The Victorian Ladies Correspondence Club
This is the first paid subscriber-only post here on enJOY. Going forward, half of the weekly posts with be for paid supporters. I hope you will consider joining those ranks, if you are able. Paid subscriptions make this newsletter possible for everyone.
(And if you can’t swing it at this time, please get in touch; we’ll work something out.)
Let me tell you about the Victorian Ladies Correspondence Club.
A few years ago my friend Heather read an essay by Margaret Renkl in the New York Times. Renkl had decided to handwrite a card every day for a year and send it to a friend or acquaintance. After reading the article, Heather decided to do the same.
This is how I started to receive the most lovely small cards, every few weeks or so.
Of course I was charmed and wrote back. I am a stationary and pen enthusiast since childhood; I have a large collection of cards. Sometimes I send them, but not as often as I would like.
Daily correspondence was never going to happen for me, but I decided to sit down once or twice a week and write a note—to Heather, but also to other friends. I have a few card senders in my life, but I widened that circle. I wrote to old friends I hadn’t talked to in a long time, to people I knew were going through a hard time. I never had the time to write to everyone I wanted, but each time I dropped a note in the mailbox I felt happy.
And I got mail back—which seems obvious, but in practice felt like a small miracle. There, among the junk mail, were small missives of delight: cute cards, funny or heartfelt notes, tiny details of my friends’ days I wouldn’t have heard about otherwise. Even though I am connected to most of these people in multiple electronic ways, writing brought up things I wouldn’t have learned or shared otherwise. It added a new texture to our connections.
I started joking that I had become like a Victorian lady with my correspondence habit.
[In Victorian-era London, mail was delivered hourly. You could receive letters up to twelve times a day—from 7:30am to 7:30pm. Apparently people got peeved if they didn’t get a response back within a few hours! Also, postage was calculated by number of sheets of paper but also by distance traveled—and was paid by the recipient.]
It’s not really a club—anyone can do this—and the payoffs are significant.
According to scientific studies, handwriting (as opposed to typing) contributes to the brain’s connectivity patterns and promotes learning and memory. It is thought to calm the nervous system and increase well-being. So, really, my card-writing sessions may benefit me as much as they do the recipients.
One thing I’ve noticed is that writing cards makes me slow down and think in a different way. What about my days do I want to pull out and share? What really is going on in my life? So often we are in the thick of it. This makes me take the bird’s eye-view and consider the bigger picture.
I’ve also noticed that writing cards and letters means I want to write more cards and letters. I’ve been asking for updated addresses from friends who have moved. I’m not giving up texting any time soon, but I’ve become just as attached to my correspondence habit. In all the many ways we can connect these days, this feels the most lovely.
And it never fails to lift my mood when I get home and there is a card in the mailbox. Some have arrived on days that were particularly challenging—when it is cheering to receive this physical manifestation of care and attention. And the cards are pretty! I have an ever-changing gallery of images on the wall next to my desk that reminds me of the dear people who have sent them. The really special cards—based either on contents or image—go into a decorative box. Someday, perhaps in my old age, I will sit down and read them all. A whole box of affection, gratitude, and care.
Life is busy and ever-changing, and often it’s hard to keep up with the people you want to be in touch with. These days I am looking for any opportunity to slow down and connect with what matters most. These small cards and letters have been one of the most satisfying examples of that. They stitch us together, one tiny missive at a time.
Note: Heather said she went into her year of cards with no expectation that people would write her back, and this seems like a wise approach. Then you get the fun surprise of discovering who the true letter writers are.
I recently re-read the Margaret Renkl essay that started this whole thing. It’s a treat in its entirety, but these passages below especially.
I hope you have a wonderful weekend ❤️
Margaret Renkl: The Nicest New Year’s Resolution I Ever Made
“I can feel myself slowing down. This is not the kind of writing I can blast through at a messy speed, correcting later. This kind of writing requires a deliberation that little else in my life requires: one thought, one word, one sentence at a time.
In that sense, the letters are as much for me as for their recipients: a thin, scrawled thread connecting us across the miles, linking their grief with my grief, their joy with my joy, their generosity with my thanks. Sometimes this practice reminds me to act on my own generosity, a way to tell people I love or admire that I’m thinking of them. I like to imagine how surprised they will be to find a handwritten letter tucked among the bills and the ads they never glance at for products they will never need…
Finding time for anything that matters will always be a challenge, but the notes themselves aren’t hard. All that dread, for years, always putting off and putting off the obligation of a thank-you note or the duty of a condolence letter — why did I waste so much time on dread?
With every renewed effort, I marvel again at how easy it is. How it takes almost nothing to write just a few lines, nothing to fix a stamp in the corner, to walk the letter out to the mailbox and lift the little metal flag to tell the mail carrier to stop at this house. I wish I had known long ago how much pleasure I would take in lifting that little red flag. I wish I’d remembered how much I love the smell of paper and ink and the memory of my grandmother, sitting at this very secretary, the way she said, “You’re the writer in the family” and made it real.”