How Letters Matter

at a key point in the plot of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s historical novel Il Gattopardo (The Leopard), the Prince of Salina, Sicily, receives a letter from his nephew Tancredi, asking him to negotiate the terms of his marriage with the beautiful Angelica, daughter of the local mayor. Delivered by a “stage-coach bearing the irregular and scanty mail” in its “canary-yellow box,” the letter “proclaimed its importance even before reading, written as it was on sumptuous sheets of gleaming paper and in a harmonious script scrupulously tracing full strokes down and thin strokes up.”¹ A fair copy, the letter is addressed respectfully to “dearest Uncle Fabrizio,” rather than employing Tancredi’s more habitual, mocking sobriquet (“Zione” in Italian, “Nuncle” in the English translation). This means that it can be shown to others, and (the narrator informs us) it also forges “a link with ancient pre-Christian beliefs which attributed a binding power to the exact invocation of a name.” The body of the letter pours forth Tancredi’s love for Angelica in effusive terms (“it should not be forgotten that romanticism was then at high noon”) before proceeding to a disquisition on the value of leveling the classes at this turning point in Italian history (the year is 1860). This is the only part of the composition that pleases the prince, partly because it chimes with his own political notions but also because “the style, with its hints of subdued irony, magically evoked his nephew’s face, the jesting nasal tone, the sparkling sly blue eyes, the mockingly polite smile.” Furthermore, he notes that “this little Jacobin sally had been written out on exactly one single sheet of paper so that if he wanted he could let others read the letter while subtracting the revolutionary chapter.” “His admiration for Tancredi’s tact knew no bounds.”

For those who see the history of letter writing as a story of continual decline, the Prince of Salina might seem to be living in the ancien régime of correspondence as well as the twilight of the aristocracy. With its beautiful paper, elegant handwriting, and polished style, its quasi-magical power to conjure up the writer and perhaps to control the reader, and its presumption that it will be shared in whole or part, the letter belongs to an alien world—a world in which people appear to have the time to communicate. Letter writing is often said to be one of the many art forms that we are in danger of losing in the transition to digital technology. But despite the gulf that yawns between our hurried emails and the artful missives of previous generations, we are nonetheless aware that letters require all kinds of tact. Pressing the “send” button, we are haunted by stories of emails accidentally fired off to the wrong account, of private “replies” that were unwitting “reply alls,” of messages that were misinterpreted or that struck precisely the wrong tone. If my overstuffed inbox is anything to go by, reports of the death of the letter are greatly exaggerated. Yet our sense of being overwhelmed by correspondence does little to mark us out from past eras, in which letters could be quite as pressing and oppressive as they are today.

This complex interplay between continuity and change goes some way to explaining why interest in early modern letters has been growing in recent years, such that we now have several painstaking studies of letter writing in theory and practice, and an increasing array of digital resources that bring the archive to our desktops. Such studies have coincided with the “material turn” in the humanities and have insisted that letters were anything but a disembodied conversation between absent friends. Instead they were messy congeries involving numerous collaborations with secretaries and messengers, complex protocols of epistolary theory, social etiquette, and tacit knowledge, and endless anxieties about the future fate of the document. Merely to write a letter in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries...