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  • Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters by Kate Thomas
  • John Maynard (bio)
Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters, by Kate Thomas; pp. xii + 251. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, £60.00, £15.99 paper, $99.00, $24.95 paper.

For those of us who have never sat down with the monographs on the GPO (that’s the not so recently defunct General Post Office of the United Kingdom) this book is a very good run through its important history: a government function that expanded its load, range, and major structures enormously throughout the Victorian period, with the new Victoria’s-head penny stamp as its flagship (or figurehead). Beginning with Rowland Hill’s reforms in 1840, it created prepaid letters and universal coverage as we knew it until it began a slow decline not long ago. In 1870 the GPO was authorized to take over all telegraph services—and in doing so it also moved itself into employing lots of women, another major innovation. Kate Thomas tells this story well and makes all the right bows to communication theory and media system analysis, but her focus is on the impact of this great communications enterprise on Victorian culture.

It is a big and important story. The quaint old post with its famous little queen stamps and its little postmarks in black was a game-changing technology that touched Victorian society everywhere. What we see and focus on in our New Historical work is always subjective—in relation to our current interests. At one point Thomas notes that a study could be made of Victorian religion and the post. But she doesn’t go there. Her relentless quest, as the title and subtitle make clear, is for sexual and especially queer moments in the postal and telegraph systems. If I have some doubts about her overall assertions of queering, I will grant that she makes us realize that to the Victorians this stodgy apparatus was often seen as sexy and strange. To focus on the GPO connections of the Cleveland Street affair, as Thomas does nicely as she explores the lives of the telegraph boys as they hustled and were hustled, is to see this twice-told story of Victorian same-sex relations in a full new picture. Or she shows us Anthony Trollope—who we know was a postal worker and official—looking over those segregated [End Page 537] nubile postal workers with heterosexual blinders that did not exclude prurient male interest in female closeness. Thomas shows how connected some emergent lesbian fictions were to postal workers (as in Eliza Lynn Linton’s ambivalent and sly The Rebel of the Family [1880]). She reads Thomas Hardy’s A Laodicean (1881) as about telegraph wires bringing women into a closeness (a kind of pre-phone phone sex) that the offline male suitors can’t get near.

Thomas’s fourth chapter, “All Red Routes,” gives us an analogically related topic. The GPO reaches out in red routes to unite the Empire; her special, wellresearched essay is on the not quite integrated network of Anglo-American imperial brotherhood based on Anglo-Saxon intimacies. The chapter offers an excellent set of readings in Anglo-Saxon fellowship as a homosexual dream (Cecil Rhodes), or a homosocial agenda (Arthur Conan Doyle); it climaxes with an exciting new (yes new!) reading of Dracula (1897). She presents it as being queer (Quincey and Jonathan father little Quincey) and as reassuring author and readers of the revitalization of empire by Anglo-Saxon American blood. The long exploration of Dracula is typical of the strength of this book. The author has dwelled in the world of her many subjects. At best, it fills in a good deal of the Victorian sexual ethos, which is emerging as much more foggy, contradictory, teasing, and queer than early investigators could have imagined. This interesting account of sex lives, letters, telegraphs, and their treatment in queer texts belongs in the world of Sharon, rather than Steven, Marcus. It is an important and nuanced study of Victorian sexualities with special focus on lesbian formations and with often splendid readings.

So we have a good addition to our large...

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