Hardy & the Importance of Victorian Communications

KARIN KOEHLER opens her study of Thomas Hardy and Victorian communication with an episode from Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891). Deeply troubled by Tess's vulnerable situation, Izz and Marian write an anonymous letter to Angel Clare urging him to return to his wife. They "uncork the penny ink-bottle they shared" and put their heads together to compose a message, only sixty-three words, which begins: "Honour'd Sir—Look to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do love you." They direct the letter to Angel's father and mother at Emminster Vicarage, hoping that somehow it will find its way to Brazil.

Koehler suggests that this moment in Victorian fiction is iconic, for it points to a significant change in British literary and cultural history. Hardy presents the modern reader with two literate field women (with portable ink-bottle) who dare to write a private letter to a clergyman's son above them in education and station, and who have such faith in their government's postal system that they believe this unimportant-looking note, which they pay one penny to send on its way, will eventually reach its intended recipient somewhere in South America. "It is highly significant," Koehler says, "that the postal service enables two poor, ill-educated labouring women to enter into contact with a man who is out of their reach, geographically, socially, and emotionally." The scene, she suggests, "poignantly illustrates how nineteenth-century developments in communication technology, and none more so than the penny post, impacted upon the literary imagination and upon representational possibilities."

It is an evocative opening to Koehler's argument that the inauguration of the penny post in 1840, just five months before Hardy's birth, affected almost every aspect of Victorian literature, including the construction of plot and interventions in narrative tradition, the notion of privacy, the development of modern subjectivity, and the expansion of democratic voices and class relations. She might just as well have begun with the death of Prince, the Derbyfield family horse, stabbed in the breast by the pointed shaft of the morning mail-cart, "with its two noiseless wheels, speeding along these lanes like an arrow," as it did almost every day of the week. It is an image that encapsulates the encroachment of faster, more efficient communication tools on even rural communities. As with everything else in this period of transition, Victorian writers met such advances with a mixture of enthusiasm and apprehension. For as Koehler persuasively argues, along with other innovations in nineteenth-century communication, the penny post became a site of engagement with virtually every aspect of modern life, all the "cultural, social, and psychological concerns at the heart of Victorian texts." After 1840, many of the associations attached to letters and letter-writing radically changed. If the "mythology of the letter" for an earlier generation involved sincerity, individualism, and self expression, the introduction of the penny post introduced a sense of collective membership in a letter-writing nation. The billet doux secretly tossed in someone's lap was now the work of the Post Office. And so the epistolary was replaced by the postal in the Victorian cultural imagination.

For Hardy, the penny post, telegraph, and other new modes of communication offered new ways to think about human relationships. Koehler is intrigued by the sheer number of letters and other kinds of written communication in his fiction. This is especially striking because he lived in and wrote about rural communities where the "postal infrastructure" was not as advanced as it was in urban centers. Koehler suggests that for Hardy, writing letters could be a transformative medium for individuals and for society, representing the human need to communicate, sometimes across impossible expanses of time and space. Koehler's undertaking here is original and ambitious, and she ranges over almost the complete body of Hardy's work, including the minor novels and some poetry. In separate chapters on targeted works, she discusses...