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Women's Letters vs. Men's Letters

Woman Writing a Letter

Letter writing was considered an appropriate task for a woman. It was one of the regular responsibilities she had around the house. For women, writing letters became a form of nurturing and allowed women to be social with family and friends. Letter writing became a feminine quality, and was considered one of the only skills she should possess. As well as encouraging women to write letters, some letter writing guides also encouraged other people to read the women’s letters. This was to make sure everything she wrote was appropriate and did not have any mistakes. Women also tend to be better letter writers since they have more leisure time.

There are a few different things men and women do differently when they write their letters. Men normally use the commercial size of paper. It is the largest size of paper and has an average size of 7 ⅞ x 4 ⅞ inches. Women were generally the ones to write the monograms and crests on their letters, as they were “often very pretty, and especially for young ladies, who are not suffered to use crests, they may be considered sufficiently good form”. Men may use the family coat of arms, however it was rarely used in letters, “It is quite right for any male descendant of a man who has properly borne arms to use the family crest”. If single women used the coat of arms or a crest in her letters, it was considered very bad form but they could always use the family seal. A woman was permitted to use her husband’s crest if she was married. A woman should also always have a wax taper, seal, and a large amount of red or black sealing wax at her desk. A woman who has guests at her house was expected to provide white paper, envelopes, stamps, a wax taper, red sealing wax, and a list of hours letters arrive and leave from the post to her guests.

The Value of Letters

Aside from their use as a means of correspondence, letters can be seen as an accurate representation of people’s lived experiences during different historical eras, and much information can be gleaned from what we read in letters both public and private. Letters tend to be valuable for many reasons, and were used in Victorian times for several purposes. Some of these purposes are laid out by James Willis Westlake, who was a public school teacher born just prior to the Victorian era in England in 1830 and who moved to America at a young age, which is where he published his book. First, Westlake says letters are valuable in acquiring knowledge of past people and events. Secondly, he believes they are important in gaining insight into the moral lives of great people after which one’s own behavior could be modeled. Finally, Westlake claims that one may use the letters of well-written and eloquent individuals to adapt and improve his or her own letter-writing style. In the New London Fashionable Gentleman’s Writer, we find an example of the third usage of letter writing: a collection of quaint correspondences between hopeful men and the ladies they wished to court. Such a manual may have been used by anxious men as they prepared to write to their love interests and express their feelings, and perhaps by women as they decided how best to accept or reject the advances.

One of Beatrix Potter's illustrated letters

Some prominent figures of the day turned to letter writing as a creative outlet. Emily Dickinson used her letters to push back against the constraints which women, herself included, faced during the era. Letter-writing was one of the few literary pursuits in which women were allowed to participate, and Dickinson used this to her advantage, infusing traditional letter-writing with her own artistic flair in order to develop her skills as a writer. George Howell, an amateur Victorian artist, used his letters to his brother as a space to entwine his words and his artistic works. Similarly, Beatrix Potter, an author/illustrator, often included pictures in her letters as a means of comfort and relief from the pressures she faced from her family.

Children were taught the art of letter-writing, as well; they were particularly taught to form letters neatly with instructive books filled with drawing and line instruction. One of these such books, “Elementary Drawing Copy Books,” incorporated traditional alphabet practice with instructions on drawing elements of the natural world. Aside from proper handwriting, young boys and girls were taught to compose letters for different reasons. Girls’ writing books taught them to use their writing skills for household management tasks, while those for boys taught proper form for business correspondence.

Business Letters

One of the most common types of letters written during the Victorian Age was the business letter. While personal letters were often written by women, business letters were mostly written by men. They focused on transactional and monetary matters, not emotional ones. In the middle and upper classes, men handled the family's business matters, but in the working class, both men and women worked outside the home and wrote business letters. Similarly, widowed women had to take over handling their late husbands' business affairs.

Business letters were very formal and deferential in language and in tone. A standard letter began with a greeting of “sir” or “honoured sir.” The body of the letter contained either very sincere apologies for a problem or very polite requests. It was imperative that the sender didn’t offend the receiver of the letter, because an impolite letter could sever any further correspondence or business relationships. The letters would often be signed with “humble servant” or “faithful friend,” indicating the high esteem in which the sender held the receiver.

Every type of business transaction and correspondence was exchanged through letters. Topics ranged from loan payments, to the sale of goods, to employee recommendations. Merchants from the city communicated with merchants in the country; wealthy benefactors corresponded with young men just setting up in business. Letter writing was more common among the middle and upper classes, who had more time and money to spend, but the working class also wrote business letters.

Correspondence through letters was more common among the middle and upper classes, simply because they had more time to write. But working class men would also write letters when necessary. Letters between family and friends could run very long, and usually covered a wide range of subjects. Business letters, however, were often very short, only discussing the present business matter and some basic pleasantries.

Before the advent of the Penny Post, it was too expensive to send personal letters, so most letters were about business matters. After the Penny Post made letter writing cheap and accessible to everyone, personal letters and love letters became much more popular.

Victorian Death Writing Practices

Death notice from a Swedish family

Mourning culture within Victorian society, while extensive and lavish by preparing the deceased loved ones and holding long funeral processions in remembrance, introduced the medium of writing to others of a loved one’s passing. Death notices and letters provided family and friends with the necessary means to grieve and cope with the loss and death of those they loved. However, prior to the institution of the Uniform Penny Post, recipients often did not have the means to pay the postage of death notices, since the cost of such letters were far too high for the middle and working classes of Victorian society. Without payment for these letters, family and friends would not know of a loved one’s passing. Catherine Golden includes in her book Posting It: the Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing an instance in which a man could not pay to receive a death notice; examples such as this were common, especially among the poor. However, after the reform of the postal system, receiving death notices came at a cheaper price, only costing a penny and affording those of lower socioeconomic class the ability of receiving such notices. This communication of a loved one's death was now evident in the appearance of such letters.

The appearance of a death notice conveyed grief in a direct, yet subtle manner. Both the envelopes and letters containing grievances of the deceased were rimmed with black-edging, allowing those at a distance to recognize what laid within the bounds of that envelope. This element of mourning practices was important for Victorian culture due to the fact that as society grew, individuals and families moved away, making it harder to communicate. Golden writes that “the black edged letter is a formal signal of loss that permits the writer to announce his or her despair without the disorderly or disruptive articulation of private emotions. Mourning could last months, even years, and the width of the black edges of the envelopes identified the time of mourning, such as wider black-edging indicated the contents were within in one year of the death; the edging grew thinner and thinner as the years went on.

Composition Conventions

Victorian letter-writing guides are very specific when it comes to instructing readers how to actually compose the letter. Instructions on how to write the letter explained every last detail, from the placement of the address so the many different phrases that could be used to end the letter. There were English Victorian guides as well as American Victorian guides. One American Victorian guide in particular written by Harvard professor Arthur Wentworth Eaton, laid out the exact measurements that a paper should be for different types of letters. This guide explained that a commercial, octavo, and billet were all sizes of paper that different letters could be written on. It said they each had different purposes. Later in on the guide, the source instructs that letters should always be written on standard white paper, or else it is considered sloppy or uneducated. It also noted that only black ink was permissible.

English Victorian guides told readers how to specifically write letters to lovers, friends, and other correspondents. They explain the things that should be found in each type of letter. “The model letters demonstrate the tonal and rhetorical attributes the manual recommends—sincerity and fidelity for men, reserve for women…”.

An English Victorian guide by Lewis Carroll explains that the first thing one should do when writing a letter is to write the address and place the stamp on the envelope, as well as the sender’s address and date on the letter. Handwriting must be neat and easily able to read. When writing a response letter, one should frame their letter by responding to the sender’s questions and remarks, and then move to your own topics. There are many more rules related to the content of the letter in this English guide. Victorians were very specific in how letters should be written.

A guide from America, “How To Write Letters: A Manual of Correspondence, Showing the Correct Structure, Composition, Punctuation, Formalities, and Uses of the Various Kinds of Letters, Notes, and Cards” by James Willis Westlake, includes some rules in regard to letter-writing in the American Victorian era. The heading should include where the letter was written and the date, and a period following it. This should go at the top but should not go past the third line of the paper. For informal letters, the heading can go at the bottom of the letter. Next comes the intro, where the address of the person receiving the letter is written, as well as their name. The beginning of the letter also begins here, where one addresses the person to whom the letter is being written. The place that the  address goes varies depending on what type of letter it is. The body comes next and should contain a margin with nothing written in it on the left side column. The paragraphs of the body should be separated when talking about different ideas. Following the body is the conclusion, where the letter is closed out. The signature should be there as well, and a person’s  whole name should be used if the letter is significant. These are located at the end of the letter, and should look aesthetic, on one to three lines. A period goes after the name.

Emily Dickinson defied Victorian letter writing conventions

Some writers of the Victorian era, however, chose to disregard these rules for writing letters. Emily Dickinson, a famous woman poet of this era, was one such person. For example, she didn’t write with a nice, pretty style. She wrote “often scrawled in pencil rather than ink, and consistently difficult to decipher”. She also didn’t pay attention to the rule about how to properly use punctuation. Instead, she used the punctuation marks she believed were appropriate for what she was writing. There were also several other rules in the Victorian letter-writing guides she did not follow.