The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

The middle of the nineteenth century, David Henkin notes, gave rise to such diverse practices as collecting autographs from famous people, valentine greetings, and junk mail—and, most important, an explosion in letter writing that transcended class and geographic boundaries. In The Postal Age, Henkin challenges technological explanations for this expansion, which attribute the growth of communication to the invention of the telegraph and the spread of railroads. Instead, he argues that sending a letter, once "an event rather than a feature of ordinary experience" (p. 17), became a staple of everyday life through a burgeoning "postal culture," in which Americans became increasingly aware of their presence and participation in a communications network that spanned the nation.

In making this argument, Henkin extends our understanding of the early national post office—rendered familiar in Richard John's seminal Spreading the News—through the middle of the nineteenth century. Whereas John's argument centered on the post office as a broadcast medium for the dissemination of information through newspapers, Henkin argues that this culture, fueled by two reductions in postage rates at mid-century, coincided with a rapid increase in the need for long-distance communication to shape a network that enveloped the country.

Henkin moves skillfully through a broad range of topics and materials, examining the writings of postal reformers such as Pliny Miles, prescriptive literature, and hundreds of letters written by Americans both ordinary and famous. Divided into two parts, the book first examines how Americans came to see themselves as part of this new network. The postage-rate reductions and introduction of prepayment entrenched the letter as the medium of communication for a mobile and rapidly expanding population. Letters thus eclipsed newspapers as the post's primary business, first as the newspaper industry shifted its focus to local events, and then as a series of new regulations made postage cheaper and more flexible. In chapter 3, Henkin returns to familiar ground from his earlier work, City Reading (1999), charting the geography of the post office as an urban social space, detailing the ways in which the post office was a locus of interaction, and therefore a potentially dangerous and subversive space, especially for women.

The second part of the book focuses on the cultural consequences of the expansion of the network through a series of case studies. First, Henkin deconstructs the personal letter, tracing its lineage from business correspondence and underscoring the tension between the private letter and its public transmission. He then examines how the construction of intimacy in personal letters played out in two great dislocations of the mid-nineteenth century: the California gold rush and the Civil War. In these two cases the (hoped for) temporary nature of the dislocation made the intimacy of letters all the more pressing. On the other hand, the new opportunities created by cheap postage also led to a decided lack of intimacy. The book therefore closes with an examination of the rise of mass mailing. Henkin demonstrates that the reduction in postal rates made possible the creation of new genres of mail, including valentines and circulars, and that the new mass of mail led to a new cultural space: the dead letter office.

The Postal Age is, by the author's own admission, a brisk survey of the subject, and leaves several questions unanswered. Though Henkin very clearly states that he is most interested in postal culture and letter writing, he seems to dismiss too quickly the importance of behind-the-scenes advances in technology and the law. Even more striking, Henkin's focus on the middle third of the nineteenth century occasionally underplays the scope of the transformation of the postal system from one designed for big-city political and commercial elites to one designed for the mass of Americans. However, these are minor quibbles with an otherwise well-argued and engaging book. This is a vital addition to the small...