The commonly held view these days is that people don’t write love letters any more, and that email and text messaging are death to romance. And it does seem unlikely that even the most impassioned lover would today claim, as the playwright Congreve does, that ‘nothing but you can lay hold of my mind, and that can lay hold of nothing but you’; then again, Congreve was a literary genius. But Nelson most definitely was not, and even he came up with the stirring formulation, to Lady Hamilton, ‘Nelson’s Alpha and Omega is Emma!’ Perhaps people have grown less romantic and more cynical. Or perhaps people were less self-conscious than we are today; certainly, irony, the presiding spirit of our age, has almost no place in this collection.
So, while reading all these love letters, and finding out the stories behind them, it was tempting to think that we modern barbarians have lost faith, both in love itself and in the art of its expression. But in fact, for the most part, it wasn’t the elegantly worked, impassioned declarations that I found most touching in the letters that follow, or rather, not those alone; it was when they bumped up against more prosaic concerns, like the unreliability of the postal service, or the need for clean linen, or the sending of regards to the beloved’s mother, or a description of a dream, that the letters suddenly came alive somehow, and their writers seemed more human. It could be argued that the flowery declarations were more for show (and, in some cases, posterity) than the genuine expression of genuine feeling — that they grew from convention rather than conviction. And there is a case for calling this book, ‘Great Men: Going On About Themselves Since AD 61’ — certainly some of those here would have benefited from being taken aside and gently told: it’s not All About You.
But to claim that a text message saying IN PUB FTBL XTR TIME BACK LATR XX is more genuine, and therefore romantic, than a declaration such as Byron’s that ‘I more than love you and cannot cease to love you’ is obviously nonsense. So while it is to be hoped that this collection entertains, moves and sometimes amuses its readers, it might also serve to remind today’s Great Men that literary genius is not a requirement for a heartfelt letter — or text message, or email — of love.
Ursula Doyle, London, 2008