Authors of Their Lives: The Personal Correspondence of British Immigrants to North America in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction: Letters and Immigrants

Introduction Letters and Immigrants The Abiding Significance of Personal Letters Immigrants before the era of instant electronic communication were compelled to write letters to family and friends in their homelands.1 The great age of European mass international migrations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was also an era of rapidly proliferating formal primary education and rising popular literacy. Across the lines of social class and region, growing numbers of European immigrants, like those leaving Britain for Canada and the United States who form the basis for this work, possessed some literacy skills. Some wrote with considerable technical facility, but most had to strain against significant limitations in their use of written language. Among the many challenges to individual improvement posed by immigration, distance and separation proved a powerful stimulus to the improvement of self-expression. Complementing that challenge was the mastery of the rules of postal systems —the first impersonal, modern bureaucracy that most nineteenthcentury immigrants would encounter in their lifetimes. Even today, when immigrants have available to them a number of forms of convenient, instantaneous electronic communication—video phones, international long distance telephone service, fax, and e-mail— many prefer to write personal letters in the old-fashioned way when communicating to family and friends.2 One reason, of course, is that the mails continue to be inexpensive. One does not have to own a computer or a fax machine, or buy time on-line at an Internet café to write a letter and to post it for a nominal cost. The technology of the personal letter remains inexpensive and easily accessible, even more so now than in the past, when pen nibs, paper, and ink were sometimes scarce, and were luxuries for people with limited means. But it is not solely the low costs, reliability, and convenience of the 1 mails that explain the abiding popularity of personal letters among immigrants . The letter asserts its claims on its own emotional terms. The material object of the personal letter is an intimate artifact of the letterwriter . The handwriting of absent loved ones that the recipients of letters in the nineteenth century, like those recipients more recently, have claimed to be thrilled to see on newly received envelopes, inscribes the writer’s unique self; and one can return to the material object of the letter again and again to evoke that presence. The personal letter is simultaneously a poor substitute for and an important embodiment of those from whom we are separated. Its existence marks an absence, but it assists the correspondents in bonding relationships rendered vulnerable by separation. It is the closest approximation that both parties involved in a correspondence may come to that which they most desire, but cannot obtain—an intimate conversation. It is significant that those immigrants , such as the Englishmen John Langton, a settler in the Canadian bush in 1833, and Richard Flower, a settler on the Illinois prairie in 1819, who kept diaries of their ocean passage and resettlement in North America, eventually put their diaries into letter form when conveying them to their families.3 The diaries could certainly be shared, but they lacked the ability to speak to the intimate bonds both men had with those with whom they wished to correspond. The importance of the easily passed-over, conventionalized apparatus of personal address—those endearments, salutations, inquiries about health and happiness, and assurances that the writer is safe and secure —that so distinguish the personal letter cannot be understood if it is simply written off as habit or a way of filling the page. Rather, these touches are what make personal letters unique, and fulfill the emotional expectations of the correspondents. A diary may be a dialogue with oneself; a personal letter is an intimate, if long-distance, conversation with another.4 Why Did They Correspond? Why should immigrant correspondents care so profoundly if they have produced, or they have received, direct and tangible evidence that they continue to share an intimacy with those whom they love, but from whom they are separated? Why is the sight of handwriting somehow reassuring? Why is the word-of-mouth of a mutual acquaintance who is 2 | Introduction in a position to deliver oral messages to or from those far away, any less laden with meaning? A personal letter from one about whom we are concerned may alleviate our anxieties by assuring us in that person...