As cold as …
A letter from Keats to his beloved Fanny, with a kindly injunction to wrap up warmly. I loved the solicitude...
Red letter day
A red letter day is a holiday or a memorable day, something that might be marked on the calendar in...
This is the world
Keats was one of the most life-loving people you could hope to meet, grasping with all his force every chance...
Waiting for the post
Dorothy Wordsworth's journals were written in the closing years of the 18th century and the opening years of the 19th,...
In mourning
In the 19th century, it was customary to use black-bordered paper and envelopes to inform someone of a death. Here...
The scrutiny that precedes reading
Yes, there is that small ceremony that precedes the reading of a letter, particularly a hand-written one delivered by post. ...
Unintended consequences
A small restaurant in Maine sought to limit the number of reservations by requiring people to send theirs by...
The last and the first
Hand written cards and letters are part of an ancient but rapidly dying art, hardly helped by the high ratio...
A packet of yellow love letters
What happened to all those love letter in a private drawer, sent and kept over centuries when this was the...
Letters tolerably long
Gaskell has many Jane Austen touches in cheerily summing up lightweight characters. But inconsequent as the letter and the writer...
Plus ça change…
There’s something reassuring in seeing that what appears an ‘issue’ today appeared equally so to people long ago. It puts...
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