general historical interestâ (George Eliot and Blackmail, 4). The mid-nineteenth centuryâs revolution in letter-writing and communications can certainly account for the âfashionâ for letters in the contemporary literature of the period. Historians have documented how the British Post Office was transformed during the course of the nineteenth century from a mismanaged and expensive system into an affordable, efficient service, while new methods of correspondence (the telegraph and telephone) were also introduced and assimilated by the institution (See Robinson, The British Post Office, a history or M. J Daunton, Royal Mail: The Post Office since 1840). As Catherine J. Golden argues, fictional uses of letters and the post â the works of Dickens, Anthony Trollope and Henry James (all themselves prolific letter-writers) often revolve around the effects of a revelatory missive â can illustrate how âauthors and artists were responding to their changing worldâ (Posting It, 17).
Exploiting communication systems in nineteenth-century London: Collinsâ Armadale
By the middle of the Victorian period, writing and receiving letters had become an essential part of everyday urban life. Wilkie Collinsâ Armadale (1866) provides a case in point. The novelâs villainess, Lydia Gwilt, embraces the freedom that Londonâs communication and transport systems afford her (Sutherland also cites this passage in his Introduction to Armadale):
I have just come back from a long round in a cab. First, to the cloak-room of the Great Western, to get the luggage which I sent there from All Saintâs Terrace. Next, to the cloak-room of the South Eastern, to leave my luggage (labelled in Midwinterâs name), to wait for me till the starting of the tidal train on Monday. Next, to the General Post Office, to post a letter to Midwinter at the rectory, which he will receive tomorrow morning. Lastly, back again to this house â from which I shall move no more till Monday comes. [Collins, Armadale, 508]
The post is identified as an important element in the fabric of Victorian London. The passage announces the birth of the modern urban experience. London can be traversed easily, yet Lydia does not so much move around the city as she is moved. Despite deciding that she will âmove no more till Mondayâ, Lydiaâs presence is being metaphorically proclaimed all over the place, via the post and the train. A tension between active (walking) and passive (sitting in a cab) travel is suggested by Collinsâ use of signal words â âFirstâ, âNextâ and âLastlyâ â which convey the reader through the city as the cab does Lydia. But as a consequence the readerâs experience of London is rather limited. Swept from one locale to another, from âcloak-roomâ to âcloak-roomâ and on to the General Post Office, the reader is unable to observe the life in between; significantly, people make no appearance in Lydiaâs circuit of the city.
A brief history of Londonâs postal services pre-1800
In order to suggest how systems of communication might reveal a broader vision of London, it is useful to outline a brief history of letters in the city prior to 1800. From its earliest days the Post Office was situated in the City (where it would remain until 1900 when the institution began the transfer to Mount Pleasant). Britain did not have a general postal service until 1635 when the Kingâs Office in Old Jewry was made available to the public. Although the enterprise was short-lived â as the Civil War (1642-1651) approached, government reverted back to the previous Tudor system, under which the mail service was intended almost exclusively for official use (Robinson, The British Post Office, 36) â a permanent General Letter Office was eventually established in Cloak Lane in 1643[1].
However, there were as yet no specific arrangements for London deliveries; whereas a seventeenth-century Londoner âcould send a letter to Edinburgh or Exeter or even suburban Barnet with little troubleâ the Post Office âoffered no provisionâ for internal correspondences (Robinson, The British Post Office, 70). As Howard Robinson observes, this oversight is particularly âastonishingâ if we consider that, by the late seventeenth century, at least one in ten of the English population lived in the capital (The British Post Office, 70). A local post was eventually established by William Docwra in 1680. Docwraâs innovations â a uniform rate (one penny) and the introduction of postal districts â would provide a âsuccessful local-scale model for Victorian postal reformâ (Golden, Posting It, 30).
Postal systems in early nineteenth-century London: William Hazlittâs The Letter-Bell
At a time, therefore, when Londonâs increasing size challenged established ways of âseeingâ the city, the postal system offered a functional means of managing the modernised metropolis. Over a century after Docwraâs improvements, the writer William Hazlitt capitalised on this potential in his final essay, The Letter-Bell (1831).
Correspondence in London was becoming increasingly valued in the first half of the nineteenth century. As more people migrated to urban areas â by the time of Hazlittâs death in 1830, for example, Londonâs population was growing by a rate of twenty per cent each decade (The London Encyclopaedia, eds. Weinreb and Hibbert, 614) â staying connected with absent family and friends became a paramount concern (Golden, Posting It, 59). This need was exacerbated by the fact that Londonâs rapid expansion made establishing a sense of identity difficult â as well as being potentially liberating, the city could provoke feelings of rootless obscurity. Wordsworthâs response to London in Book VII of the 1805 Prelude is a case in point:
How often in the overflowing streets Have I gone forwards with the crowds and said Unto myself, âThe face of every one That passes by me is a mystery...â [VII.595-598]
The line endings emphasise the paradoxical experience of the London crowd â the âoverflowing streetsâ also generate lonely anonymity (âand said/Unto myselfâ).
Whereas Wordsworth can only assimilate this sense of dislocation by ruralising the cityscape and bringing its apparently ceaseless circulation to a standstill (âall that mighty heart is lying stillâ notes the speaker in Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, 3 September 1802), Hazlitt uses a metropolitan system â the post â as an imaginative framework to process the experience of migrating to the capital. Although the post features throughout The Letter-Bell as a means of retaining a connection with the countryside, it is significant that Hazlittâs links between the present and past are mediated not through the natural rhythms which incite Wordsworthâs âspots of timeâ, but via a metropolitan system of communication. While acknowledging that urban innovations do not lend themselves to âso poetical a descriptionâ (183) as a rural post-boy, Hazlitt nevertheless suggests that the city can produce emotional constancy. Londonâs disorder might produce a writer more stable in his or her vision precisely because it forces the discovery of a sense of self.
The Letter-Bell examines the process of association, establishing a dialogue between London and memory; the sound of the letter-bell, rung by postal workers throughout the city to announce the last collection of the day[2], ânot only fills the streets with its importunate clamour, but rings clear through the length of many half-forgotten yearsâ (The Letter-Bell, in William Hazlitt: Metropolitan Writings, ed. Gregory Dart, 177-78). This focus on chiming the present with the past (Dart, Metropolitan Writings, 177) can be read as a response to the cityâs modernisation during the early decades of the nineteenth-century. At a moment when old London is being rapidly obliterated by new developments the âimportunate clamourâ anchors Hazlitt within this unsettled and unsettling cityscape. Upon hearing the bell, Hazlitt is recalled to the moment of his âfirst entrance into life, the period of my first coming up to townâ:
...when all around was strange, uncertain, adverse â a hubbub of confused noises, a chaos of shifting objects â and when this sound alone, startling me with the recollection of a letter I had to send to the friends I had lately left, brought me as it were to myself, made me feel that I still had links connecting me with the universe, and gave me hope and patience to persevere. [178]
Hazlitt maintains an interplay between written correspondence â the âletterâ that must be sent to friends back in Shropshire â and the metaphorical communication he establishes between his past and present selves. The movement into Londonâs âchaosâ is suggested by the parenthesis which conveys the reader into the cityâs abstraction, its âconfused noisesâ and âshifting objectsâ, until âthis sound aloneâ returns us to security. Our perspective is still thrown between that of the individual â âmyselfâ â and the wider world â âthe universeâ â yet rather than being overwhelmed by the city, Hazlitt registers the possibility of reading and surviving the seemingly discordant urban experience.
Tom Paulin reminds us that communication is central to Unitarianism, the liberal Christian movement to which Hazlittâs father belonged â Unitarians or âRational Dissentersâ regard free discussion as âthe means by which a wholly enlightened society will be establishedâ (The Day Star of Liberty: William Hazlittâs Radical Style, 37). In the aftermath of the French revolution Favret claims that the letter was cast as a âtool of division...of spies, Jacobinical conspiracies and seditious corresponding societiesâ (Romantic Correspondence, 198). Advocates of the Unitarian belief, however, were more likely to embrace the possibilities of modern communication systems. Although not religious himself, Hazlitt clearly shares this enthusiasm â the essay eulogizes not merely the sound of the letter-bell but also the ritual of the Mail-coaches leaving Piccadilly (the âfinest sight in the metropolisâ, 181) and the rapidity of the new telegraphs, a âwonderful contrivanceâ (182)[3].
In relation to London, the post is particularly valuable to Hazlitt because it represents connections between individuals that can often be absent in city living. Alternative urban sounds such as the âdustmanâs-bellâ and the âmuffin-bellâ, represent human necessities â food and waste are inevitable factors in everyday life â and so their timbre has âsomething...but not muchâ (181). By contrast, the letter-bell or the âpostmanâs knockâ suggest random interactions rather than regular rituals. Evoking anticipation and possibility (âif the postman passes, and we do not hear the expected knock, what a pang there is!â, 182), the post can be used as a trigger for associations and inspiration in a way that other systems in the city cannot, restoring to Hazlitt a sense of belonging within a human network.
For Hazlitt, the letter is clearly an extension of the self:
I do not recollect having ever repented giving a letter to the postman, or wishing to retrieve it after he had deposited it in his bag. What I have once set my hand to, I take the consequences of, and have been always pretty much of the same humour in this respect. [180]
By emphasising the personal element of the message â his substitution of âhandâ for âmindâ underlines the idea that an individualâs handwriting assures the sincerity of the correspondence âHazlitt uses the post to establish the individual within the jungle of urban anonymity.
Post Office reform in the 1830s
The Letter-Bell was published just before the role of letters within the nineteenth-century city and culture underwent radical reassessment. If, as Favret maintains, letters are insistently âabandoned, burned, buried, silencedâ or âsent homeâ in early nineteenth-century fiction (Romantic Correspondence, 199), Victorian culture seems particularly intent on bringing such suppressed missives to light. The prevalence of concealed/revealed communications in the literature of the period â the discovery of a bundle of old love-letters, for example, leads to the blackmail and, eventually, the death of Lady Dedlock in Bleak House â causes Welsh to conclude that the Victorian imagination obsessively âdwelt on how awful it was, or would have been, to get away with murder and then to be found out much laterâ (George Eliot and Blackmail, 19).
This focus on the material as much as the formal effects of the letter is indicative of a broader shift in the value of written communications within Victorian society. In order to understand how these changes translate into literary representations of London, it is useful to outline some of the major changes to the postal service which were initiated during the reforms of 1840. The campaign for postal reform began in earnest in 1837, the year that Queen Victoria ascended to the throne. Its initiator, Rowland Hill, was an outsider to the British postal system. The son of a progressive Birmingham schoolmaster, Hill chose to focus his own âreform effortsâ (Golden, Posting It, 37) on the Post Office, arguing in Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability (1837) that the introduction of a standardized, affordable rate of postage would advance âthe religious, moral, and intellectual progress of the peopleâ and transform the British Post Office â a âfeebleâ and âinefficientâ service â into a âpowerful engine of civilisationâ (6).
Uniform penny postage came into effect in January 1840, along with several other changes to Post Office policy. For example, from 1840 onwards, postage would be prepaid by the sender rather than charged on delivery to the receiver, and any additional fees would be calculated according to weight (instead of number of letter sheets or distance travelled). By stressing accessibility for all such innovations rehabilitated the image of the Post Office â and that of the letter â as an emblem of national progress.
Since letters delivered in London accounted for almost a quarter of the countryâs correspondence (Daunton, Royal Mail, 45), Hillâs reforms gave the cityâs postal service particular priority. In order to improve the London system, the separate corps of letter-carriers who delivered the General and District mail were consolidated, there were twelve hourly deliveries per day, and ten separate postal districts were created (Daunton, Royal Mail, 46).
Charles Dickens and George Elgar Hicksâ representations of the General Post Office on St-Martinâs-le-Grand
Hillâs measures consummated improvements to the London service which had begun several years beforehand. In 1829 the cityâs General Post Office, having outgrown its long-standing site in Lombard Street, was relocated to a purpose built complex on St. Martinâs-le-Grand. Designed by the architect Robert Smirke the porticoed facade of the new building echoed that of its creatorâs best known work, the British Museum, and rejuvenated two acres of what had been âone of the worse sections in Londonâ[4]. âThe Grandâ, as it was known to the nineteen-year-old Anthony Trollope[5], provided a physical hub for the cityâs post as well as a metaphorical centre for writers and artists.
George Elgar Hicks, for instance, may have been âno Hogarthâ (Bills, 'The General Post Office â One Minute to Six' by George Elgar Hicks, 550), yet in June 1860 he could enjoy the fact that his latest work, The General Post Office, One Minute to Six, was proving to be the most popular painting at the Royal Academyâs summer exhibition; âthe crush represented in MR. HICKâS picture gives only a faint idea of the crowd around itâ, reported Punch, âThe glimpses which you catch of it, between hats, over shoulders, and under arms, increase the reality of the sceneâ (See Golden, Posting It, 111).
For Hicks, the Post Office is emblematic of urban life. In recognition, perhaps, of the democratising effect of the penny post, the building becomes a levelling space in which Londoners of all ages and classes can be brought together; children, workers, gentlemen, postal officials and middle-class ladies all mingle in the crowd, united in their desire to catch the last collection. The setting also draws out the paintingâs comment on the psychology of the crowd. Although each individual has arrived to send a correspondence, there is no communication between the majority of the customers, and almost every eye is fixed on the window department off-canvas.
Dickens had described the same event a decade before in Valentineâs Day at the Post Office (1850):
All the boys in London seemed to have gone mad, and to be besieging the Post-Office with newspapers. Now and then there was a girl ; now and then a woman ; now and then a weak old man : but as the minute hand of the clock crept near to six, such a torrent of boys, and such a torrent of newspapers came tumbling in together pell-mell, head over heels, one above another, that the giddy head looking on chiefly wondered why the boys springing over one anotherâs heads, and flying the garter into the Post-Office with the enthusiasm of the corps of acrobats at Mr. Franconiâs, didnât post themselves nightly, along with the newspapers, and get delivered all over the world.
Suddenly it struck six. Shut Sesame! [77]
The passage emphasises Londonâs status as a centre not only of national but of international communications, projecting its letters and inhabitants (âAll the boys in Londonâ) out across the Empire (âall over the worldâ). As well as underlining the exotic potential of the Post Office â a metaphoric gateway to other lands and worlds (âShut Sesameâ implies magic) â the articleâs occasion allows for particular focus on communications within London itself. As Dickens remarks, âlovers and sweethearts are generally neighboursâ (75).
Published in the inaugural issue of Household Words, the article exemplifies the periodicalâs professed aim â to âshow to all, that in familiar things, even in those which are repellant on the surface, there is Romance enough, if we will find it outâ (quoted in âIntroductionâ to Uncollected Writings of Dickens: Household Words, 13). As the passage illustrates, the article is conditioned by strict time constraints â the six alliterative âsâ sounds at the final line, reflecting the six strikes of the clock, consolidate the sense of control over the cityâs inhabitants.
Time also transforms the mundane rhythms of the sorting office into a world of magic. Meeting by âappointment...under the clock of the General Post Officeâ, Dickens and co-author Wills are initiated into a âmaze of offices and passages...like knights-errant in a fairy taleâ (73). As they enter an âenormous hallâ this fantastical analogy is extended to the postal workers:
Without being exactly transformed into statues, or stricken fast asleep, the occupants of this hall (whose name was Legion) appeared to be in an enchanted state of idleness. [73]
Time appears to have reached an eerie standstill, transporting the reader away from everyday reality, yet the fact that the workers are not quite âtransformedâ or âstrickenâ asleep confuses the nature of their âenchanted stateâ. They exist in a liminal space between fairy tale and reality, a double vision which reflects back to the city â it becomes a space which is at once fantastical and ordinary.
However, the atmosphere of romance is repeatedly undercut with the reminder that there is a production line behind the apparent magic. As âsheepskinâ sacks of letters arrive from the receiving houses across the city, Dickens viscerally extends the suggestion that the epistles are âsacrifices to the fane of St. Valentineâ:
Anon they looked like whole flocks suddenly struck all of a heap, ready for slaughter; for a ruthless individual stood at a table, with sleeves tucked up and knife in hand, who rapidly cut their throats, dived into their insides, abstracted their contents, and finally skinned them. [73]
The Post Office is an exemplar of an organisation which consumes the individual â a place where the letter-writerâs individuality, their private correspondence, is subsumed into a public machine.
Anthony Trollope: Victorian novelist and Post Office official
The notion that the modern world has overtaken manâs ability to control it is dramatised in Dickensâ Little Dorrit (1855-57) where mail coaches quite literally run over unsuspecting individuals in Londonâs streets (137). Similarly, in Anthony Trollopeâs The Way We Live Now (1875), Paul Montague catches a cab to meet his ex-fiancĂŠe and arrives before he is able âto arrange the words with which he would begin the interviewâ (371).
As well as spending much of his life in the capital, Trollope was employed as a civil servant in the Post Office for thirty-three years (1834-1867), during which time his contributions to the service ranged from introducing pillar-boxes[6 to supervising the establishment of London postal districts, and his novels thus offer a unique perspective on the relation between letters, literature and London. In The Way We Live Now communication is not simply a prominent element of the London scene; the exchanges of letters and missives between the cityâs inhabitants also allow the reader an insight into the condition of Trollopeâs contemporary urban society.
Left: The General Post Office (East & West, 1870-73). Right: Sculpture on the northern
buildings of the General Post Office. King Edward Street façade. 1889-95. [Click on these
images to enlarge them.]
Richard Mullen observes that âit is impossible to appreciate Trollope the writer without knowing Trollope the dedicated postal officialâ (Anthony Trollope: a Victorian in his world, 83). As well as commenting on the postâ one work even refers to Rowland Hill by name[7] â Trollopeâs novels were, claims Mullen, shaped by his experience at the Post Office: Trollopeâs âtraining in writing clear English influenced his styleâ, while balancing two careers âmade him a disciplined novelist who thoroughly organized his plots as well as his time for writingâ (Mullen and Munson, The Penguin Companion to Trollope, 405). The Way We Live Now is one of Trollopeâs most metropolitan works â eighty-four of its one hundred chapters take place in London (Sutherland, âIntroductionâ, The Way We Live Now, xxxv ). Considering, however, that the novel was written after Trollope had resigned from his position in the Post Office, the extent to which the institution informs its representation of the city may seem limited. R. H. Super, for example, devotes barely a word to The Way We Live Now in his examination of the relationship between Trollopeâs postal career and his literature (Trollope in the Post Office).
Letters and London in The Way We Live Now
Nevertheless, contemporary communication methods feature extensively in the novelâs representation of London. It is notable, for example, that the workâs two volumes each begin with an exchange of letters between city dwellers. The correspondences of Lady Carbury, a forty-three-year old coquette and aspiring novelist, serve to initiate the reader into the metropolitan scene:
Let the reader be introduced to Lady Carbury, upon whose character and doings much will depend of whatever interest these pages may have, as she sits at her writing-table in her own room in her own house in Welbeck Street. [1]
As Lady Carbury sits at her desk and reels off letters to newspaper editors, three are offered for the readerâs âperusalâ. In a structural sense, the letters compound the novelâs focus on specific London topography; the address in Welbeck Street heads the text as it does two of Lady Carburyâs letters to the editors. The format of the letter also matches the condition of urban life. Trollopeâs language emphasises the speed of his protagonistâs communications, produced with a âquickly running handâ â Lady Carbury is ârapid in everything, and in nothing more rapid than in the writing of lettersâ. London requires her to keep âscribblingâ to maintain her career, but results in letters which are themselves âDetestably falseâ and which consequently introduce the reader to a city and a society âready to accept that which is untrueâ (Tracy, Trollopeâs Later Novels, 166).
The exchange between Paul Montague and his former fiancĂŠe Mrs Hurtle at the beginning of Volume II illustrates how the temporal delay in sending and receiving letters within the city had significantly narrowed by the 1870s â as a result of Londonâs hourly delivery, Paul is able to meet Mrs Hurtle in Islington on the same morning that he receives summons from her (1-10). The episode sets up obvious parallels with the opening of Volume I. A sense of the cityâs geography, for instance, is established through the communications and, like Lady Carbury, Mrs Hurtle composes three letters. However, while the reader is privy to the contents of each, only one, the briefest, is posted to Paul, a technique which establishes an intimacy between Mrs Hurtle and the audience and allows us to anticipate the outcome of their meeting. At the same time that emphasis is placed on the fact that Paul and Mrs Hurtleâs spatial separation has diminished via the post, Trollope uses the letter to suggest that the couple remain emotionally divided.
An analogy between the cityâs communications and the human body is suggested in a description of Mr Melmotte, the âvile city ruffianâ who stands at the heart of both the novel and its presentation of London. An episode in Chapter LXII where Melmotte destroys incriminating letters says much about Trollopeâs vision of the metropolis in The Way We Live Now:
Mr. Melmotte on entering the room bolted the door, and then, sitting at his own table, took certain papers out of the drawers,âa bundle of letters and another of small documents. From these, with very little examination, he took three or four,âtwo or three perhaps from each. These he tore into very small fragments and burned into bits,âholding them over the gas-burner and letting the ashes fall into a large china plate. Then he blew the ashes into the yard through the open window. This he did to all the documents but one. This one he put bit by bit into his mouth, chewing the paper into a pulp till he swallowed it. [119]
The image of Melmotte placing the letter âbit by bitâ into his mouth evokes posting mail into the âmouthâ of a letter-box. Yet whereas the post can initiate a process of projection, of externalising oneâs thoughts, in Melmotte we witness a sequence of increasing internalisation. His withdrawal, entering the room, bolting the door, and, finally, consuming the letter, is compounded by repetition â âtore intoâ, âburned intoâ, âblew...into the yardâ, âbit intoâ, âchewing into a pulpâ. The fact that these images gradually develop from those of destruction to digestion is significant. Melmotteâs letter is consumed not by the post but by an organic âsystemâ. The ritual inverts the notion that a letter stands as a substitute for its writer â âswallowedâ back into the body of its author, the letterâs self-asserting potential is cancelled out. Consumption has characterised Melmotteâs reputation from the beginning of the novel: âPeople said...that he had swallowed up the property of all who had come in contact with him, that he was fed with the blood of widows and children...â (68). That Melmotte now turns to devour his own letters underlines the vacuity which occupies the heart of the modern city.
The telegraph and the position of women in Victorian London: The Telegraph Girl and In the Cage
Letters are not the only forms of communication to feature in Trollopeâs city â characters spend almost as much time âloitering about the Post-officeâ (322) waiting for telegraphs as they do writing letters. When Melmotteâs daughter, Marie, attempts to elope to New York, it is a telegraph that is instrumental in returning her to London â Marie has âhardly put her foot on the platformâ in Liverpool before she is apprehended by two of her fatherâs employees and sent back to Euston Square (470-74). Offsetting the speed of the train against that of the telegraph, the episode suggests how these electronic communications have extended the command of the capital across the nation, and provides Trollope with an excuse to attack one of his rivals at the Post Office[8]:
Who is benefitted by telegrams? The newspapers are robbed of all their old interest, and the very soul of intrigue is destroyed. Poor Marie, when she heard her fate, would certainly have gladly hanged Mr. Scudamore. [471]
By the late nineteenth-century the telegraph was, as Henry James described it, âone of the commonest and most taken for granted of London impressionsâ (James, Preface to In the Cage). It was also associated with an emerging female workforce. According to Tom Standage women were âregarded as âadmirable manipulators of instrumentsâ, well suited to telegraphyâ (Standage, The Victorian Internet, 127). Several critics have examined how the emergence of new, female âurban charactersâ in late-Victorian London â the suffragette, the âGlorified Spinsterâ, the shop girl, the shopper â contested traditional representations of both the city and the women within it (Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 80). We could add the female telegrapher to this list. The Central Telegraph Office (1874-1962) at St. Martinâs-le-Grand â manned by some eight hundred female employees â provides the setting for a late short story by Trollope, The Telegraph Girl (1877), which was written following a visit to the department. By taking a female telegraph worker as its protagonist the story provides an interesting counterpart to Henry Jamesâ In the Cage (1898), and a consideration of the relationship between these two pieces reveals how virtual methods of communication influenced the image of the city as the nineteenth century drew to a close.
Both Trollope and James use London â and telegraphy â to engage with the increasingly ambiguous status of women within their contemporary society. London is presented as a space which at once liberates and threatens female identity. The Telegraph Girl begins by announcing that its heroine, Lucy Graham, âpossessed the means of independence if she chose to be independentâ (354) â âWhyâ, asks the narrator, âshould she not be independent, and respectable, and safe?â (355). Thrown upon her own resources following the death of her brother, Lucy must strike out on her own in the city âjust as though she was a young manâ (355). The simile underlines how Lucyâs independence â her âeighteen shillings a weekâ earned in the telegraph office â is, from the start, flagrantly at odds with her âfeminine necessitiesâ:
To run backwards and forwards from High Holborn to St. Martinâs-le-Grand had been very well as long as she could comfort herself with the companionship of her sister-in-law and defend herself with her brotherâs arm;âbut how would it be with her if she were called upon to live all alone in London? [354]
The line between employment and prostitution â a familiar Victorian subtext â is fragile too for Jamesâ unnamed heroine. As an intermediary in the telegraphic exchange between two lovers, the protagonist of In the Cage is not only complicit in the sexual liaison, but also has the potential to exploit the knowledge for her own gain â on occasions, her suggestive language combines the role of a blackmailer with that of a prostitute â âCome therefore: buy me!â (339).
Trollopeâs ambivalent status as a âconservative liberalâ (Robinson, Imagining London, 186) has prompted divisive critical responses to his work; at the same time that Trollopeâs novels can be regarded as morally subversive, they are equally upheld as âcomforting, conservative documentsâ (Imagining London, 186). Attempts to reconcile Trollopeâs official and unofficial characters are particularly prevalent in approaches to his attitudes to women. Critics such as Margaret Markwick (Trollope and Women, 5) and Victoria Glendinning (Trollope, 383-400) acknowledge that many of Trollopeâs female âcreations conform to the expectations of the ageâ, but argue that Trollope equally challenges accepted sexual stereotypes.
That Lucy provides a limited vision of London can be read as both an endorsement and a critique of the social and sexual boundaries which regulate her experience of the city. In spite, or as a consequence of her independence, Lucyâs urban environment is restricted to two specific locales â her bedroom in Clerkenwell and the telegraph department at St. Martinâs-le-Grand â both of which come to be associated with imprisonment as the narrative progresses. Spatial imagery conveys Lucyâs increasing confinement as she moves from her brotherâs bookshop in Holborn, to a âcomfortable roomâ and, finally, a âlittle garretâ (371). âShe is not a prisoner!â (378) asserts her prospective husband, arriving at the telegraph office with a marriage proposal. In the end, Lucy must be rescued from both her employment and London â the narrative concludes as she waits on Paddington Station, looking forward to joining her husband-to-be in Gloucestershire.
Lucyâs association with the telegraph office does not influence her vision of the city as intimately as it does the protagonist of In the Cage. Like Dickens and Hicks, James identifies the telegraph office as a microcosm of urban life: the âpostal-telegraph officeâ has âso much of London to give out, so much of its huge perpetual story to tellâ (James, Preface to In the Cage). James transforms the functional image of the telegraph office â a place from where electronic communications are sent, received and, crucially, decoded â into a medium through which the city can itself be translated. Positioned behind the âtransparent screenâ at âthe little post-and-telegraph-officeâ the protagonist is established as an urban spectator, privileged to a âprodigious viewâ of the metropolis, a âpanorama fed with facts and figuresâ (323). The office not only provides her with a vantage point from which she can observe the city. Telegraphy is used, moreover, as an analogy for the girlâs method of urban observation. Her perspective of the London crowd, for example, is invested with telegraphic imagery:
What virtually happened was that in the shuffling herd that passed before her by far the greater part only passed â a proportion but just appreciable stayed. Most of the elements swam straight away, lost themselves in the bottomless common, and by doing so really kept the page clear. On the clearness therefore what she did retain stood sharply out; she nipped and caught it, turned it over and interwove it. [326]
The word âvirtuallyâ confuses the readerâs grasp of meaning â it can mean âliterallyâ but also suggests a lack of form. The intangibility of the electronic telegraph system mirrors that of London â a âbottomless commonâ. The city leaves fragments which must be pieced together by the reader, just as the telegrapher transcribes the electrical codes delivered into the office by the âsounderâ. Yet quite what our protagonist does âretainâ remains undisclosed. Her actions, while appearing to establish physicality ââshe nipped and caught it, turned it over and interwove itâ â never seem to reach their implied completion. While the concluding word âinterwoveâ signals a moment of consolidation, the singular âitâ collapses any sense of unification. The cycle repeats itself over again and the reader is unable to establish concrete control, suggesting how urban experience consists of fleeting moments that need to be captured in order to give meaning to them.
Conclusion: Letters in London after the nineteenth century
Communications provide the framework of the modern city. This investigation has revealed a parallel between the complexities of post-industrial living and the complexity of systems such as the post and the telegraph, exposing how reformed and innovative communication methods altered the way that individuals related to one another and to their urban world in Victorian literature and life. Considering that penny postage remained valid into the twentieth century â not until 1940, a century after the standard rate was introduced, did the price rise significantly (from 1 ½d.) â extending the study to explore representations of letters in London after the Victorian period might further reveal how the image of the city altered alongside these developments. Victorian innovations, such as the penny post and telegraph, can be seen as blueprints for modern forms of communication (see Standage, The Victorian Internet) â text messages and the internet, for instance. By examining how the development of communications in London during the nineteenth century affected literary representations of the metropolis, we also learn much about our vision of the twenty-first-century city and how we relate to one another within it.
Related Material
Last modified 16 June 2012
