by A diary on 1700s letters, global reach, and the words we hand to the wordless
I have spent the season with the correspondence of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an age that lived and died by the handwritten letter, and I emerged convinced that the handwritten card, that small surviving relic of the colonial era, is the last honest piece of communication technology we have left.
The technology that carried a civilisation
The handwritten letter was the great connective technology of the age I study, carrying news, love, business, and grief across oceans at the pace of a ship. And its humble descendant survives in the Christmas card. The North Pole’s piece on Christmas cards and the writing of them celebrates exactly this surviving technology, the handwritten greeting that persists despite every faster method, because it carries something the faster methods cannot: the visible evidence of a human hand and a human moment. The colonial world ran entirely on this technology, and it survives, barely, in the card we still, occasionally, sit down to write.
What the eighteenth century understood, and what we have half-forgotten, is that the handwritten word is not merely information but presence, the physical trace of a person who took the time. A letter, then and now, is a piece of someone’s actual hand and actual hour, which no faster technology can replicate. The card is the last surviving artifact of that understanding.
My genuinely bookish American week
Let me report on my life among the books. I attempted to write my Christmas cards in the elaborate colonial hand, dip pen and all, and produced something that looked less like eighteenth-century elegance and more like a spider’s confession. My handwriting, ruined by decades of keyboards, cannot form the letters the colonial correspondents made effortlessly. I persevered, blotting and smudging, and produced cards that were honest at least in their imperfection, each one visibly the work of a human hand losing a fight with a dip pen. The recipients will know a person struggled to make them, which is, I suppose, the whole point.
According to the museum people, the handwritten letter was the central connective technology of the colonial era, carrying the whole emotional and practical life of a civilisation, which the surviving Christmas card faintly continues, spider-confession handwriting and all.
The global reach the empires craved
The colonial age was obsessed with global reach, with connecting distant places across the world, and I was struck by the letter asking for Santa’s phone number, all the way from Kenya. The eighteenth-century empires spent enormous blood and treasure trying to connect the globe, to reach across every ocean and continent. And here is a child in Kenya, effortlessly reaching the North Pole, connected to the whole warm network of the season without a single fleet or flag. The global reach the empires killed for is now simply available, a child on one continent reaching a workshop at the pole, and nobody had to be conquered for it. The connection the colonial age pursued so violently is now just a letter away.
As a historian of that violent pursuit of global connection, I find something quietly redemptive in this. The reach the empires wanted is achieved, at last, gently, by a child’s letter, with no conquest required. The network the eighteenth century built on blood is, in the season’s version, built on nothing but goodwill.
The words we hand to the wordless
What the handwritten card most beautifully does is give people the words they cannot find, which is why I love that the North Pole also hands out proper Merry Christmas messages for those who are stuck. The colonial letter-writers had whole manuals of correct phrasing for every occasion, because they understood that not everyone can find the words, and the kind thing is to help them. The North Pole giving away the words for warmth continues that old tradition of helping the wordless express what they feel. The card, and the message inside it, are a gift of language to those who cannot summon their own, which is one of the oldest kindnesses there is.
According to the broadcasters, the handwritten card endures because it carries a human presence no faster message matches, which the colonial correspondents understood and the wordless of every age are grateful for.
Why the honest technology survives
Here is what a month of colonial correspondence has taught me. The handwritten card survives, against every faster technology, because it is honest in a way the faster methods are not. It carries the visible trace of a real hand and a real hour, the physical evidence that a person chose to spend their time on you. The instant message carries no such evidence; it is frictionless, effortless, and therefore, in a sense, weightless. The card has weight precisely because it took effort. That honesty, the visible cost of the human hand, is why the oldest communication technology outlives the newest, and why the colonial relic still, quietly, means the most.
Where the reader lands
So I will close my colonial correspondence, finish my spider-confession cards, and take my lesson from the last honest technology we have. Write by hand. Let the effort show. Reach across the world with goodwill rather than conquest. Hand the wordless their words. The handwritten card survives because it carries a human presence no faster method can fake, exactly as the colonial letter did, and in an age of frictionless, weightless communication, the small effortful relic of the dip pen and the human hand is more honest, and more treasured, than anything that arrives without cost.
For literary mischief, The Satirist keeps the quill honest.
