Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems by Karin Koehler (review)

One might say that Karin Koehler’s Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems stakes out new ground by bringing together two venerable topics in Hardy criticism: on the one hand, the clash of old and new, and on the other, “the difficulty of communication” (in R. M. Rehder’s phrase), with modernity here assuming the shape of the new information systems of the nineteenth century (qtd. in Koehler 159). The impact of modern information technologies and networks on literary production has, of course, formed the subject of a substantial and still-growing body of work in Victorian studies. While this subfield has not left Hardy’s oeuvre entirely unexplored, however, a certain bias in favor of novel technologies, as distinct from systems of distribution, has caused disproportionate attention to be paid to A Laodicean (1880–81), with its unusually prominent treatment of telegraphy and photography (a situation somewhat analogous, perhaps, to the twenty-first-century revaluation of In the Cage [1898] within the Henry James canon). Even though Hardy was at best ambivalent about new media—telegraph and telephone, and later, typewriter and radio—he was, as Ralph W. V. Elliott put it in his essay on the writer’s correspondence, a great “epistolarian,” a fact reflected in the prominence accorded letters and letter-writing in his work (“Thomas Hardy, Epistolarian,” Reading Thomas Hardy, edited by Charles P. C. Pettit [Macmillan, 1998], 209). Wisely, then, Koehler centers her project’s focus largely on transformative developments within the Victorian postal system—in particular, the establishment of Rowland Hill’s penny post in 1840—a point of emphasis in which her book joins, and acknowledges its debt to, such recent studies as Kate Thomas’s Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters (2012) and Laura Rotunno’s Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840–1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture (2013).

It is also a point of emphasis that is, generally speaking, more consistently observed earlier in the book. Koehler begins, for instance, by discussing a trio of novels—The Trumpet-Major (1880), Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)—against the backdrop of Hill’s reforms. She ably shows the ways in which the two earlier works, in particular, “registe[r] the anxieties, as well as the occasional enthusiasm, with which communicational developments were greeted by traditional communities” (27). Chief among these anxieties, in Koehler’s reading, are those relating to the culturally corrosive effects of integration into the “emerging national network” emblematized by the postal system, such as “the standardisation of spoken language” (31, 32). Subsequent chapters explore a number of topics connected with epistolarity (considered rather more generically) in Hardy’s novels. Koehler discusses, for example, the ways in which Hardy’s treatment of letters highlights the “sexual double standard” at the heart of Victorian constructions of privacy, exemplified by Clym Yeobright’s “violent appropriation of his wife’s correspondence” in The Return of the Native (1878) (22, 60). Hill’s reforms, specifically the egalitarian promises of the penny post, are effectively used in a later chapter—“‘Unopened and forgotten’: Letters from the Margins”—to frame Koehler’s discussion of failed acts of communication in Hardy. These, she argues, frequently “serve as both emblems of and poignant attacks on social and sexual injustices” (24). A final chapter considers representations of letter-writing in Hardy’s poetry and short fiction.

“Given its historicist perspective,” Koehler writes, Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication eschews substantive engagement with the well-known epistolary frolics of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida (21). For this omission, surely, no apology is needed. At times, however, readers may find themselves wishing, precisely, for more historicism, particularly with respect to media and their cultural effects. Here, some of Koehler’s formulations would benefit from more qualification and nuance, such as the stark declaration that “in the nineteenth century Britain saw a gradual yet pervasive...