Letter Office Research Articles

‘One Chief Letter Office at New-York’: Packet Ships, Imperial Administration, and the Geography of the American Post, 1692–1783

ABSTRACTThe postal system in the American colonies is an understudied arm of the first British Empire. Although outside the main institutions of colonial administration, the post office followed the overall periodisation of imperial affairs, as America waxed and waned in London’s attention. This directly shaped the geography of the post office, because American officials focused on the post’s ability to connect American towns, while British officials emphasised the transatlantic connection of the postal packet ships. The packets, however, were not as important to transatlantic communications as they imagined, which led the American officials to resist when London wanted to make New York City the headquarters of the American post.

Whosoever Holds This Hammer

Whosoever Holds This Hammer Dawn Manning (bio) Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor. Before sunrise, I’m at the bench, saw teeth sunk deep in a new sheet of silver, dust gilding my jeans in a sparkling snowscape, breath-fog on my glasses. Outside the lab just beyond the thinning tree line, electronic church bells knell the hours, the gray lanes of the freeway string uneven beads of traffic into unkempt tangles in the mall parking lot. I strike a strip of copper on the folded edge, chase out the air, force it to curl in on itself— a nautilus whose molecules yield and spread out faster under my brass hammer than the inner unstruck ring can master. The sky’s dull and tarnished by low snow clouds, flat and featureless as nickel. I chase my hammer across the plain, raise up bright mountains by the range—light the torch, coin my own sun. [End Page 79] Dawn Manning dawn manning is a writer and metalsmith living in Greater Philadelphia. She is the author of Postcards from the Dead Letter Office. She was the 2017 Mona Van Duyn Scholar in poetry to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and her poems have received the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, the San Miguel Poetry Prize, and other honors. Copyright © 2017 University of North Carolina Wilmington

Scribblers and Scriveners: Poe, Melville’s Bartleby, and Antebellum Literary New York

ABSTRACT: Critics have variously read “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” a tale about the death of a legal copyist and putative Dead Letter Office worker, as Melville’s statement about failed attempts at communication, the lack of an audience for the American literary artist, and his own increasingly futile search for readers. As he penned “Bartleby,” Melville probably had in mind another author of serious and significant literature compelled to eke out a living by writing for magazines. That author was Edgar Allan Poe, who, from late 1844 to early 1845, labored at hackwork a mere seven blocks away from Wall Street to support himself and his family. Drawing on the recollections of friends, acquaintances, and business associates who knew the ill-fated writer, Melville describes his scrivener in terms that recall contemporary accounts of Poe during his New York years, and he includes in “Bartleby” allusions to “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” Undoubtedly aware that Poe’s dreams for sustained editorial and artistic independence had failed to materialize, Melville created a narrative about a man whose skills cannot secure for him the life he desires—a story about a thwarted writer, a figure whom Melville, in 1853, very likely feared he had become.

Dead Letter Office

Dead Letter Office Valerie Wohlfeld (bio) Return to Sender is the name of the god of remorse and disaster. Even the zip code is off course in this disaster. Bartleby prefers the unrequited envelope; being tired of the curse of social intercourse is his only disaster. Here dies the wayward summons for divorce, no forwarding address: one fled to Rio, one to Peru; who is the victim, who the source of disaster? Paper columns piled unread like the unraised dead; in unmarked files, mice nest and nurse in this disaster. The end is in the beginning like the force of heat death, verse, and entropy: here lies fortune’s reversal, a universe’s disaster. Valerie, catastrophe is the name of your lover; to live without love is not the worst disaster. [End Page 106] Valerie Wohlfeld Valerie Wohlfeld’s first collection, Thinking the World Visible (Yale University Press, 1994), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Her poetry book Woman with Wing Removed was published in 2010 by Truman State University Press. She received an M.F.A. from Vermont College. Her work has appeared in Yale Review, Hopkins Review, Antioch Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Copyright © 2012 Middlebury College Publications

The Dead Letter Office: Archival Records at the Library of the Supreme Court of Victoria

The library of the Supreme Court of Victoria has a long history, much of it well documented. However, the historical artefacts related to the evolution of the library are difficult to access, limiting their use as a guide to past practice, or as something useful to inform activities in the future. This paper uses cases from the library's history to discuss why historical records should be reconstituted into formal organisational memory in order to strategically and culturally inform the future in a way that is not possible if the documents remain inaccessible or 'dead'.

Dead Letter Office: Conspiracy, Trauma, and Song of Solomon's Posthumous Communication

3 Song of Solomon picks up where Mumbo Jumbo leaves off. That is, in repeating with a difference certain details and motifs of Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Toni Morrison signifies upon what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has called one of grand works of critical Signification (238). (1) While the writing of Mumbo Jumbo concludes, we read, at P.M. on Jan. 31st, 1971, Morrison's famous North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent sets off from the roof of Mercy Hospital for other side of Lake Superior ... [a]t 3:00 p.m. on Wednesday the 18th of February 1931 (Reed 218; Morrison, Song 3). If Morrison sets her watch by Reed's earlier novel, she also rewinds the time back to the early years of the Depression. Yet even in that return to the past, Song of Solomon continues Mumbo Jumbo, a novel that, except for its epilogue, is set in a fantastic pastiche of the 1920s. With this opening example, I would like to suggest how an exploration of Song of Solomon and its many intertexts evoke questions of narrative logic, historical time, and cultural memory. Because it is so densely allusive on so many different levels and in so many different modes, Morrison's novel deserves to be read not only through its numerous intertexts, but also as a commentary on the significance of intertextuality as a literary, historical, and social process. As her careful but parodic dating suggests, Morrison, like Reed, uses intertextuality to provide an alternative to dominant accounts of history, and, like Reed again, she does so by engaging both with texts of the black Atlantic and with Euro-American currents in Western literary culture. In particular, for my interests, both Song of Solomon and Mumbo Jumbo rewrite Thomas Pynchon's paranoid postmodern quest classic The Crying of Lot 49. (2) On the surface, Morrison's novel seems far from Pynchon's and Reed's work, but in fact they constitute a complex constellation that can lead to a rethinking both of intertextual relations and of intersections among literature, history, and memory. Each novel involves a protagonist's quest for a hidden truth that destabilizes his or her everyday world and turns out to involve coming to terms with some significant, but previously obscure, aspect of the past and its still operative influence on the present. Pynchon's Oedipa sets out to execute a will and finds herself searching for proof of an elaborate postal conspiracy that recedes hundreds of years into the past. Reed's PaPa LaBas attempts to understand the wax and wane of the Jew Grew infection and ends up seeking the sacred Text of black culture and uncovering an epic battle that stretches back to ancient Egypt. Finally, Morrison's Milkman initially sets out after his Aunt Pilate's inheritance, only to discover that it is not gold that is at stake, but an oral cultural document of familial and communal history. Despite broad narrative and thematic similarities--and a host of smaller-scale convergences--Morrison's work diverges significantly from the two other texts I have identified. While Reed in Mumbo Jumbo pushes Pynchon's paranoid and conspiratorial logic to the extreme, at once universalizing and shattering it, Morrison takes a different tack. She backgrounds conspiracy in order to explore a related, but significantly different, narrative logic, that of traumatic memory. While critics have in particular read Morrison's Beloved as a literary enactment of trauma, Song of Solomon also offers an opportunity to engage with contemporary legacies of traumatic memory. (3) Exploring the intersections among these texts takes on particular significance because narratives of conspiracy and trauma have emerged in recent decades as two of the most powerful logics through which the subjects of postmodern U.S. culture register and reflect on history. The two narrative logics are often linked, both in real life and in popular culture. In two well-known examples, the trauma of Kennedy's assassination has given birth to rampant paranoid speculation, and Mulder's conspiratorial thinking on The X Files has supposedly been spurred by the traumatic abduction of his sister. …

Titanic's wake

Early in 1997, I photographed the Mexican film set for Titanic: this was part of an earlier project called Dead Letter Office, a title owed obliquely to Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. Bartleby's mysterious refusal to work may have begun with his job as a post office clerk sorting undeliverable mail. Re-reading the story, I suddenly imagined that it was difficult and even spiritually challenging to send a letter the short distance from Tijuana to San Diego, even if Hollywood movie-making had crossed the line.

Narratives of Triumph and Rituals of Submission: Charlemagne's Mastering of Bavaria

Among the more striking literary creations of Herman Melville is a short story entitiled ‘Bartleby’. The eponymous hero is a law-clerk who gradually withdraws from his employer's power, and ultimately from the world, by meeting all requests – to copy texts, to quit the premises, to co-operate with the authorities of the prison to which his intransigence finally leads him – with the phrase, ‘I would prefer not to.’ Melville's existential fable is disquieting on all sorts of levels and it has, perhaps, a special resonance for historians. The story's narrator is Bartleby's employer, a tranquil elderly man baffled by the latter's stubbornness. One of the problems the narrator faces is the shortage of sources: ‘this man … was one of these beings of whom nothing is ascertainable, except trom the original sources and … those are very small’. After Bartleby's death, the narrator learns that he had worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, and the story ends with a vision of piles of lost ‘dead’ documents and artefacts whose texts and meanings remain unread and beyond recall. As a text haunted by notions of unknowability and by the crushing weight of dead letters, ‘Bartleby’ seems to speak directly to some of the pre-occupations of historians in a post-modernist era.

A Christian State? A Comment

Dr. George Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, told a congregation in Melbourne's St. Paul's Cathedral that he had recently received a letter addressed to Jesus Christ, care of the Holy Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Heavenly Kingdom. It had been posted in the United States, but found its way to London. There, a postman, understandably a little unsure as to where the letter should go, had marked the envelope, Try Lambeth Palace!' Under the public law of England, his was actually a most reasonable course for a civil servant to take. The Church of England is established by law, so if any official question relating to God must be decided, the law presumes that the Church of England is best placed to answer it. The law in New Zealand and Australia is different. Even if the inherited public law in both countries requires the Head of State to be an Anglican,2 that is where the religious establishment ends. The public law is otherwise agnostic: it makes no judgment about the orthodox and heterodox, and it does not recognize an established church.3 In these countries, the envelope would lie in a dead letter office, and the correspondent would have been wiser to pray. I believe that an agnostic law is an important institution, and one worth preserving. My view does not assume that an agnostic law is incompatible with a Christian society, nor that the idea of a Christian society should not be pursued. It should be, but as T.S. Eliot thought, in countries like New Zealand, Australia and Canada, it will probably have

Radiophonic Ontologies and the Avantgarde

For Artaud, expression does not have the same value twice, does not two lives; [...] all words, once spoken, are ([1938] 1958:75), and this unwholesome aspect of language, when coupled with the incantatory and vibratory properties of radio, propels what Allen Weiss, in an essay on the work of Gregory Whitehead, describes as the project of radio art: Radiophonic art is guided by the serendipity of a fata morgana, the bewildering, aleatory process of recuperating and rechanneling the lost voice (1995:79). That is, in the one ear, we have the poststructuralist scenario (inaugurated by the scenographemes of Artaud), in which meaning progresses noisily, without stable referent, as one word cannot double or replicate another in intent, force, meaning, or effect. Yet, in the other ear, in its struggle to rechannel loss, the art of radiophony attempts to circuit language back to some original, predictable, even replicable source in the living human body, even though this circuit is formed by chance operations in an illusory referential system. In Whitehead's Dead Letters (1994), postal clerks in the dead letter office become an apt subject for the radio artist, as they echo this serendipitous rechanneling of loss in their quixotic attempts to resuscitate nixies and redirect them towards their intended, living addressees. The art of radio, like Luigi Russolo's Art of Noise, is invested in choosing, coordinating, and dominating all noises, [...] enriching mankind with a new unsuspected voluptuousness ([1911] I986:I71), paradoxically recuperating the referent without mimetically reproducing life. Reproduced mechanically or mimetically, life is actually death, a paradox that is most obvious in the live aesthetics of broadcast media:

The Dead Letter Office: Composition Teaching and "The Writing Crisis"

The Dead Letter Office: Composition Teaching and "The Writing Crisis"

The Dead Letter Office: Composition Teaching and “The Writing Crisis”

The Dead Letter Office: Composition Teaching and “The Writing Crisis”

The Birmingham New Parcel and Letter Sorting Office

The building and equipping of the Birmingham new parcel and letter office is currently nearing completion. This is the most ambitious postal engineering project so far embarked upon by the British Post Office. It is a complex of mechanization equipment which, together with the associated control and signalling apparatus, will be accommodated over six floors of an imposing new building situated in the heart of the city of Birmingham. The paper does not attempt to describe the office in detail but, following a brief outline of the scheme, concentrates on those aspects of the installation which are novel in their application to postal engineering in the U.K.

Art. XIII.—Note on the Réh Efflorescence of North-Western India, and on the Waters of some of the Rivers and Canals

The following notes, very nearly as they stand, were forwarded in July, 1861, by post to the late Colonel Baird Smith, for communication to the Eoyal Asiatic Society. The address got defaced in the mail-bags; and the parcel, after lying for several months in the Dead Letter Office, found its way back to Eoorkee. My observations have thus forfeited the advantage of correction and criticism from one so experienced in the subject to which they relate. Meanwhile, I have had some hurried opportunities of seeing and hearing more, and can thus make some alterations and additions.— H. B. M.