Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century (review)

In this major study of immigrant letters historian David A. Gerber contributes to the scholarship on personal correspondence in a number of ways. In the first section of the book, comprising an introduction and six chapters, Gerber considers the chief issues that arise when social historians attempt to use letters as evidence, places these texts in their broad cultural and historical contexts, and offers a method, based in discourse analysis, for a social history-focussed reading of letters as texts. In the book’s second section Gerber demonstrates these methods in four case studies.

Gerber’s specific materials are letters written by middle-class British immigrants who came to Canada and the United States between the 1820s and 1860s. English, Protestant Irish, and Scottish in background, these peoples’ experiences upon entering North America differed from that of European immigrant groups. Not surprisingly, then, Gerber eschews the more common approach of immigrant historians, who tend to use letters collectively as a path to understanding group identifications, especially ethnicity. He instead focuses the role of letter writing in reestablishing personal relationships and expressing individual identity. By so doing, Gerber is able to offer new insights into the familial and social relationships, and their disfunctions, that were as much a part of immigration as were cultural transplantation and demographic push-pull factors.

The first half of Authors of Their Lives deserves to become mandatory reading for any scholar entering the field of epistolary studies. Here we find an excellent overview of the scholarship dating back to sociologists Thomas and Znaniecki (1912) and through 2003, ranging among disciplines but with a focus on social historians’ work. Gerber points to the populist character of this work, whether sociological, historical, literary, linguistic, or anthropological, and places it within the development of the New Social History.

From this review of literature Gerber moves to a consideration of the letter as an “act of literacy” (57) in which individuals struggle to create a writing self that can successfully engage in a written conversation. The conversation is experienced as authentic in the sense that the letters represent “the faithful execution of an obligation to maintain a bond” (91). This is, then, purposeful writing—Gerber sees it as part of a larger “culture of emigration” (92)—that can be categorized according to the kinds of negotiations being accomplished. One can use letters to regulate relationships or to express emotion or to describe daily life, categories of epistolary discourse that Gerber labels as regulative, expressive, and descriptive.

The regulative category claims Gerber’s first attention and strongest focus. This section of the book, in which Gerber lays out the issues that impinge on the letter’s regulative function, is where we find his most original contributions to epistolary theory. Regulative issues produce the genre’s self-referentiality, the many passages in which writers comment on neglecting to write, for example, or their anxieties about being able to write in such a way that their readers will comprehend their meaning.

One of the writers’ chief anxieties was the postal system. Gerber explains the 19^th century development of transatlantic postal systems as “networks on the edge of Modernity” (140). The letter writers were dependent upon the technologies of both writing and its conveyance. Especially the transportation apparatus eventually became complex, bureaucratic systems with a global transnational reach, systems not always trusted by the letter writers.

Finally, in this first half of the book Gerber provides a composite look at the life history of a correspondence. How do correspondents establish the beginning of an epistolary exchange? How do they negotiate its terms of reciprocity? What brings about the tapering off or end of correspondence? Some steps in this process have already been recognized as typical, as in the “first letter” (162) recounting the adventures of the sea passage to North America. Other steps outlined by Gerber...