'Essentially separated in spite of all uniting factors': Thomas Hardy and the Community of Letter Writers

[...]they constitute a privileged space for the exploration of the complex relationship between personal, interpersonal, and collective experience, a site in which to investigate how individuals interact with one another and with the social and cultural systems of which they are part. In telling the story of Michael Henchard, who describes himself as “bad at letters” and “a poor tool with a pen,” Hardy consistently makes his plot hinge upon old-fashioned characters’ inability to adjust to modern practices of communication (Mayor 78, 127). [...]Henchard discovers that Elizabeth-Jane is not his biological daughter because his wife Susan, who has only recently learned to write, has “folded and tucked in” the sheets of the letter containing this revelation “without an envelope in the old-fashioned way” (Mayor 122). [...]he challenges the post office’s rhetoric of inclusivity by representing characters who use the post to bridge otherwise insurmountable social barriers, only to make the painful discovery that their letters cannot bring them closer to the communities to which they aspire. [...]Williams’ words gain significance when we begin to consider that the process of communication itself is not timeless or universal, but subject to evolving cultural, material, and technological conditions. [...]the nineteenth century, community was, for the most part, constructed and consolidated through direct, face-to-face exchanges between people inhabiting the same location.