Many will nix the “Dear”—you are not dear to them—and

begin only with the clerical thud of your full name.

With the spread of mass literacy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that public began scribbling to authors as never before. If you had to guess which nineteenth-century author received the most mail, guess Charles Dickens. In November of 1840, as The Old Curiosity Shop was being serialized, he groaned: “I am inundated with imploring letters recommending poor little Nell to mercy.” Dickens’s ferocious popularity coincided not only with rising literacy rates but with the Uniform Penny Post, the overhaul to the Royal Mail that allotted cheap postal access to the British public. You can imagine the aching back of Dickens’s mailman, and you can imagine that where there’s fan mail, there’s hate mail. Dickens destroyed almost all of the letters he received from readers, but Mark Twain didn’t, and in Dear Mark Twain: Letters From His Readers, you’ll see the baffling goulash of mail people felt compelled to send him. As the foreword has it, these missives came from “farmers, schoolteachers, and schoolchildren, businessmen, preachers, customs agents, inmates of mental institutions, con artists, dreamers of various sorts, and at least one former president,” all of them witness to the first American movement of mass education, the first time in history the nation had a mass readership.

They asked Twain for autographs, for advice, for aid in publishing their own work; they begged for money; they offered approbation and they offered scorn. From one gentleman in 1880: “What I want to know is by what rule a fellow can infallibly judge when you are lying and when you are telling the truth. I write this in case you intend to afflict an innocent and unoffending public with any more such works.” From an Ohioan in 1885: “Dear Sir: For Gods sake give a suffering public a rest on your labored wit.—Shoot your trash & quit it.—You are only an imitator of Artemas Ward & a sickening one at that & we are all sick of you, For Gods sake take a tumble & give U.S. a rest.” (That’s Artemus Ward the humorist and irreverent lecturer, nom de plume of Charles Farrar Browne.) You can almost feel the cozy glow of smugness in those lines, their self-satisfied warmth, the underlining current of What makes you so special? Every hate mailer is charmlessly convinced he knows best, certain his standards beat the author’s. That Ohioan obviously got a good deal of pleasure from unloading on Mark Twain, and that seems to be nine-tenths of the reason people bother to send hate mail: It cheers them up.

In his 1826 essay “On the Pleasure of Hating,” William Hazlitt speaks of our rueful inability to “part with the essence or principle of hostility,” and of hatred being “the very spring and thought of action.” Hazlitt’s thesis—he would have found kin in Lawrence—is that the joy of hate is intrinsic to our cantankerous tribe. “Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust: Hatred alone is immortal.” We might have been civilized enough “to give up the external demonstration, the brute violence,” but the urge to such violence throbs in us still. We won’t club an author over the head, but we’ll mail him a nasty note and grin as we do. Before the imperium of the internet, there was a pleasing ritual involved: The hate mailer had to put pen to pad, choose the envelope and stamp, unearth the address of the publication in which the offense appeared, then walk down the block to the mailbox. It was a personal affair, from the hater’s hand to the author’s. And the chances were high that the author would read the letter, too. Remember when you used to get letters in the mail? You always read them. Now the hate mailer’s slap is only a click away from reaching your face, but also only a click away from being deleted unread. Gone is the pleasure of the personal.

In More Die of Heartbreak, Saul Bellow’s narrator remarks: “There’s no having any relations with people; none at all, if you won’t accept abuse.” A writer has a kind of relationship with his public, with both the brains and the boobs that comprise it. Should you become a writer, brace yourself for the analphabetic rantings of the anonymous, the frivolous, the platitudinous and crapulous. Prepare for a cataract of derision and self-righteousness should you dare pen anything perceived as too left or too right, as too pious or too profane, as possibly ageist or racist, sexist or classist, each “ist” word shot like a silver bullet intended first to take you down and then to wake you from your own beastliness. Of course it doesn’t matter whether you are any of those things, or even if your record or your prose indicates the opposite—only that you are perceived as such.