English Author Jane Austen

It was actually his uncle Pliny the Elder who had passed the description on to his nephew. But it was such an accurate pictorial account of the ­natural catastrophe that engulfed the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum that volcanologists still use the term “Plinian eruption” as a scientific category. Pliny the Elder was unable to write about the eruption himself because he died trying to rescue friends from Pompeii. He had taken a ship across the Bay of Naples but collapsed and died on the beach. How do we know? Because his nephew also wrote ­vividly about that event in another letter to Tacitus. Another famous letter writer from the same era is Paul of Tarsus, the apostle whose 13 epistles form part of the New Testament. It’s likely he didn’t write them all and scholars also wrangle over whether they are proper letters – communications between people separated from each other – or epistles, which are essays designed to look like letters.

Whether St Paul’s writings are open letters or diatribes the process of writing on crossed strips of river reed with a pen made from a split reed or a goose quill was a laborious one. It has been estimated that it would take about an hour to produce 70 words, in which case the longest epistle Letter To The Romans would have taken 100 hours to complete. In the Dark Ages one of the best scribblers was the scholar and monk Bede, known to history by the title “venerable”. He wrote an epic letter to Bishop Egbert of York ­discussing the state of the church in the eighth century which is a valuable account of monastic corruption. T he scourge of the monasteries would turn out to be Henry VIII, for whom writing letters was “su[m]what tedious and paynefull”. But his daughter Elizabeth I produced an estimated 3,000 letters. Her three-decade correspondence with her youthful successor James VI of Scotland – whose mother Mary Queen of Scots she executed – is a fascinating insider’s portrait of royal conflict, manipulation and mistrust. As the Queen ages and the young James becomes a man her letters evolve into more relaxed musings on politics and duty.

Four centuries later Queen ­Victoria was also a prolific letter writer. For her most frequent correspondents she had envelopes printed with their addresses already written out in a facsimile of her own hand. One of her closest confidantes was her eldest daughter the Princess Royal, to whom she sent some 3,700 letters. These included frank thoughts about mother­hood. “An ugly baby is a very nasty object and the prettiest is frightful when undressed,” she wrote. Eleanor Roosevelt, probably the most influential first lady the United States has ever had, wrote thousands of intimate ­letters to a woman journalist who was almost certainly her lover. But she also corresponded with presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and with Winston Churchill. Having been married to one president she had no qualms about speaking her mind to others: lecturing Truman and ­critiquing Kennedy’s performances on television. She emerges as a canny and astute adviser to presidents and would-be presidents and a resourceful diplomat.

You didn’t have to be royal or ­presidential to write valuable letters. There are plenty of examples of ­ordinary people, without whose ­prolific letter writing the curtains on history’s window would be closed. Take the Paston family, whose ­letters to each other from the Black Death to the Wars of the Roses are the first record of private correspondence to survive in Britain. They offer a unique glimpse into the concerns of an upwardly mobile family who rose from peasantry to gentry. Margaret Paston, whose husband was a lawyer as well as a landowner, laid bare the chaotic effects of war on the population. Her letters range from the ­dramatic – telling of armed forces ejecting her from the household – to the domestic, painting a ­picture of 15th-century family life – one of her seven children ran off with the bailiff while others, she documented, ­constantly needed new clothes.

A couple of centuries later John Chamberlain was set up for life by his ironmonger father, which meant he could devote much of his time to scribbling. His series of letters written from 1597 to 1626 have been described as “the most interesting private ­correspondence of Jacobean England”. He wrote at least one long ­letter a week and is a great source of ­ London history because his chief ­purpose was to keep his friends, who were often posted abroad in foreign embassies, in the loop. He also wrote about the biggest scandal of James’s reign: the divorce and murder ­conviction of Frances Howard, ­Countess of Essex. A contemporary of Chamberlain, Anne Newdigate wrote about the same period from a feminine point of view. Her appeal, after the death of her husband Sir John Newdigate to a government official called the Master of the Wards demonstrates the plight of widows at the time. Trying to secure guardianship of her own son she was forced to explain that she had breast-fed all her children herself, rather than employ a wet-nurse, to assert her maternal credentials.

If the most expansive witnesses to history are sometimes the most peripheral players, that cannot be said of Horatio Nelson, Britain’s greatest naval hero. His vast correspondence is sometimes likened to the diaries of Samuel Pepys. About 5,000 letters survive, written in an unpolished style with scant regard to punctuation. The most famous are his sometimes lustful, sometimes ­ maudlin missives to his mistress Lady Hamilton. But his dispatches and reports to senior officers and politicians are also a valuable source for naval historians. His contemporary Jane Austen lived through the industrial revolution and Napoleonic wars (in which two of her brothers were naval ­officers) while giving them scarcely a mention.