In the last twenty years we have lived through a social and literary revolution of huge importance that has taken place silently and apparently without comment: the death of the hand-written letter. The letter was creative and personal; it was emotionally and physically real; it could be deeply important to the recipient, and it could be preserved for years, or even centuries. But no one writes letters any more, they have been replaced by brief, functional texts sent electronically, which lack physical reality and a sense of permanence, hence they are quickly forgotten or erased or both. Thus a five thousand-year-old system of human communication has come to an end, in an event as sudden as when the horse vanished from our roads a little over a century ago. This extinction of letters provides the ideal moment to look back on their history, the long centuries during which the letter was a mark of every literate civilisation. For every form of official and personal communication, whether from kings, philosophers, soldiers, poets, scholars, lovers, artists or administrators, among the famous and the powerful or among the unknown and the insignificant, the letter was vital.
Between about 2010 and 2015 I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to persuade one publisher after another to commission me to write a history of letters; but I failed. However, while reading on the subject, I discovered a delightful Victorian book of letters, and when I finally acknowledged that my new book would never be written, I decided to re-publish a selection from this source. The book in question is Facsimiles of Royal, Historical, Literary and other Autographs in the Department of Manuscripts, British Museum, edited by G.F.Warner, 1899. Warner (1845 –1936) was a manuscript expert who spent all his working life with the British Museum, and published facsimiles of many unique manuscripts. This book, which has never been reprinted, is a large folio showing around 150 documents, from which I have chosen some thirty subjects, and added portraits of the writers, and explanatory notes. I offer this selection as a tribute to Warner’s work, and as a sketch of a much longer work on letters, which I had hoped to write. The subjects covered here are royal, political, military, literary and purely personal. The writers include John Knox, King James I, Cromwell, Wren, Newton, the Duke of Monmouth, Hume, Voltaire, Garrick, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Browning, Dickens, George Eliot, General Gordon and Queen Victoria.
Pen to Paper
