Letter Writing: A Social Phenomenon

Jennifer L. Adams

David Barton and Nigel Hall, editors. Letter Writing as a Social Practice. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins, 2000. 262 pages. Notes, bibliography, and index. $70.00.

Each day in the dawn of this twenty-first century, most of us are bombarded in our homes and in our offices with various types of mail, including utility bills, financial statements, subscription reminders, and various “junk” mail, not to mention the e-mails that fill our Internet inboxes. However, few of us find in those stacks of envelopes personal letters from our friends and family. In fact, many scholars of arts and letters have noted with lament that personal letters have seemingly gone the way of vinyl record albums or of Murphy’s Five-&-Dime stores; they have all been swept away by the rush of life in our modern, technological world. However, this decline in the sending and receiving of the personal letter has gone either unnoticed or unmentioned by most scholars of communication. Perhaps this is because letter writing began its decline after World War II, just as the communication discipline was developing strength; certainly communication scholars from that time on have found an overwhelming number of new communication technologies to study without dipping into those of the past. Or, perhaps this oversight on the part of communication scholars was caused by the popular conception that the study of letters was best left to those doing literary analysis. Whatever the reason, there is a general lack of published research on letter writing as a communicative genre within the field of communication studies. Therefore, David Barton’s and Nigel Hall’s collection of essays titled Letter Writing as a Social Practice is a notable achievement; it is a reminder that letters have, throughout much of history, served interpersonal and social functions in addition to literary ones.

The articles selected for inclusion in this book cover a diverse range of topics, representing various cultures and historical eras. However, no matter what particular subject matter is addressed by these authors, a perspective of the letter as a social practice ties all the articles together. Their common aim is to better understand the process of letter writing as a social phenomenon and the social implications that arise from such writing. All the articles assume, as stated in the introduction by Barton and Hall, that “the most revealing way of investigating letter writing is to view it as a social practice, examining the texts, the participants, the activities and the artifacts in their social contexts” (1). However, despite this unifying principle of the articles, the book maintains a cross-disciplinary focus and represents scholars from anthropology, history, and education. As such, they can be somewhat easily discussed by the sub-topic upon which each article is focused, either on culture, history, or pedagogy, although there is obvious overlap in these categories.

Of the twelve essays included in this book, five deal explicitly with the historicity of letter writing. One of these, titled “Letters and the Social Grounding of Differentiated Genres,” by Charles Bazerman, is a most interesting genealogy of letter writing as a historical genre. Bazerman notes that letters have strong generative connections with other literary genres, including the books of the New Testament, newspapers, financial statements such as bills of sale, and novels. Scholars of rhetoric will be pleased to read about the letter in Ancient Greece, where letters were memorized and recited orally by messengers who were said to “carry the very presence or projection (‘parousia’) of the sender” (18). In another equally interesting essay written by Nigel Hall, the materiality of letter writing in the nineteenth century is explored. He reviews the objects involved in the writing process during that time, from quill pens to ink blotters, and shows how these items were a material staple in the homes of many people, suggesting the importance placed on the letter during that historical era. Other historical essays included in Letter Writing as a Social Practice deal with topics such as the relationship between personal letters and a social position of refinement in America between 1750 and 1900, the social significance of letter writing to a Cornish community in the 1790s, and English “pauper” letters asking for governmental relief from the early 1800s. All of these essays are concerned with the everyday practice of social letter writing from times gone by, and are fascinating reading.

Another category of essays in this collection deals with issues of letter writing in various cultures or subcultures. Of the three that I have grouped into this category, two deal with the subculture of prison, and explore the ways in which prisoners develop and maintain relationships with those on the “outside” through letters in America and in Great Britain. Another article, titled “True Traces: Love Letters and Social Transformation in Nepal,” by Laura M. Ahearn, addresses the ways that love letters influence the way that writers and senders in Nepal develop a sense of personal agency that has not traditionally been a part of Nepali culture. Scholars of interpersonal communication will likely be intrigued to discover that letters often substitute for face-to-face communication in situations where loved ones are separated by geographical distance, and are important to studying certain personal relationships.

A third category of topics addressed in this collection deals with issues of pedagogy, both historical and contemporary. In one of these articles, Lucille M. Schultz describes how literacy was taught in nineteenth-century schools in America through the copying and composing of letters. She reviews collections of textbooks from that era that included both examples of letters for business and social occasions and rules of etiquette for polite correspondence in society. Also included in this category is an empirical study by Nigel Hall, Anne Robinson, and Leslie Crawford, in which the extent to which school children were able to construe letter writing as a social practice rather than as a school exercise was measured after lessons on letter writing were introduced in class. These authors discovered that children quite readily accept letter writing as a social practice, perhaps because when writing letters, “they simply used those interpersonal skills that they had developed through being socially, psychologically, and linguistically proficient in their everyday lives” (146). Letters seem to be inherently social acts, and as such the results of this small experiment should be intriguing to both educators and scholars of interpersonal life. The final article dealing predominantly with pedagogy describes the ways in which letters are used to educate unschooled adults in South Africa quite effectively, perhaps suggesting that letters might be an effective pedagogical tool when teaching illiterate adults in other cultures as well.

Taken as a whole, these articles do indeed present a convincing argument that there are social effects of letter writing that are rarely explored in academic literature. Throughout history, letters have served both personal and professional ends for communicating over distance, and their importance as a communicative genre should not be ignored. While letters are literary, they are in everyday life mostly social—they have helped people develop and maintain relationships, they have emerged as central to communication in many types of cultures, and they have been used to educate both children and adults. However, now that letter writing is in decline, is this research merely historically valuable? This question is best answered by the last essay in Letter Writing as a Social Practice, titled “Computer-Mediated Communication: The Future of the Letter,” by Simeon J. Yates. Yates notes the ways in which traditional letter writing practices have been taken up by those who send and receive e-mails and other computer-mediated mail, and yet he does not see computer mediated communication as a new chapter in the history of letter writing because each form still serves different cultural and social needs. And so, perhaps the letter is not doomed; perhaps it is still a vital and living mode of communication between individuals. If this is indeed the case, Letter Writing as a Social Practice may prove to be the impetus for other studies about the social and communicative functions of the letter. Given the lack of such research in the past, this book is more than a beginning; it provides a look at the most current and relevant considerations of letters across disciplines, and is a useful addition to the libraries of those who study the social implications of personal communication.

Jennifer L. Adams is a Ph.D. candidate in communication at Purdue University.