University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Text with a view: turn of the century literature and the invention of the postcard

(USC Thesis Other)

Text with a view: turn of the century literature and the invention of the postcard

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content

TEXT WITH A VIEW:

TURN-OF-THE-CENTURY LITERATURE AND THE INVENTION OF THE POSTCARD

by

Monica Cure

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMPARATIVE LITERATURE)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Monica Cure
ii

Acknowledgments

This dissertation would not have been possible without the powerful combination
of people who cared about my intellectual work and people who cared about me as an
individual, the distinction between the two often becoming delightfully blurry. First on
this list is my advisor, Hilary Schor, whose brilliance and kindness seem to know no
bounds. She understood my vision from the first and fiercely supported me to the end.
Every meeting with her breathed new life and excitement into my work. To Pani
Norindr, committee member and mentor, I owe an immense debt of gratitude that extends
back in time to my first year as a graduate student. He helped create a space where I felt
true intellectual freedom and was there every step of the way in my graduate school
journey. I am grateful to Alice Gambrell who came on board as my outside committee
member just when I needed her and with great enthusiasm at that. I also benefitted from
the insight and support of Philippa Levine, Meg Russett, and Karen Pinkus during the
beginning stages of my project. Likewise, early and invaluable assurance that such a
dissertation was possible came from classes led by Paola Cortes Rocca and Janet
Hoskins. I would like to thank the Gold Family Foundation, the Del Amo Foundation,
USC’s College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, and especially USC’s Comparative
Literature Department for the fellowship support that facilitated my completion of the
dissertation. I would also like to thank the department’s administrative assistant,
Katherine Guevarra, for always making sure things (paper work, scheduling, the list goes
on and on) ran smoothly. I am thankful, too, for the kind assistance of the librarians at
USC’s Doheny and Grand Avenue libraries, the British Library St. Pancras, New York
iii

University’s Fales Library and Special Collections, and the Ohio State University Billy
Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Several individuals deserve special mention for
their unique contributions to this dissertation. I am grateful to my friend and colleague
Oana Sabo who was always one step ahead of me in the dissertation process and
generously shared her experience. Octavia Gavrila provided both her home as a retreat
for me where I could write over the summer months and her friendship at a time when I
needed it most. Sandy and Scott Kim, besides their constant encouragement and
friendship, invited me into their “tertulia,” a wonderful group of artists who helped foster
the creativity that kept my work exciting. Likewise, I am grateful to all the members of
the graduate reading group “The Search” for being the circle of intellectuals and friends I
have always wanted. Every week our time together reminded me why I was doing what I
was doing. Special thanks to Nicolas de Zamaroczy for insisting on reading each chapter
right as I finished it, offering helpful comments and editing suggestions, and generally
making me feel wonderful about my work. I am grateful to the Mosaic community
(especially the women of SHE) whose contributions are perhaps less tangible but no less
important: making Los Angeles feel like home, stretching me creatively and grounding
me spiritually. Finally, I want to express my most heartfelt appreciation to my family,
who always believed in me, and to the One who deserves the most gratitude of all.

iv

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ii

Abstract iii

Introduction: Imagining the Postcard 1

Chapter One: The Economic Postcard in the Travel Writing of
W.D. Howells and S.G. Bayne 19
II. 23
III. 35
IV. 45
V. 55

Chapter Two: Insincerely Yours: The New Postcard and the New
Woman in Wharton’s The Custom of the Country
and Sedgwick’s Franklin Kane 62
II. 66
III. 82
IV. 91
V. 103

Chapter Three: The Postcard Goes Astray: The Dark Side of the
Postcard in E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread
and Herbert Flowerdew’s The Seventh Post Card 111
II. 112
III. 124
IV. 136

Chapter Four: The Postcard’s Wish: Collapsing Here and There in
Kipling’s “The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat”
and Stoker’s Dracula 155
II. 168
III. 179

Bibliography 196

v

Abstract

My dissertation examines the invention and the rise of the picture postcard at the
turn of the twentieth century and how the postcard, as a new communication technology,
interacts with literature, particularly the novel form. It recovers a historical moment in
which the postcard is both revolutionary and controversial. The immense, and
international, popularity of the picture postcard starting in the 1890s caused certain
cultural critics to lament the “death of letter-writing.” Implicit in this critique is the fear
of the death of the novel, which began its life in epistolary guise. Each of the postcard’s
essential features, its open form, its limited writing space, its spectacular image, its lower
cost, is represented within the novel as corresponding to huge societal changes. Uproar
over the postcard in particular mirrors anxieties about the changing nature of the literary
marketplace including the role of women in public life, the appeal of celebrity, an
increasing dependence on new technologies, the rise of mass-media, and the diminution
of the world. I argue that representations of postcards in the following works overtly
defamiliarize them and help mask how the changes they represent have already begun to
be incorporated into the older medium of the novel.
Chapter one deals with the postcard as a symbol of the democratization of travel
and travel writing, taking William Dean Howells and the businessman cum travel writer
Samuel Gamble Bayne as examples. The increasingly competitive and professionalized
literary marketplace of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century forces even
“serious” authors into finding new ways to sell their work through a savvy positioning
vis-à-vis new mass cultural forms. In chapter two, Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the
vi

Country and lesser-known Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s Franklin Kane both have their
(anti)heroines whirling through Europe, aligning the new medium of the postcard with
the figure of the New Woman. Like the postcard, the New Woman is half personal
communication and half mass-produced commodity. They both threaten the breakdown
of authentic, readable relationships but promise liberation from stultified, antiquated
forms. In chapter three, E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and popular mass-
fiction writer Herbert Flowerdew’s The Seventh Postcard demonstrate how the postcard’s
ease of use actually invites its misuse from the very beginning. Postcard crimes seem to
be all the more shocking for the postcard’s innocuous nature but it is the very belief in
that nature that makes the crimes possible. As the postcard creates the illusion of
openness and intimacy, the recipient falls prey to subtle deceptions. My final chapter
examines the concept of the colonial postcard, first brought to widespread critical
attention by Malek Alloula, and moves beyond the exotic visual subject matter. The
postcard, in its desire to encompass all subjects, functions in ways that are symbolically
analogous to colonialism. What surfaces are fears that the postcard will finally empty
even its sender of all specificity. In Rudyard Kipling’s short story “The Village that
Voted the Earth was Flat,” the act of subjecting an obscure English village to a steady
flow of media attention, postcarding it, effectively colonizes it. In Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, the uncanny similarities between the vampire and the vampire hunters point to
the threat to British culture that has always been present.
1

Introduction
Imagining the Postcard

In July of 1900, the first edition of the British periodical The Picture Postcard
opened with a letter, “To Our Readers, Apologia Pro Vita Nostra”:
We make bold to say that readers of The Picture Postcard will be
surprised at the immense amount and the wide range of interest attaching
to such an apparently insignificant thing as a penny picture postcard.
Ostensibly but a mere miniature view of some town or place of interest to
the passing traveller, a picture postcard is yet capable of possessing an
interest and significance undreamed of by those who have not yet troubled
to look into the matter. (1:1)

I must start my work in a similar fashion. Proposing the significance of postcards to
readers of literature is, indeed, surprising at first. The written phrases we associate with
the postcard are now as much a cliché as the (indeed, often photographic) images on its
opposite side. The postcard’s now mundane use belies its status as invention, a new form
of communication technology, at the end of the nineteenth century, and the need for
establishing the conventions of what the postcard as a medium could signify. We now
take for granted that these small, double-sided rectangles are a means of “personal
communication” but what, exactly, does one send when one sends a postcard – is it the
same thing being sent at the turn of the twentieth century? In its early decades, while its
conventions are still malleable on a wide scale, the postcard elicits expectations and
anxieties that seem extraordinary now. By tracing the postcard through turn-of-the-
century literature as well as popular culture sources, what emerges is the postcard’s
literary and affective history.
2

In addition to establishing this history, my dissertation argues that the literary
representation of the postcard served primarily to undo the certainties of postcard
exchange, to “trouble” yet once more the “mere miniature view.” The literary
representation of the postcard raises again the questions of who sends what to whom,
leaving open to interpretation every action from the selection of the image to the writing
of the message to the openness of the address. These postcardic questions culminate in
high modernist texts after World War I, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, which interrogate
the very nature of literature itself. Ulysses features, among others kinds of postcards, an
anonymous and ambiguously libelous postcard, an ethnographic postcard used to
establish the “proof” of a sailor’s story, and a postcard of an Irish nationalist unwittingly
purchased by a member of the British aristocracy. But these literary postcards had
precedents. Texts written at the time of the postcard’s invention reveal an awareness of
the postcard’s underlying instability even as it is being codified. Postcards become the
perfect space to play out such turn-of-the-century anxieties as the changing nature of the
literary marketplace, the equivocal character of the “New Woman,” the role of new
technologies in the invention of a “private” self, and the dangerous and totalizing quality
of new media. When the postcard entered the novel, nothing about it could be taken for
granted.
I look at both the novel and the postcard not only in terms of content, but as media
in a particular historical moment. The postcard, when it has received critical attention
(which has only happened relatively recently and on a small scale), is often viewed
purely as its image, as it is in Malek Alloulah’s The Colonial Harem. While a worthy
3

project, there is not much to differentiate a colonial postcard from a colonial photograph
or, in certain respects, from a “metropolitan” postcard. Previous to this, though
collections had been archived, it was very difficult to know what to do with a postcard, as
evident even in the emphatically-titled 1995 collection Postcards in the Library:
Invaluable Visual Sources which cites a 1981 “landmark” article entitled “Postcards are
popular, but not in your library” by Bill Katz (Stevens 2). On the other hand, Jacques
Derrida’s late work, the quasi-autobiographical La Carte Postale (1980), tends to lose
historical specificity even while it makes such interesting claims about the nature of the
postcard form and reading: “une lettre, à l’instant même où elle a lieu...se divise, se met
en morceaux, tombe en carte postale” (90).
My dissertation begins by recreating that historical specificity, starting with the
first conception of the postcard in Germany in 1865 by Heinrich von Stephan, when the
cheaper postal rate and open format were rejected as being too radical, meaning too few
people would buy postcards to make manufacturing them profitable. When the measure
passed in Vienna four years later allowing the use of the postal card (a plain, government-
issued card with one side reserved for the address), few could have imagined the result.
This history is a veritable explosion of postcards: within the first three months, three
million were sold within the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Staff 47). The following year
when England issued its own cards, 75 million passed through the British postal service
(Staff 48). The postcard became an international phenomenon that coincided with the
creation of the Universal Postal Union (coincidentally spearheaded in large part by von
Stephan, the postcard’s first proponent) and the standardization of a global postal service.
4

Within that history, one that runs roughly parallel to other forms of new media, such as
the telegraph, the phone and early film, there lies a history of correspondence, of
technological innovation, and of social relations.
As Richard Menke writes in his book Telegraphic Realism, “a technology does
not become adopted simply because it exists; it requires a social framework that will
make its establishment seem worthwhile, feasible, and thinkable” (69). The social
framework for the postcard developed over time despite the postcard’s seemingly
overnight success. The first stage of the postcard’s history is defined by its open form,
abbreviated writing space, and lower cost in comparison with the letter. In advocating for
France’s belated adoption of the postcard in 1873, Louis Wolowski elaborates on each of
these features and argues that the postcard will not be the death of the letter. He turns
especially to England and the latest report by the British Director General of Post and
Telegraphs to justify his predictions saying, “La post-card devait naître en Angleterre, où
l’on connaît si bien le prix du temps; time is money, dit le proverbe populaire de cette
countrée” (6). Indeed, “time is money,” a phrase actually coined by Benjamin Franklin,
characterizes this early phase of the postcard. The postcard was economical not only
because it cost less to mail but also because one no longer had to spend time writing
flowery greetings for simple communications.
The difference in writing style, Wolowski argues, ensures the continuation of the
letter: “Sans doute, la carte-postale n’a point la prétention de remplacer la lettre close, ni
de suprimer la douceur et le besoin des communications intimes; elle sert seulement
d’auxiliaire utile et commode à cette nature de relations qui n’exigent ni longs
5

développements, ni aucune espèce de mystère” (7). Due to its open form and small
writing space, postcard communications would have to be of a different nature from what
was written in letters. Fears of the death of the letter were equal parts sentimental and
economic, as we shall see later. Wolowski, in reassuring his readers that the postcard
would coexist with the letter rather than replace it, recalls the earlier widespread fear that
the newer medium of photography would supersede the older medium of painting: ““La
merveilleuse invention de la photographie a fait suposer, au premier abord, que les
peintres n’auraient plus rien à faire; or, ils n’ont jamais été plus occupés que depuis
l’habitude prise, dans toutes les conditions, de se rapprocher de ceux qu’on aime, ou
qu’on este curieux de connaître, alors qu’on peut contempler leurs traits” (7). Wolowski
claims that, similarly, the postcard will increase demand for letters as well by simplifying
the postal service and making it more available than ever before. He uses statistics from
England in 1870 to back his claims.
Wolowski is also far-sighted when he posits that as countries become more
familiar with the postcard, the public will develop more uses for it, such as invitations to
lectures or meetings, or any message that can be printed on one side. What he could not
foresee is the postcard boom that will happen once images (particularly photographic
images, ironically enough) begin appearing on its front. Issued exclusively by the
government, or with government approval, for roughly the first two decades, decorated
cards were relatively rare, usually depicting a stylized symbol of the nation, such as a
crest. This changed with the intersection of government and commerce known as the
World’s Fairs, for example in Paris in 1889 and in Chicago in 1893. As Naomi Schor
6

writes, “In both Europe and the United States no single event contributed more to
popularizing the picture postcard than the series of World's Fairs and Expositions that
were such landmark events during the latter half of the nineteenth century,” (213). The
postcard gained new status as a souvenir, fusing personal, handwritten messages to larger
narratives. The public began imagining not only “new uses” for the postcard but also
new ways it could circulate. In 1889, the writers of the periodical The Post Card marvel
at how during the Paris World Fair postcards bearing the image of the new Eiffel tower
could be bought and mailed from any of the tower’s lower levels. They were stamped
with “au second étage” or “au troisième étage,” the beginning of the postcard’s “wish you
were here” sense.
When government production gave way to private companies in the early1890s,
the postcard had truly arrived. The main effect this had was birth of the picture postcard.
The so-called “golden age” of the postcard, from this moment until World War I, is
characterized by the dominance of the image. Picture postcards became the first means
of cheaply circulating individual mass-produced images and their popularity reached new
heights. Nothing was too “lofty” (reproductions of the world’s most famous churches
and artwork) nor too “low” (images of washerwomen and pea-sellers) to be represented.
The importance of the image is made clear by a measure, first passed by the British postal
service in 1902 and shortly thereafter adopted across the globe, which slightly altered the
format of the postcard. Until this moment, one side of the postcard, the “front” was
reserved for the address, and the message and image both had to fit on the “back” (Tejedo
7

31). With “divided back” postcards, the message and address share a space on the back,
allowing for the image to occupy the entire “front.”
Images changed the way society viewed postcards. People now saw them, in
addition to a convenient means of communication, as the most highly collectible item of
the time. Already primed by the Victorian cult of collecting, the public marveled at the
postcard’s collectible qualities: inexpensive, attractively diverse, compact, and readily
available. Soon entire stores were dedicated to postcards and trading clubs, where even
strangers from far-flung countries could exchange postcards via international post. As an
extreme example of the trend, postcard-specific phrasebooks were published to allow
foreign correspondents to communicate. However, the postcard’s new status as
collectible allowed an even further shortened text. Messages on postcards now often
simply read “Here’s another one for your collection” or simply featured a signature. The
illustrated postcard as collectible coexisted alongside the postcard as communication,
though it “colored” the medium in the public imaginary. This further encouraged new
ways of circulating postcards. For example, one fad was to match a postcard image and
its stamp as closely as possible, affixing the stamp to the image side.
Balancing this tendency of the postcard’s flexible use was governmental
regulation of the burgeoning industry. The American World Almanac lists the postcard
regulations of1903, including, “When post cards are prepared by printers and stationers
for sale, they should, in addition to conformity with the requirements of this order, also
bear in the upper right-hand corner of the face an oblong diagram containing the words
‘Place postage stamp here,’ and across the bottom the words ‘This side for the address’”
8

(“Postal Information”). With demand being what it was, postcards, incredibly, became a
major business at the turn of the century. German factories were at the forefront and
printed images obtained both in other European countries and more remote locations such
as Mexico or South Africa. German factories also accepted commissions from companies
in other countries but local productions were continually striving for their share of the
market. The fierce competition produced a plethora of themes, styles, and techniques.
One writer even went so far as to say that “in no other industry is there such a
competition to put forth something new that will catch the public and its pennies” (“A
Post-Card Anniversary”). Each company, or individual seller, tried to find out what the
public “wanted” and to create the latest novelty. Taken to extremes, postcards were
decorated with items such as fabric, feathers, or even human hair. Once again, measures
were taken to assure regulation. In a 1907 decision, postcards featuring feathers were
taxed at “50 per cent under the provision for ‘manufactured feathers’” rather than ‘25 per
cent as ‘printed matter’” (“Postcard Rulings”).
At other times, nonconforming postcards were banned outright and concomitant
social critiques were made. An item in The Picture Postcard links the policing of
postcards to both governmental officials and arbiters of “taste”, as well as establishes a
tie between materially and morally noxious postcards. According to the writer, certain
postcards are no longer popular which featured “illuminations or jewelry [that] were
represented by a sort of white tinsel. The postmen complained that this composition
poisoned their hands, so orders were given to destroy any such cards posted in the future”
(3:74). Oddly, these particular postcards would have had no way to remain popular since
9

they were banned already. Moreover, it would appear as if they had already been banned,
both officially and by the dictates of taste: “We would remind our readers that all cards
having beads, glass dust, and such-like ornamentation, are also forbidden by the British
Post Office. We are very glad this is so, for the stuff is not only liable to injure those
whose hands it passes, but the root-idea of such appliqué ornamentation is barbaric in
conception, and most inartistic in execution.” Strangest of all, the item intersperses facts
about “improper,” i.e. pornographic, postcards, equating them in essence to physically
harmful cards: “The Paris police recently made another raid, and seized 3000 improper
post-cards at the kiosques… As to the so-called ‘improper’ post-card, we do not regard
them as post-cards at all; they are simply indecent pictures with the word ‘post-card’
printed on the back.” The writer of this item goes a step further than postal officials in
getting rid of pornographic postcards: he un-postcards them.
What we see in this item on a micro scale is the large scale process by which the
postcard as medium is standardized and its history is erased, even in its early stages.
Anxieties provoked by the postcard are anticipated at its adoption, as we have seen in
Wolowski’s treatise, but also are constantly managed through regulation as the form
develops. From initial concerns that postcards were not economically viable because no
one would use them, the fear became that they were too popular and moving too quickly
to be properly absorbed. The discourse around postcards at the time is rife with
assumptions that the postcard is a nuisance to the postal service: “it is announced from
America that the picture postcard is threatening to disorganise their Post Office system;
in fact, is becoming a kind of Frankenstein monster” (The Poster and Post-card
10

Collector). For every rosy advantage of the postcard, there seemed to be a danger against
which measures had to be taken. These are the dark threats that will live on in literature
even after they have been guarded against in daily life. They have to do with the
postcard’s essential features: its lower price, open form, abbreviated writing space, and
infinite image possibilities.
In 1889, the following characterization appears in a magazine called The Post
Card: “The new postcard brought the world a postal revolution…She calls at the home of
the rich and poor; in fact, she is to be found everywhere” (Heinsberger). In certain ways,
the portrayal repeats the description of the changes brought about by Rowland Hill’s
postal reform of the mid-nineteenth century and the creation of the penny post. The
postcard’s even cheaper postal rate and limited writing space (convenient for those who
lacked formal education) made regular postal communication available to a previously
unrepresented group. Prime Minister William Gladstone famously communicated via
postcard, adding to his liberal persona. Proponents celebrated the democratic nature of
the postcard while its critics bemoaned the social promiscuity for which it served as a
metaphor. But more than simply sharing preexisting pathways of circulation, the
postcard’s revolutionary feature became that it allowed different social spheres to cross
paths. The rich and the urban poor could theoretically send postcards to each other
without knowing the other’s social station. The postcard easily disguised the sender’s
background. A short story entitled “Picture card romance. A Tale of nineteen postcards
and two letters,” composed completely of “postcard” text, plays on this possibility. A
woman from Vienna and a man from Budapest exchange views of their cities, and slowly
11

become more intimate: midway through the correspondence, she asks for a postcard with
his picture and signs her nickname. Following two unprinted letters and a postcard
saying he is coming to Vienna, another postcard exchange with his Viennese friend
Hermann reveals the woman is, in fact, a maid. This, of course, ends the correspondence.
But for opponents of the postcard, the real social bite was its open form. Many
members of the upper class saw the idea of the open format of the postcard as scandalous
when it was first introduced: an omnipresent concern was that communications would be
visible to the eyes of prying servants. Even as the postcard gained popularity, this
concern continued to be depicted in caricatures of spying postal officials as late as 1920
in Punch, where class was coupled with provincialism in the image of the “Country
Postman.” Moreover, the open form created the possibility of circulating slander,
innocent or otherwise. One writer complains of friends who think “a postal card the best
medium for forwarding the specifics she has promised to send you for biliousness and
bunions; or she asks you where you bought the frizzes, which you have so artfully
arranged that even your rival ‘specs they growed’ on your own head” (The Post Card).
Anything written on a postcard theoretically would be seen by many others and thus
would be instant publication of any defamation. Ironically, the first suggested solution to
this threat, that postal officials not allow libelous postcards to circulate, only gave
credibility to the fear that others were, indeed, reading them.
Yet the open format was also part of the postcard’s popularity and this feature
generated the publication of books of postcard code as well as other more personal and
ingenious ways of keeping messages hidden from readers other than the recipient.
12

Postcard senders at times used the positioning of the stamp to communicate meaning,
until the regulation of where the stamp could be place. Hidden messages could still be
written under the stamp, for example expressing the sender’s desire to kiss the addressee.
While “serious” books of “postcard code” were published to remedy the “problem” of the
open form, one wonders how much a problem this actually was. The Private Code and
Post Card Cypher: A Telegraph and Post-Card Code-book for Family Use, published
in1914 by well-known humorists Constance and Burges Johnson, plays with this notion.
Following in the wake of similar publications, their book appears to set out a legitimate
postcard grammar in its first half but then takes code to the extreme where writing the
word “Congress” means “I saw five churches, three art-galleries, one museum, and
eleven restaurants yesterday. Spent to-day in bed, eating milk-toast and reading Marie
Corelli” (45). Part of the pleasure of sending a postcard in its early days was the frisson
that came from knowing that one’s private message could be read by others. Even royals
were not immune to the lure of the postcard. Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Victoria
Eugenie, was successfully courted by King Alfonso XIII of Spain via postcard, beginning
in 1905. Despite complaints of not having any privacy, many of her postcards to Alfonso
XVIII are stamped and postmarked, implying she had no issue with sending them through
the mail.
The postcard was, oddly enough, an especially fitting medium for the
international, royal couple because of its smaller writing space. Since neither knew the
other’s native language well, they communicated principally in French, which was
uncomfortable for both of them. Victoria Eugenie complains in one of her postcards that
13

when Alfonso writes in Spanish, it takes her hours to decode what he says. Undaunted,
she ends the postcard saying, “But we understand each other don’t we? God bless you
darling! Your loving Ena.” Taken literally, the postcard medium’s message hardly
provides any information, which many viewed as a detraction. Taken figuratively, its
elliptical writing always signals to something beyond, something unsaid that would have
been said had there been more space. Due to their saying “little or nothing,” postcards
symbolize triviality but also are charged with expressing intimate feelings. They
represent the limits of personal involvement (as in sending “only a postcard”) but also the
easiest shortcut to an “essential” personality in feelings and beliefs.
The postcard engages in the fantasy of communication without words as well as at
a distance. If a postcard’s shortened message signals all that is unsaid, the postcard’s
materiality signals not only the sender’s absent body, but his or her entire world. Beatrix
F. Cresswell’s poem “To My Friend” in The Picture Postcard is both an apology for and
a celebration of the postcard’s absent presence:
“I cannot write a letter dear, nor would its pages bring
The thousand thoughts towards you that are ever on the wing:
And I should need a magic pen to place before your eyes
In all its fullest beauty the scene that round me lies:
So I trust the picture postcard I send to you to-day
My thoughts, love, and surroundings, in one message to convey.” (3:110)

The poem pits the postcard against the letter, as so often happened in the postcard’s early
history. While it initially seems as if the speaker is apologizing for sending a shorter
postcard rather than a longer letter, it is the letter that the speaker deems inadequate. The
letter is able neither to capture the speaker’s “thousand thoughts” nor fully describe the
14

speaker’s environment. The lowly postcard, assumed to convey less by being shorter,
appears to succeed through the speaker’s “trust” in the postcard – a fantasy of the ideal
medium. Moreover, the poem claims that the postcard can convey “thoughts, love, and
surroundings” together in “one message,” creating a complete sense of the sender’s
world, both outer and inner “realities.” Even in writing less effusive than Cresswell’s
poem, one gets the sense that the image and text are imagined as completing each other in
the idealized postcard.
The magic of the speaker’s postcard, one which is able to contain all of the
speaker’s “surroundings,” belongs to the wider phenomenon of postcardization. The
postcard sender has been able to find the perfect postcard, one representing the sender’s
exact location, because he or she is able to choose from so many options. In an effort to
offer any image that would be of interest to buyers, postcard manufacturers produced
topographical views ranging from villages to cities to foreign scenes, often from myriad
angles. In large cities, one could fairly easily buy a postcard of one’s own street and
mark one’s own house with an “x” before sending it. Moreover, postcardization
extended far beyond physical location. Anything and everything could appear on a
postcard, from scenes of natural disasters to ruling monarchs to the latest clothing
fashions. As one newspaper put it, postcards could feature “everything imaginable and a
few other things besides” (qtd. in “Post Card Fad Increasing” 9). Despite attempts to
place postcard images into categories, including views, postcards were always eluding
categorization, both by the novelty of their subject and, as Naomi Schor points out in her
article “Cartes Postales,” by belonging to several categories at once. George Watson
15

Cole’s 1935 plan for the “systematic arrangement” of postcards, Postcards: the World in
Miniature, fails to recognize that this excess is precisely what helps create the impression
of a postcardic microcosm.
While the seemingly inexhaustible ability of the postcard to reproduce people,
places and situations from “real” life fascinated the general public and added fuel to the
postcard’s collectability, others saw it as a further threat to authenticity in an already
mediated world. A 1903 article in the humor magazine Punch satirically states that
“Candidates for the new Geographical Tripos at Cambridge will be expected to show
proficiency in identifying picture post-cards of various places, scenes and landscapes”
(“Post-card Notes”). Moreover, the article continues, the British Museum’s artifacts will
be replaced by picture postcards, the superfluous artifacts being sold to Pierpont Morgan
to defray “a part of the immense cost of the new national treasure.” The counterargument
was that postcard images made previously unavailable cultural icons available to a larger
audience, creating a visual canon. Such is the claim of a writer for The Poster and Post-
card Collector: “It was a very happy idea to think of reproducing, in penny post-card,
Hogarth’s famous picture of ‘Marriage a la mode,’ familiarizing the work of the great
caricaturist in places where he had hitherto been known only by name” (151). Others,
however, felt that not enough of these “right” kinds of educational postcards (view cards
and reproductions of high art) were being produced to justify the existence of the form.
At their perceived worst, postcards managed to empty out their subjects and sites
of meaning. Several reasons were given for this. One was the lack of accuracy in
postcard representations themselves; for example, national monuments could be
16

“painted” in garish colors, shown by “moonlight,” or “decorated” in an effort to make the
postcard a novelty. Another was that postcards indiscriminately featured both heads of
state and carousels (with only the number of postcards produced to indicate a hierarchy)
which some felt “cheapened” the subject depicted on the front. The same postcard rack
often featured both actresses and religious leaders. A postcard could also depict multiple
subjects on the same card, often leading to strange juxtapositions. The effect was one of
compression, in which the postcard collection collapses in on itself. Rather than
providing a comprehensive world picture through an infinite number of postcards, these
postcards made the world illegible. In an effort to remedy this symptom of a much larger
issue, The Picture Postcard made an appeal to taste and devised the “Cartophilic motto of
‘One card, one view’” (3:8). Postcards were seen as either making the world more
accessible and better connected or flattening it out completely, where each site began to
look the same.
Expectations of the postcard were great in its early years but so were fears about
its potentially harmful effects. As postcard use became normalized, both of those
diminished. The basic story-line of the postcard solidified into the sender being “away”
(often abroad), personally selecting and buying a particular postcard, hand-writing a
message that was pleasant but superficial (figuratively and literally), and sending it
through the mail, upon which the postcard finally arrived into the hands of the intended
recipient. As I began this dissertation, that story was my starting point; still, I wondered
why there seemed to be more to the postcard than met the eye. What I did not know was
what the literature of the early postcard would tell me. What I found could not have been
17

more surprising. Slowly, deviations in the postcard narrative began to surface through
literature, to uncanny effects.
Chapter one, through the travel writing of William Dean Howells and the
entrepreneur cum travel writer Samuel Gamble Bayne, reveals how the half-penny
picture postcard is, in fact, big business. The increasingly competitive and
professionalized literary marketplace of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
forces even “serious” authors into finding new ways to sell their work through a savvy
positioning vis-à-vis new mass cultural forms. In chapter two, the (anti)heroines in Edith
Wharton’s The Custom of the Country and lesser-known Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s
Franklin Kane not only use postcards but are defined by many of the same
characteristics. Like the postcard she uses, the New Woman is half personal
communication and half mass-produced commodity. They both threaten the breakdown
of authentic, readable relationships but promise liberation from stultified, antiquated
forms. Chapter three demonstrates how the postcard’s ease of use actually invites its
misuse from the very beginning. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster’s and The
Seventh Postcard by the popular writer of mass-fiction, Herbert Flowerdew, both hinge
on the ambiguity inherent in the postcard form. In the final chapter, the postcard’s desire
to represent all subjects also standardizes, decenters, and flattens them. Fears surface that
what the postcard begins will finally empty even its sender of all specificity in Rudyard
Kipling’s short story “The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat” and Bram Stoker’s
Dracula.

18

Chapter One
The Economic Postcard in the Travel Writing of W.D. Howells and S.G. Bayne

In contemporary discussions of the postcard as a new medium, commentators
constantly brought up its economic aspect. The postcard was more than a novelty; no
less than London’s Financial Times published an article called “The Importance of the
Post Card” in 1902 (qtd. in The Picture Postcard 3:38). Literature dramatizes the
postcard, especially in the recurrent character of the postcard seller. But his depiction is
by no means unconflicted. Why do these postcard sellers keep appearing? The
standardization of postcard distribution today makes such a character unexpected. The
postcard seller’s mundane activity attracts repeated description at the same time that he
seems to be a source of nuisance. Like authors themselves, he deals in representations.
Changes in the literary marketplace of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century led
to both the necessity as well as opportunity of engaging new ways of representing foreign
places. “Serious” authors, however, were careful to locate themselves vis-à-vis the
literary canon and as well as differentiate themselves from new mass cultural forms
(including what came to be known as pulp fiction), finding their particular niche. What is
the new generation of writers hawking, exactly? Especially when it comes to travel
writing, their books are more postcard-like than they might care to admit. How are their
views different from postcard views since they trade in the same material? How is the
travel writer different from any tourist writing postcards?
What we know about travel writers in the nineteenth century is their intention to
be high-minded. They separate themselves not only from those without the means to
19

travel but also from those without a spirit of observation while traveling. James Buzard
in his seminal study of travel writing The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature,
and the Ways to Culture, writes of the increasing distinction between the words “traveler”
and “tourist” from the 18th century onward until they obtain the positive and pejorative
connotations they commonly hold today. The “traveler” is the explorer, the conqueror,
the scholar, while the “tourist” simply performs travel through the offices of agencies
such as Thomas Cook and Son, failing to see things in and of themselves. The genre of
travel writing evolved to endow the writer with just such a persona of the traveler, a
figure increasingly blurred by the democratization of travel. By the turn of the twentieth
century, travel writers such as W.D. Howells and S. G. Bayne have to conceive of
increasingly sophisticated strategies of positioning themselves vis-à-vis the migrating
masses. They have a vexed relationship to the beaten track where, on the one hand, they
rely on well-known sights and tropes, as well as previous travel writers, for prestige and
recognition. The physical act of traveling, in that sense, establishes a travel canon that is
analogous to the literary canon, and often mutually constitutive. On the other hand, in
order to lay claim to originality, they have to find a way to focus on new material. For
Howells, this means transferring realism, the aesthetic of his fiction, to travel writing and
avoiding “sentimentality.” For Bayne, this involves witty and self-reflexive attention to
the economics of travel, both material and social, as well as a reevaluation of
authenticity. The anxieties of both these travel writers appear in their treatment of the
postcard, which mirrors the postcard-like nature of their projects. The postcard is
20

simultaneously the embodiment of the commercialization of travel as well as travel’s
canonical aspirations.
William Dean Howells, or the “Dean of American letters” as he came to be called
after 1899, received not only critical acclaim during his lifetime, but also turned his
writing into an extremely lucrative career, thanks to his popular appeal (Crowley). On
closer examination, Howells had several things in common with the now obscure Samuel
Gamble Bayne. Bayne was born only seven years after Howells and similarly became an
independently wealthy man by the end of his life. S. G. Bayne had a varied career in
which he made his money in the oil industry, then in banking, and finally became a
successful travel writer on the side. Like Howells, he considered himself a self-made
man and he entered into the highest New York social circles, despite emigrating from
Ireland to seek his fortune. Both Howells and Bayne published travel narratives at the
turn of the century during the height of the picture postcard craze. I will be analyzing
Howells’s Roman Holidays and Others and Bayne’s A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel.
Like Howells, Bayne focuses on the economics of travel, but unlike Howells, this is due
more to self-identifying as a businessman than to having a realist aesthetic. While he still
must contend with the travel writing tradition, he calls himself a “layman” when it comes
to describing the Rome that “has been so thoroughly exploited” and this allows him to
maneuver more freely (Bayne, Fantasy 97). Howells however, as a professional, must
engage more closely with tradition. Bayne seems much more comfortable discussing the
touristic apparatus, of which the postcard is representative, and incorporating it within his
own writing than Howells does. His cachet as a travel writer comes precisely from being
21

able to play with the expectations of the tourist. If Howells is uneasy with what the
postcard represents and yet depends upon it, Bayne allows it to infiltrate his text and
increase his popularity.
If travel writers needed the postcard, the postcard needed to travel. In a sense, the
postcard is always a travel postcard, even when not depicting foreign lands, because it
travels from elsewhere in order to relay a message. The postcard differentiated itself
from previous image-bearing cards such as the carte-de-visite and the trade card not only
by having space for writing, but also by being mailed. At the turn of the century, it
obtained its greatest value through circulation, even when the message was secondary
and the primary goal was collecting. Those from farthest away were often the most
valued because of rarity. As a 1902 edition of the British newspaper Today states,
“Enthusiastic or thoroughly insane collectors refuse to have anything to do with cards
which have not passed through the post, and send off about half-a-dozen a day to foreign
correspondents, who send them the same number in return. As the postage of a foreign
post-card is a penny each, this amounts to nearly 20 pounds a year” (qtd. in The Picture
Postcard 3:133). Movement added value to the postcard, much as it was an integral part
of the concept of traveling.
Sending postcards to friends who collected them soon became requisite for
anyone traveling abroad, and part of the experience of tourism itself. For the recipient,
the aura of physical distance gave such postcards authenticity. For both the recipient and
the sender, the postcard reinforced the iconic status of the views and places they depicted.
By the turn of the century, would-be travelers knew what they had to “do” as much
22

through images as through what they had read and heard. Postcards partially satiated but
covertly fueled the desire to experience “the real thing.” The following exchange takes
place in a postcard journal in which two correspondents discuss the value of a set of
postcards: “ ‘These views of Pompeii – have you seen better?’ ‘No, nor want to. Why I
seem to be there again,’ I exclaimed; ‘there’s no need to go to Italy now!’” (TPP 3:23).
On the one hand, the postcard is presented as a replacement for travel, particularly travel
that is inconvenient or even dangerous. On the other, the postcard can be appreciated by
the connoisseur only because he has already visited Pompeii.
Hence postcards also served as a symbol of the particular sender’s cultural capital.
In satires of the period, tourists go to foreign countries precisely in order to be able to say
they have been there, the postcard serving as proof. In its negative connotation in
relation to the tourist, the postcard view replaces the actual view. The act of “performing
travel,” which includes purchasing and sending postcards, literally mediates the
experience. The Daily Chronicle writes at this time: “Some people think the pictorial
post-card has got to be a nuisance. Wherever you go now-a-days you find it. Climb to
the top of an Alpine pass, and there is a German busy writing his name for the benefit of
friends at home” (qtd. in TPP 3: 133). The German character, rather than enjoying the
view, has climbed to the top in order to be able to send postcards and obfuscates the
landscape for those supposed “travelers” who wish to experience it directly. The
nuisance appears to be that he reminds the traveler that the traveler’s own “authentic”
experience is tenuous. Even it depends on the current “canon” of travel, consisting of
previous travel writing, contemporary touristic infrastructure and fashions, and, of course
23

the postcard. Perhaps one can no longer see “a sight” without comparing it to a postcard,
but at the turn of the twentieth century the postcard mechanism is actually what
transforms a landscape into a sight.

II.

When William Dean Howells writes Roman Holidays and Others in 1908, he
contends not only with centuries of writing on Rome, but with his own writing decades
previous. His novel A Modern Instance catapulted him to fame in 1882 but he was
already well-known as an editor for Atlantic Monthly as well as for his travel sketches.
These included Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867) based on his time
abroad as the American consul in Venice. By 1908, Howells was a famous novelist,
capable of fetching huge sums in advanced book contracts but Roman Holidays marks a
return to travel writing. Howell’s transition to realism, the movement he helped
champion in America, comes into clearest relief in this genre. Though he pays some
homage to his predecessors (including his younger self) and former travel “romances,”
Howells is more concerned with seeing things “as they are.” He pays particular attention
to the living situations of the lower classes, brief everyday scenes, and the minor details
of travel. The postcard, for Howells, represents a romanticizing tendency, in which the
landscape is idealized and layered with meaning by previous travelers. At the same time,
through its very banalization and commercialization of the scene, the postcard comes to
play a contemporary role worth being noticed by the realist writer.
24

The discourse of realism dominates the discussion of American literature at the
end of the nineteenth century because, led by Howells, “the realists were the first group
of American authors to produce a full body of theory about the purpose, function, and
quality of literature,” according to Daniel Borus (17). Criticism today recognizes that,
rather than a monolithic movement of Realism, multiple realisms existed which were
often contradictory even within themselves (e.g. Pizer). This would have come as no
surprise to Howells. In his most famous essay, “Criticism and Fiction” (1891), he traces
sympathy with his literary aesthetic back to diverse sources such as Edmund Burke and
Jane Austen and actually finds it principally in countries other than England, especially
Russia. Howells seems to pit what is “real” against what is “ideal,” but even he
recognizes the problematic nature of such a distinction. He demonstrates an awareness of
how literary movements can depart from their initial intentions: “Romance was making
the same fight against effete classicism which realism is making against effete
romanticism” (“Criticism and Fiction” 200). And he prophetically announces the
possibility of the later irrelevance of realism, as it becomes conventionalized, substituting
a “book-likeness” for “life-likeness”. Ultimately, getting to the heart of what is “real” in
literature involves creatively reworking literary tradition. Howells includes an extended
quotation of Burke’s in which Burke states that artists’ main problem is “they have been
rather imitators of one another than of nature” (196). Clearly, Howells both resists and
yet relies on the literary canon. “Criticism and Fiction” was not inconsistently reprinted
in a volume called My Literary Passions, which chronicles the influence of writers from
25

Cervantes to Tennyson in Howells’s understanding of what the new kind of fiction
should look like.
The repeated phrase in “Criticism and Fiction” is that writing should be “simple,
natural, honest,” terms which seem vague but which actually reflect a specific paradigm
shift. Howells aligns the new writer with the scientist, in contrast with the pedant,
because the scientist observes the “real grasshopper” versus the model grasshopper made
out of wire and cardboard. Borus explains that “American realism in its broadest
definition set for itself the task of producing a literature in which the material world
where its readers dwelt figured as a dominant characteristic” (19). Specifically,
“novelists were to record all that they saw around them” (14). Thus Howells advocates
writing with a new sense of the visual. As Nancy Armstrong persuasively argues in
Fiction in the Age of Photography, the invention of photography in the mid-nineteenth
century provided a new visual standard and what was regarded as “realistic” in literature
came to be writing that depicted objects that had been or could be photographed. The
visual order created by photography “acquired the status of the order of things
themselves” (Armstrong 19). Howells, at least at some level, recognizes the connection
at the end of the imaginary conversation between the scientist/writer and the pedant in
“Criticism and Fiction” when the pedant closes by saying, “The thing you are proposing
to do is commonplace; but if you say that it isn’t commonplace, for the very reason that it
hasn’t been done before, you’ll have to admit that it’s photographic” (198). “Things as
they are” is equated with photography versus “things as a type” which is based on
previous modes of representation.
26

The reaction of the scientist/writer to this, supposedly derogatory, charge of being
photographic is not recorded in Howells’s essay. Though Howells’s writing is often
compared to photography within his own time even in a positive sense, the claim does not
always rest easily with him. The underlying criticism is that writing “things as they are”
can be mechanistic rather than a literary craft. Writing then becomes something anyone
can do. As much as he wanted to distance himself from slavish devotion to canonical
writers, he also wanted to avoid association with mass fiction writers, who worked solely
according to stereotypes.
In his travel writing, this becomes an even greater imperative. With the advent of
the economical postcard and the democratization of travel, nearly everyone becomes a
“travel writer” in a sense. In this capacity, the postcard is associated with a previous
sentimental mode, perception through “type,” as well as adherence to a circumscribed
“canon” of travel. A common complaint about the tourist, as opposed to the traveler, is
that he sees all places as essentially the same because he is not able to pick up on details
photographically. This corresponds to the early German “Grüss aus” postcard genre
which, oftentimes, features a generic landscape scene with space for a handwritten or
individually printed city name. These scenes are often watercolor reproductions, in a
picturesque and idealized style. They are almost everywhere and nowhere. Even when
postcard images are photographic reproductions, they often aim at categorization and are
usually produced in series. Early French postcards make this explicit by containing the
caption “Scènes et types” on images of foreign (or especially colonial) subject matter.
Thus they depict a “typical” Algerian, even when the photographic image suggests an
27

individual, “real” Algerian. Postcards also help create tourist sights by categorizing and
captioning them.
Yet, the postcard also has ways of aligning itself with the realist project.
Especially in their photographic guise, postcards can serve as a near substitute for seeing
the thing itself. They perpetuate the myth of the photographic image as a transparent
representation – they are sent so that they can show what the sender has seen. Despite
Howells’s ambivalence towards the postcard as idealized type, he also recognizes its
value in establishing a visual canon of travel. Postcards are the poor man’s way of seeing
the world – inadequate, but better than nothing. In Roman Holidays, Howells’s describes
one of Rome’s most famous sights in the following way: “Seen from above, the Spanish
Steps are only less enchanting than the Spanish Steps seen from below, whence they are
absolutely the most charming sight in the world. The reader, if he has nothing better than
a post-card (which I could have bought him on the spot for fifty a franc), knows how the
successive stairways part” (106). Howells implicitly allows that postcards accurately
depict the visual facts of the Spanish stairs, yet he still puts them hierarchically below
physically being there with the phrase “if he has nothing better.” He continues his
narration to characterize life around the steps, implying that a postcard could not tell the
whole story, but he has already picked up certain techniques from the postcard. Howells
shows the Spanish Steps both seen from above and below, mimicking the multiple
perspectives of competing postcard series, where a famous sight is photographed from all
directions. Moreover, within Howells’s writing, postcards themselves are also part of the
scene he witnesses. Including postcards in the description of the Spanish Steps verifies
28

that Howells was there, and “could have bought” them. Their reality also lies in the fact
that Howells can say they cost a franc for fifty.
In order to focus on the material conditions of his journey rather than continue the
idealized depictions from the past or the mass-produced postcard images of the present,
he allows the postcard, which he might otherwise reject, to crop up in his travelogue.
Howells’s persona in Roman Holidays is that of the seasoned traveler, who has already
seen what is most worth seeing, and more importantly, knows how to see. His persona is
an arbiter of taste, not one who is overawed by what might impress the masses, but he is
also genial, self-deprecating and takes an interest in the common man. Howells’s first
person narration and direct addresses to the reader create a lack of pretense, despite the
authority he claims for himself, and a sense of intimacy. Postcarded sights hold no
attraction for him as novelties but they do attract him as sites for new, personal
observations which he can then communicate. The sites are loci of heightened attention
and give him access to different social classes at the same time. The economics of
tourism, represented by postcards, is part of the local setting, which Howells wants to
describe as such.
The narrative of Roman Holidays follows Howells’s persona from Madeira
through Spain and on to Italy, concentrating especially on Rome. Rather than being a
guidebook in any strict sense of the word, the narrative’s interest comes from the
juxtaposition of Howells’ earlier self with the now famous writer, which appears through
descriptions of the way Italy has changed over the years. Howells self-consciously
references his earlier travel writing especially while in front of Italy’s most canonical
29

sights: “I remembered the amphitheatre [in Pompeii] so perfectly from 1864 that I did not
see how I could add a single emotion there in 1908 to those I had already turned into
literature” (61). This passage performs the double service of implying that he has given a
definitive rendering, and it also serves as an excuse to turn his attention elsewhere.
Howells relies on previous travel writing (including his own) and travel convention to
affirm his canonical status, but nonchalantly introduces new details that keep him up-to-
date and prevent a fall into reminiscence. The postcard is a sign of the times. When
talking about the Roman Coliseum, he writes: “After twoscore years and three it was all
strangely familiar. I do not say that in 1864 there was a horde of boys at the entrance
wishing to sell me postcards--these are a much later invention of the Enemy--but I am
sure of the men with trays full of mosaic pins and brooches, and looking, they and their
wares, just as they used to look” (89). Instead of romanticizing the coliseum and
revisiting the heroic deeds which may have occurred there, Howells focuses on the locals
with whom he invariably comes into contact as a result of being a traveler. He writes
about the guide, the waiter, and especially the postcard seller who doubles as a beggar.
The postcard seller appears in almost every city within the narrative. The
Howells persona speaks of him with annoyance as the keeper of every major sight. The
postcard seller is a constant reminder of the commercialized state of travel, i.e. tourism,
and the impossibility of unmediated experience. In one passage in Naples, Howells
refers to the source of his annoyance more explicitly: “This terrible traffic pervades all
southern Europe, and everywhere pesters the meeting traveller with undesired bargains.
In its presence it is almost impossible to fit a scene with the apposite phrase” (49). On
30

the one hand, Howells is simply referring to the importunate calls of the postcard street
vendors that distract him. On the other hand, as a travel writer, Howells indirectly
comments on the way modern tourism, embodied in the postcard trade, prevents him
from being able to describe the scene in a fitting and original way, since it has all be
described before. Here Howells implicitly levels his strongest arguments against the
postcard in calling attention to its cheapness as “undesired bargains,” its totalizing nature
which “pervades all southern Europe,” and its mass-production as “traffic,” all arguments
used elsewhere by critics of the postcard craze, and of tourists. Tourists likewise were
seen as swarming the continent, interfering with normal circulation, and being unaware of
what was truly valuable in foreign cultures.
At the same time, once Howells takes the implications of modern tourism as his
object proper according to the tenets of realism, with nothing being too unworthy of
observation, he continues “and yet one must own that it has its rights. What would those
boys do if they did not sell, or fail to sell, postal-cards. It is another aspect of the labor
problem, so many-faced in our time” (49). Howells cleverly uses the presence of the
postcard to push the text away from the potential sentimentality of a visit to Naples
toward a realist interest in social issues. Without the “nuisance” of the postcard sellers,
Howells would merely be describing “the divine beauty of the afternoon light on the sea
and mountains” over again whereas now he is content to briefly mention it (49). The
postcard seller is actually crucial to the project of Roman Holidays rather than being an
interruption or distraction.
31

Howells has to negotiate the romantic trappings of previous travel writers from
the beginning of his account. He must deal with certain expectations and conventions,
especially when describing the natural landscape of the places he visits. How can he
present an account which is “simple, natural, and honest” when the scenery has already
been so layered over with meaning? Interestingly enough, he begins the description of
Madeira in Roman Holidays with a metaphor of artificiality: “No drop-curtain, at any
theatre I have seen, was ever so richly imagined, with misty tops and shadowy clefts and
frowning cliffs and gloomy valleys and long, plunging cataracts, as the actual landscape
of Madeira” (1). By using a metaphor from the theater, Howells contrasts a painterly
visual representation to “the thing itself.” Howells partially gives the drop-curtain artist
his due, saying he has “been most impressed by the splendid variety which the artist had
got into his picture” but the visual artist’s work amounts to little “in the presence of the
stupendous reality before [him]” (1). By saying this, he seems to reserve the rights of
accurate reproduction for himself as a writer since he continues to describe the landscape
for several pages.
Yet, when describing the mountains of mountains of Madeira, he recognizes the
limits of words: “Their picturesqueness of form and their delight of color would beggar
any thesaurus of its scriptive reserves, and yet leave their beauty almost unhinted. A
drop-curtain were here a vain simile; the chromatic glories of colored postal-cards might
suggest the scene, but then again they might overdo it” (6-7). Whereas Howells uses the
drop-curtain as a metaphor, strictly maintaining the superiority of words, he refers to
actual postcards of the island. Clearly, the postcard image, in Howells’s estimation, is a
32

more accurate representation than the drop-curtain metaphor but his wording betrays a
strange ambiguity. On the one hand, to “suggest the scene” means the postcard is not
quite enough. Looking at a postcard is less than being there, though it is the next best
thing. On the other hand, that the images “might overdo it,” implies that they are already
too much. Viewing them might prevent having a “clear,” unmediated picture of the
scene. Howells specifically cites colored postcards, which were often colored by hand or
printed over in varying numbers of tones. The postcard has the propensity to layer a
scene with previous viewings, just as color is layered over the postcard image.
The opening description also foreshadows that the beautiful scenery is actually
a back-drop to what will be really of interest to him – the human drama on which he will
focus. Several times throughout Roman Holidays, the postcard itself actually takes the
place of more detailed description. Howells feels the weight of the conventional,
romanticized landscape, but deflects it onto the postcard so he can emphasize the less
traditional aspects of the places he visits. After a long paragraph on beggars in Naples in
general and an encounter with the organized charity of the Catholic church in particular,
Howells continues, “That was while we were driving toward Posilipo for the beauty of
the prospect along the sea and shore, and for a sense of which any colored postal-card
will suffice better than the most hectic word-painting” (50). The famous scenery, despite
its magnificence, is not even the subject of the sentence’s main clause. Rather than
verbally describing it, he passes on the responsibility to the postcard, complicating its
association with the tourist rather than the traveler. The postcard allows him as a travel
writer economically to save up his words, just as it allows tourists to be frugal with
33

descriptions of their trips. In allowing the postcard to be the bearer of the sentimentalized
landscape, Howells has found a place for it within his framework of realism.
Despite the fact that the reader never sees Howells, the quintessential traveler,
engaged in the act of buying a postcard, Howells relies on the figure of the postcard in his
descriptions. Rather than only substituting a postcard, material or imaginary, for an
extended picture of place, he also writes postcardly through elliptical commentary. A
postcard writer can foreshorten his message to “Wish you were here,” because of the
touristic apparatus associated with the form. “Here” refers to the image on the front of
the postcard. “Wish you were” encompasses all the ways modern tourism has marketed
going to these particular sites as something desirable and potentially a status symbol (“I
am here, and you’re not”), to which the postcard itself has contributed in a circular
fashion.
In the same way, Howells participates in the economy of postcard writing
specifically through his engagement with the canon. He extricates himself from the need
to be exhaustive by referring to previous travel writers. In visiting Spain, he calls it “the
country of many more youthful dreamers in my time than, I fancy, is in this. We used
then, much more than now, to read Washington Irving, his Tales of the Alhambra, and his
history of The Conquest of Granada, and we read Prescott’s histories of Spanish kings
and adventures in the old world and the new. We read Don Quixote...” (20). By citing
these classics, he does not need to construct Spain as a site of interest from the ground up,
and they justify his account of a mere day-trip across the Spanish border. When he
actually goes into his description of two blocks of the Spanish border town, he can focus,
34

once again, on the postcard sellers, a few buildings, and the theft of a black shawl rather
than an epic or romantic narrative. In summary, he claims, “Our visit to Spain did not
wholly realize my early dreams of that romantic land, and yet it had not been finally
destitute of incident” (23). His visit allows him to express a preference for the prosaic,
his “love of reality underlying all [his] love of romance” (24). Howells differentiates
himself from the common tourist precisely by paying attention to what is “common.”
To some degree, Howells does accept his own role as a tourist, but only insofar as
it allows for a realistic depiction of the places he visits, à la the postcard. For example,
he constantly refers to the amount of tips he doles out to waiters or cabdrivers, whether it
is too much or too little. While that does fit him into the stereotype of the rich American,
it also allows him to signal an economic reality, of which he is only a part. A major
criticism of Victorian tourists in Italy, starting in the late nineteenth century, is their self-
centeredness. They privilege ancient Roman past to the exclusion of its present and often
condemn national modernization efforts which they feel imperil the classical architectural
treasures they wish to visit. Howells calls for a departure from the previous touristic
mode, even as he acknowledges he is engaged in a new one: “I hold that Italy is for the
Italians who now live in it, and have to get that better living out of it which others all
want our countries to yield us; and that it is not merely a playground for tourists who
wish to sentimentalize it, or study it, or sketch it, or make a copy of it, as I am doing
now” (29). He recognizes his complicity, but if he is a tourist, at least he is not of the
worst (sentimentalizing) kind. Making “a copy” of Italy is somehow getting closer to an
essence, which is ultimately unobtainable.
35

III.

Samuel Gamble Bayne enjoys touristic copies (both tourists copying and copies
made for tourists), even if he has not completely given up the notion of authenticity. He
plays the role of the rich American tourist even more closely than Howells and actually
embraces it. Rather than fearing looking like a tourist, he is concerned instead with not
being the tourist who is duped. Bayne wants to get the most out of what he pays for,
even if he is aware it is not a “genuine” experience. He expects the trip to be
commercialized. This goes along with his writing persona of the affable businessman on
vacation. Bayne presents himself as humorous, easy-going, not overly concerned with
bookish knowledge of the places he visits, but observant when it comes to current affairs.
Although not a professional writer, Bayne demonstrates his literariness more in
narrativizing his trip with himself as a central character, surrounded by secondary ones,
than in his descriptions of the places he visits.
What validates his travel writing can be summed up in the phrase “romance of
business.” Michael Pupin, a famous early twentieth-century inventor, uses it in his
foreword to Bayne’s 1924 autobiography The Derricks of Destiny: “His career
epitomized what Americans mean when they speak of the ‘romance of business’” (x).
What exactly did Americans then mean by it? One of the first uses of this phrase is in the
title of the 1862 novel by Richard B. Kimball, Undercurrents of Wall-Street: A Romance
of Business. In this context, it refers to a dramatic, or even melodramatic, story where the
36

action is provided by the twist and turns of the protagonist’s economic fortunes, a plot
structure later popularized by Horatio Alger, Jr. Bayne’s persona follows the typical rags
to riches story, which he finally fleshes out in his autobiography, but parts of it already
crop up in his travel narratives (A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel being the third). The
Derricks of Destiny chronicles Bayne’s boyhood in Ireland before he emigrated to the
United States, his struggles in the oil industry, the establishment of the Seaboard National
Bank, his success and celebrity connections, and his foreign travel. It features all the
elements of the conventional business romance: unexpected “breaks” as well as
disappointments, business partners (both wise and treacherous), a dramatic inheritance,
and an advantageous marriage.
Yet, by the time Bayne publishes his autobiography, “a romance of business” has
already become “the romance of business.” The article change reveals a shift in focus
where business is no longer the vehicle for a main character’s development, but rather
than main character itself. As the Pupin’s foreword implies, the phrase gained currency
in the beginning of the twentieth century. Pupin claims that Bayne “would have been
eminently fitted, if he had chosen, to write the ‘inside story’ of half a dozen of the
greatest American institutions” (Derricks x). Elbert Hubbard, an influential proponent of
the Arts and Crafts movement in America, uses it in his 1913 Book of Business when he
refers to business as “eminently a divine calling” (144) and his collection of essays,
posthumously published in 1917, is entitled The Romance of Business. William Cameron
Forbes recycles the title in 1921 and writes that the purpose of his collection of essays is
“to explain the nature of business, in the hope that it would remove some of the
37

prejudices that many people wrongly hold against business” (v). These later writers wish
to disassociate the connotations business has with the nouveau riche lack of culture.
Travel, to this end, also seems to be an integral part of the romance of business. It
dovetails nicely both with the changing of locations for more lucrative opportunities
(likening the businessman to a pioneer), business trips, and the leisure trips which being a
prosperous businessman allows. In fact, Bayne’s autobiography takes certain passages
almost verbatim from his previous travel narratives. The contemporaneous British satirist
Saki (H.H. Munro) writes in his short story “Clovis on the Alleged Romance of
Business” that if a businessman has not traveled, all the romance lies with the
commodities which have – “the Spanish olives and Rangoon rice” (135).
This romance not only extends to the travel postcard as a commodity, but the
postcard also represents the potential romanticizing of the commodities of travel it
depicts. While the inauthenticity of the postcard bothers Howells, the way it can
sentimentalize and stereotype a scene, Bayne is unfazed. Bayne enjoys reproductions as
reproductions, as well as seeing their productive, i.e. business, value. In Miles Orvell’s
The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-1940, Orvell
argues that a shift occurred between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in
attitudes towards imitation and authenticity. While Victorian America celebrated the
simulacra of familiar experiences in miniatures and art reproductions, “The culture of
authenticity that developed at the end of the [nineteenth] century and that gradually
established the aesthetic vocabulary that we have called “modernist” was a reaction
against the earlier aesthetic, an effort to get beyond mere imitation, beyond the
38

manufacturing of illusions” (Orvell xv). As the shift occurs, not in any smooth transition,
the postcard becomes a site for the contesting valorizations of imitation and authenticity,
as it is both a representation and one of the material facts in modern tourism.
Bayne sees the romance in new economic models of tourism whereas Howells
focuses on economic realities in order to escape previous romantic literary models. On
the surface, Bayne’s Mediterranean journey resembles Howells’s in many ways. They
pass through virtually the same ports, with Bayne simply going further east before
returning by the same route. They both are aware of the cost of things. But unlike
Howells who focuses on the material conditions of the places he visits and only indirectly
discusses the impact his going there has, Bayne focuses on the conditions of the “trip.”
Though both of these men, in their old age, are traveling by cruise ship, only Bayne refers
to the “list of passengers” while Howells merely obliquely mentions that he was
accompanied on his excursions. For Howells, the action of his travel narrative happens
on land whereas Bayne recognizes that just as much happens onboard, with “an extensive
programme of entertainment...consisting of balls, lectures, glees, games of bridge whist
and progressive euchre, concerts, readings, and a bewildering schedule of functions”
(Fantasy 2).
A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel opens with a humorous poem Bayne writes on
the steamer in anticipation of “what was to happen on our coming voyage” (1). Rather
than imagining the sights he would see, the poem focuses on the characters of the captain,
the management, and the purser. From the start, he makes the voyage’s constructedness
apparent and its artificiality enjoyable. In a tone that is clearly facetious, Bayne alludes
39

to previous romantic conventions as he begins his narrative: “The fame of this ship and
her captain spread so far and wide that a worthy band of male and female pilgrims
besought him to take them to foreign parts, for a consideration” (2). The fact that he is
obviously on a commercialized voyage rather than an authentic pilgrimage (despite the
fact that they do end up in Jerusalem) is what gives the statement its humor. Yet this
observation in no way implies a hierarchy between the two. The inauthenticity of
tourism is part of the experience for which Bayne is consciously paying. If Howells’s
travel writing is a sober, black and white real-photo postcard, Bayne’s is impossibly
colored and decorated with tinsel.
Bayne furthermore spends the better part of his first chapter giving an account of
the characters on the ship, rather than opening with a view of the landscape as Howells
does. He includes “the human skyscraper,” “the fidgetarian,” “the General,” “the pocket
Venus,” and “the Impressionists,” all of whom “were doing their best to attract attention
in a harmless way” (3). Instead of going immediately into yet another exoticizing
depiction or even pseudo-ethnographic study of the natives, he concerns himself with the
inauthentic positioning of tourists on board. He sees them as figures in a particular social
set, the upper and upper-middle class. Much in the same way that certain postcard sets
were divided into “scenes” and “types,” Bayne plays with the conventions of the “types,”
categorizing people more according to their social functions than to a different culture or
ethnicity. The display of fellow tourists is clearly part of the enjoyment of the trip for
Bayne. He collects them both according to rarity (or eccentricity) and representativeness:
40

“No collection of this kind would be complete without a military officer, and we had him
all right” (3-4).
As he describes the other passengers on board, he notes that they already carry
their own souvenirs even before having left New York harbor. They range from the more
innocuous “human mushroom” who wears a “a Paquin wrap and a Virot hat...with a steel
net wire neck-band – the very latest fads from Paris” to Mrs. Andy who “didn’t carry a
pug dog, but she thought a ‘lady’ ought to tote round with her something in captivity, so
she compromised on a canary, which she had bought in Smyrna, where all the good figs
come from” (4,3). The most extreme example is the man with explorer Mungo Park’s
persona who “wore the fez, of course, and sported a Montenegrin order on his lapel; he
had Turkish slippers; he carried a Malacca cane; he wrapped himself in a Mohave blanket
and he wore a Caracas carved gold ring on his four-in-hand scarf” (6). Bayne refers to
him as a “harmless imposter.” What is inauthentic here is not so much the articles
themselves, but rather the man’s way of wearing them, of going “over-board” compared
to the other passengers of the ship, who did not all carry “this array of proofs, but many
dabbled in them just a bit” (6). Clearly, these signifiers of travel not only refer to the fact
that their carriers have been to certain places, but they are also status symbols.
It is not surprising then that Bayne ends this first section with a transition to the
postcard that would otherwise seem abrupt: “Now we reach the post-card mania” (11).
What he has been describing all along has been related to travel’s role in acquiring
cultural capital. Bayne understands this when he claims that the postcard-sending-habit’s
“foundations are laid in vanity and egotism” though “at the start it was a mild,
41

pleasurable fad” (13, 12). Sending a postcard to all one’s acquaintances back home
communicates one’s status – that one has the money, leisure time, and cultural finesse to
go abroad – rather than just a particular piece of information. Like the man overladen
with proofs of travel, sending postcards is addictive: “Once it gets a foothold it supplants
all other vices” (11). Acquiring postcards actually supplants, in Bayne’s estimation, all
other touristic activities as well. It is the first thing the passengers do when landing at a
port, before they even see the sights depicted. Bayne points out its precedence over more
“authentic” experiences by saying they would not have stopped “to say ‘Good morning’
to Adam, to take a peep at Bwana Tumbo’s hides and horns, or to pick up the Declaration
of Independence if it lay at their feet” (11). Though that might seem like a criticism, he
himself devotes more space to the description of the activity than he does to that of many
of the places on the itinerary. The sections on certain cities like Cadiz, Pompeii, and
Sorrento could actually fit on a postcard. He also acknowledges his complicity with the
postcard mania when he says “we toiled like electrified beavers,” including himself in the
group of those who were desperate to finish sending all their cards to family and friends
(11).
Yet he draws the line when the behavior becomes too “inauthentically”
inauthentic. Bayne claims that certain passengers who did not leave the boat for certain
tours would still buy and address postcards depicting those places, and ask others landing
to deliver them. In Bayne’s estimation, these passengers are attempting to cheat the
economy of cultural capital in which the postcard plays such a large role. He responds, “I
felt no hesitancy, after silently receiving my share of this fraud, in quietly dropping them
42

overboard as a just punishment for this impertinence” (12). Bayne’s issue is not so much
with the postcard’s inauthenticity of representation, or even the economics of tourism that
the postcard represents, but rather with the attempts to circumvent them. The bad tourist
is the tourist who does not go through the motions completely or is not aware that he is
going through motions.
Part of being a good tourist is recognizing what is an appropriate souvenir, one
that will confer the most cultural capital. Bayne gives a counter example when in
Funchal: “While strolling in the public market I noticed a bit of local color: one of the
fierce looking pirates had for sale half a dozen little red pigs with big, black, polka dots
on them. I stopped to look at them and the corsair insisted that I should buy one at least
and take it with me for a souvenir” (14). This particular souvenir is actually too authentic
to be of any value to a tourist. What Bayne wants to obtain from the public market is not
so much any real object but rather “a bit of local color.” His shopping trip is successful
when he has this experience, which he then turns into his account, both in the sense of his
written story and of his cultural capital.
The postcard is the ideal souvenir because it combines both the superficial “local
color” (quite literally) as well as a readily exchangeable material form. The postcard
seller appears in Bayne’s narrative as well. Bayne puts him near the top on his list when
describing Cairo: “From Shepheard's veranda, crowded with tourists, one may see
hawkers of all kinds yelling, or coaxing possible purchasers, and offering post-cards,
ornamental fly-whisks, walking-sticks, shawls, scarabs, etc.; snake charmers, boys with
performing animals, jugglers, and every possible thing you can think of that might be
43

bought for a souvenir...” (62). The sentence continues for half a page more, enumerating
Egyptian women, Bedouins, professional mourners, etc. As Bayne creates the view for
his readers, it becomes difficult to distinguish between souvenirs and sights. Jugglers
seem to belong to the category of everything “that might be bought for a souvenir.” The
postcard, likewise, blurs the line between touristic sight and souvenir by providing an
image that is for sale. And it provides the most for a tourist’s money. Like Bayne’s
description, the postcard can contain a seemingly infinite variety of representations of
other objects, besides being an object itself. Moreover, the postcard’s authenticity is not
up for discussion – what you see is literally what you get.
The other souvenir commented on extensively by Bayne, the Egyptian scarab,
occupies a more ambivalent position. “Because there is now a veritable and increasing
boom in scarabs” in Cairo, Bayne finds the background of the scarab worth telling,
focusing on the fact that most of the objects taken out of graves are already in museums,
and new factories have sprung up to satisfy the demands of tourists (66). What he sees as
the difference between the two types of scarabs is not primarily a matter of authenticity:
“Of course there is a marked difference between a scarab cut by an old Egyptian, which
has been buried for thousands of years, and something made out of glazed terra-cotta and
sold by the dozen; the former being worth a good sum of money and the latter a mere
trifle” (66). Bayne is amused by attempts not only to differentiate but to hierarchize the
two. When a local tries to sell him the “real thing,” Bayne sidesteps the offer by saying
that he wants only an imitation, which is then reoffered for five cents. Interestingly
enough, in the ancient history Bayne provides, he notes that originally bodies of the
44

“real” insects were placed in tombs until it was ascertained that they did not last and
imitation scarabs of semi-precious stones were introduced. While Bayne clearly sees the
value of imitations, he resents being asked to pay more for something that is “authentic.”
The only time Bayne actually uses the word “authentic” in a non-facetious sense is in the
section on the Holy Land when referring to pilgrimage rather than touristic sites, a
distinction he wishes to make clear.
Bayne also recognizes the value tourism adds to the sights while in Egypt: “A
thought struck me when looking at the Pyramids and the Sphinx, and that was that no
object of any kind, natural or artificial, has ever been seen by so many great men in all
ages as has this group at Gizeh. For six thousand years the great of all nations have made
an effort to look upon these mammoth monuments” and he goes on to mention figures
like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Cleopatra” (64). The fact that others have seen
the Pyramids and the Sphinx, Bayne explicitly states, constitutes their appeal and the
feeling from which “the spectator, do what he may, cannot release himself” (64). Other
than to say one may attempt to release oneself, he does not actually resist the lure of
tradition, the impressions of thousands before him, but rather revels in it. The acceptance
of the inevitability of mediation actually allows Bayne some measure of irreverence, even
as he plays out his role as a tourist. Pages later, in captioning an image of the Sphinx, he
labels her “The grand old girl of all sculpture... The Queen of post-cards, to which the
pyramid behind her runs a close second” (70). It is no coincidence that the objects most-
viewed by the great men of the past should be the trivial postcards of today and Bayne
appears to be reconciled to that fact.
45

IV.

Bayne’s captioning of the mechanically reproduced image in the book is not
accidentally postcard-like. Images had begun to play a huge role in the success of travel
writing, just as postcard images were becoming a crucial part of the travel experience
itself. The marketing term “profusely illustrated” increased exponentially after 1870,
hitting its peak right at the turn of the century, and tapering off again with the advent of
WWI. This curve is almost exactly analogous to the popularity of the postcard. Harper
and Brothers, which published both Howells’s Roman Holidays and Bayne’s A Fantasy
of Mediterranean Travel, produced illustrated editions of travel narratives by the turn of
the century as a matter of course. The images give a narrative parallel to the written one,
intersecting at some points as illustrations but not necessarily. Like the postcard, whether
or not the image and text directly correspond, the combination of the two in travel books
serves as a substitute for experience, which annexes the publishing industry to the travel
industry. These books package the place in such a way that they are “the next best thing”
to actually being there – they are certainly more economical and convenient. The reader
might not be able to travel to Italy but images are intended by publishers to create a
second level aura of authenticity, with which writers are complicit. At the same time,
travel writers reserve ultimate authority for themselves, needing to show the images as
yet another form of mediation.
Bayne begins his travel writing career much later in life than Howells and so his
style is already adapted to the current market. His travel books previous to A Fantasy of
46

Mediterranean Travel, On an Irish Jaunting-Car Through Donegal and Connemara
(1902) and Quicksteps Through Scandinavia, With a Retreat from Moscow (1908) were
likewise published by Harper and Brothers with copious illustrations. Bayne opens
Quicksteps through Scandinavia with a short foreword to the reader stating the purpose
of his book: “This is a brief account of an excursion through Scandinavia and Russia, by
which the writer hopes to aid the intending traveller in selecting what he should see and
what avoid in passing through northern Europe” (7). So far, it reads more like a travel
guide than travel writing, a distinction that comes about with the democratization of
travel, according to Buzard. It would seem that Bayne sets up his book to impart
information, such as itineraries, cost, means of transportation – all that enables modern
tourism. Yet he continues: “Illustrations are more illuminating to the average mind than
words, and they have been used freely in an attempt to place before the reader what
countries herein described are really like” (7). Rather than being merely or even
primarily an aide to travel, Quicksteps through Scandinavia actually becomes a
replacement for travel. Implicit in his statement is both a display of deference to the
power of the image but also a veiled criticism of the potentially “average” mind of the
reader. Bayne as writer creates a substitutive experience, just as the postcard offers its
recipient the benefit of almost being there.
The writer for The New York Times who reviews Quicksteps through Scandinavia
goes so far as to entitle his article “Northern Europe by Verbal Kodak” for Bayne’s
ability to convey a personalized, yet realistic, version of what he saw. While Bayne
implicitly differentiates the images in his book from his own writing, the reviewer
47

conflates them, making the book more marketable by highlighting its novelty. It is this
quality that the reviewer values in the work since “naturally, one does not look for deep
information upon people, places, and politics in a book of this kind.” Bayne finds his
niche in the market by postcarding his travels, by which he combines superficial
“objective” information, a personal address, and images.
The actual illustrations in Quicksteps through Scandinavia head in the direction of
the postcard, though they stop short of it. They are meant to evoke a scrapbook or photo
album and tie images to the persona of the author, if not always directly to the narrative.
The title page announces that the book is “Illustrated from Photographs Collected by the
Author.” Rather than being inserted after the fact by an unknown layout designer, this
gives the impression of Bayne’s personal touch in the appearance of these images. More
than his simply selecting the photographs, the subtext implies that he has handled them
and thus they somehow are more organically connected to the experience depicted in the
text and the text itself. This is especially true in the attribution of the images. While,
according to their captions, most photographs are copyrighted by the New York firm of
“Underwood & Underwood,” a few are taken by “the Student” who is Bayne’s travel
companion for much of the narrative. Not revealing his “legal” identity even in a
copyright keeps him as a character in the story.
Illustrated travel writing as postcard finds its full expression in A Fantasy of
Mediterranean Travel. This begins with the cover design, which is a depiction of a man
who appears to be sleeping in a lounge chair. Above his head is the Acropolis, the Arch
of Constantine, Santa Sofia, the Sphinx and a pyramid, accompanied by Bedouins in the
48

foreground. Together, the composite images form a super-postcard of the most canonical
Mediterranean sights, in tri-color splendor. The man ostensibly is Bayne who falls asleep
in the steamer chair in the opening scene of the book but the subtext is that of the arm-
chair traveler, the one who experiences the fantasy of travel, rather than its reality.
Already, before even opening the book, the reader is attuned to expect a vicarious journey
from the design choices made by the publisher.
Inside the book, the layout of the images on the page mimics the postcard. These
images receive rectangular borders and are printed on separate pages, the paper of which
is thicker stock than that for the text. The majority of them are standard postcard views,
including landscapes, monuments, as well as pictures of the natives. The book closely
follows the classic postcard division of “Scènes et types,” with a couple deviations of
either political or personal import. For many of the images, Bayne supplies his own
facetious captions, such as, “The Dead Sea with the lone fisherman in front. He has just
heard that the fish are not biting and is somewhat depressed in consequence” (56). Bayne
also plays with standard postcard captions, such as “Arab types – Camel Drivers –
Sunburnt Snowballs of the Nile,” in which the description gets progressively more
“specific” (74). In reality, he is writing on the postcard, both in the sense of on top of and
on the nature of. Most telling, though, are the captions which begin “This is...”, such as
“This is Queen Hatshepset’s De-Al-Bahara Temple at Thebes, ornamented with fine
gold. The original methods by which ‘Hatty’ swiped the money to build this temple
leave Wall Street tied to the hitching post at the sub-treasury steps” (44). Here Bayne
takes a more or less standard image of an already classic tourist sight and personalizes it,
49

as one would while writing to a friend or associate. As the president of a bank, Bayne
both allows the image to speak for his interests and he also invests it with “currency.”
The image of the temple gives him the appearance of being cultured by having been to all
the right (canonical) places while his droll caption secures the relevance of the temple to
the modern touristic circuit. He, in effect, writes his own messages on these faux-
postcards.
Howells, on the other hand, began writing his travel texts before the postcard age
in publishing; in fact, travel writing established his literary career. Venetian Life (1866),
his first published book, led to his increasing celebrity at a relatively early point in his
life. By following the evolution of images in Howells’ first travel text, we can map out
the increasingly important, and vexed, relationship between the travel writing market and
the tourist industry. Pre-postcard, images are not seen as vital to the experience of
vicarious travel and the narrative voice alone does the work of conveying a sense of
place. The initial 1866 editions, published both in London and in New York, are not
illustrated, though they are well-bound. Venetian Life goes through several editions
relatively quickly but it is only in 1891 that an illustrated edition is published by
Houghton, Mifflin and Company. By this point, Howells is more than established as a
writer. Up until this edition, the book’s success is due to older modes of canonization
rather than the burgeoning visual culture associated with tourism at the end of the
century.
Clearly intended as a luxury item, the “Large-Paper Edition” two-volume set
features elegant white covers with gold lettering, gilded page edges, and red silk-lined
50

inner covers. It is a limited edition with “Two hundred and Fifty Copies Printed,” and
space for a handwritten number designating which copy it is. The illustrations are from
reproductions of “original watercolors” by Childe Hassam, Ross Turner, Rhoda Holmes
Nicholls, and F. Hopkinson Smith. The style of the artwork, as epitomized by Hassam, is
related to French Impressionism, even as, by the 1890s, the vanguard of Impressionism
was giving way to Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. Rather than represent the spirit of
Bayne’s cutting-edge realism, the images seem supplemental. These illustrations, with
the exception of one by Nicholls, do not directly correspond to the text. They have
picturesque titles such as Hassam’s opening piece “Sunset from the Gardens” rather than
illustrating any of the harsher realities Howells puts forth. The unessential (and therefore
luxurious) nature of these images is also embodied in the fact that they are printed (in
color) on small, separate pieces of paper and adhered onto the book pages. Opposite each
illustration is a sheet of tissue paper with the image’s title. Rather than being integral to
the project of Venetian Life, the illustrations function as separate art objects which
aestheticize the edition as a whole. If Howells believes, as he states in a preface to an
1867 edition, that “value as my book may have is in fidelity to what I actually saw and
knew of Venice,” then the impressionistic illustrations by the other artists are an
intentional extravagance by the publishers. Rather than being the natural form of tribute
to a successful author, the luxury illustrated edition represents only one possibility.
Houghton, Mifflin and Company themselves published another, simpler and non-
illustrated, edition of Venetian Life in the same year. The small, two-volume set with
51

plain blue covers once again signals to ability of the narrative to stand alone. Clearly, the
illustrations to a text written before the turn of the twentieth century are optional.
In 1907, well into the years of the postcard craze, Houghton, Mifflin and
Company published yet another illustrated edition, but with some significant changes
which reveal the postcardization of the travel writing market. It again features
impressionistic water color reproductions, this time by Edmund Henry Garrett, a friend of
Hassam’s, but the pasted-in images are now postcard-size and printed on thicker stock.
Moreover, the main attraction of this edition is not only that it is limited to “five hundred
and fifty copies” which are numbered by hand, but also that it is “signed by the author,
the artist and the publishers.” Rather than being marketed simply as an art object,
consumers are purchasing a personal connection. Ironically, this becomes attractive once
authors and artists become less accessible through celebrity and the publishing industry
becomes more diversified and dispersed. Of course, the real irony is that the handwritten
signatures are themselves commodified markers of the personal, much in the same way
mass-produced postcards often featured only the sender’s signature in lieu of a message.
The publishers’ signature “Houghton, Mifflin Co.” while handwritten, does not stand for
the individuals, Houghton or Mifflin, and accordingly is all in one script. Garrett’s
signature appears handwritten both below the frontispiece as well as mass-produced in
lower right hand corner of the reproduction of his painting San Geremia. Howells has the
most elaborate means of personalizing his contribution to the new edition with “The
Author to the Reader” section, alternately called “Autobiographical”. Before signing the
volume, he closes with “Kinder readers no book ever had, and if the author could have
52

any further wish concerning it, his wish would be that it might somehow make him
personally friends with every friend it has won”: both acknowledging and disavowing the
distance between author and reader (xviii).
By the time Roman Holidays is published, the situation from the mid-nineteenth
century has changed. Images appear in the very first 1908 edition. While the inside
cover does mention that it is “Illustrated,” the word is not advertised on the front cover,
as is common in previous publications. The practice of illustrating a travel text now
seems to be taken for granted by Houghton and Mifflin. There is a more postcard-like
connection between the narrative, the image, and the narrator as well as the reader as
recipient. The majority of images are photographic reproductions in the vein of “view”
postcards, the kind that the majority of tourists bought while abroad. Only one, small,
mark of its former status as a luxury remains – the tissue paper opposite the frontispiece.
Serving no practical purpose (the title “Glimpse Outside of Modern Rome” is not even
printed on it), the paper harkens back to the superfluity of the 1891 Venetian Life’s
treatment of images as separate art objects. It is not coincidental that the frontispiece is
one of the few non-photographic images in the book, a significant departure from the
impressionistic illustrations of Howells’s earlier work. Choosing “Glimpse Outside of
Modern Rome,” with its painterly brushstrokes, in Roman Holidays as the frontispiece
harkens back to the earlier relation of the visual to travel writing. The edition uses it to
signal Howells’s established canonical status while the black and white photographs
speak of his continuing relevance to the reading public as the prophet of realism.
53

Not only does Howells’s book feature illustrations which are photographs, his
writing is described as photographic. The appeal of Roman Holidays comes from the
way the everyday is understood to be filtered both through photographs and through
Howells’s narration. A short review under the rubric “Table Talk” in the publication
American Photography (1909) understandably ignores the painting reproductions
altogether and labels the book as “Illustrated from photographs” (49). The reviewer
hones in on how photography interacts with Howells’s writing:
Mr. Howells discourses in his own inimitable style in this beautiful
volume on his views and impressions on revisiting Rome after an absence
of forty years. Mr. Howells sees things in a photographic way, being a
realist of most pronounced type, and his descriptions are always most
charming. It is interesting to compare in some instances the verbal
description with the photograph, and see how adequately one translates the
other. This is sure to become one of the standard books of Roman
description. (49)

On one hand, photography is the mark of the “real” through its indexical quality
and this metaphor for Howells’s writing infuses his style with authenticity. Rather than
being supplemental, photographs within the text illustrate not only what Howells saw, but
also how he sees, “photographically.” On the other hand, in contrast to the implied
reproducibility of the photograph, his personal style is “inimitable” and the charm of his
description comes from his own point of view. Image and text are seen as “translating”
each other, as if they were two different media languages trying to describe the same
object – Rome and the other places visited on Howells’s journey. That the photographs
and texts are, mutually, translations of each other rather than “Rome” directly makes the
54

site of Rome seem both more removed and more authentic. It also gives consumers the
impression that they are purchasing the next best thing to being there.
The images function like postcards in that the images and text are independent but
mutually reinforcing. They recall actual illustrations only a few times when the caption
is put into quotes, signaling that it refers to a particular phrase within the text. Yet one
such example is particularly revealing of the way the postcard image opposite the text
allows Howells to write economically. Opposite the passage “I leave the reader to
imagine the lovely scenery for himself; almost any of my many backgrounds will serve;
but I will supply him with a piece of statistics such as does not fall in everybody’s way,”
is a view of Pisa with the following caption: “Pisa, ‘With almost any of my
backgrounds’” (268). While Howells is talking more specifically about the scenery along
the Arno river in Pisa, there seems to be an understanding that, by this point in travel
writing, depiction of scenery is more the domain of the postcard picture or what has
already been written. He will not waste words going over it again. The general view of
Pisa provides that background in visual form. He then can proceed to give his “statistics”
which consists mainly of the fact that he finds out from his driver: anglers catch fish
primarily in the evening. This detail contributes to Howells’s realist aesthetic as well as
his personal “traveler’s” touch. Part of the appeal of the work is thus the book’s ability to
provide both the expected views as well as a new angle through everyday details, thus
making it more marketable.
The end result of the combination of text and image according to the review in
American Photography is the delicate balance of both standardization and canonization,
55

and a saleable product for “$3.00 net, postage 17 cents.” Roman Holidays becomes “one
of the standard books of Roman description” through postcard technology by containing
the expected sights and also having a personal voice. Most of the images have
straightforward postcard-like captions, naming the view or monument, and leave the
personal quality to the text. This allows Roman Holidays both to fit within a tradition of
travel writing (or “Roman description”) and set itself apart. While Bayne’s Fantasy of
Mediterranean Travel does not set out to become a standard of travel description, hence
selling only for $1.25, it also engages in the economy of the postcard, layering the sights’
reputation and bolstering the author’s own.

V.

By sending these book-postcards to the American public, both Howells and Bayne
gain cultural capital themselves, as well as generate revenue for their publishers.
Howells updates his previous status as an expert on all things Italian. He also updates his
status as a canonical writer. Passages from Roman Holidays make it into a 1915
handbook on rhetoric for college students, alongside quotes from Thackeray’s Vanity
Fair. And even more interestingly, despite Bayne’s lack of literary credentials, John
Bancroft Devins cites a long paragraph from Bayne in The Classic Mediterranean,
published just one year after Bayne’s travel book. Devins’s chapter on “Algiers and
Malta” begins with an epigraph by Robert Browning and opens with an Arab proverb
before continuing with Bayne’s passage, putting Bayne on the same level as these other
56

sources. Devins cites him in order to give “this view of the inhabitants of Algiers, in
most of which sentiments all travelers can concur” (57). The view which Bayne provides
is the postcard view, a collection of the different types of people there, all available at a
glance: “thin, bandy-legged Arabs; fat, burly Turks; ramrod-like Bedouins; Kalougis with
a complexion suggesting sole leather; Greeks with frilled petticoats; Romans, of course,
with the toga; Kabeles with black hair and wearing a robe with a big gasbag; Moors with
the duke's nose and spindle shanks” (57). Bayne has become citable by sending
postcards, confirming the stereotyped views that are in possession of “all travelers.”
Bayne’s travels also give him cultural capital unavailable to him by any other
means (unlike Howells who was already an intellectual icon). He cashes in on this on at
least two occasions in the Letters to the Editor section of the New York Times. In a letter
appearing on the May 24, 1912 edition, Bayne counters a previous letter that claimed the
Irish nation had never produced a man of note in the arts or sciences. Rather than begin
directly with the names of counterexamples, he starts by writing that the Irish built
universities not only all over Europe “but also on the Aran islands, near Galway, the ruins
of which are in good preservation to this day.” The Aran islands became an increasingly
popular tourist destination in Bayne’s native Ireland in the late nineteenth century. He
includes a chapter on them in his first travel book, On an Irish Jaunting-car Through
Donegal and Connemara. In his letter, he cites the same professor he cited a decade
earlier in his narrative: “One of these ruins, Dun Aenges, is described by Prof. Petrie as
‘the most magnificent barbaric monument now extant in Europe.’” Bayne downplays the
57

fact that he is from Ireland in his defense and writes as the seasoned traveler instead, who
has gained his authority by visiting important sites.
In the other instance of June 6, 1913, Bayne argues for the inclusion of New
York’s Woolworth building in the list of “the finest buildings in the country” previously
printed in the New York Times. He acknowledges the good taste of the art students and
connoisseurs presided over by the American Federation of Arts, but expresses surprise at
the omission. Rather than having academic credentials, the validity of his opinion comes
from having “had the privilege of seeing almost all of the important and notable edifices
in the world, recent and modern.” He continues on to compare the Woolworth building
favorably with “the Taj Mahal and the Kutub tower in India, the Pyramids of Egypt, and
the Coliseum at Rome.” Having seen, in person, these other monuments authorizes him
to claim the Woolworth building “is, in fact, the most interesting work of any kind in
New York.” Despite the fact that comparison is necessary only on the local and domestic
level, bringing up exotic places outside the States validates his understanding of an
architectural standard, and thereby allows him to dispute the currently forming canon of
American sights. Presumably the general public would have seen postcards and other
images of these places, theoretically allowing them to make a similar judgment call, but
Bayne’s having seen them in person legitimizes a personal opinion.
Still at the beginning of the twentieth century, this kind of direct contact becomes
somewhat less important. Cultural capital can be accrued through increasingly mediated
states. The more reproducible and accessible tourist sites are, the less they need to be
physically visited in order to bask in their glow. Instead, the aura of places begins to be
58

reflected in the veneration of acclaimed books of travel writing and even the celebrity
status of the writers themselves. Media is the method by which the aura is achieved,
putting distance between the object and the viewer, but also by which the object is
threatened with extinction. On the postcard principle, it becomes enough to have a sort
of distant contact with the writer who went to Italy rather than having to go to Italy
oneself. Bayne’s New York home becomes a tourist attraction outright. Located among
the mansions of Riverside Park, it appears in the 1910 version of New York, Metropolis of
the Western World, otherwise known as the New York Standard Guide. Consecrated by
the famous British actor Sir Henry Irving as “the most magnificent residential avenue in
the world,” Riverside Drive is home to “S.G. Bayne, President of the Seaboard National
Bank” (109). Bayne seems to have achieved the happy marriage of money and taste that
seems so elusive in Gilded Age discourse due, in part, to his status as a traveler and
writer. The 1914 guidebook King’s How to See New York: A Complete Trustworthy
Guidebook makes his consecration even more explicit by interspersing monuments such
as “the equestrian statue of General Franz Sigel” and the “Firemen’s memorial, erected in
1913 to commemorate the heroic deeds of the New York firemen” with the homes of
Bayne and his neighbors (152).
Several of Howells’s homes (befitting his higher canonical status) also become
sites of tourism, visited to this day. These include locations in Belmont, Cambridge, and
Boston, Massachusetts; Kittery, Maine; and Jefferson, Ohio. Even in the early twentieth
century, images of his homes are made available to the public in postcard form. The
process of Howells’s own postcardization is very much tied in with the increasing
59

professionalization of writers at the turn of the twentieth century and the two signs of
success in the market place: celebrity and financial gain. Images of the writer’s home
serve both as a marker of achievement and wealth, and as proof of the public’s interest in
their private lives. Attention to Howells’s houses also comes in the forms of magazine
interviews, books, and inclusion in touristic guides. Rather than additional articles about
the Italy Howells describes, the articles focus on Howells and function as a stand-in for
the culture-transferring powers of Italy.
The interest in the homes of authors is not a new phenomenon at the turn of the
twentieth century but that is when it changes from focusing on canonical authors to
helping create them. The genre of “homes and haunts” begins in the mid-nineteenth
century with William Howitt’s Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets
(1847) but the writers Howitt includes are mostly dead ones, giving the anthology
something of a historical, rather than purely literary, appeal. It is not until the end of the
century that these anthologies really begin proliferating and emphasizing contemporary
writers over ones long dead. The first time Howells is featured in one such collection is
in 1877 in Poets' Homes: Pen and Pencil Sketches of American Poets and their Homes.
Here, Richard Henry Stoddard begins with a general discussion of Cambridge, inviting
the reader to walk with him, as if they were touring, followed by a description of
Howells’s home, both in visual and verbal versions. Anticipating a postcard-like method
of abbreviated verbal description, Stoddard claims that “the picture the artist has drawn
will give you a much better idea” of Howells’s quarters, but he continues to describe
them just the same (122). Interestingly, as much space, if not more, (as well as an
60

illustration) is given to the description of Howells’s homes in Venice, the Casa Falier and
the Palazzo Giustiniani. Howells himself goes into great detail about what kind of
furnishings they had, how tall the walls were, etc. Since his fame at this point has come
mostly from his early travel narratives, especially Venetian Life, the association is clear.
Howells becomes a tourist attraction by having toured.
In the same way, he also becomes canonical because of the way he is able to
interact with previous canonical writers, not only literarily, but also materially. Howells
is aware of this when he writes his own sort of “homes and haunts” anthology in Literary
Friends and Acquaintance in 1900. “The White Mr. Longfellow” begins with a
description of his own house in Cambridge and again mentions his old “Gothic palace on
the Grand Canal in Venice” (179) before discussing his interactions with Longfellow.
Howells is thus able to put himself on the map, both literarily and touristically. He is
featured both in Literary landmarks; a guide to good reading for young people, and
teachers' assistant; with a carefully selected list of seven hundred books (1892) as well as
Literary Landmarks of Boston: A Visitor’s Guide to Points of Literary Interest in and
about Boston (1922). A literary landmark, thanks to tourism, is increasingly as material
as it is textual.

61

Chapter Two
Insincerely Yours: The New Postcard and the New Woman in Wharton’s The Custom of
the Country and Sedgwick’s Franklin Kane

During a meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in London on April 25, 1906,
Frederic T. Corkett of the firm of Raphael Tuck and Company read a paper describing the
merit of the picture postcard. It was a controversial move since, even by his own
admission, postcards may seem not “to deserve the attention of the members and friends
of this distinguished Society” (622). More than a century after the postcard’s inception, it
is hard to imagine such attention, either to denigrate or praise it. At the time, however,
the new postcard was the parvenu of the communication world and given the late
nineteenth century’s mania for categorization, many felt a vested interest in determining
its place in the media hierarchy. The majority of cultural critics ranked it firmly beneath
the letter or even the telegram. The postcard, through its showy visual aspect and
abbreviated writing space, was read as trying to be something it was not, namely,
personal communication. Yet despite the protests of the keepers of culture, the lowly
postcard had become immensely popular and managed to infiltrate the highest ranks of
society. Corkett concluded with the following advice to ease their minds: “Collect only
good, artistic, and interesting cards…Shun all indecent and undesirable subjects. Then
will your collection always be a pleasure to your friends and acquaintances, and a delight
to all who see it” (631).
Postcards could very well stand for the people sending them. The anxiety of the
Royal Society of Arts surrounding the new popular form at the turn of the century mirrors
62

concern with the possible entrance of members of the lower classes, especially women,
into high society through gaps in social readability. Edith Wharton is the writer who
most famously represents this anxiety in her novels, though the subject also proliferated
among lesser known contemporary writers, such as Anne Douglas Sedgwick. The theme
of social ambiguity surfaces through conflicts between the nouveau riche and old money
families, transatlantic marriages, the changing role of the professional, and most
importantly, the figure of the New Woman. Like the postcard, the New Woman is half
personal and half mass-produced commodity. Not surprisingly, the quintessential New
Woman in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country (1913), Undine, not only
communicates via postcard but also behaves as one. Wharton’s alignment of Undine
with the postcard reveals her fundamental wariness of change in the old world. For her,
the New Woman and the new postcard both herald the breakdown of authentic, readable
relationships even as they promise liberation from stultified, antiquated forms which they
never fully deliver. Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s ostensible New Woman, Helen, in
Franklin Winslow Kane (1910) begins in a similar vein but Helen is “saved” by the love
of a good man, enclosing the postcard in an envelope, as it were. The woman novelist
herself at the turn of the twentieth century had to define herself vis à vis the New
Woman. The women who send postcards in these novels, as well as those who write
these postcard women, are just as threatening, attractive and, ultimately, protean as their
form of communication.
The New Woman and the new picture postcard share a common beginning at the
turn of the nineteenth century and were hailed as a sign of the times. The New Woman
63

appeared in literature as well as in the popular press in many, and sometimes
contradictory, guises. According to Martha Patterson in her book Beyond the Gibson
Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915, the New Woman “both
promised and threatened to effect sociopolitical change as a consumer, as an instigator of
evolutionary and economic development, as a harbinger of modern technologies, as an
icon of successful assimilation into dominant Anglo-American culture, and as a leader in
progressive political causes” (4). Yet her most popular incarnation is that of the Gibson
Girl drawings: images of young women with an awareness of their physical attractiveness
which they use to lure hapless, rich suitors, who, in turn, give them economic freedom to
a degree – the freedom to shop. Here the New Woman is first converted into a
commodity which allows her to become a consumer, circumventing traditional courtship
plots characterized by love letters. She chooses to go to the highest bidder, the one who
will allow her to spend the most. In an ironic twist, the drawings themselves were
featured on almost everything that could be decorated and sold; matchboxes, plates,
brooches, calendars, pillowcases, fans, screens; turning the Gibson Girl into a literal
commodity. Most importantly she appeared on postcards, associating the impersonal
woman with the impersonal medium.
Wharton and Sedgwick (who was constantly compared to the older and more
established Wharton) have very similar conceptions of the New Woman which align with
the description of the new postcard on multiple levels. They both envision these women
as utterly mobile, both socially and geographically, and often living expatriate lives in
Europe, in constant global circulation like the postcard. And like the postcard, they are
64

visually appealing and appear to be entirely surface. Their physical attractiveness
actually makes up for their lack of “content,” with other characters reading more into
them than is there. They convert themselves into commodities rather than claiming
subjectivity. Like the open format of the postcard, they crave publicity. They displace
artifacts from the past for their own use. The depiction is then applied to the professional
women novelists themselves by contemporaneous literary critics, particularly since
Wharton and Sedgwick were both expatriate American writers. The critics merge the
lives of these women, and their identity as women per se, with their works, which are
seen, like the postcard, as half personal and half mass-produced.
To begin to understand why the postcard was so problematic and how it came to
represent anxieties about modern femininity, it must be pointed out that originally the
purpose of the postcard was to facilitate business correspondence. A smaller space for
writing allowed businesses to dispense with more ornate writing styles. It saved money
by saving time, paper for the envelope, and by the postcard’s cheaper postal rate. A
regular receipt or order could be sent through the mail without the previously requisite
compliments, etc. A somewhat surprising result, though, was that people quickly adopted
the postcard as a means of personal communication. Messages were sent about
everything from the times of arrival of visiting relatives to sharing what was cooked for
dinner. The same principle of simple, and economically minded, communication
intended for business affairs was applied to day-to-day life. The adoption of the business
model of communication threatened the way the upper class did cultural commerce,
65

particularly as the elite had previously separated public and private spheres according to
gender.
Because it was not originally intended as personal correspondence, its open
format proved problematic. Some members of the upper classes bemoaned the postcard’s
lack of privacy; its form made communication visible to servants, both private and civil.
The elite disapproved on grounds of that loaded word, promiscuity. It was difficult to tell
the class of a sender on a postcard, and any one postcard might be circulated among
several classes by means of the postal service. Other members of the cultural elite railed
against it as being one of the causes of the death of the art of letter writing. They
believed that the postcard would not only supplant the letter in terms of popularity, but
also that the overall writing quality of correspondence would be inferior. In their eyes,
the limited writing space on a postcard seemed to favor a lower level of literacy. They
concluded that the postcard made postal communication available to people who would
not have been able to write a sustained letter, and gave them no incentive to learn how to
do so. This grievance was only aggravated in the 1890s by the official introduction of the
picture postcard when the government allowed the private production of postcards.
Images proliferated. It became a regular means of postal correspondence for people who,
because of their economic situation and limited education, would not have sent letters.
Even people for whom money was no object began sending them on a frequent basis.
The picture on the postcard became an excuse to send correspondence through the mail,
even with a mere signature as the postcard’s “message.”
66

The art of letter-writing has been a subject for books in Europe since at least the
Renaissance with titles such as Le miroir de vertu et chemin de bien viure by Pierre
Habert in 1571 which includes a section on “Le stille de composer et dicter toutes sortes
de lettres.” The art of letter-writing is not considered a separate subject of study at this
time, but one that is part of living life well. This continues through the mid nineteenth
century in works such as Emily Thornwell’s 1856 The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility,
in Manners, Dress, and Conversation... also a Useful Instructor in Letter Writing...Etc.
Correct letter-writing becomes a synecdoche for an ordered society and the behavior of
women is considered the clearest gauge. Postcard writing and the business-like, rather
than lady-like, behavior of the New Woman go hand in hand. When critics at the turn of
the century lament the letter’s demise, more is at stake for them than merely the changing
of media forms. The postcard allows the New Woman to slip in through the mail slot.

II.

“Undine Spragg – how can you?” – The Custom of the Country opens with this
address to the main character by her mother (3). This seemingly banal phrase will come
to stand for some of the main questions the novel poses for the reader, as well as what is
asked among the others characters. It also signals the New Woman’s basic inscrutability.
Who is Undine Spragg? How can she do what she ends up doing? The novel follows
Undine’s rise to social prominence through a series of calculated marriages and divorces.
Despite her extreme self-centeredness, Undine seems to lack any sort of stable center
67

herself. Unsure of what she wants, she reproduces for herself the desires she attributes to
others and then uses anything and anyone to satisfy them before she moves on to the next
thing. Misreading her, or reading too much into her, is actually the cause of death of her
second husband, Ralph Marvell, who once thought he was her first husband. And even
when other characters see her for what she is, that doesn’t mean they can fathom her
superficiality. She defies all conventions, even while appearing to continue social forms.
If the other characters in the novel are letters, Undine Spragg is a postcard – they belong
to the same classification by the thinnest of ties. She is the very representation of
evolving media and the concomitant new social order.
Undine is first characterized by the masseuse, Mrs. Heeny: “I never met with a
lovelier form” (3). This epithet is no coincidence and is repeated a couple pages later:
“The young girl whose ‘form’ had won Mrs. Heeny’s professional commendation
suddenly shifted its lovely lines as she turned back from the window” (5). The
description seems only half-human, especially with the ambiguous possessive “its”.
Undine is a form and she is constantly changing as she adapts, and adapts well, to
different social environments. One of the reasons she can do it so well is that she is all
form, without content. Readers expect to be able to read lines, whether of a book or of a
letter, but Undine’s “lines” here are the lines of her body and are purely visual. While
her beauty remains constant, the uses to which she puts it are constantly changing based
on whom she has decided to try to attract. By commodifying her own beauty, Undine
transforms herself into an object, one that has nothing to communicate on its own, once
again shown by “its,” which could refer either to “young girl” or “form.” Undine’s
68

strong volition, which stands out in higher and higher relief as the novel progresses,
defines her personhood and personality, yet her principle choice is always to decide to
which man she will belong. In the same way, the postcard is valued as a gesture and an
object, one that can be collected, rather than for its deep revelation. Its open form almost
requires platitudinous communication.
Undine has evolved, in the Darwinian sense to which Wharton often alludes, out
of social necessity. Wharton presents a world that is highly stratified, whose inner circles
are successively smaller and where only the very adaptable can penetrate. Wharton gives
part of Undine’s prehistory early on in the novel through the topos of geography. The
Spraggs move from the Midwestern locale of Apex City to New York, apparently
motivated by the social advantages that the move might afford Undine. The Spraggs
keep changing addresses even once having arrived in New York in an effort to be more
fashionable, for example moving from a house in West End Avenue to the Stentorian
Hotel. But even more important than the address is the address, which becomes relevant
on the eve of her true “arrival.” A note has just been delivered from Mrs. Henley
Fairford to Mrs. Spragg, inviting Undine to dine, though neither Mrs. Spragg nor Undine
has ever met her. Mrs. Heeny has to translate that this is the protocol of the highest class
in New York and that the real motivation behind the invitation belongs to Laura
Fairford’s brother, Ralph Marvell. While this mode of operating is perfectly intelligible
to Marvell’s traditional social circle, Undine and Mrs. Spragg are baffled and fail to see
what would be the point of communicating in such a roundabout way. When Undine
decides to do the same and compose a reply in her mother’s name, however, she violates
69

the rules of the game. If Ralph is indirectly writing through his sister, it should follow
that Undine should be allowed to communicate through use of her mother’s name without
needing Mrs. Spragg to write out the note. What old New York allows figuratively, it
frowns upon when done literally. The only reason Undine succeeds is because, as Mrs.
Heeny concedes, “Mrs. Fairford don’t know [Mrs. Spragg’s] writing” (10). What was to
the upper class an intelligible, albeit coded, address becomes, in Undine’s hands, a
subterfuge. Though the old address is less than straightforward, it is stable.
That Undine decides to reply to the note as her mother is one thing, already
signaling a disturbance in a fixed identity; how to do it convincingly is an entirely
different matter. The first obstacle is stationery, which Undine already knows will reveal
the writer’s standing. “She had read in the ‘Boudoir Chat’ of one of the Sunday papers
that the smartest women were using the new pigeon-blood note-paper with white ink; and
rather against her mother’s advice she had ordered a large supply, with her monogram in
silver” (18). Undine, lacking any other model, takes her cue from mass media and seems
to be quite pleased with her choice. In fact, she holds Laura Fairford to her standard,
thinking, “It was a disappointment, therefore to find that Mrs. Fairford wrote on the old-
fashioned white sheet, without even a monogram – simply her address and telephone. It
gave Undine a poor opinion of Mrs. Fairford’s social standing, and for a moment she
thought with considerable satisfaction of answering the note on her pigeon-blood paper”
(18). Ostensibly, Undine believes that the form is the substance which is why she
depends on the gaudily elaborate stationery. Mrs. Fairford, on the other hand, because
she has the substance of social standing, chooses a simple form. Undine is so eager to
70

make a mark on society that she does not even realize that using pigeon-blood paper
would expose her as a fraud not simply because of style, but because her monogram itself
would be different from her mother’s. Fortunately for Undine, ultimately unfortunately
for Ralph Marvell’s sister, she decides to imitate.
The final obstacle in replying to the note is, interestingly enough, not the body of
the note. As if the note were a postcard message, Undine “giggled as she formed the
phrase ‘I shall be happy to permit my daughter to take dinner with you’ “(19). As the
postcard’s critics feared, the brevity of the communication keeps the social farce from
becoming known. The “content” of the note per se is what interests Undine least. The
signature, on the other hand, requires her to rewrite the note multiple times. Oftentimes,
the signature was the only writing the turn-of-the-century postcard did contain. Wharton
discloses three of the possibilities and mentions “several other experiments.” When
Undine decides not to imitate Laura Fairford’s simplicity, who simply signs “Laura
Fairford,” in the way she forges her mother’s signature, she flounders for direction. What
should have been the most straightforward part of the note, the marker of identity,
becomes the most complicated.
Thus the novel opens with minute attention to how Undine manages to express a
depth that she lacks by simply keeping everything on the surface. Throughout the novel,
Undine uses an incredibly wide range of forms of communication to do this. Aaron
Worth notes the significance of these varied forms in Wharton’s works in general in his
article “Edith Wharton’s Poetics of Telecommunication” (2008): “Technologies and
networks of communication, and other figures of mediation, loom large in her work, from
71

the notes and cards whose ritualistic circulation serves as a visible index of the recondite,
‘hieroglyphic world’ of Wharton’s “Society’ to the postal, telegraphic, and telephonic
networks that sustain or subvert that world” (2). Not only do various modes of
communication further the situations in Wharton’s texts, they figure the characters
themselves. The different modes are not chosen haphazardly. As Worth mentions, “Like
the social parvenu, the new technologies had their own rules of propriety and tact (or
tactlessness), operated according to their own principles, and frequently found themselves
in conflict with existing media – though in the end they would themselves become the
‘natural’ center of things” (4). Yet, in his discussion of The Custom of the Country, he
fails to recognize the centrality of the postcard in his rush to acknowledge the telephone.
While the telephone is indeed the latest technology within the novel, Wharton is much
more interested in the progression of both communication and her main character.
The postcard is significantly the first mode of communication that Undine uses as
a young girl. The context is the site of Undine’s “first struggle,” which was “to get away
from Apex for the summer” (52). She uses tactics such as sucking lemons to make
herself look sickly and her parents “alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of
the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred them selves for a month
to a staring hotel on a glaring lake” (53). Here we see, albeit in inchoate form, Undine’s
first use of her appearance to get what she wants, even though she is not exactly sure why
she wants it, other than the fact that it is what the other girls have. One of those girls is
Indiana Frusk, Undine’s principal rival since childhood and less-successful foil. At her
first resort, “Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic post-cards to Indiana, and
72

discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the
other visitors” (53). Wharton mentions Undine’s first use of communication media in the
same sentence as her awareness of her beauty. Undine discovers the strategic value of an
attractive surface, both of the postcard and her own body, in dominating.
Wharton so wants to include the figure of the postcard at this crucial junction that
she even becomes slightly anachronistic. Though the novel never mentions specifically
what year the action is taking place, Elaine Showalter estimates that it is set “from about
1900 to 1912” (88) and approximately eleven years pass in the novel from the time
Undine arrives in New York as a young woman to the time her son is nine in the final
chapter. Undine would have had to send the postcard as a young girl in the 1880s, at
least a decade before the picture postcard came into vogue. Wharton’s oversight actually
attests to the normalizing power of the postcard – it erases its past in the same way that
Undine later does. Yet everything and everyone from Undine’s past, starting from her
first friend and rival, Indiana Frusk, and ending with her first husband Elmer Moffatt,
returns in different form. Likewise, though she is never again seen writing a physical
postcard in the novel, the postcard is the form of communication that most represents
Undine. Undine is later better able to simulate depth and emulate social status through
other forms of communication, but superficiality is what defines her and into what she
eventually converts other traditional forms of media.
Like the image on a sentimental postcard, Undine is a reproduction without an
original; and like a postcard, her value is connected to the circulation of her image
through publicity. It is no coincidence that the reader first sees Undine hoping for a note
73

from the painter, Claud Walsingham Popple. Undine’s “arrival” is intrinsically linked in
her own mind to being seen and admired and ultimately she is painted by Popple. Yet, as
someone at Mrs. Fairford’s dinner party says, “All his portraits seem to proclaim what a
gentleman he is, and how he fascinates women! They’re not pictures of Mrs. or Miss So-
and-so, but simply of the impression Popple thinks he’s made on them” (35). Undine’s
portrait is never of “her” and, likewise, she can only see “herself” through the impression
she makes on others. Once she is painted, Undine looks at her portrait and “she saw
herself throning in a central panel at the spring exhibition, with the crowd pushing about
the picture, repeating her name; and she decided to stop on the way home and telephone
her press-agent to do a paragraph about Popple’s tea” (198). While the conceit of a
portrait standing in for the subject is a traditional one, Wharton takes it in a different
direction with the subject being relevant only insofar as it is seen by others. The older
medium of painting is of interest here for Undine only when it is cannibalized by the new
media of the telephone and of newspapers which endlessly reproduce her image. Her
elusive nature is especially manifested in her husband Ralph’s possession only of the
photo of the painting, which he puts away after the divorce (340).
Undine seems monstrous to the old order because of her fixation on the
reproduction of herself. The showing of the painting, as well as its transmission to her
press-agent and conversion into further publicity, makes her late and causes her to forget
about her son’s birthday party. She has no real affection for what she biologically has
reproduced, her son Paul, except as he fits into the “picture” for suitors such as Mofatt:
“Undine reflected that, with Paul’s arms about her neck, and his little flushed face against
74

her own, she must present a not unpleasing image of young motherhood” (267). The
irony of the mythological origin of her name is that an undine is an immortal water
nymph who can gain a soul only by marrying a mortal man and bearing a child,
becoming mortal herself. It becomes clear that Wharton’s Undine does not gain a soul in
this way but rather prefers remaining ageless and immortal through her conversion into
art.
Undine, similarly, transforms the nature of the letter so that even when she seems
to be sending letters, they become postcards in the hands of their recipients. She has the
opportunity, or rather the duty, to write them to her husband Ralph when she goes abroad
to Europe alone, surreptiously in pursuit of Peter Van Degen. Besides the fact that her
communications are rare until they cease completely, her letters contain only stock
phrases about the people she has seen, that she is in good health and hopes he and Paul
are well, that “the weather was too lovely or too awful.” The only other phrase she could
have included is “wish you were here” though that would have been too much of a stretch
under the circumstances. Despite the medium of Undine’s communication being a letter,
she also seems to view it spatially as a postcard. The letters are always brief, their length
clearly delimited, and she includes the “invariable expression of the hope that [Ralph]
was getting along all right: the phrase was always the same, and Ralph learned to know
just how far down the third page to look for it” (307). For ease of “personal
communication” with her husband, she mass-produces her own letters, leading to a
postcard effect, that of being intensely personal and impersonal at the same time.
75

What is especially interesting about the effect is what it does for Ralph Marvell:
“What satisfaction he extracted from these communications he would have found it hard
to say; yet when they did not come he missed them hardly less than if they had given him
all he craved” (307). For Ralph, aside from any content, these postcard letters simulate
his wife’s physical presence: “Sometimes the mere act of holding the blue or mauve sheet
and breathing its scent was like holding his wife’s hand and being enveloped in her fresh
young fragrance: the sentimental disappointment vanished in the penetrating physical
sensation” (307-8). Here the letter acts like a postcard in its sheer materiality. The
postcard, unlike the letter which traditionally concentrated on conveying textual
information, was particularly suited to this substitution by its focus on the visual. Again,
it is no coincidence that Undine’s “colourless” words are written on blue or mauve
sheets. The letter as postcard has a higher indexical quality. It particularly evokes
Undine’s presence for Ralph because even when she is present in the flesh, it is not her
words which matter to him. Wharton conveys this particularly clearly in Ralph’s
retrospective realization that he had read too much into his wife’s physical hand when he
had held it in the Italian ilex-grove: “Its surface-language had been sweet enough” (221).
Undine’s hand, both her physical hand and her hand-writing, allow Ralph to imagine it
says what he wishes. At other times, he half-acknowledges to himself that there is
nothing to read, and is not bothered by this: “In other moods it was enough to trace the
letters of the first line and the last line for the desert of perfunctory phrases between the
two to vanish, leaving him only the vision of their interlaced names, as of a mystic bond
76

which her own hand had tied” (308). Rather than a mystic bond, the bond is a postal one,
between the sender and the recipient, creating the illusion of intimacy.
If the letter is one of the forerunners of the postcard which forever alters it,
another historical precursor is the calling card. Unsurprisingly, Undine alters this
traditional form of communication as well, treating it like a postcard. Instead of standing
for a stable referent and adhering to legible rules, Undine believes the calling card to be a
means to an end. The calling card shares qualities with the postcard, such as an open
form, but it is intended to be hand-delivered and deliberately representative of one’s
status. Unlike Ralph and the Marvells, Undine has no conception of the calling card as
an expression of intimacy and a stable identity. She interprets their leaving cards as
rudeness. Meanwhile, she views her own cards in monetary terms: “Her new visiting-
card, bearing her Christian name in place of her husband’s, was like the coin of a debased
currency testifying to her diminished trading capacity” (361). Rather than resorting to
keeping a closed card-case like the riding-master who almost fools her into thinking he is
a nobleman, Undine prefers to utilize shifting titles and signatures. Undine’s solution is
never to change her view of herself, but rather to change her name, which she does after
divorcing Ralph by marrying the Marquis Raymond de Chelles. Unlike the riding master
who pretends he is a nobleman, Undine actually is a noblewoman at this point but the fact
has become meaningless since she will not even pretend to act like one. Undine does not
merely attempt to evade the system, she obliterates it because it has no meaning for her.
The postcard’s mobility, being sent at a distance, is what ultimately
differentiates it from previous forms such as calling cards and the intermediary
77

photographic carte-de-visite. Likewise, Undine constantly changes her location, as
crucial a shift in the social order as the postcard is in the postal order. While initially
people did send postcards locally from home to home, postcards quickly and almost
definitively became known for being sent from somewhere other than home. Undine,
and those like her in the novel, always seem to be away from home. She is rootless and
spends most of the novel pursuing men who seem to be grounded. In the opening of the
novel she associates being fashionable with transience since “all the fashionable people
she knew either boarded or lived in hotels” (15). For Undine and the Spraggs, the
rootedness of the Marvells is hardly conceivable at first as shown by their reaction to
Mrs. Heeny’s statement that “they live with old Urban Dagonet down in Washington
Square” (7). While their stability, being one of the oldest families in New York, gives
the Dagonets and the Marvells the respectability that Undine craves, ultimately it is
completely foreign to Undine’s nature. For a social climber like Undine, social mobility
goes hand in hand with geographical mobility.
Her desire for mobility is seen in her early days of wanting to travel while still a
Midwestern girl but culminates in a nomadic existence, circulating between Europe,
especially Paris, and New York. While in Paris, she expresses the same preference for
living in hotels. The closest thing Undine has to a place where she feels at home is the
Nouveau Luxe hotel in Paris, which is mentioned more often than any other dwelling
within the novel. The same scenario that happened with Ralph Marvell takes place on
foreign soil with her next husband, the Marquis de Chelles and indeed Undine associates
the two in her mind. Once again, Raymond’s main attraction for Undine is the title that
78

he is able to confer upon her, yet the stability of that identity, being fixed and stationary,
is what she cannot stand. Her greatest displeasure is at being fairly imprisoned at
Raymond’s ancestral home, St. Désert, the name of which is highly suggestive. She
proposes he sell the estate that has been in the family for generations. Raymond de
Chelles finds the proposition “monstrously, almost fiendishly significant: as if her
random word had at last thrust into his hand the clue to their whole unhappy difference”
(526). It is as if Raymond has finally grasped Undine’s postcard nature, her need for
circulation and its accompanying publicity, as definitive.
In the last chapter of The Custom of the Country, we see Undine’s “final” arrival.
Having remarried Elmer Moffatt, she finally “had everything she wanted” though “she
still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them”
(591). Moffatt is the one character in the novel who is almost as protean as Undine is and
they share a set of values, with Moffatt’s wealth enabling Undine to achieve her goals.
Despite the vast changes in her life, however, some things never change for Undine –
they just become more expensive. Rather than living at a hotel, as she has done up until
now, she and Moffatt purchase a “private hôtel” in Paris. Wharton translates only half of
the French phrase to underscore Undine’s continuing transience, despite now having the
money to buy a “home.” Hôtel has the meaning in English of literally a hotel while hôtel
particulier refers to the more domestic town house, a secondary residence one uses while
away from one’s principal residence. Meanwhile, their main residence on Fifth Avenue
is “an exact copy” of the Pitti Palace of Florence. Even when they are at “home,” that
79

home is displaced by being a copy of a building that is elsewhere. It is as if they have
purchased a more expensive version of a picture postcard of a Florentine landmark.
Similarly, Undine’s pigeon-blood stationary reappears in the final chapter in a
more expensive version. Along with the Fifth Avenue house, Moffatt buys Undine “a
necklace and tiara of pigeon-blood rubies belonging to Queen Marie Antoinette” (586).
The oddness of the description demands that the parallel be made. Both the stationary
and the jewelry are things Undine has been taught to want. But more than that, they are
objects which are endowed with their owner’s personality. The stationary Undine buys,
according to the magazine where she gets her advice, is supposed to convey something of
the writer’s fashionability even before any words written on it: style without style.
Likewise, Marie Antoinette’s jewels have been imbued with her aura, which is part of the
reason these particular jewels are so valuable. At the same time these items are meant to
represent their owners, the articles simultaneously confer and communicate status. The
pigeon-blood jewels, like the pigeon-blood stationary, use postcard technology to speak
without speaking but at a much higher cost.
Undine is also able to “upgrade” her main medium of communication due to
Moffatt’s money, though the basic nature of it has not changed. Undine and Moffatt
travel so much that “they are always coming and going” and Undine’s communication
consist mostly of telegrams to her son Paul announcing their new locations: “Paul never
knew where they were except when a telegram announced that they were going
somewhere else. He did not even know that there was any method of communication
between mothers and sons less laconic than that of the electric wire” (576). As a laconic
80

medium, the telegram is similar to a postcard but even more sterile since the postcard
supplements the sparseness of its message with an image. Its main advantage is that it is
faster, and therefore more expensive, but speed here is not the effect of needing to
communicate information quickly. In fact, Undine had previously disregarded the
telegram announcing Ralph’s illness as not urgent (to disastrous results to her reputation)
and the one time Undine does need its speed to tell Paul about a dinner party, she did not
have “the time to telegraph” (577). Rather, the speed of her telegram adheres to postcard
logic. The transmission of postcards is not hampered by the need for careful wording nor
for a response in the way letters or even most telegrams are. This passage is rightly
famous as the moment Wharton reveals to the reader what she really thinks of Undine as
a mother.
Postcards per se appear again in this final chapter, this time in Paul’s hands: he
“tried to occupy himself with pasting post-cards into his album” (578). In this instance,
the postcard album is a substitute for the family photo album, which had already become
an established feature of early twentieth-century homes. Rather than images of his family
members, which always seem to be in transition due to Undine’s marrying, divorcing,
and remarrying, he collects mass produced images. Indeed, considering the postcard-like
nature of his mother, this is sadly fitting. Even though Wharton does not mention where
Paul obtains his postcards, whether they were written on and sent to him (implying at
least the minimum of personal connection) or simply purchased, the irrelevance of that
question is made clear by the process of pasting them into the album, where the back of
the postcard would no longer be visible in any case. The arranging of the album, which
81

Paul actually fails to accomplish due to his new and strange environment, is a metaphor
for his labored attempts to piece together his family identity and therefore his own: “he
saw too many people, and they too often disappeared and were replaced by others” (580).
All he has is postcard people, the surface without the substance.
One of those people, Mrs. Heeny, shows up again in the final chapter with the bag
of newspaper clippings she always carries and tells Paul, rather than a photo album,
“You’d oughter start a scrap-book yourself – you’re plenty old enough. You could make
a beauty just about your Ma, with her picture pasted in the front – and another about Mr.
Moffatt and his collections” (582). Her suggestion makes it even clearer than the album
is a substitute for a family album. Yet newspaper clippings as family photos are even
more disingenuous than postcard images because they claim to give “facts.” Paul
instinctively knows that he cannot get his answers there: “He wanted to hear about his
mother and Mr. Moffatt, and not about their things; and he didn’t quite know how to
frame his question” (584).
Mrs. Heeny cannot even imagine his question because the whole world of the
nouveau riche is based on postcard-like image and surface knowledge, as if what is made
public and circulated is all there is to know. What Paul is trying to articulate through his
album, Wharton expresses on a larger scale through Paul’s perceptions of Moffatt’s new
house. After giving up on his album, Paul finds himself in the library, the room that
“attracted him most: there were rows and rows of books, bound in dim browns and old
faded reds as rich as velvet: they looked as if they might have had stories in them as
splendid as their bindings” (578). Yet when he wants to read one, he discovers that they
82

are locked up in glass cases. It is the same principle as the postcard, which is heightened
in the postcard album. Books become primarily images whose content is inaccessible,
though promised. And again newspapers serve as a substitute. While all the books are
locked away, Undine complains to Moffatt, “‘I wish you’d put that newspaper away,’ she
continued; his habit of leaving old newspapers about the drawing-room annoyed her,”
though in the next breath she herself looks at it for Driscoll’s appointment as ambassador
to England (593). And rather than a family photo album, Moffatt appropriates the past of
others. Humorously, Paul wonders if “the wigged and corseleted heroes on the wall
represented Moffatt’s ancestors, and why, if they did he looked so little like them” (579).
Moffatt does this even more overtly by acquiring Raymond de Chelles’s heirloom
tapestries. Personal identity, rather than being acquired through bloodline and hereditary
social circles, and expressed in letters, is now acquired through commodities and is
expressed according to postcard principles.

III.

Whereas Undine in Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country represents the
worst-case scenario of the New Woman, Anne Douglas Sedgwick creates female
characters in Franklin Kane with some hidden degree of depth, capable of being brought
back to traditional forms by a man who can inspire them. Like Wharton, Sedgwick is
fascinated by women who are able to use their allure to get what they want but she is not
willing to accept that the future inevitably belongs to them. Her choice of title, the name
83

of a male character, despite most of the action being filtered through a feminine point of
view, indicates the desire to reintegrate past and present gender expectations. The point
is not lost on contemporary novelist, biographer, and critic Hugh Walpole who writes that
he remembers Franklin “as I do very few characters in modern fiction. The book is
Franklin and Franklin is the book” (qtd. in Forbes, n.p.). The figure of the New Woman,
rather than being invested all in one character, is split, in effect, among two which also
implies that the identity is not intransigent. Sedgwick stands a better chance of
rehabilitating the New Woman when she is not a monolithic character. Bostonian heiress
Althea Jakes lives an expatriate life in Europe where she meets and befriends the
impoverished but charming Scottish Helen Buchanan. While stylish and blasé Helen is
ostensibly the figure for the New Woman through her apparent lack of need for close,
personal relationships, Althea demonstrates not only characteristics of but also a desire to
be the same kind of modern woman. Helen writes postcards but Althea treats letters as if
they were postcards. Sedgwick is invested in the exposure of the New Woman as, if not
a fraud, at least a curable condition.
Sedgwick utilizes broken engagements to advance the narrative instead of The
Custom of the Country’s multiple divorces. A variation on the courtship plot, it retains
many of the basic elements. Althea almost accepts her longtime suitor Franklin Kane,
whom she has already rejected several times, until she meets Helen’s cousin, Gerald, who
is as charming and impoverished as Helen. Althea falls in love with Gerald and he
decides that marrying her would be advantageous. Unbeknownst to any of the other
characters because of her surface nonchalance, Helen has been in love with Gerald for
84

years. Franklin inherits a good deal of money and decides to propose to Helen who
accepts him, almost as a business transaction. After Franklin and Helen announce their
engagement, Althea realizes from Gerald’s reaction that he is not really in love with her
and actually loves Helen. Althea breaks off her engagement with Gerald and reunites
with Franklin as a consolation prize, though, in fact, Franklin has sacrificed his happiness
with Helen for her. Gerald and Helen are married with Franklin’s blessing (and financial
support). Through the final twists of the elaborate plot, the characters are all given a new
degree of depth, despite what begins with postcard interactions. Ultimately Helen and
Althea are not indifferent surfaces merely awaiting the signature, any signature, of
marriage. Sedgwick acknowledges the possibilities the postcard represents only in order
to reinstate a previous epistolary model.
The novel begins with Althea Jakes’s jaded views of her time in Europe. Cut off
from any stable family or social existence, she asks herself what has been the point of her
travels over the last twelve or so years. She wonders if the study of archaeology in Rome
and of pictures in Florence might not be “of much the same nature as her yearly visit to
Paris for clothes,” namely “Was it not something merely superficial?” (4-5). Althea
demonstrates the same postcard-like mobility and circulation as Undine in The Custom of
the Country but with an introspection that Undine does not have: she is aware of her lack
of substance.
Ironically, Althea tries to combat this feeling by admiring someone who herself
seems to be defined by lack – Helen Buchanan. When a mysterious woman appears in the
hotel’s dining room, Althea becomes wholly preoccupied with reading the stranger’s
85

appearances, trying to figure out what the stranger has that makes her so intriguing.
Althea even contrasts her plain dress with her own elaborate one. The postcard
hermeneutic has been activated for Althea. Helen seems to have an indefinable
substance, though Althea gathers this only from Helen’s surface. However, this only
exacerbates Althea’s feeling of lack: “Since seeing her she felt more empty, more aimless
than ever. It was an absurd impression and she tried to shake it off with the help of a
recent volume of literary criticism” (13). It is not a coincidence that Althea attempts to
ward off its effects with reading something more significant, literary criticism, later that
evening, using it to bolster her sense of self.
Even more significantly, “a corrective to this morbid state of mind came to her
with the evening post, and in the form of a thick letter bearing the Boston postmark” (13).
The writer of the letter is, of course, Franklin Kane, announcing his imminent arrival in
Europe. Althea begins, confronted with the lack she perceives in herself after seeing
Helen, to consider Franklin as an option. His letter contains “everything that he was
doing and thinking, and about everything that interested him,” including technical details
of his work as a physicist (16). He, and his letter, are set in direct opposition to the
postcard form and to Althea herself. Whereas she lacks a purpose and anything to
communicate, she starts to see the possibility of a purpose in being his purpose, which
would provide a way of avoiding “that engulfing consciousness of nonentity” (15). By
showing her dependence on Franklin for a sense of self, Sedgwick represents the postcard
as being parasitical to the letter: “Franklin’s absorption in her was part of her own
personality; she would hardly have known herself without it; and her relation to him,
86

irksome, even absurd as she sometimes found it, was perhaps the one thing in her life that
most nearly linked her to reality; it was a mirage, at all events, of the responsible
affections that her life lacked” (15). The postcard form depends upon the letter for its
status of personal communication. Its association with the letter allows a handwritten
address and signature, with or without platitudinous comments, to stand for a personal
message without conveying any real content.
Despite Franklin’s letter actually having content, Althea is still tempted to treat it
as if it were a postcard since the postcard form is what appeals to her in reality. “The
sight of Franklin’s handwriting on the thick envelope brought her the keenest sense she
had ever had of his value” though she is just as uninterested as ever in what he has
actually written (15). What is salient to Althea in Franklin’s communication are the very
things that a postcard would feature, its visuality and materiality, and the use of those two
to convey meaning without words. As she thinks about the possibility of marrying
Franklin, she conflates him with his form of communication and then mentally
transforms him from letter to postcard. She imagines her ideal lover in postcard terms, as
colored “purple and gold” and capable of opening up “large, bright vistas,” as opposed to
Franklin whom she sees as “dun-coloured,” probably like the paper he used for his letter,
though she hopes dun-color might look like gold when “illuminated by joy” (16-17).
Moreover, despite the complete letter Franklin has just written, Althea imagines that
falling in love with him would depend on him coming in “with the right word, or, if not
with the word, with an even more compelling silence!” (17). Her fantasy empties
Franklin of personal content, reducing him to postcard qualities: material presence and
87

limited but suggestive text. By the end of the passage, Franklin’s letter has visually
turned into the open form of the postcard under Althea’s manipulation: “So she
wondered, sitting alone in the Paris hotel, open letter in her hand” (17).
While Althea has to remake Franklin into a postcard image, the beautiful Helen
Buchanan already exists as such for her when Althea strikes up a friendship: “She had
never in all her life met any one in the least like Miss Buchanan. She was at once so
open and so impenetrable. She replied to all questions with complete unreserve, but she
had never, with all her candour, the air of making confidence” (27). Althea is fascinated
by the postcard qualities of Helen, her ability to be both personal and impersonal at the
same time. She considers her to be rare and unique unlike Althea’s more stolid aunt Julia
who warns Althea: “You may find yourself disappointed if you trust to depths that are not
there” (44). Aunt Julia’s assessment of Helen is, in fact, the complete opposite of
Althea’s: “Essentially, she is the most commonplace type of English girl” (44). What
Althea considers to be a unique, personal expression, Aunt Julia sees as mass-produced.
Shocked by her aunt Julia’s suggestion that Helen does not really care for her,
Althea broaches the question to Helen of keeping in touch once they both leave Paris
which, to Althea, means frequently writing letters. Helen, on the other hand responds,
“Oh, my dear, I do so hate writing. I never have anything to say in a letter. Let us
exchange post-cards, when our doings require it” (45). What has been foreshadowed up
until this point in the novel is made explicit. Helen’s preferred mode of communication
comes as no surprise to anyone but Althea. Althea finally realizes from the way she
decides to keep in touch that Helen’s attachment is not very deep. She responds, “ ‘Post-
88

cards!’ Althea could not repress a disconsolate note. ‘How can I tell from post-cards
what you are thinking and feeling?” (44). Still under the impression of depth, Althea
fails to see how perfectly postcards suit Helen. She thinks that Helen would have more to
say but refuses to tell her. Helen, on the other hand, tries to by enlighten Althea by
saying simply, “You may always take it for granted that I’m doing very little of either”
(44). In that case, the postcard is Helen’s perfect medium and exactly expresses what she
is trying to say.
True to her word, Helen does send postcards, three to be exact. One is to
postpone her visit to the summer house Althea has rented from Helen’s cousin Gerald.
The second, “in answer to a long letter of Althea’s, in which Gerald had been asked to
come with her” is to say Gerald is yachting and he will try to make it in the autumn (84).
The third arrives as Althea, convinced of the hopelessness of winning Gerald’s affection,
is close to accepting Franklin’s proposal: “And the fact that a third post-card from Helen
expressed even further vagueness as to the chance of Gerald’s being able to be with them
that autumn at Merriston, added to the sense of inevitability” (94). Each of these three
postcards expresses absence, mobility, and ambiguity. They are also in response to
Althea’s more substantive missives and desire for presence, both of Helen and of Helen’s
cousin, Gerald. Althea is torn between her fascination with the new postcard form (and
the postcard people who embody it) and her nostalgic attachment to the previous
epistolary form, as representative of “real” relationships. Franklin Kane, the letter that
has arrived at Althea’s summer home, thus is both a consolation and a disappointment.
Helen’s third postcard produces a “sense of inevitability” in Althea in terms of accepting
89

Franklin precisely because it moves her to acknowledge the incompatibility of her
desires.
Sedgwick deliberately positions Althea as a transitional figure. While Helen
appears to be the obvious New Woman in the novel, Althea is self-conscious about being
old-fashioned. In many ways, she is drawn to the postcard-like New Woman and tries to
emulate her though she is far from wanting to adapt completely to the new social
conditions of the twentieth century. Her perceptions, even about the man she is deciding
to marry, are second-hand: through Helen, Althea realizes “suddenly that she did not
really like what she had thought she liked, or that she liked what she had hardly before
been aware of” (35). Though she has a good social pedigree and had been “trained in the
school of severe social caution” by her mother who “typified delicacy, dignity,
deliberation, a scrupulous regard for the claims of heredity, and a scrupulous avoidance
of all uncertain or all too certain types,” Althea’s view on what constitutes an ideal social
circle is constantly shifting (35-6). Whereas before she does not perfectly adhere to
previous social tradition (both through inexperience and through not being married), now
she is exposed to new values through Helen.
While her ideas are second-hand, her clothes are brand new, demonstrating the
importance she places on surfaces. Like Undine and Helen, and the women of the turn of
the twentieth century in general, she goes to Paris to buy dresses. Althea is especially
characterized by what she wears. From the first chapter, “the consciousness of the
perfect fit and cut of her elaborate little dress” is what sustains “her inward tremor of
silence” (11). From that same initial dinner, “all the little silver tassels” are the only
90

thing Helen remembers Althea by, despite Althea’s own close observation of Helen.
Later on, Gerald will comment both that Althea should dress more like Helen and also
appreciate the contrast of Althea’s “elaborate little dress of embroidered lawn” to the flirt
Frances Pickering’s as a metonymy for their different ways of being. That the clothing
really will make the woman is Althea’s hope. In turn, what Althea loves in Gerald is his
charm, his surface, and not the message he is sending her. She expresses horror that
Helen would ever consider marrying for money, yet she almost buys Gerald. Althea,
despite her traditional upbringing and allegiance to the old social structure, is far from
being a simple foil to the quintessential New Woman.
Helen, on the other hand, is shown by Sedgwick to be a New Woman in
appearance only. Sedgwick writes the postcard fantasy into the “reality” of the novel. In
the end, she gives Helen the hidden depth that Althea has been reading into her all along,
though with a different message. Sedgwick’s message, as opposed to the one inferred by
Althea, is a conventional fate rather than an esoteric destiny. Unlike Wharton’s Undine,
Sedgwick’s Helen only looks like a postcard when she is in fact a letter, concealing her
own love for her cousin Gerald. Unbeknownst to Althea, Helen does send a letter, to
Gerald, which prefigures Helen’s genuine, although hidden, attachment to him.
Likewise, the only other letter from Helen is also to Gerald in which she informs him of
her engagement to Franklin Kane. It is Franklin who “saves” her by telling her that she
does not know herself and introduces her to “the you who can think things” (171). After
Helen’s engagement to him, she is inspired not “to be the mere passive receiver” of
affection (269). Finally, it is Franklin’s long letter to Helen, the whole of which is
91

included in the novel, which convinces her to soften her hard New Woman heart and
accept Gerald despite his previous blindness to her love.
Both Althea and Helen respectively express the belief that “Franklin was gazing
at her soul,” discovering a depth they themselves did not know they possessed (271).
Despite the fact that Frankin lacks anything appealing in his surface, or perhaps because
he does, Franklin becomes the perfect corrective for the characters in the novel. He is the
only one in the novel who seems “to know what love is” (321). Franklin tells Helen that
he considers “the power of effort, endurance, and devotion” as the essential human
characteristics to which she replies “I’m afraid the inessentials matter most, then, in
human intercourse” (128-9). Their statements mirror the two opposed modes of written
personal communication at the turn of the century. The letter is the mode which
highlights the individual, requires effort (as well as education) and testifies to devotion.
The postcard, in turn, is perceived as mass-produced and common, lacking in sentiment
and content, yet it is supremely attractive. Ultimately, Sedgwick has the letter model
triumph. In the end, Helen recognizes Franklin’s worth. Though the novel seems to be
principally concerned with the choices of its two female protagonists, it is aptly titled
Franklin Kane.

IV.

Wharton and Sedgwick were themselves considered liminal characters, very much
tied to the traditional values and social structures that feature so prominently in their
92

work, yet also belonging to a new generation of women. In Martha Patterson’s words,
“Edith Wharton, as a member of the old New York elite, constructs a New Woman who
represents a threat to an old order, which, though stifling in its social codes, valued an
aesthetic of genuineness as opposed to what she saw as the overwhelming sham of fin-de-
siécle commercialism” while Sedgwick writes in her letters that “ ‘modern women’ [is a]
hateful term – still it does express a real and a rather new attitude” (13; 49). Having been
born into upper-class families, both of them chose to live the majority of their lives in
Europe, wrote on the international theme, made a living from their writing despite having
married “well,” and had to deal with the issue of divorce (Wharton actually got a divorce
from her husband while writing The Custom of the Country and Sedgwick married a man
who had been previously divorced). While they were both celebrated in their lifetime,
they both lived under the shadow of Henry James (whom they both knew personally) that
critics had cast on them.
Critics of their time and shortly thereafter praise their novels yet these
(predominantly male) critics have certain expectations of Wharton and Sedgwick as
women writers. They expect the works of Wharton and Sedgwick to adhere to imagined
standards of femininity, which are notoriously difficult to define. A strange connection
emerges between the way the New Women in their novels communicate and what
constitutes “good” women’s fiction writing. The complicated demands placed on women
writers are manifested in the desire of critics to see their writing as essentially a feminine
and “personal” expression, a criteria that does not apply to male writers in the same way.
While male writers were also supposed to reject being influenced by the masses, women
93

writers had no choice other than to write as “themselves.” Just as the letter is thought to
carry the writer’s “essence” in opposition to the postcard which is mass-produced,
women writers are to avoid trying to represent anything outside their own sphere.
The demand that these women’s novels be letter-like begins innocuously enough.
Critics first praise them for writing “high” literature. In The New American Type and
Other Essays, critic Henry Dwight Sedgwick (no relation to Anne Douglas Sedgwick)
provides a contemporary assessment of Wharton’s work up to 1914. His chapter on
Wharton follows the chapter on “The Mob Spirit in Literature” by way of contrast since
Wharton’s writing stands out from mass fiction. He astutely recognizes literature as a
medium with little to distinguish it inherently from other types of media: it is
“communication at a distance...capable of conveying emotions while they are still warm.
Books are as serviceable as any other vehicles of emotion” (32). By pointing this out,
H.D. Sedgwick introduces the need for works of literature to distinguish themselves from
other media, precisely to avoid being lumped with less elite forms.
At one point he expresses the desire for Wharton to have written more non-fiction
to combat a tendency in writing that he expresses in postcard-like terms reminiscent of
Howells: “Now, more than ever, we need critics to help us to an appreciation of the
pleasures of refinement. Europe is so near, and so easily overrun, that the obvious
charms of the obviously beautiful are daily rendered more and more obvious and less and
less charming by scores of amiable people, who interpose themselves and their shadows
between us and the beauties of the past” (71). Wharton’s patrician outlook is seen as an
antidote to mass tourism, specifically the postcarding of Europe. She has the ability to
94

rescue Europe’s hallowed sites from their now seemingly endless and mindless
reproduction. Yet H.D. Sedgwick is not entirely pleased with her work in this genre. His
main complaint is that she does not put enough of “herself” in her work. He claims that
“it is her personal intimacy with Italy that interests us” (75). What he wants harkens back
to a previous letter model of travel writing, where the letter is both unique and personal.
It is intended as an expression of both a singular experience and an essential self.
H.D. Sedgwick states this in more general terms when he writes, “Our generation,
not yet wholly purged of the lingering effects left by the old Romantic individualism,
cannot but feel that the more fiction is interpenetrated by the author’s personality the
more interesting it is” (58). He categorizes his era as one of transition, recognizing that
different modes of writing and reading are beginning to surface but chooses to favor what
was done in the past. Interestingly, he continues not with an explication of what the
interpenetration of the author’s personality might mean, but rather he goes on to say that
“this assumption involves as a corollary the immense importance of gender” (58). Here
we have arrived at the principle end point of his discussion of authorial personality.
Ultimately, women writers are responsible for writing “as” women, thus preserving the
stability of gender relations through literature. Appropriate feminine writing should be a
personal expression and avoid any association with mass-production, concomitant with
the sordid world of writing for money.
In H.D. Sedgwick’s analysis in the same volume of Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s
work, the “corollary” between of personal writing and gender becomes overtly
prescriptive: “A woman’s novel should reveal the sex of its creator” (241). He
95

differentiates between a book which “is really the child of her own feelings, intuitions,
and perceptions, of her own experience of life” from one which is not “a mere artificial
construction made out of other people’s experiences and imaginings (241). With that,
H.D. Sedgwick once again sets up the dichotomy between letter and postcard modes of
the novel. Writing that cannot be attributed as coming from her own life experience
appears to be mass-produced, as if written on a postcard featuring images created by
other people and then also printed by others. He feels a new novelist and a woman, “has
the advantage of a double curiosity, where it can be aroused, both concerning her books
and concerning herself. For a man, especially, there is an agreeable tremor of
anticipation as he begins a woman’s novel” (209). H.D. Sedgwick not only genders
novels by women, but also describes reading of them in heterosexually erotic terms.
Were he unable to imagine a genuine “feeling” or organic connection between the gender
of the writer and the novel, his fantasy would be cheapened. While he is aware that
“women, indeed, have for many years demanded to be judged by the standards applied to
men,” he maintains that gender is readable in novels because of his insistence on the
novels being commensurate with the writer’s true self (210). This, however, is salient
only when the gender of the writer is female.
For example, as he reveals what makes Wharton’s writing uniquely feminine, it
becomes clear that he is not referring principally to subject matter – indeed, that is
dangerously close to Henry James’s. Although H.D. Sedgwick does make the same point
as Virginia Woolf’s narrator later makes in A Room of One’s Own, that what once
characterized feminine writing was narrowness of personal experience translated into
96

content, he feels that already “nowadays sundry social exclusions and discriminations
have been brushed aside (83-4). Instead, he refers to her very process of writing: “There
was, for instance, in her early stories a certain feminine dependence, as a girl on skates
for the first time might lay the tip of her finger on a supporting arm” (60). Wharton’s
progress as a writer is necessarily read as feminine though it does not differ significantly
from the experience of any other writer. He also mentions her “feminine
capriciousness...a method of deciding upon instinct rather than upon reflection” when
deciding how to tie different episodes in her novels together (61). Clearly H.D. Sedgwick
is invested in a reading of Wharton’s work as an inherently personal and letter-like
feminine expression. He is least comfortable with it when he is forced to recognize her
writing’s popularity and “its ready-to-wear quality” of cleverness, when it runs the risk of
appearing to be a mass-produced object (53).
The tension between H.D. Sedgwick’s approval of Wharton’s writing as uniquely
feminine yet his disapproval of its impersonal quality is especially shown in the repeated
use of the term “brilliancy.” For H.D. Sedgwick, this is the term which categorizes her
par excellence: “Who that is writing to-day can dispute with Mrs. Wharton the title to the
term brilliancy?” (96). “Brilliancy” holds positive connotations of originality and getting
the reader’s attention yet it is also a surface quality, a decoration, and “one cannot help
asking one’s self, diffidently indeed, but pertinaciously: are not the ornaments too
clinquant, do not the decorations assert themselves too presumptuously and mar the softer
and more harmonious colors of the groundwork?” (68). Her works “glitter” which is
appealing as feminine ornamentation yet they run the risk of catering, even if
97

“unconsciously,” to public tastes. Instead of letters which reveal Wharton’s true
personality, we have the flashy postcard, to which actual glitter was often applied for a
competitive edge in a market which valued novelty.
Critic John C. Underwood cites H.D. Sedgwick’s label of Wharton’s ‘brilliancy’
in his 1914 collection of essays Literature and Insurgency: Ten Studies in Racial
Evolution, but observes that brilliancy is a quality “of the superficial, by the superficial,
for the superficial. It is intrinsically alien to the genius of the Anglo-Saxon world, in
particular to that of its male half; and the great mass of the world in general has some
reason for looking at it with suspicion” (389-90). The equating of superficiality and
brilliancy implies that her work is threatening to him because, despite lacking
authenticity, it remains very attractive. According to Underwood, she only wins “lasting
respect or a larger reading public among the men” when “she goes deeper than the
superficial brilliancy and cleverness for the sake of cleverness now and then, in her first
works as well as in her later ones” (351). Even more than H.D. Sedgwick in The New
American Type, Underwood is concerned here with literature as a litmus test for national
health which he, like other turn-of-the-century theorists on degeneration, believes
depends upon masculinity. Effeminate literature is that which fails to transmit
“American” cultural values yet is fashionable and popular.
Interestingly enough, in his preface, Underwood links, among the ills of modern
American society, “the woman-produced-read-and-catered-to-literature of the day and
hour in America” with “machine rule” or mass-production (ii, vii). The New Woman, in
his allegory, “is a still-more artificially machine-made product.” He chooses to
98

investigate the current state of society through literature because literature “of the better
sort” formerly counteracted the tendency of “the lowest common denominator, expressed
in terms of money and what money can buy most directly” (ix). Instead, “To-day
American literature ‘higher up’ finds itself as machine-made and soulless a product as
every other phase of the American life it has helped to distort and to misrepresent” (ix).
In other words, not only is contemporary literature mass-produced, but it has a hand in
mechanizing culture and commodifying relationships (divorce being cited by Underwood
as one example). The change represented by the transition from the personal letter-mode
to the mass-produced postcard-mode in literature, a seemingly direct form of personal
communication to a more obviously mediated one, is attributed to the New Woman.
Yet, mechanization and industrial power is also what makes America great
according to other cultural critics of the turn of the century. The commercial aspect of
American life, while “vulgar” and looked upon with disdain by proponents of European
culture, is a force to be reckoned with, not least because it comes to define what is
uniquely American. On the one hand, it appears to indicate a lack of “culture,” and on
the other, it represents freedom from stultified forms of culture. These themes, which are
already present in The Custom of the Country and Franklin Kane through the New
Woman characters of Undine and Helen, are also read into the lives of Wharton and
Sedgwick. Their “American-ness” is always expressed in ambiguous terms. Both
Wharton and Sedgwick clearly are writing from an international perspective while living
most of their lives abroad in Europe, but their displacement is precisely what critics
99

interpret as American in the end, in the same way a postcard printed in Germany and sold
in France can be seen as the personal communication of an American traveling abroad.
H.D. Sedgwick, in writing about Wharton, identifies her as one of “the notable
and justly celebrated species, -- the American woman. This interesting type has been
studied with ardor due to the rapid modifications by which it has diverged from its
European progenitors” (62). He would like for her writing to line up with her personal
identity, in letter-like fashion, as American. Yet the way he makes them line up is
counterintuitive. For him one of the marks of being American is an admiration of
European cultivation, seen in the way visitors flock abroad in order to get “cultured.” He
sees “an intimation of the presence of this cis-Atlantic attitude in the evidences of
cultivation so profusely scattered through Mrs. Wharton’s stories, and the patriotically
inclined are justified in pointing to her with pride as a product of our national
civilization” (67). What is most American according to H.D. Sedgwick about Wharton is
her very integration of what is not American.
In the same vein, H.D. Sedgwick points out the fact that Anne Douglas Sedgwick
is much better known and appreciated at the time in England than in America. Two
decades later, critic Arthur Hobson Quinn in his American Fiction: An Historical and
Critical Survey, continues the idea that what makes Sedgwick, like Wharton, most
American is her exposure to European culture: “With the exception of Mrs. Wharton, no
American novelist of her generation had such a varied experience in the study of
international types. Her American origin enabled her to treat English and French
characters with objectivity as well as insight. It made it possible also for her to draw her
100

American characters not only in contrast to Europeans but usually as dominating forces
and never as mere caricatures” (595). Paradoxically, Sedgwick’s and Wharton’s
European experience helped define them as American. For both H.D. Sedgwick and
Quinn, this is not true of James who appears to have lost himself. Despite that fact, he
remains the greater writer for them – the expectations of personal writing do not apply in
the same way for men as they do for women.
Moreover, these early critics of women writers project their gender schemas onto
what women could and could not write about effectively based on what they believed was
within or outside of the scope of the feminine mind, and therefore these women’s
personal experience. While they never question male writers’ ability to represent women,
seeing the male point of view as universal, women are somehow still supposed to be
uninformed about masculine characters. Quinn states this while couching his language in
general terms: “the general rule [is] that Miss Sedgwick’s men are not as well drawn as
her women” and “it cannot be denied that [Wharton’s] women are on the whole better
drawn than her men” (594, 578). Even while critics acknowledge or even stress the
influence of Henry James’s writing in their work, that Wharton and Sedgwick have
access to the male psyche in this way is never considered a possibility. That they could
effectively “mimic” this aspect of his writing would unacceptably suggest that there is no
real masculine essence, or that if there is, it can be mass-produced.
Likewise, this supposed lack of knowledge of the masculine mind is extended into
the realm of business, the quintessential male preoccupation at the turn of the century.
This attitude even makes its way into London’s Financial Times in 1902 in an article
101

entitled "The Lady Novelist in the City". The article mocks Mary Kennard's Golf Lunatic
and His Cycling Wife: “When the lady novelist deals with finance she is very funny (4).
And lest the reader mistake Kennard as an isolated instance, the writer specifies, “The
finance of lady writers is always funny, but that Milwaukee deal is a real gem” (4).
These comments about Kennard, a novelist who sold well despite not having critical
acclaim, are not limited to popular literature but extend to “serious” women writers.
Quinn says of Wharton that “she is weakest when she attempts the description of business
relations” (579). H.D. Sedgwick likewise points out that “great novels must have a
foundation like that of Roman masonry…the most important part is familiarity with
business” (211). For him, “it is this lack which necessarily puts a woman’s work with
respect to solidity in the second rank” (212). The stated “weak point” in Sedgwick’s
work is based on two assumptions: that women (as opposed to men) can only write well
out of personal experience and that women writers do not have business experience.
These assumptions are revealed as such precisely in the fact that both Wharton
and Sedgwick, as professional writers have business experience. As Wharton critic
Millicent Bell points out, “she adapted herself with determined toughness to the modern
book market…pressing her publishers for advertising and promotional effort, insisting on
royalties commensurate with her market value, and shifting without any sentimental
regrets to new publishers who maximized her earnings” in true New Woman fashion (12-
3). In many ways, The Custom of the Country is a book about business. Undine, the
novel’s most modern character, is constantly and unsentimentally making and unmaking
the most lucrative marriage deals for herself. On the other hand, Ralph Marvell, one of
102

the novel’s main male protagonists, attempts to go into writing but cannot navigate the
new market with his romanticized notions of the gentleman scholar. If descriptions of
Mr. Spragg and Elmer Moffatt’s business transactions seem vague, that is precisely
because they are shady.
Likewise, Sedgwick, while she has ambiguous feelings toward the New Woman,
is more interested in business transactions than she might care to admit. She reveals
some of her interest in the financial rewards of being a professional writer as well as her
business acumen in her personal letters. She writes to a friend in 1901, at the beginning of
her career, “My novel has gone to be type-written. It makes me quite glum to think of the
long time I must wait until I can know if it will be accepted and then until I get some
money. I am really quite greedy for some money, for I haven’t had a penny of my own
since Christmas” (A Portrait in Letters 22-3). Sedgwick becomes a prolific and finally a
best-selling author. Her letter from January 15, 1910 reveals that even as she is
correcting proofs for Franklin Kane, she is already looking for a new novel idea (100).
That next novel, Tante, is among the top ten best-selling novels of the year in the States.
As for Franklin Kane, one favorable reviewer for The New York Times rightly identifies
the monetary aspect of the story as principally responsible for moving the plot as well as
the impact it makes on the reader. The reviewer refers to it as both the “shock” that “here
are four people of gentle breeding, and of unusual fineness of fibre, and yet a man can
say to a woman whom he has just asked to be his wife: ‘I couldn’t have thought of
marrying you if you hadn’t had money’; and a woman can say to a man: ‘Do you realize
that if I marry you it will be because you have money” (“Miss Sedgwick’s Latest
103

Novel”). Despite her ambiguity towards “modern women,” also shown in Franklin’s
“rescue” in this predicament, that identity is at the core of her work.

V.

Not everyone was troubled by the postcard-like qualities of the New Woman – it
could mean good business through visual representation. As a mode of communication,
the postcard revealed anxieties about the New Woman but as a means of circulating
images of her, the postcard could actually serve to neutralize the threat. In The Custom of
the Country, this is prefigured by the character of the artist Claud Walsingham Popple.
Like Paul Morpeth in The House of Mirth, he is widely known to be based on artist John
Singer Sargent. He exploits the nouveau riche desire to be represented in a modern and
fashionable way, turning it into financial gain for himself. H.D. Sedgwick, in the same
book of collected essays as his review of Wharton and Sedgwick, The New American
Type, critiques Sargent’s art and identifies him as the portraitist of the new type par
excellence. He calls Sargent the “Barbarian Conquerer…of painters,” in language which
parallels Wharton’s description of Undine, and says “he was born to depict a hybrid
people, vagabonds of the mind, to portray the strain of physiological and psychological
transformation in the evolution of a new species. His talents dovetail with the exigencies
of our epoch” (16). H.D. Sedgwick particularly identifies his portraits of women as being
more “marked” since they ‘are the first to reveal the strain of physical and psychical
maladjustment” (17). Later, when writing about Wharton, he returns to Sargent and says
104

that no one has portrayed the salient traits of the “American woman” more effectively
than he. His paintings of women have the same “fundamental nervous restlessness” as
Wharton’s stories (63).
Sargent, despite being complicitous with the new American type, still has one foot
in the world of respectability. His medium is oil painting and his works are even
displayed in the same expositions as classic English portraitists such as Reynolds. What
John Singer Sargent had done among the nouveau riche, Charles Dana Gibson was about
to make accessible to the masses. Beginning with the first folio printing of his work in
1894 to the onset of World War I (concomitant to height of the picture postcard’s
popularity), Gibson’s most well-known creation, the Gibson Girl, dominated the
American public imaginary as the figure for the New Woman. The Gibson Girl is
beautiful (with her trademark small waist, large chest, thin neck, and voluminous up-do),
elegantly fashionable, and above all, self-possessed and confident. In many ways,
Wharton’s Undine is the closest literary representation and while he never illustrated her,
he did do the illustrations for one of Wharton’s early stories, “Mrs. Manstey’s View”
(1893). While the Gibson Girl appears to be emancipated and engaged in activities such
as athletics, drinking and smoking, and choosing her own suitors, critics such as Martha
Patterson point out that her freedom is limited and she is not politically active. Gibson’s
representation of the New Woman not only makes her less threatening but also
consumable.
Her image could be used to advertise beauty aids and clothing but then be
featured on actual articles themselves. In this sense, her image was especially apt for the
105

postcard, which could represent virtually anything and, indeed, postcards featuring
Gibson Girls were numerous. These images then circulated and further extended her cult.
The most tantalizing thing about the Gibson Girl is that, despite her aloofness and her
inaccessibility, she herself is ultimately capable of being possessed. Not only did “the
Gibson Girl embody the values necessary to sustain a consumer-based economy:
insatiable demand, purchasing power, and commodity discernment,” she is actually for
sale (32). Both Undine and Sedgwick’s Helen (at first sight) in the same way seem
unobtainable, inspire desire, and can be bought even while appearing the retain
independence.
The inherent confluence of the picture postcard and the New Woman as depicted
by Gibson is evident in the lyrics of a song written by a popular turn-of-the-century team
of composers: Arthur J. Mills and Bennett Scott. “The Picture Postcard Girls,” written in
1908, tells of a shy bachelor who collects picture postcards: “Smart photos of Musical
Comedy Stars, All over his room he has got; He’ll gaze on them nightly with rapturous
bliss, For he is in love with the lot.” The predicament is a modern one. The man in the
song is twice represented as living in a top, or back, room “near the sky” – presumably in
a high rise apartment building. Clearly a candidate for the dehumanizing influences
associated with modernity, he is content with less than human interaction. “Though
bashful before a sweet maid,” the lyrics portray him as bold with the picture postcard
girls, saying “I love you,” asking them to marry him, and even kissing each photo
goodnight. The song list several of them by name, all famous British and American stage
actresses of the time, such as Marie Studholme, Phyllis Dare, and Pauline Chase. Like
106

the New Woman, the postcards require “all his sundry cash he saves the different photos
to buy” and, though mass-produced, he considers them “as precious as deep-sea pearls.”
Most revealingly, the song also cites Camille Clifford as one of the women on the
postcards. Though she is by no means the only celebrity associated with the Gibson Girl,
in 1904, at the beginning of her career, she won a $2000 prize in a contest to find the
living girl who most closely matched the model of the Gibson Girl. According to The
Play Pictorial, a theatrical review of the time, she looked “as if she might have stepped
right out of one of the well-known artist’s pictures” (“The Prince of Pilsen” 144). The
real thing and its representation become virtually indistinguishable. Whether Gibson
modeled his images on real women or whether real women modeled themselves on
Gibson’s images, these images proliferated. Ironically, despite the Gibson Girl being an
icon of the American New Woman, Camille Clifford was a Danish immigrant to New
York, a fact not lost on the press. Taken within a context of nationalistic anxiety, her
1906 hit song on the stage of “Why Do They Call Me a Gibson Girl?” acquires new
meaning.
In Martha Patterson’s words, “Edith Wharton, as a member of the old New York
elite, constructs a New Woman who represents a threat to an old order, which, though
stifling in its social codes, valued an aesthetic of genuineness as opposed to what she saw
as the overwhelming sham of fin-de-siécle commercialism” (13). This sham of
commercialism is most troubling in The Custom of the Country in the way it takes the
place of Undine’s romantic interests, what should have been the most personal and
authentic of relationships. That is why the postcard so perfectly represents her, a new
107

form of business communication disguised to look personal and accepted as such by the
masses. Much of Undine’s and the postcard’s power to threaten comes from their
appearance in, or, it could be argued, creation by, their historical moment. In a time
period of huge societal transition, liminal forms capitalize on ambiguity. Undine is able
to mimic the conventions of an older age to obtain what she wants while holding none of
the underlying values of those conventions. Likewise the postcard, designed for
expedience, retains the front of personal communication because of its proximity to the
letter in a way that is not possible for the more modern telegram.
But to say that either Undine or the postcard is to blame for the tragedies that
ensue is to miss the point. Wharton expects readers to be horrified by Undine yet also
leaves moments in the text where she is pitiable if not actually sympathetic. One of these
moments, as Hermione Lee rightly points out in her comprehensive biography of
Wharton, is Undine’s disappointing marriage to Raymond de Chelles (439). Here
Wharton evokes the image of an order far older than the one Undine leaves behind in
New York, a world referred to as “feudal.” Indeed, Wharton’s title for The Custom of the
Country comes from the eponymous early seventeenth-century play written by John
Fletcher and Philip Massinger, as the introduction to the New York Public Library’s
edition of Wharton’s novel points out (xix). The custom in the play refers to the right of
the ruler to take the virginity of his subjects’ daughters, the alleged droit de seigneur of
the Middle Ages. The choice of this title harkens back to an era when women, and poor
men, were more obviously pawns. Within the novel, a parallel effect happens when
108

Ralph Marvel discovers that his young wife had previously been married to Elmer
Moffat, the most dominant man within the narrative.
Yet when the phrase “the custom of the country” appears in the text, it refers to
the custom of American men of not sharing “the real business of life” with their wives –
making money in a whole apart from the domestic sphere and simply allowing their
wives to spend it on their own (Wharton 206). The New Woman, in Wharton’s
perspective, is simply a continuation on an old theme whereby women are marginalized.
Undine’s mother’s “knowledge of what went on ‘down town’ was of the most elementary
kind, but her husband's face was the barometer in which she had long been accustomed to
read the leave to go on unrestrictedly, or the warning to pause and abstain till the coming
storm should be weathered” (16). Undine herself considers this ignorance of the business
world her lawful right and says so multiple times throughout the novel.
The difference between hers and her mother’s generation, though, is that she has
no notion of being a placeholder for non-commercial values and engages in business on
her own line, the selling of herself. Undine is so monstrous, and arguably tragic, because
she never receives anything in return, hence her continual, unsuccessful striving to be
satisfied. The revolutionary potential she may have had through some resemblance of
agency is negated by the fact that she is a commodity. There is nothing generous about
Undine, nothing that she gives for free, because she cannot even conceive of it. Her
subjectivity is parallel to the postcard – a postcard which is not valued because of its
message but rather because it is collectible. Wharton represents Undine, like the Gibson
girl, as powerful and threatening but ultimately flattened into a two-dimensional image.
109

Chapter Three
The Postcard Goes Astray: The Dark Side of the Postcard in E.M. Forster’s Where Angels
Fear to Tread and Herbert Flowerdew’s The Seventh Post Card

Only a year after the postcard’s widespread introduction, a British journalist
writes this about the postcard: “Every rose has its thorn, and it seems a fresh terror has
been added to social existence in England by a novelty intended only to promote
convenience and economy” (“Post-card Libels” 4). The particular “thorn” being
described here is libel. Because of the postcard’s open form, all a libeler would have to
do is write a slanderous message on a postcard and mail it; the message would then, at
least in theory, be read by anyone who happened to come across it. This early complaint
against the postcard was so widespread that Wolowski, in arguing for the postcard’s use
in France, mentions that the postcard has indeed been used in England “pour faire des
observations injurieuses adressées au destinataire” (11). His main response to the danger
is to say that it reminds him of the early days of the postal service “où est arrivé qu’on
s’adressait mutuellement des propos injurieux, écrits ouvertement sur l’adresse ou le dos
de la lettre” (11). Wolowski implies both that the problem is not endemic to postcards
since letter envelopes were once used to that end and that postcard libels will be a passing
phase.
To a degree Wolowski was correct: “terror” is not something one regularly
associates with the postcard today. However, rather than something that “happens” to the
postcard, as is implied, the possibility of misuse resides in the form itself. The possibility
is simply more evident as postcard conventions are still in the process of being
110

established. The postcard’s major features (shortened message, open form, varied
images, lower cost) add up to ease of use and this is precisely what makes it so readily
available for socially unacceptable uses. Thus, the postcard fantasy of easy, direct access
“goes bad” through postcard stalking and the dream of open, affordable communication
“devolves” into public insults even from the moment the postcard is created. The new
technology causes terror in seemingly infinite ways – stalking, invasion of privacy, libel,
and impersonation being just some examples – until something newer takes its place.
After postcard conventions and regulations are firmly established, it is easy to forget that
the form ever caused unease. The postcard’s central narrative becomes the lighthearted
story that postcards are bought for almost nothing, written on-the-go about unimportant
matters, and sent directly to recipients who momentarily enjoy them before discarding
them.
It is up to the novel to disrupt this accepted narrative and once again reveal the
dark side of the postcard evident in early newspaper depictions. The novel, indeed, takes
the standard postcard storyline as its starting point. The belief in the triviality, one might
even say harmlessness, of the postcard turns sinister when links in its narrative chain are
manipulated. Crimes committed via postcard seem all the more shocking because of the
postcard’s innocuous nature, but it is the very belief in that nature that makes the crimes
possible. As the postcard creates the illusion of openness and intimacy, the recipient falls
prey to its subtle deceptions. Indeed, as we shall see, postcard crimes revolve around the
question of the recipient: for whom is the postcard intended? While the postcard makes
written postal communication available to a wider range of people than ever before, in
111

E.M. Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread, it concomitantly opens postcard recipients to
shifty senders, such as a “baby” sending a postcard. While it can quickly and cheaply
deliver news of a relative’s arrival, the postcard delivers virtually untraceable death
threats in Herbert Flowerdew’s murder mystery The Seventh Post Card. This chapter
will analyze early instances of postcard terror in contemporary newspapers (especially
The New York Times), before examining how and why the postcard wrecks havoc in
Forster and Flowerdew’s novels.
We must keep in mind that the double-sidedness of the postcard, both figurative
and literal, is what makes the early postcard is so successful at deception. This creates
ambiguity even in assessing if a person has been wronged by the postcard, an ambiguity
especially exploited by Forster and Flowerdew. The postcard effortlessly publishes not
only what is helpful to people but also what should have remained hidden, at least
according to those who are negatively affected. This is true both of image and text.
Being depicted on a real-photo postcard, for example, could increase one’s fame or be an
invasion of one’s privacy. Before the era of the picture postcard, it was not uncommon
for the public to have no idea what certain celebrities, especially politicians and writers,
looked like (Diamond 158). Many people, especially women, abhorred the thought of
their images going into circulation because they no longer had any control over them, but
this was also a precondition for the new, modern conception of celebrity. In terms of the
postcard’s message, libel is difficult to prove, in intent as well as in effect. The
postcard’s open form both declares that the message contains nothing worth hiding and
invites people other than the designated recipient to view it. The burden in libel cases is
112

proving that the intended recipients are everyone except the person to whom the postcard
is addressed.

II.

It is not too much to say that even the most inoffensive of postcards could prove
deadly when fallen into the wrong hands. On the morning of November 15, 1902, an
Italian anarchist, Gennaro Rubino, attempted to assassinate the Leopold II, King of
Belgium, in Brussels. After his arrest, his pockets were found to contain picture
postcards, bearing the images of the king as well as two other Belgian royals. According
to the press, Rubino “procured the cards so as to be able to recognize the members of the
royal family” (“King of the Belgians Attacked”). Images of the royal families of Europe
were a staple of the early postcard industry, and collecting these postcards was thought of
as a harmless pastime or even one that bolstered the current hegemony. The ordinariness
of the collecting of kings is what almost brings about King Leopold II’s demise, as a
representative of an entire order. Rubino makes clear that “he would have fired at any
monarch – ‘at the King of Italy as well as at the King of the Belgians, because monarchs
are tyrants who cause the misery of their people.” An odd note to this story is that,
according to The Scotsman, Rubino admitted to considering killing Edward VII of
England but “due to the strong feelings of the English people in favour of the monarchy”
he chose the unpopular Belgian king, whose cruelty in the Congo was already well-
113

known, instead (“The Brussels Anarchist”). Postcard popularity apparently can both
increase one’s vulnerability to attack and provide some measure of protection.
Fear of anarchism at the time ran deep (American President William McKinley
having just died at the hands of an anarchist in 1901) and the postcard is always on the
verge of having anarchist connotations. It reorders hierarchies of representation. With
the postcard, it is nearly impossible to determine what is worthy of being distributed and
what should not be featured. Postcards indiscriminately disregard rigid notions of
representation and replace them with more flexible ones. In the same postcard rack a
store could sell postcards of well-known actresses and famous preachers. Confusion
between the two categories happened at least once in a newspaper feature where a woman
trying to buy postcards of “Dr. Clifford and Pastor Thomas Spurgeon” was given a lower
price because “all the actors and actresses [were] reduced to a penny” (“Postal Card
Irony” 6). The writer asks if it is “another proof of the intimate association of Church
and Stage,” referring to the spectacular nature of celebrity preachers and certain
evangelical gatherings. Prior even to being bought, the early postcard is able to send a
message.
The postcard makes both promises and threats it cannot keep. British actress
Phyllis Dare’s image proliferated in postcard form throughout the United Kingdom and
she takes her rightful place in Mills and Scott’s popular song “The Picture Post Card
Girls.” The postcard circulates her image and marks her fame but is also a source of
anxiety through the demands it conveys. Throughout her autobiography From School to
Stage, Dare references how many postcards she received from fans with the request that
114

she sign them and claims “to be rather an authority on the subject [of the picture postcard
craze]” having “signed anything between seventy-five thousand to one hundred thousand
postcards” within a three year span (55-6). But she has not always been such an expert.
At first, she “invariably took the messages written thereon most seriously” and was
terrified when she received the following one: “I fell in love with you the first time I ever
saw you, and shall determine to win you by fair means or foul” (56). Dare writes how for
weeks she avoided walking near alleys where she believed it would be easier for a
kidnapper to reach her. Later, however, the illusion of proximity that the postcard creates
no longer bothers Dare. She mentions one admirer who informs her that he is “the proud
possessor” of 937 postcards of her. He implicitly gives this as evidence of his “knowing”
her character but she is nonplussed. Dare experiences the same phenomenon when
audience members mistake her for the roles she plays on stage.
While publicity is an occupational hazard that actresses come to expect, the extent
of the fear of publicity for the common woman is revealed in a 1906 short story called
“The Picture Postcard” featured in the well-known literary magazine The Black Cat. The
story concerns the beautiful female subject of a mysterious postcard. She bears a
startling, and for those who recognize it, disturbing, resemblance to a professor’s secret
fiancée, a nun, and a household servant, all of whom happen to be named Laura. In
trying to make sense of the resemblance, the priest says it best: “Possibly some one of her
family closely resembling her may have become an actress or singer, and so have made
her face public property” (5). The anxiety that comes from the possibility of “their”
Laura becoming public property is palpable and indeed provides the drama for the short
115

story. Somehow it must be proven that each Laura cannot possibly be the woman on the
postcard for if she is, the story implies that they do not know Laura at all. Indeed, the
Laura who turns out to be the subject of the postcard, the household servant, is traveling
under an assumed name and is actually the wife of a wealthy artist, with whom she has
had a falling out. Realizing that her husband has created the postcard and sent it out in
hopes of conveying a tacit message to her, she returns home and is happily reunited with
him. The power of publicity has done its work – she has received the message.
She would be perfectly happy except for the dark side of postcard publicity: “But,
dear there’s one thing I don’t quite like…having my picture, that you painted of me,
scattered all over the country this way. It was a desperate remedy” (9). Clearly, as an
artist’s wife, she has posed for paintings before, but what bothers her is the uncontrolled
proliferation of her image that happens through the picture postcard. Indeed, this fact
threatens to mar, or even negate, the otherwise perfect happy ending. The extent to
which this is true is shown in the recourse the artist, or rather the writer, takes. He asks
his wife to pull out her copy of the postcard, and to her surprise the image has begun to
fade: “And in another day or so it will be gone completely. They were calculated to last
about a week – that is, all but one I have kept for myself. That was an easy matter to
manage if you understood photography. I didn’t intend for them to live after they had
served their purpose. Did you think I wanted your face all over the country, either,
dear?” (9). He invents a sort of magical photographic invisible ink to write his message.
It is the only way to benefit from publicity without having to pay the cost. The artist
116

keeps all three “originals” – his wife, the painting, and the now unique postcard – firmly
in his possession.
The woman writer, as discussed in the last chapter, particularly charges the space
in between domesticity and celebrity. While her activity is one that can still conceivably
be undertaken in privacy, the literary market at the turn of the century would not allow it
to stay that way. Women writers were public private figures, and no one exemplifies this
better than Marie Corelli. She was not only the most popular British woman writer but
the most popular writer of any category at the turn of the twentieth century though she
never earned critical acclaim. She was also notorious for trying to avoid the publicity
that her fans demanded of her. Yet least as early as 1902, The Picture Postcard magazine
mentions the existence of a postcard image of Corelli’s home at Stratford-on-Avon and
suggests a publishers should create a series of homes of famous writers, which harkens
back to the “homes and haunts” genre. Already images of her private life, in addition to
her writing, were generating revenue. Her publishers recognize this according to her
preface to her 1906 novel The Treasure of Heaven: “By the special request of the
Publishers, a portrait of myself, taken in the spring of this year, 1906, forms the
frontispiece to the present volume” (vii).
Corelli takes some objection to the inclusion of her photograph saying, “I am
somewhat reluctant to see it so placed, because it has nothing whatever to do with the
story which is told in the following pages, beyond being a faithful likeness of the author”
(vii). But what seems to trouble her more than the gratuitous interest in her image are the
“various gross, and I think I may say libellous and fictitious misrepresentations of me
117

[which] have been freely and unwarrantably circulated throughout Great Britain, the
Colonies, and America, by certain ‘lower’ sections of the pictorial press” (viii). Limits
on snapshot photographers, or what would be called the paparazzi today, were just being
put in place. To state it as a variation on Oscar Wilde’s famous saying, apparently, the
only thing worse than being depicted is not being depicted well. In her defense, the press
was never kind to her and did indeed include what seem even today to be unflattering
sketches, but Corelli seems unwilling to acknowledge the role of publicity in her success
and focuses only on its negative aspects. While she refuses to admit that her books may
not exactly stand only for themselves (and refuses to authorize sale of any postcards with
her image), she fears that an unflattering image may “alienate my readers from me” (vii).
Corelli is a celebrity who tries to use her status as such to restrain her own publicity. The
closest she comes to avowing this is when she says, “My objection to this sort of ‘picture
popularity’ has already been publicly stated” (italics mine, viii).
In the preface (dated July 1906), Corelli may be referring to a lawsuit she initiated
which was made public a couple months earlier in the London Chronicle. She asked a
judge to halt the sale of picture postcards that depicted scenes of her private life in
Stratford-on-Avon. Her lawyer asked the judge to compare the images on the cards and a
recent photograph (perhaps the very one alluded to in her preface) to “see what a gross
libel had been perpetrated on her features” (“Marie Corelli Brings Suit” NYT 10).
Corelli’s refusal to release any official photographs may have led to the pictorial
depiction of her life by painter A. Wall and the defense claims “that if the portraits of
Miss Corelli had been flattering nothing would have been heard of the action...very few
118

ladies would admit…that [even] a photo did them justice, and he assumed that Miss
Corelli was no exception to the rule” (10). Again, the statements would seem to indicate
that representation per se was not the problem, but rather its controllable nature.
Furthermore, Edith Wall, partner in the venture, says in their defense, “that, so far from
seeking privacy at Stratford-on-Avon, Miss Corelli had courted publicity in every way”
(10). Indeed, the images of Corelli’s “private life” include some of her eccentric
activities which would seem to be designed to draw attention, such as riding her gondola
down the Avon river.
The defense refutes the charge of libel which later appears in Corelli’s preface as
well: “If that was a libel, every exhibition of the Royal Academy would be a collection of
libels” (10). The key difference appears to be that, in the legal sense, the libel is written
and published, while in the popular sense, libel can be taken figuratively, including in a
conversation or pictorially. Hence the judge’s difficulty: “Mr. Justice Swinfen Eady said
that the point raised by the motion had never been decided before, and he would consider
his decision” (10). While the postcard images are far from being examples of high art,
neither are they malicious. By dint of not being photographs they should have escaped
the need for photographic “accuracy” yet the fantasy of the postcard’s truthfulness is too
strong to be ignored. Here, as in her preface, Corelli fears that the postcards were
“calculated to expose her to unjust contempt in relation to her private life and prejudice
her in her profession as an authoress” (10). Her lawsuit brings to the forefront anxieties
about the effects of postcard publicity and the way it blurs the line between private and
119

public realms. As the most popular writer of her day, and particularly as a woman writer,
her profession already straddles the divide, which leads to her sensitivity on the subject.
Libel written on postcards is hardly easier to prove than the pictorial libel at
which Corelli took umbrage. Because of its open form, any postcard sent through the
mail is a potential case of libel if it contains anything offensive to the recipient. Law
journals from the turn of the century are littered with cases of postcard libels and they
often get the added publicity of being featured in the newspapers. The case of Chattell v.
Turner (1896), both actresses, is one example of a relatively early libel case. Turner
accused Chattell of having an affair with her husband and, according to Chattell,
committed various acts of libel, including writing a postcard to Mr. Turner saying, “You
and your woman may expect me down, and I promise you a nice scene at the theatre. I
have stood it long enough” (“Chattell v. Turner” 361). That postcard is last in a chain of
negative publicity which finally convinces Chattell to demand of Turner through her
solicitors that she “write an apology which was to be published in two of the provincial
papers” (361). Chattell clearly intends to bring postcard publicity back under her own
control through further publicity.
At the heart of the early legal debates is the question of whether or not sending a
postcard through the mail constitutes publication of the message. Does the sender have
one or multiple recipients in mind? The open form, regardless of an address to a specific
person, theoretically allows anyone to read the message. Public opinion at the turn of the
twentieth century leans heavily toward the belief that reading postcards belonging to
others is indeed irresistible. Postal employees were just the first in a line of imaginary
120

readers and many caricatures were drawn of the meddling mailman who learns the latest
town gossip from the postcards he delivers. But the difficulty of delivering postcards is
shown in the awkward juxtaposition of instructions issued by the French Post Office in
1899: “Employees are forbidden (a) to read postcards (b) to send, forward, or deliver any
postcard bearing written insults or abusive expressions” (qtd. in Staff 63). Clearly
employees were not supposed to read other people’s mail, yet reading it would be the
only way of censoring inappropriate messages. Ironically, the assumption that postal
workers might read postcard messages was what gave the charge of libel some legal
weight.
Invariably, in legal arguments postcards and other forms of communication are
contrasted, usually to the liability of the postcard. Rulings are usually for the plaintiff in
the early decades of the postcard. A landmark appeal case in England, Sadgrove v. Hole
between two businessmen in 1901, overturned the verdict in favor of the defendant but
was an exception to the rule since “a communication sent by post card instead of by a
closed letter would generally be evidence of malice” (“Sadgrove v. Hole” 459). The case
recounts the law literature on postcard libels. According to the prosecution, damaging
statements were previously made by letter, of course, including infamous anonymous
letters, but that damage was limited because they were privileged communications, which
would only incidentally be read by a third party. Letters might be intercepted, but
postcards were made to be intercepted. Telegrams also came under similar charges of
libel publication but according to the decision of Robinson v. Jones in 1879, “the case of
a post card is stronger than that of a telegram, because of the impossibility of imagining a
121

case in which there could be any necessity to substitute a post card for a closed letter”
(461-2). The open format of the telegram can be justified because of urgency, but the
postcard has no such excuse. Furthermore, the judge of this early case fears the ease with
which postcards can perpetrate libel: “I decline to be a party to allowing a libeler to
extend the sphere of the publication of his libel beyond the necessity or exigency of the
case, for the purpose of saving himself a small difference in postage” (465). Once again,
what was seen as a particular and helpful feature of the postcard as a mode of
communication, its low cost, is also a liability.
The loophole in the Sadgrove v. Hole appeal was that the message did not state
the name of the plaintiff and could not be readily inferred from what was written. The
addressee did not necessarily have to be the subject of the address. The postcard form
proved tempting to libelers and new ways around legal injunctions were found using this
ambiguity. The Poster and Post-card Collector reports of a Frenchman who printed a
series of postcards depicting the evils of drunkenness and posted them to known or
suspected inebriates (243). The message of these postcards was clear but also vague
enough since it was dependent on the recipient making a connection between himself and
the image, taking the image personally. Even though certain actions for slander were
taken against the sender, the charges clearly could not stand up in court due to his savvy
handling of the postcard form.
Of course, another line of defense was simply not admitting that one wrote the
slanderous postcard. No less than Queen Natalie of Serbia was accused by her daughter-
in-law, Queen Draga, of sending objectionable postcards. In an interview Queen Natalie
122

says, “The charge that I sent her insulting postcards is an infamous bit of malignity on her
part” and that Queen Draga is a “petty, narrow-minded, narrow-hearted Servian subject”
(“Queen Natalie’s Wrath” 7). Indeed, why would she insult her daughter-in-law by
postcard when she can do it in the international press? Yet the point remains the same:
the postcard with its short messages is seen as particularly susceptible to falsified
identities. The letter would allow an analysis of style, at least, if not handwriting (one of
the new scientific rages at the turn of the century). Letters were quite the production but
postcard messages, by association with the medium, could be reproduced and altered.
Also, because of its open format, the postcard has instant “witnesses” who could be led
astray.
In other instances, the “witnesses” themselves are the victims, failing to recognize
the postcard has intentionally rather than accidentally fallen into their hands. An early
postcard scam reported in Godey’s Lady’s Book banks on the assumption that postcards
would be read and taken at face value. The plot is simple enough: a swindler in Paris
“wrote a number of postal-card messages, addressed to himself, as if coming from
different persons, in which frequent references were made to certain large sums of money
that he was shortly to receive. The porter, of course, read all these notes before taking the
cards to the tenant's apartment” (“A Parisian Swindler”). When the man asks to borrow
money from the porter, the latter readily lends it to him, having it on supposed good
authority that the money would soon be repaid. Instead, the man disappears. The
“accidental” manner in which the information on the postcard reaches the porter
123

convinces him of its veracity. He never suspects that he himself is the intended recipient
of the postcards.
The same is true in another postcard scam from the turn of the century involving
the sale of postcards to American tourists “from” the former prime minister of Britain,
William Ewart Gladstone. Gladstone was widely known to correspond via postcard and
to advocate the postcard as an efficient mode of communication. The scam artists created
an addressee “of whom the world has never heard,” wrote the briefest of messages, and
forged Gladstone’s signature (“Counterfeit Gladstone Postcards”). Gladstone’s
reputation was such that he was known to correspond personally with ordinary citizens
by postcard. Ironically enough, the message reads: “Dear Sir: There is [absolutely] no
truth in the statement you have kindly brought to my notice. Yours faithfully, W.E.
Gladstone”. The falseness here is not in the statement per se but in the supposed sender,
who gives the object its commercial value, and the intended recipient/buyer of the
postcard. The article exposes the disappointment of the purchasers when they discover
that their “prized relic” came from a “manufactory of ready-made Gladstonian
postcards.” The incident also exposes the fantasy of receiving a postcard “from”
Gladstone. Rather than the imaginary recipients of the real Gladstone, they become the
real recipients of the pretend Gladstone.

124

III.

The postcard’s impossible senders and equivocal recipients are the norm rather
than the exception in E.M. Forster’s first novel Where Angels Fear to Tread. Young
Irma Herriton receives postcards from none other than a baby. Of course, she is far too
delighted to keep that a secret. While at first it would seem to be pure school-girl naiveté
that could convince her that a baby could write postcards, she does vaguely understand
that it is the baby’s father who has sent them, despite being signed her “lital brother.”
She behaves, though, as if the baby itself had sent them. To complicate matters, the
postcard actually may have been sent with the intention to blackmail Irma’s grandmother.
The disjuncture between sender and recipient, and the wishful thinking that accompanies
it, is at the heart of the postcard form and what makes it so susceptible to appropriation.
Once again, the “natural” order of the postcard, from the seller to buyer/writer/sender to
addressee/reader has so many potential gaps in it that the potentially “respectable”
postcard can go astray at any moment. Forster uses the postcard to signal the
irrepressible and unpredictable nature of desire when faced with stifling conventionality.
In Where Angels Fear to Tread, the first postcard arrives at a crucial moment
halfway through the novel. The plot begins by well-mannered, upper-class, and
provincial Mrs. Herriton packing off her widowed daughter-in-law, Lilia, to Italy for
improvement or at least to keep her from remarrying beneath the family to Mr. Kingcroft.
Though her eldest son has been dead for years, Mrs. Herriton still feels that Lilia’s
“vulgar” behavior reflects poorly on the family and sets a bad example for Lilia’s
125

daughter, Irma (or her granddaughter, as Mrs. Herriton would prefer to call her). Lilia
goes to Italy under Miss Caroline Abbott’s supposedly sure supervision but news comes
from a tiny town in Monteriano that Lilia is engaged to an Italian. Mrs. Herriton sends
her other son, Philip, to try to stop the marriage but he fails since the Italian, Gino,
marries Lilia as soon as he hears Philip is coming. Forster, though he portrays the
Herritons in various degrees as narrow and controlling, then shows the negative effects of
the marriage through the disintegration of Lilia’s life, from deluded happiness to
resentment to death in childbirth. The novel could have ended there. Mrs. Herriton
chillingly concludes that matter has been taken care of and decides to devote no further
attention to it – the family’s respectability is safe. That is when the first of the postcards
arrive, addressed to Irma from her infant half-brother.
It is not surprising that this turning point in the novel introduces the new medium
of the postcard. Up until this moment, communication media in the story, mostly letters,
is fairly straightforward and intelligible within England. The first letter that appears in
the novel is the one from Mrs. Herriton to Lilia, prompted by rumors that Lilia likes Mr.
Kingcroft, “who wrote at once, begging for information, and pointing out that Lilia must
either be engaged or not, since no intermediate state existed” (5). The letter produces the
type of order desired by the sender and is deemed “good” for that reason: “It was a good
letter, and flurried Lilia extremely. She left Mr. Kingcroft without even the pressure of a
rescue-party” (5). For Mrs. Herriton, the letter is the harbinger of clear and conventional
social relations, of which she herself is a symbol within the novel. In this first instance of
letter-writing, the letter is contrasted with the more organic “talk” that circulates, though
126

both serve Mrs. Herriton’s purposes, to the letter’s advantage. A tried and true
technology, the letter’s association with efficiency is seen when, in the midst of the
uproar produced by news of Lilia’s engagement, two of Mrs. Herriton’s servants threaten
to leave. Failing to find instant replacements for them through registry offices, she
“wrote six letters” and was rewarded by the servants’ contrite return.
Letters received by Mrs. Herriton also serve her purposes by being socially
legible. When Lilia first writes letters from Italy, they are proof to the family that Mrs.
Herriton’s plan, via Philip’s idea, was a success. Philip “declared that she was
improving” based on their content (5). She raves about the places she visits and seems to
be sufficiently content to have forgotten Mr. Kingcroft. After it turns out that Lilia has
fallen in love with Gino, the letters may, at first glance, appear to have been deceitful, but
in fact, Lilia’s second letter from Monteriano is what first made Mrs. Herriton suspicious.
After Philip and Harriet leave the room, “Mrs. Herriton sat a little longer at the breakfast-
table, re-reading Lilia’s letter” (6-7). Clearly this is not because of some great affection
for Lilia or pleasure at her writing style, but rather, to look for clues as to the efficacy of
her own design. Later, those phrases which are impressed in Mrs. Herriton’s memory,
“We love this place – Caroline is sweeter than ever – Italians full of simplicity and
charm” will show that she was right to be suspicious (10).
What Mrs. Herriton gathers from Lilia’s letter is the only explanation for her
intuition that something must be coming with the second post. Her correct assumption
amazes her daughter Harriet. Arriving with that post is a letter from Mrs. Theobald,
Lilia’s mother, announcing Lilia’s engagement. Mrs. Theobald’s “intolerable…crested
127

paper” has long been a marker for Mrs. Herriton of the pretentious nature of Lilia’s
origins (7). Everything about the letter is readable to Mrs. Herriton. Harriet, whom Mrs.
Herriton has successfully trained to be even more conventional than herself (almost “too
successfully” as Mrs. Herriton says at one point), at first cannot “read” the letter since its
contents are at odds with her expectations of what a letter should carry: “ ‘Look here,
read it, mother; I can’t make head or tail’ ” (8). For her, “the meaning” of the letter is
ungraspable since she expects form and content to perfectly align. Mrs. Herriton, on the
other hand, is prepared for any content and thus calmly understands that the letter is
announcing Lilia’s engagement.
That Mrs. Herriton is more concerned with form than content is shown by the fact
that the way she learns about Lilia’s engagement bothers Mrs. Herriton more than Lilia’s
engagement itself when “suddenly she broke down over what might seem a small point”
(8). Mrs. Herriton abruptly realizes that not only has the content of the letter violated the
conventions that are dear to her but, moreover, form itself has been violated: “How dare
she not tell me direct? How dare she write first to Yorkshire! Pray, am I to hear through
Mrs. Theobald – a patronizing, insolent letter like this? Have I no claim at all? Bear
witness…that for this I’ll never forgive her!” (8). What Mrs. Herriton understands all of a
sudden is that Lilia knew her mother would share the news with her mother-in-law and
counted on it. It is not the content of the letter which is patronizing and insolent, but
rather the way the letter is used as a postcard, through the message’s indirect
transmission, is patronizing and insolent. While that may seem to be incongruous
considering the entire plot of the novel is set in motion by her desire to prevent Lilia’s
128

remarriage, it is actually consistent. What Mrs. Herriton cares about in the issue of Lilia
staying a widow is all about social form: she considers it an insult to the family. If Mrs.
Herriton’s distinguishing feature is a savvy adherence to convention, it comes as no
surprise that she should care so much for form, in the sense of medium. In her only act of
physical violence, Mrs. Herriton takes Mrs. Theobold’s letter and tears it into pieces.
The act of tearing the letter into pieces is repeated symbolically during the trip
Philip must then undertake to Italy in order to put an end to the engagement and save the
family’s honor. In Italy, letters lose their power to work. Italy is seen as the antithesis of
the letter in the same way it is seen as the antithesis of British order. The standard
technology might exist, but it is not put to use in the same way. The first instance of the
letter’s failure in Italy actually belongs to Philip, in the letter which he sends ahead of
himself to Caroline to announce his arrival. At face value, it might not seem to be a
failure. Miss Abbott receives it and accordingly comes to the train station to meet him,
albeit somewhat late. Its real failure is that it communicates something that is true but
that Philip wants to keep hidden. Philip believes that he is revealing something for the
first time when he takes Gino aside and says, “Signor Carella, I will be frank with you. I
have come to prevent you marrying Mrs. Herriton” (23). In fact, Gino says he is unable
to comply with Philip’s request (and receive the monetary award) “because we are
married – married—married as soon as I knew you were coming” (23-4). The letter,
aside from announcing Philip’s arrival, clearly announces his intentions despite him.
Moreover, it actually produces the opposite effect of those intentions: a shotgun wedding.
129

The unexpected but severe consequences already allude to the postcard’s open format and
how easily the medium slips from under the sender’s control.
Much of the drama in Where Angels Fear to Tread comes from the ambiguity of
Gino’s moral status, whether his actions are brutish or innocent. Gino, consistent with
his character, at first does not seem to be aware of the true efficacy of the letter, rather
than have a malicious intent to subvert the form, though he clearly does that. When it
comes to his preferences, he desires face to face communication. In fact, he uses the
pretext of going into town for letters as an excuse to leave the house: “They were
delivered at the door, but it took longer to get them at the office” (30). Once in town, he
runs into “his very dear friend Spiridione Tesi of the custom-house at Chiasso, whom he
had not met for two years,” who has come to visit him unannounced, completely unlike
Philip (31). Not surprisingly, at the post office “there were no letters, and of course they
sat down at the Caffè Garibaldi” (31). Later, once he and Lilia start having marital
issues, he tells Spiridione but his friend “replied in a philosophical [and] not very helpful
letter” (41). Gino almost would wish letters could work in Italy as instigators of order
but he cannot quite see them as Mrs. Herriton does: “His other great friend, whom he
trusted more, was still serving in Eretrea or some other desolate outpost. It would take
too long to explain everything to him. And, besides, what was the good of letters?
Friends cannot travel through the post” (41). Gino seems to be clueless as to the “good of
letters” as opposed to Mrs. Herriton’s “good letter.”
Lilia’s letters in Italy are the most tragic of all because they have stopped
working, contrary to her expectations. After her marriage, in response to her first letter to
130

Mrs. Herriton, “a jaunty account of her happiness,” “Harriet answered the letter saying
(1) all future communications should be addressed to the solicitors; (2) would Lilia return
an inlaid box which Harriet had lent her – but not given—to keep handkerchiefs and
collars in?” (27). Lilia has been effectively cut out of the family, shown by Harriet’s
already solicitor-like reply, organized by numbered points. Lilia’s letter has failed to
produce the desired response, which is to keep up the connection. She says to Gino,
“Look what I am giving up to live with you!” (27). Gino, not understanding letter order,
believes she is referring to the box, the more natural referent for him. Lilia and Gino fail
once more when the solicitor writes her ordering her to give up some of her money due to
her remarriage; she and Gino “composed a stinging reply, which had no effect” (27).
Forster chooses to draw attention to a disconnect between northern and southern ways
beginning at the level of letter.
The failures of Lilia’s letters become even more tragic when it becomes clear that
her marriage is a failure. After Lilia’s discovery and confrontation of Gino’s infidelity,
she ends up writing “page after page, analyzing his character, enumerating his inequities,
reporting whole conversations, tracing all the causes and the growth of her misery” (41).
Only after writing it does she realize it is a letter meant for Irma. She sends it off, hoping
for catharsis, but instead, Mrs. Herriton intercepts it and saves “Irma’s placid childhood”
from being destroyed forever (41). Lilia fails twice, once because she expects a nine-
year-old child to understand and sympathize with her predicament, and secondly because
the letter never even arrives in her hands. Later on, in what could be considered another
way the letter fails Lilia, Mrs. Herriton uses it to make Caroline feel remorseful for her
131

own part in facilitating the marriage (“She burst into tears when I told her a little, only a
little, of that terrible letter. I never saw such genuine remorse”) (45). Once again Harriet
is called upon to write, “forbidding direct communication between mother and daughter,
and concluding with formal condolences” (41).
In her rage, Lilia tears up Harriet’s letter, an action reminiscent of Mrs. Herriton’s
response to the indirect announcement of Lilia’s engagement. Immediately, she begins to
write “a very short letter, whose gist was “Come and save me” (42). She writes the letter
to Mr. Kingcroft, as a last resort. But Gino can read her, even without reading the
contents of her letter: “It is not good to see your wife crying when she writes…[nor] to
see that she is writing to a man. Nor should she shake her fist at you when she leaves the
room” (42). Despite putting the letter in an envelope, Gino clearly sees its contents
written all over Lilia’s face, as if it were the open face of a postcard. Once again, the
letter, whose path was so straight in England, is foiled in this foreign environmemt. Lilia
goes through the trouble of delivering the letter to the post herself, “but in Italy so many
things can be arranged. The postman was a friend of Gino’s, and Mr. Kingcroft never got
his letter” (42). Shortly thereafter, Lilia dies and Forster implies that she becomes ill
from giving up hope of getting a response. It is as if the natural course of the letter is
anything but natural in Italy.
Lilia might have succeeded had she sent a postcard, whose open form she could
have used to her own advantage, to dispel suspicion, rather than a letter. But the fact that
she is still trying to send a letter shows her fatal inability to integrate into her new
surroundings. The postcard’s vagaries seem to be more congenial to the Italian soil and it
132

indeed succeeds where the letter has failed. Unlike the letter Lilia once sent Irma from
Monteriano, postcards from Italy make it into Irma’s hands. This is made possible by the
categorization of the postcard as an object rather than a communication and the use of the
image as a distraction. Forster writes, “Irma collected picture post cards, and Mrs.
Herriton or Harriet always glanced first at all that came, lest the child should get hold of
something vulgar” (49). The fact that Irma collects postcards is enough reason not to be
surprised when one arrives in the mail for her, even from Italy, whereas a letter addressed
to a nine-year-old would surely raise eyebrows. At the time, postcard clubs had sprung
up around the world with the express purpose of exchanging postcards, so messages
written on them were usually generic. Thus the Herritons view the postcards as items to
be added to a collection, rather than as a form of communication.
Mrs. Herriton and Harriet are much more concerned with the quality of the
images on the postcards which Irma receives, believing them to be the only bearers of a
message. The censure is not unrealistic for the time, with such treatises as The Child and
the Cinematograph Show and the Picture Post-Card Evil by Canon Hardwicke
Drummond Rawnsley, published by 1913. Principal targets were “vulgar’ comic cards or
even what some critics of the time would call semi-pornographic card (all countries took
active measure to prohibit “actual” pornographic cards, though the lines were blurry).
With the uproar over the images featured on the cards, less attention is paid to the
message. Harriet looks at the card Irma has just been sent and “on this occasion the
subject seemed perfectly inoffensive – a lot of ruined factory chimneys – and Harriet was
about to hand it to her niece when her eye was caught by the words on the margin. She
133

gave a shriek and flung the card into the grate” (49). By then, of course, it is too late and
Irma manages to get a hold of the postcard and the postcard gets a hold of her
imagination.
The text reads, “View of the superb city of Monteriano – from your lital brother”
(49). On the surface, and the postcard’s great advantage here is that it is all surface, there
does not seem to be anything inappropriate about the words either. Neither the irony
between the postcard’s image and its description nor the spelling error merit Harriet’s
reaction, which is to box Irma’s ears and tear the postcard into pieces (the latter action
being reminiscent of her mother and Lilia). The openness and innocuousness of the text
masks the true import of the postcard – that Gino has a child by Lilia with him in
Monteriano. The “sender” is the message, or at least the beginning of the real message.
What concerns the characters for the rest of the novel is determining what the postcard
really says. Mrs. Herriton readily comes to her own conclusion, that Gino is
blackmailing her, but Forster refuses to clarify Gino’s intentions unequivocally.
The Herritons had already received news of the baby’s existence via a letter
from their solicitors after Lilia’s death. The very hallmark of discretion, the letter allows
them to decide to keep the baby’s existence a secret from everyone. Irma’s receiving the
postcard from Monteriano turns everything upside down. The postcard bothers them so
much because not only does it reveal to Irma the existence of her half-brother, but
through its very “innocent” and “candid” nature it also forces them to openly
acknowledge that they are keeping a secret. Through Mrs. Herriton’s dexterous
management, Philip had only “felt a little displeased, though he could not tell with what”
134

when they decide not to tell anyone about the baby (44). She makes it clear that not
telling is not necessarily keeping a secret in the same way she prefers “‘course’ to
‘tactics’” when referring to that choice. With the postcard blithely and “unintentionally”
announcing the existence of the baby, the Herritons must acknowledge the discrepancy of
attitudes and extract the promise of secrecy from Irma. That in itself leads her to asking
more questions.
The postcard’s power is not only the announcement of a blood relative but in the
creation of the fantasy of the little brother. The idea of a baby sending a postcard is an
absurdity, obvious even at age nine. Yet this extreme case reveals the general workings
of the postcard: it feeds the dream of impossible, direct communication. The postcard
allows the recipient to believe that the sender would write the perfect phrases were there
more room on the postcard, thus making the sender exactly what the recipient wishes him
to be. This happens independently of the sender’s intentions due to the form, let alone
when the sender is purposely trying to deceive the recipient by pretending to be someone
else. Though even letters can be forged, the postcard, through its short and open text, is
better at masking an identity. An entire letter written in the voice of a baby is clearly
written by an adult while a postcard makes it easier to suspend disbelief. Forster, through
his use of free indirect discourse, shows how naturally the suspension occurs: “Just as
they had got things a little quiet the beastly baby sent another picture post card – a comic
one, not particularly proper” (50).
And Irma clearly wants to believe in the existence of the little brother brought
about by the postcard’s arrival. In fact, the baby postcards fit Irma’s desires even more
135

completely than a physically present baby could: “A new little brother is a valuable
sentimental asset to a schoolgirl, and her school was then passing through an acute phase
of baby-worship” (51). As a sentimental object, nothing can surpass the picture postcard,
part of whose job it was to sentimentalize everything. Forster strengthens the connection
by saying, “Happy the girl…who had the right to extricate them from mail-carts” (51).
Here mail-cart is meant in the (now obsolete) sense of baby carriage or pram but alludes
strongly to the arrival of the “baby” by mail. Irma ultimately ends up breaking her vow
of secrecy after a second postcard from the baby reaches her: “She was proof against a
single post card, not against two” (51).
Once Irma mentions the baby, it becomes impossible for the Herritons not to
mention him, which has been their fear all along. For them, the existence of the baby is a
scandal and they guess Gino must know that, hence arrival of the postcards: “Two years
before, Philip would have said the motive was to give pleasure. Now he, like his mother,
tried to think of something sinister and subtle” (51). Between the two possibilities, that
Gino is simply trying to entertain Irma or that he is somehow trying to extort money, the
latter is clearly the more obvious possibility, considering how he had married Lilia (also)
for money. As pertains to Irma, he had been willing to bring her to Italy while Lilia was
alive not just because he thought Irma might be happy there, but also because then they
would not have to part with her money. Yet the postcard still does not seem to be the
most likely tool of extortion. It is to the credit of the postcard’s power of dissimulation
that critic Denis Godfrey writes in 1968: “Irma has been told of her mother’s death, but
not of the existence of a far away little brother. Now through the medium of two
136

postcards sent, without any sinister intention, by Gino, she hears about him” (23). That
the postcard is without any sinister intention is a big assumption.
The impossibility of knowing the postcard’s true intentions, related to its true
recipients, is what moves the plot forward to its, and the actual baby’s, final resting place
when Philip and Harriet are sent back to Italy by Mrs. Herriton to acquire the child.
Both the Herriton’s and Irma believe they are the intended recipients of the postcards.
Mrs. Herriton considers herself the object of blackmail and responds with a letter through
her solicitors while Irma, having been entreated in the last postcard “to send the baby
one,” secretly does so despite the injunction against it. The postcard is the new weapon
of choice in “the curious duel which is fought over every baby,” which, in this case, is
actually lost by the baby (4). The child dies during Harriet’s attempted kidnap, never
once having been named.

IV.

Death by postcard comes one step closer in Herbert Flowerdew’s novel The
Seventh Post Card (1914). Flowerdew was a prolific British author at the turn of the
twentieth century up until World War I. His work was popular enough at the time for
several of his novels, including The Seventh Post Card, to be translated into French, and
one of his novels, The Presumption of Stanley Hay, MP even served as the basis for a
film decades after its first publication. Plagued by financial problems, Flowerdew also
wrote under the pseudonym Nowell Cay, published short stories for newspapers and
137

found it expedient to serialize his work in magazines. His novels gained popularity as
well as notoriety by treating the controversial topics of his day, especially divorce. The
Seventh Post Card is a more conventional mystery novel in many ways, but self-
consciously so. Flowerdew shows an awareness not only of the public’s fear of the ever-
increasing speed associated with modernity, but also with the particular anxiety inherent
in new forms of media.
In The Seventh Post Card, a mysterious organization called “The League of
Personal Safety,” abbreviated the League or L.P.S., terrorizes all the citizens of England
who drive motor vehicles. While this was a minority of people in 1914, it was a
significant, and wealthy, one. The League claims that, because of the influence of
motorists, measures are not taken to prevent reckless driving and thus protect innocent
pedestrians. The League takes justice into its own hands, executing, without a trial,
anyone who has killed a pedestrian while driving a motor vehicle. The victim is notified
of the League’s decision via postcard. Two writers of detective fiction, Sir Julian
Daymont and Joanna Somerset, and a young law student who has fallen in love with
Joanna, Jack Yemmerde, charge themselves with the apprehension of the League. The
plot thickens considerably first when Joanna accidentally kills a pedestrian and then when
Jack’s rich grandfather, who is opposed to Jack and Joanna’s marriage, does the same.
More than a mere mode of communication, the postcard in The Seventh Post Card
embodies the logic of the League. The novel, in turn, activates dormant fears of the
postcard’s ambiguous recipients and anonymous senders.
138

When The Seventh Post Card was originally published in The Cavalier in
serialized form, it ran under the much more sensational title The Motor Kuklux. At first
glance, the fact that the magazine was owned by Frank Munsey, the creator of pulp
fiction magazines in America, appears to be the reason. However, the characters
themselves refer to the league in this way. While the Ku Klux Klan in America was
considered long-dead (Flowerdew’s novel was published right before its revival,
influenced partially by the silent film The Birth of a Nation in 1915), it had left a lasting
impression even in England. Imagery of lynchings, either photographed or sketched,
continued to circulate throughout Europe in various forms, including on picture postcards
themselves. The phrase “Ku Klux” had come to stand for any vigilante group.
Flowerdew’s choice of the term Motor Kuklux is meant to conjure up associations with
terror and secretive, communal retribution. The parallels that Flowerdew unexpectedly
draws between the postcard and the Motor Kuklux include singular messages that are, in
fact, meant for everyone, and masked senders. Most importantly, Flowerdew aligns their
method of simplification: they both establish “short-cuts,” ignoring the full story of what
may have happened. Flowerdew links the vigilante group’s fantasy of instant and
complete justice with the postcard’s simplified form of communication.
Ideally justice should be as swift and simple as sending a postcard but that belief
goes awry when taken literally. In the novel, the fantasy of instantaneous justice turns
into its opposite: justice becomes terror and just as instantaneous communication borders
on impenetrability. Vigilante groups, when taking justice into their own hands,
simplifying the process of trials and minimizing the possibility of appeals, actually turn
139

justice into its opposite, something criminal. An added level of irony is that through the
principle of simplification, the League resembles another technology: that of the
automobile itself. The automobile makes motion and speed so easy to control for those
who have access to it that the motion and speed actually become deadly. What is meant
to simplify life technologically, when it reaches past a certain limit, takes life away. The
cover art for the initial installment of Flowerdew’s story in the Cavalier demonstrates this
affinity by conflating deadly motorists and the League in one image of a sinister goggled
motorist running down a well-dressed man. It seems as if the serial killer is avenging run-
down pedestrians by running down pedestrians.
The novel begins with the League’s only letter: type-written, sent to some of the
most important automobile clubs and associations in London, and signed “The League of
Personal Safety.” Its message warning motorists is completely misunderstood. At first,
the mysterious sender is assumed to be generally against new technology, only
coincidentally in the form of the automobile. The League’s initial use of the more
traditional letter seems to corroborate this. The Secretary of the Petrollers compares the
sender to the “crank” who sent “a letter from some Association formed to oppose all
modern inventions” (3). What becomes clear is that the League of Personal Safety
actually employs technology, especially modern communication media, to bring about its
purposes. The fact that the letter is typewritten (an affront to genteel “personal”
communication at the time) and anonymous, for all intents and purposes, are the reader’s
first indicators. Contrary to its name and its “humanitarian” goals, the League is
140

portrayed as an impersonal, automated and malefic force, much like the automotive
technology that is the focus of its aggression.
Likewise, despite having introduced itself via letter, that same letter functions as a
postcard, which is the League’s true representative. What is especially terrifying about
the League of Personal Safety’s announcement is how lightly it is taken, a quality
associated with the postcard. The letters sent by the League announce its intentions
without any particular fanfare. They arrive at the various offices on April first, which
itself turns out to be a coincidence, “quite accidental,” since it later becomes clear that the
author is in earnest and this is not a mere prank (1). Though the language of the letter is
rather formal, “the communication was not taken seriously by any of its recipients” (2).
It is treated more like a postcard than a letter by all who receive it. Flowerdew goes into
detail how the letter only accidentally reaches Scotland Yard where the authorities
“attached so little importance to it that when later the missive assumed importance the
typewritten sheet could not be found” and “the secretary of the Royal Auto Club merely
dropped his copy into the waste-paper basket with the morning’s advertisements” (2).
This particular letter takes it place next to the postcard with the rest of the junk mail.
The League’s letter is also printed and distributed in multiple copies, in the same way
postcards are mass reproduced.
The League’s first postcard is, indeed, also ignored. The very day after the initial
letter had been sent out, an unavoidable accident happens when a motor-omnibus driver
runs over a little girl who had darted out into the street without looking. Despite obvious
mitigating circumstances, the League considers the girl’s death a shortcut to proving the
141

driver’s guilt. The driver is shot dead four days later and a postcard is found in his
pocket with a postmark twenty-four hours prior “giving him formal notice that the
execution has been decided upon and signed ‘L.P.S.’” (4). Once again, like reactions to
the letter, “to all appearances Smith had attached so little importance to it, if he even
understood what it meant, that he had put it in his pocket without mentioning to anybody
that he had received it” (4). The postcard’s completely apparent message is illegible to
the driver. Not until the West End Gazette suggests the connection between the initials
“L.P.S.” and the League of Personal Safety does anyone remember the letter.
In the postcards that continue to follow, Flowerdew undoes the established
conventions of the postcard to reveal what it was always capable of being. The entire
plot of the novel hinges on the fact that the postcard does not divulge its sender. It hardly
seems to give any clues at all as to the League’s true identity, which is absolutely
essential to the League’s endeavor. The tagline for Flowerdew’s story in The Cavalier, in
fact, is “How a nameless Nemesis terrorizes automobile drivers” (193). Part of the
postcard’s ability to remain untraceable is its shortened form. In an age where
handwriting analysis was the newest forensic tool, the postcard is especially difficult to
match with a writer because it contains a limited writing sample. Sir Julian, moreover,
points out that the League’s handwriting on the postcards is probably disguised in any
case, which is why he turns to the typewritten letter for clues. The murderer’s, or
possible murderers’, identity is in question until the very end. His identity, means, and
methods all become subsumed in the communication technology he cleverly prefers – the
postcard.
142

More than not revealing a specific name, the postcard refuses to reveal even the
makeup of the organization – whether it is the work of one man or many. Though this is
related to the League’s need to continue working undetected, the fact has valence to
vigilante dynamics as well. Choosing to refer to itself as a multiple entity, the “League”
implies that it carries collective sentiment and has numerous resources at its disposal. As
a collective action, it also disperses responsibility. Though the detectives suspect from
the beginning of the novel that The League of Personal Safety is in fact just one man,
Wilmott Milldane, the question of whether the League is one or many killers always
hovers over the text. The postcard so masks his identity that no amount of circumstantial
evidence seems to be able to eliminate the possibility that Milldane is not acting alone.
Even after Milldane is apprehended, there is no way of proving who else was not
involved especially since another postcard recipient, Jack’s grandfather, is murdered
afterward.
Much of the League’s power comes not only from keeping its own identity a
secret but also from being able to interpellate multiple recipients simultaneously. Though
each postcard is addressed to only one individual, the entire country “gets” the message,
which was fully the League’s intention. This effect is already the result of the postcard’s
open form, but is amplified when the League’s postcards are reproduced in the press. Sir
Julian finds “in the half-penny picture papers almost full-size photographed reproductions
of the type-written letter which had been pinned on the notice-board of the Roadsters’
Club, together with life-size photographs of the warning postcards, all hand-written, and
written in the same hand” (8). That they appear in the “half-penny picture papers” is
143

significant beyond the implication that the events are being sensationalized. These
papers, by costing a half-penny, the celebrated cheaper postal rate of the postcard, and by
being illustrated, mimic the postcard itself. Reproducing the League’s postcards in “life-
size” strengthens this point. Inadvertently, the newspapers help send these death
sentences to everyone so that their fulfillment is just a matter of time in the mind of the
public.
The accepted view of the postcard, both social and legal, claims that this postcard
is intended for you, the one holding it in your hands, and only you, but that is never truly
the case. When the public accepts the postcard’s fantasy of direct communication, each
individual assumes he is the intended recipient and the effect is collective terror: “Dread
of the League had already affected the rate of speed of motor traffic, and that even the
motor-buses in the metropolis picked their way along the thoroughfares at reduced speed
in fear lest they might inadvertently cause loss of life” (7). The public becomes obsessed
with the case, taking it personally, which fuels the terror even more.
The impression that the League could be addressing anyone via postcard is
magnified by the fact that the message itself is not personal. That the actual
pronouncements of capital punishment are sent on postcards is sinisterly fitting – the
deaths caused by the automotive drivers were accidental and their sentences at first seem
incidental. The limited space of the postcard ensures that the sentence will indeed be a
sentence. The novel itself never reproduces any of the postcard messages word for word
and this contributes to the sense that the message contains nothing “special.” It also gives
a sense that the message is the same every time, with only an almost arbitrary address
144

change, rather than being tailored for each incident. Victim after victim is basically
enumerated in the novel’s first pages, with only the slightest description as to who they
are and the circumstances around the accident.
After five deaths following postcards from the otherwise traceless League, the
League takes on “an almost supernatural character in the public mind” (6). Since the
League only “appears” via postcards and dead bodies, the postcard itself takes on this
association. Jack at one point says of the postcard, “We know now that the postcard
means what it says” and later declares to his grandfather that he will not “leave the
neighbourhood while the threat of the postcard is hanging over you” (102). In the
slippage of these two statements, the postcard itself appears to have agency. The inability
of the police or the detectives to find the murderer attributes to the postcard the ability to
enact instant justice. The sixth victim, a stock broker, for example, acts as if actually
receiving the postcard itself is the direct, albeit delayed: he “had not waited to receive it,
but as soon as he found himself liable to do so, had hastily disguised himself and taken to
flight with such thoroughness and success that none of his relatives and acquaintances
knew whether the [League] had found him or not” (6). For the League as postcard, the
distance between saying and doing is supernaturally short.
To add to its supernatural associations, the killer appears to be all knowing. The
League appears to be informed about each incident almost immediately after it happens.
In truth, this power has a very mundane source: the newspapers. It is later discovered
that Milldane “used to spend his whole time reading newspapers that came to him from
all parts of the country. Sometimes he took cuttings from them…about some accident
145

caused by a motor-car or some case of careless driving or exceeding the speed limit”
(139). Thus, after Joanna herself injures a pedestrian in an accident, she is safe for all
intents and purposes until an account of it appears in the newspaper, which would then
make her subject to assassination by the League. Besides the press literally reproducing
the League postcards, it also practices a similar logic of simplification. Even while
getting the “story,” the press’s need to compress and quickly deliver it leads to an ironic
suppression of other stories. It has already become clear that the League gets its
information from publicity but journalists choose to ignore how their actions will affect
the larger context of the news story they are delivering. By publishing news of Joanna’s
accident, they are complicit with the League.
It is not without irony that the only time Joanna is actually pursued by a stranger
in the novel is when “the chief descriptive reporter of the Axis News Agency and one of
the most brilliant and successful journalists of the hour,” Gracchus Wells, follows her and
Jack, further aligning the League with mass media (161). Jack at first even believes it to
be their main suspect, Milldane, but it turns out to be Wells seeking information for an
article. Jack “felt that he could have shot the man” when he finds out it is Wells just as
surely as he had planned to shoot Milldane, had the pursuant been him. The two seem to
be just as threatening to Jack as he tries to protect Joanna from the League of Personal
Safety. Wells, on the other hand, considers himself and his work as actively opposed to
the League: “Publication means light; the suppression of fact means darkness and all its
attendant evils” (164). He says the publicity that will surround Joanna after the story
breaks will be protective and he does “not admit for a moment that he considered a good
146

newspaper story of more importance than an innocent girl’s safety” (164). If people are
constantly watching her, he reasons, the killer will have no opportunity to come near her
– a “theory” to which Jack does not subscribe (186). Wells continues, “If I had followed
my inclination and made a feature of Colonel Yemmerde’s danger from the Kuklux
directly the inquest on Gibson was ended instead of being persuaded to wait until he had
a post card from the League, I reckon I should have saved his life” (164). The irony, of
course, is that before a postcard is issued by the League, Jack’s grandfather is not in any
danger. Mass media fails to protect those who might be targeted by the Motor Kuklux in
the same way the League of Personal Safety is far from inducing a sense of safety.
Jack continues to make the connection explicit when one of Wells’s papers
reproduces a photo of Joanna that “had been used by her publisher to advertise her latest
book” (169). Jack declares that Wells “is as bad as [a Kuklux man]” though Joanna puts
on a brave face and says it might even be good press for her books (169). As Marie
Corelli feared in her real life case, the publicity photo generated for Joanna as a writer
takes her image out of her own control, exposes her. The celebrity system of the
publishing industry helps her to sell books but it is also what makes her more vulnerable
to the League.
That Joanna, one of the main characters working against the League, is a writer is
no coincidence. Her narrative skills are used as a corrective against the League’s refusal
both to consider the mitigating circumstance of the motor accidents and to tell its own
story. Joanna is a particularly well-suited opponent because she begins her writing career
as a typist. The female typist-turned-novelist is a common trope at the end of the
147

nineteenth century when using a typewriter was an attractive metaphor for the creation of
mass (i.e. automatic) fiction. Sir Julian Daymont, who has initially hired her as his
secretary “pointed out how much more profitable it is to type a thousand words of one’s
own than a thousand words of somebody else’s” (11). Her work on the typewriter, its
mechanical and efficient nature, aligns her with the League but her transition from typist
to novelist allows her to balance efficiency with a concern for narrative. Indeed, one of
the early twists in the plot is that Milldane uses her typewriter to produce the initial
L.P.S. warning letters. Sir Julian recognizes a particularity in the type which leads him
to, if not exactly suspect Joanna, feel the need to confront her and enlist her help. He
admits that he thinks her capable of simplifying details for an abstract cause in which she
believes which is why, he tells her, “I was very relieved, you will remember, when you
discovered for yourself the fundamental flaw in the apparent logic of the Suffragist
window-breakers” (20). She is almost a sort of New Woman but not quite.
Sir Julian Daymont who is himself a writer, particularly a writer of detective
novels, is for his own reasons a perfect candidate to pursue the League. Contrary to the
Motor Kuklux, which wishes to escape narrative, Daymont submerges himself in it. By
taking on the “real life” case, his character is conflated that of with his famous literary
creation, the detective Vergil White. Jack at times even refers to him by that name. The
satisfying simultaneity of being both writer and character mirrors Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle’s famous interest in the George Edalji case. In the historic Edalji case, Conan
Doyle proves the innocence of an Indian parson’s son who was wrongly accused of,
among other things, sending offensive anonymous letters and postcards. As a result of
148

Conan Doyle’s investigation and re-opening of the case, Edalji was cleared and the
incident led to the creation of England’s Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. The likeness
between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Flowerdew’s Sir Julian Daymont is clearly
recognizable at the time and is invoked in a satirical review of The Seventh Post Card in
Punch (“Our Booking Office” 20). Just as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s involvement makes
the case of interest through his re-reading of the facts, Sir Julian Daymont re-narrativizes
the Motor Kuklux as he tries to apprehend it.
Finally Jack, though he is not a writer, is similar to Joanna in the way his
mechanical inclinations are tempered and to Sir Julian in his pursuit of justice. Initially,
Jack is also suspected of being the sender of the catalytic L.P.S. letter because he had
access to Joanna’s typewriter. Joanna remembers that he had been typing something
which he refused to show her but later Jack reveals that it was a love letter. Jack’s
particular interest in the motor-car sets him directly opposed to the League and the novel
describes him as having “an almost equal fondness for machinery and animals” (55). He
bridges a new technological age with a previous pastoral mode unlike the Motor Kuklux
which uses technological simplification to attempt an impossible return to simpler times.
Likewise, the career of barrister that his rich and controlling grandfather has chosen for
him places him squarely against the Motor Kuklux’s form of vigilante justice. Despite
the profession not necessarily being of his own choosing, “the idea of proving the
innocence of an accused man against overwhelming circumstantial evidence had its
appeal for him” (55). His ideal of overcoming circumstantial evidence in the courtroom
takes the opposite route from the League’s method of operation and requires engagement
149

in the judicial narrative. Moreover, he is on the side of the defendant rather than the
plaintiff.
Any sympathy the League may have garnered through its mistaken pursuit of
justice disappears when a plot twist involves Joanna in a car crash while driving Jack’s
car. The novel itself gives all the necessary, and even excessive, circumstantial evidence.
Joanna swerves to avoid a horse-drawn vehicle full of passengers, whose driver is clearly
in the wrong, endangering herself and injuring a pedestrian in order to minimize possible
casualties. The pedestrian, an old tramp, dies in the hospital, but the exact cause of his
death is unclear. One of the doctors is accused of malpractice in the case, but Joanna
selflessly testifies in court on his behalf. A definite sense of irony is created by the fact
that Joanna who, along with Sir Julian, had been pursuing the League is now being
pursued by the League.
Of course the main interest in narrating these events is not, however, the irony but
rather the way they affect the burgeoning love story between Jack and Joanna. Jack and
Joanna’s love story is meant to be a direct counterpoint to the erasure of narrative
associated with the League and the postcard. While the novel, through the detectives,
renarrativizes the League’s actions, Jack and Joanna’s love story is constantly being
threatened by it. Joanna’s accident scares Jack into first professing his love for her,
thinking she is seriously wounded when she is thrown from the car. The catalyst for the
beginning of their relationship is the same for the beginning of the League’s pursuit of
Joanna. The imminent arrival of the League’s fatal postcard for Joanna threatens to erase
indiscriminately all possibility of their future together.
150

As if to make the point even clearer, even after Joanna’s life is safe, a new threat
to their story arises in connection to the League. Jack appears to be framed by the
League for the death of his grandfather, Colonel Yemmerde, and is imprisoned. Joanna,
in trying to clear Jack’s name resorts to her own familiar narrative techniques: “She had
dreamed of discovering near the spot where the revolver had been found, the identifying
trifle – a button, a hairpin, a handkerchief, or a glove – which in the stories with which
she pleased a sensation-loving public always…led eventually to the unraveling of a
crime” (274). However, the League’s maneuvers seem to be the antithesis of the
expected story: “fact refused to follow the conventional rules of fiction, and her search
failed to produce the least vestige of a ‘clue’” (274).
Opposition to the love story of Jack and Joanna also had come from Jack’s
grandfather but in a way firmly entrenched within narrative tradition. Joanna discovers
that Jack had delayed so long in declaring himself to her because his marrying her
depended upon the whims of his rich grandfather, “‘And your grandfather wishes you to
marry somebody else,’ she guessed, with the instinctive belief of the born story-writer
that the trite positions of fiction are really common in fact” (49). Their love story is
representative of the traditional marriage plot and builds upon it. Jack recognizes this
when Colonel Yemmerde indeed decides to disinherit him based on Jack’s choice of
wife: “Nothing could have been more emphatic or like the story-books. All the correct
‘Never darken my doors again’ business” (78). The threat of the grandfather’s
disapproval proves to be no real obstacle, but rather moves the plot forward. The threat
151

of the League, on the other hand, signifies the disintegration of the narrative’s very fiber
through the League’s anonymous and inscrutable nature.
The mystery of the League of Personal Safety is solved only when Jack and
Joanna are free to live happily ever after. Also imperative to this happy ending, though,
is the uncovering of Milldane’s story as well as the recuperation of the postcard. Both
processes are begun at the same time by a postcard being used to unearth the truth about
Milldane: “On the day that Sir Julian began his investigations – the day he went to
Ambleham Abbey – a post card came here for Mr. Milldane from a niece of his at
Bedford, and Sir Julian thought it worthwhile to go and see her” (139). After tracking
down the niece through the postcard, he learns from her that Milldane had lived most of
his life in India and after finally making his fortune, had come back to England and
married a young and beautiful wife. Six months after the wedding she had been run over
by a car and killed. The niece also mentions that he had never been quite the same
afterward and “that the tragedy turned his brain” (140). Giving Milldane this story not
only ascribes a motive to Milldane but also bestows a “face” to the League. As a result
of this trip, Daymont is also able to get a writing sample from Milldane’s niece from
which he can recognize a similarity with the photographed copies of the warning
postcards. It turns out that the postcards were personal, written in his own handwriting,
despite Daymont’s misgivings at the beginning of the novel – as personal as his reasons
for beginning the League of Personal Safety.
The final postcard of the novel also offers conclusive proof of Milldane’s
association with the League of Personal Safety. In the hotel room Milldane has rented
152

under the name of L.P. Smith, Sir Julian Daymont discovers “a new sheet of blotting
paper which had been used evidently only once to blot an address” (183). Holding the
sheet up to the mirror he learns the missing correspondence had been addressed to Joanna
at Elstone House. The detectives later find out that the expected postcard has been
delivered there.
Flowerdew’s The Seventh Postcard allows earlier fears about the nature of the
new postcard to resurface only to put them finally to rest. What was dangerously
ambiguous in sender and recipient is now clarified, even at the cost of plausibility. The
novel occupies the strange position of both exposing how easy, even inevitable, terror via
postcard is but also neutralizing the threat in a manner which appears at least as natural.
By the same token, The Seventh Postcard makes a serious critique against the media
while being part of its apparatus. What becomes clear as a result of these contradictory
forces is their symbiotic nature.

153

Chapter Four
The Postcard’s Wish: Collapsing Here and There in Kipling’s “The Village that Voted
the Earth Was Flat” and Stoker’s Dracula

A poem printed in The Picture Post Card in 1902 gives a sense of the seemingly
limitless optimism that the postcard inspired in some during its early days. “Cartolyrica”
both praises and charges the postcard:
Go, little Card, in happy strength,
Make all thy Beauty known;
From West to East
Let many feast
On Grace so sweetly grown.
There’s nought can bar thee ‘neath the sun,
In Peace bind ev’ry race in one. (3:42)

The writer of the poem imagines that the postcard has the ability as well as the duty, to
freely circulate throughout the world and to unite “every race in one.” Despite the
admission of the card as “little,” the tone of the poem is oddly militaristic, emphasizing
the postcard’s “strength” before its “beauty” and insisting that it cannot be stopped. The
postcard gains specifically late-nineteenth century imperialist connotations in its
civilizing mission. The “little Card” could easily be replaced by “Britannia” to create a
conventional paean of empire. Yet, since the poem takes the form of an apostrophe, it is
unclear whether as postcard that undertaking falls to the lot of the individual sender, a
larger national entity, or something else completely. How exactly is the postcard to carry
out its utopic mission of unity? What else might be bound up in this process?
One response critics have provided to these questions centers around the so-
called “colonial postcard,” meaning a postcard that visually depicted colonized people,
154

usually photographically, especially if produced by or circulated within the metropole.
That is to say, critical attention to postcards in a colonial context has been dominated by
the visual aspect of the medium. Under that rubric, individual postcards from the turn of
the twentieth century have provided examples of how colonized people were represented
by the metropole and how those images may have been used. To see was to know was to
possess – creating colonial “unity”. The images circulated on postcards familiarized the
people of colonial powers with their nation’s possessions and allowed them to participate
vicariously and symbolically in that possession. Critics have read these postcard images
as part of the material reality of colonialism (that they existed in the first place was a sign
of domination) but also as one of colonialism’s constituting fabrications. Malek Alloula
and those after him focused on the ways in which the images represent the fantasies of
the colonizers, especially those of a sexual nature. Critics have been correct in
identifying postcard images alternately as part of the Foucauldian power/knowledge
complex and as a means of fantasy projection.
It is important to note, first of all, that the concept of the “colonial” postcard, as
popularized by Malek Alloula, is an anachronistic one. Even within the examples he
provides in his book, there is no series called “Collection Colonial” – only “Scénes et
types,” “Collection Idéale,” and one example, oddly enough, of a “Collection Régence.”
Colonialism has a vested interest in annexing the “other” representationally even as it
does so materially. At the same time, the desire for mastery requires differentiation and
specificity. This is why The Picture Postcard Annual and Directory can feature both an
ad establishing “Picture postcards as LINKS OF EMPIRE” and the following thoughts on
155

photographic postcards by a Mr. Algernon E Aspinall in the West Indies: “The utility and
the chances of sale of such cards as these is undeniable, for by their means the Mother
Country knows what is going on in her Colonies, a topographical record is established,
and the collector finds the result of their perusal certainly beneficial” (1:79).
While the critical work on colonial postcards has been invaluable, much insight
has been lost in not considering colonial postcards within the wider context of the
postcard medium at the turn of the twentieth century. In Jonathan Best’s book on
Philippine postcards during the American occupation, he writes that “postcards showing
food vendors, dry-goods shops, hemp workers, water carriers, tradespeople, and workers
of every variety…Methods of manufacture, modes of transportation, and the products
that were being produced all found their way onto postcards” but mistakenly assumes that
“the subject matter went far beyond what the average tourist of local buyer might want”
(44). Best’s conclusion that “The newly arrived Americans, exuberant with a sense of
colonial, manifest destiny, wanted to document and collect everything, and send pictures
home to their curious relatives and friends” thus is only half of the story (44). During the
postcard’s early days, as was often pointed out even at the time, nothing was too big or
too small to be featured on a postcard; it was not only the famous and the exotic that
appeared. Moreover, many of the same conventions governed representations of
domestic scenes and figures, and colonial ones.
The postcard’s invention (and heyday) at the turn of the nineteenth century
coincides with the era of high colonialism as well as the peak of what David Cannadine
has termed “invented tradition” in Britain. During this period, dominant national
156

symbols became inseparable from imperial ones. As a medium, the postcard was the
perfect vehicle for the blending of the two orders. Postcards catalogued and ordered the
metropolis in much the same way as it did the colonies. The postcard, moreover,
exemplifies the colonial double-bind. Under colonialism at the end of the nineteenth
century, the dominant culture sought to “civilize” the other, which meant acculturation
and absorption under the guise of unification, while maintaining the other’s discreet
identity, one inferior to the dominant culture. Postcards both bridged and increased the
distance between different cultures by making one culture “available” to postcard senders
of another culture but also highlighting that culture’s otherness.
Moreover, postcards featuring purely “colonial” subjects cannot be read outside
the wider postcard network. Otherwise, what is lost is what may be colonial about the
postcard itself. The postcard seeks to subsume everything into its domain and makes it
available to the postcard user. While individual postcards break down the world into
tiny, discrete images, the concept of the postcard is the impossible desire for postcards to
represent everything, coupled with the fantasy of the absolute collection. Ellen Handy
refers to the postcard “sublime” in the context of the western landscapes by photographer
William Henry Jackson, but the idea has even farther reaching implications: “The
sublimity of the postcard genre’s imagining of the world is necessarily a collective
phenomenon pertaining to postcards assembled in quantities, rather than a quality
residing in individual cards (421). Naomi Schor likewise has written about how
postcards of the minutia of Paris contributed to a world picture that included both space
and time. However, postcard images did this through personal messages that were often
157

akin to captions and patterns of circulation, including collecting, that reinforced the
image’s indexical quality. The postcard form was uniquely suited to invest individual
identity with colonial overtones: senders inscribed themselves onto the foreign material
so that the postcard was both them and not them. More than just a pretty picture, the
postcard did something within the metropole as well as without.
The Picture Postcard, which interestingly enough became amalgamated seven
years later to The British Empire Trade Journal, claims that there is little that cannot “be
brought under the aegis of our all-embracing hobby” whether this was other hobbies such
as photography or international news (3:83). TPP covered news stories related to picture
postcards, usually featuring new postcard series or publishers but often creating a tenuous
link between current events and postcards. For example, the writers “cannot refrain from
referring to the treaty of alliance between Great Britain and Japan,” since they claim that
treaty will spark new interest in postcard collecting and offhandedly mention that Japan
must be influenced by England out of all Europe (3:40). The magazine constantly
reaffirms the postcard’s national and imperial import, since one of TPP’s explicit aims is
to show why postcards should be taken seriously. What surfaces time and again is how
the postcard, both as artifact and as medium, provides a map of the geographical and
cultural landscape of the British Empire even as the postcard helps create it. Throughout
its different issues, postcards are even used as a metonym for civilization itself. In one
tongue in cheek item, TPP jokes, “Of all her once vast colonial empire, Spain now
possesses but one solitary colony – the island of Fernando Po, situated in the Bight of
Biafra, opposite the Cameroons, West Africa. Still, there is one consolation left to Spain;
158

remote and barbaric as is the spot, the island possesses picture post-cards” (3:54).
Picture postcards symbolically reordered British identity through image and
circulation just as earlier postal innovations physically reordered England’s empire. This
was not simply a matter of bringing the post’s “civilizing” influence to far-flung colonies,
but affected and altered the heart of empire itself. Richard Menke and historians of the
postal service in Great Britain write of how the post changed the physical face of London.
Menke specifically mentions that postal reform changed street names and house numbers,
reenvisioned London as so many postal districts, and campaigned to cut actual holes into
houses for letter slits (40). Postcards, coming towards the end of postal reform, reordered
the city symbolically and made it available at one’s fingertips. Toward this end, TPP
often reiterates the importance of the “topographical” or “view” card – the card that
reproduces geography and creates “sites”. Editor E.W. Richardson considers view cards
the crux of the respectability of the picture postcard and its ultimate value as a collectible.
In a letter to Richardson, E. Watson-Thomas agrees by saying that a simple postcard
album is sufficient for fantasy cards, “but for the topographical section, which, after all,
is the most important branch of the art, the cabinet is perfect” (26). The cabinet method
of display allows the postcard collector easy access to a city that was both decentralized
and unified. Nancy Steiber, in her analysis on postcards of Amsterdam around 1900,
finds the same principle at work, intra-postcard, with postcards that contain multiple
images: “These postcards showed Amsterdam fragmented in bits and pieces. But the mix
of old and new in the tiny photographs was attempting to create a comprehensible
wholeness through the kaleidoscope of images” (37).
159

The postcard’s ability to decentralize and order aligns it with the London
Underground which, in its turn, became an icon of the city itself rather than simply a
mode of transportation through it. The Picture Postcard Annual and Directory notes that
“One of London’s underground arteries -- the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway -- is
another of the many companies who have not been backward in putting the picture
postcard to the test as an advertising medium” (2:49). In particular, though, the postcard
commissioned by the Underground line gives the recipient the virtual experience of
traveling by tube: “They have issued a two penny packet of six cards, which, however,
possess no pictorial interest, the subjects being outlined maps of London, showing how
theatres and other spots in the great city can be reached by the ‘Bakerloo’ tube, and
similar cards” (2:49). The postcard, rather than merely pointing to a destination, contains
it and reroutes the pathway toward it in a similar though virtual fashion to the
Underground itself.
Whereas the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway has its set terminus and limits in
reordering the city of London, the desire of the postcard is a totalizing one. The postcard
does not stop with London – it constantly seeks to represent more. TPP claims that “A
sign of the times, and one indicating a healthy growth of the movement, is the
increasingly large number of local printers and stationers who print and publish their own
post-card illustrating their own cities or districts” (3:7). As in Naomi Schor’s article
about Paris, the postcarding of England is given as a sign of modernity as well as the
popularity of the new medium. Isabel Fernández Tejedo, in her history of the Mexican
160

postcard, likewise refers to the systematic postcarding of Mexico City at the same time as
part of Porfirio’s pseudo-European view of progress.
Due to the competitive nature of the postcard trade at its height, postcard
publishers were always looking to produce something different. For view cards, this
comes in the form of contracting the postcard’s focus into increasingly local, increasingly
minute detail, as well as expanding the selection of views internationally when that
option was available to the publisher. Moreover, as a collectible, often sold in sets, the
postcard form encourages completion and geographical location was one of the most
popular ways of organizing a collection. But as geographical completion is an
impossibility, the postcard category will be ever expanding. As an article in The Picture
Postcard Annual and Directory on the publishing firm of M. Blum & Degen expresses it,
“We would not venture to say that they have views of Mars or the Shady Planet, although
the time might not be far distant when we shall have our sets illustrating the topography
of the sidereal system!” (1:81).
Not only did postcards seek to represent districts and town comprehensively
(though not necessarily equally, as Schor points out), the non-topographical postcards
that were sold in those respective places served as a representation of the locale as well.
Even the postcards which physically appear in an area could add to the way one could
conceptualize it. Another turn-of-the-century postcard magazine, The Poster and Post-
Card Collector, gives the following advice to postcard sellers: “Before a dealer selects
his stock, he should study the neighbourhood in which his shop is situated. Cards which
will sell well in Regent St. for 3d and 6d would remain on hand in Whitechapel if offered
161

at 1 d each” (192). The specifics of these examples are tantalizingly left out. The article
in The Poster and Post-Card Collector does make an attempt (albeit veiled) to establish a
connection between neighborhood, class sensibility, and postcards: “There is also a class
of card which appeals to people of artistic temperament, which we may term
impressionist, which sell by reason of their picturesque and artistic qualities, and a certain
proportion of these may be stocked in a good neighbourhood” (193).
Part of that reason is a practical consideration. Even if the character of a place
were to remain unchanging, the form of its preferences certainly does not. The article
continues that among the only safe subjects are local views and images of the royal
family, incidentally the two categories which map out the geographical body and
represent the political one. Actors are merely part of the seasonal landscape. The
mutuality between the representation of locales in postcards and the representation of
postcards in locales still happens today when vendors exhibit in different locations and
tend to cater to each, as seen in Schor’s examples: “trays and trays of postcards of New
England villages at New England fairs and flea markets; trays and trays of postcards of
Paris by arrondissement in Paris” (204). It is not simply the sites that define a
neighborhood on a postcard but also the postcard which defines the neighborhood as a
site.
The architecture of cities, despite the sometimes artificial removal of people from
the image, was meant to be comprehended in postcards along with their inhabitants. This
type of cataloguing was a common impulse at the second half of the nineteenth century,
as cultural historians have noted. Before the postcard was the carte-de-visite and the type
162

photograph which, according to Deborah Poole, “catered to European curiosity about the
physical appearance of Africans, South Americans, Asians, and Polynesians, as well as
the more familiar, but equally ‘exotic,’ peasants of rural France, Russia, and Spain” (42).
By the turn-of-the-century, the circulation of images of the “other” was less about
curiosity surrounding the individual type per se and more about the creation of a
comprehensive world picture – it was about possessing the “set,” which also included
specimens in one’s own backyard.
George R. Sims, in the preface to the three volume series he edited in 1902 called
Living London, claims: “The Life of London in all its phases and aspects has never until
now been exhaustively attempted…The purpose is to present for the first time to the
English-speaking public a complete and comprehensive survey of the myriad human
atoms which make up this ever changing kaleidoscope, the mightiest capital the world
has ever seen” (6). Rather than desiring to show or illuminate something never before
seen, the preface makes clear that what he considers innovative about his work is its
ability to juxtapose and connect disparate elements. His project aligns so closely with the
project of the postcard that it is little wonder that a series of postcards were given to
readers who subscribed to each volume. According to TPP, these included such diverse
images and captions as: “Oriental types in London,” “A Lady Pavement Artist,”
“Searching a suspect at the docks” (3:51).
The Post-Card Connoisseur writes of another series of postcards in the same vein
called “Odd corners of London,” which includes the postcard “Behind the Counter of a
Post Office.” This card presents a vantage point that shows the backs of clerk girls with
163

the public’s faces. According to the magazine, the postcard’s appeal is that “the view has
therefore the interest of novelty as well as actuality” (2:XII). Once again, just as in the
postcarding of London neighborhoods, the desire for novelty feeds into the already
present desire for completion, the covering of all angles. This happens to the point where
the postcard becomes self-referential; this postcard heads in that direction, which is
continued by postcards which feature postcard factories, stores, or vendors. Moreover,
“Behind the Counter of a Post Office” has the coveted quality of “actuality.” The
postcarding principle includes not only geography and people, but also current climates
and events.
This aligns the postcard with the rise of journalism. The confluence between the
two can be seen in multiple ways. Postcards were often given away by magazines,
newspapers, and other periodicals to subscribers, as in the case of Living London. But
postcard industry aligned itself with journalism in more essential ways as well. A 1906
trade book called The Photographic Picture Post-Card, for Personal Use and for Profit
points out that “the faculty of deciding what will be popular, either generally, or in a
given time and place, is an instinct – the journalistic instinct. It is a natural gift, varying
in power in different persons” (79). This “journalistic instinct” is the ability to foretell
what will interest people before they have had a chance to experience it for themselves.
Postcard producers often saw themselves as an alternative form of journalist. A novelty
that soon became widespread in various countries was postcards depicting a page of a
newspaper, either real or fictional, with images bursting from behind the page for a three-
dimensional effect. It is as if by being featured on a postcard, and sent individually rather
164

than en masse, the news becomes “activated” in a way that does not happen with a simple
newspaper.
Moreover, with innovations in the postcard printing process, postcard publishers
were able to encompass current events more quickly and completely than ever before,
mirroring the journalistic rush for a “scoop.” The Picture Postcard Annual and Directory
features a story on a London printing studio which worked in tandem with postcard
photographers/sellers to release postcards on the same day that important events occur.
The article gives the following example: “The floods at Bray, Ireland, recently, were a
matter of keen local interest, and the London studio received two photographs at eleven
in the morning, from which they were ordered to make half-tone blocks and print off a
thousand postcards as quickly as possible. These were on a rail to the photographer by
three in the afternoon” (1:69). The speed with which this process occurred seems to
indicate that the postcard was trying to compete with the newspaper, yet after the
postcards had been printed, the original photographs “were disposed of to two popular
morning newspapers”. Postcards are not intended as mere information, but rather as a
more effective route to creating a total world picture that could be personalized by the
sender.
A postcard series that corroborates this view is the “Life Model/Song Cards”
introduced by M. Bamforth & Co. These postcards feature a stanza of a popular song
from different categories of music and are illustrated by photographs of models striking
artistic poses. Though the content of these postcards is nothing like important current
events, the publisher claims, “In fact, I only want an hour’s notice to illustrate any song
165

on the market” (Picture Postcard Annual and Directory 2:27). That would have been
quite the feat considering the necessity of organizing the models, though there were
surely stock images as well. The focus on speed seems quite unnecessary except in the
context of the creation of a “personalized” as well as comprehensive world picture – that
everything of personal importance would find its way into postcard form. Included in the
postcard fantasy is the mapping out of an emotive interior world as well as a political and
physical one. A postcard illustrating a popular song would thus need to be available at
the time when the song is actually popular. In regards to the need for speed, this kind of
postcard can occupy a position that is comparable to any political event. Totality requires
coverage over time as well as space, along with the belief that one’s personal world does
or will eventually correspond completely with the “outside” world.
The publisher of the “Life Model/Song Cards” also advertises that they receive
orders “not only from the United States -- where agencies have been recently established
-- but from the British colonies, and as far off as Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania”
(2:27). It is a key feature of postcards that they are disseminated everywhere, which has
the effect of expanding the world picture that the postcard creates. Inner and outer
worlds align. While postcard collectors will value a rare postcard for its powers of
completion, a singular and unique postcard would be antithetical to the medium for this
reason. Postcards must circulate. It is here that the confluence of the postcard and
Colonialism can be seen clearly. Both processes have an interest in not distinguishing
“other” from “self” even while simultaneously demarcating the two. In the postcard, this
takes the form of the image on the front and the self-image of the sender, while in
166

Colonialism the dichotomy is between colony and metropole. Both the postcard and
Colonialism demonstrate an overt interest in expansion, encompassing more and more
“subjects” and repositioning them according to their own borders.
Though many unreflectively indulged in the postcard fantasy of perfect
representation, others demonstrated some awareness of the constructed nature of
postcard. TPP reprints a quote by The Indian Social Reformer in its note “A Curious
Hindu Character Card”: “A well-known firm of photographers in Madras sent to native
gentlemen a picture postcard ‘with best wishes for a pleasant Pongul.’ There are three
pictures on the card, representing respectively an ascetic, a religious procession, and a
dancing-girl! Asceticism, religious pomp, and a partiality for dancing girls seem to be
the three prominent features of Hindu society which strike a foreigner” (1:21). Though a
higher level of awareness of representation could reasonably be expected from a
progressive journal such as The Indian Social Reformer, the quote is picked up by the
popular magazine TPP for a couple reasons. The first reason is that the quote does not
deny that these three elements exist in Hindu society, rather the affirmation that these
elements are indeed the ones which strike a foreigner. The second is the quote’s sense
that the oddness of the postcard is the juxtaposition of these three elements. What would
have gone completely unnoticed as the subjects of three different postcards strikes the
viewer when combined. Clearly there is more to TPP’s often repeated aesthetic mantra
of “one card, one view.” The multiplicity of images of individual postcards allows
slippage in representation because the total picture is never truly complete. Including too
many images on one postcard interferes with Handy’s “postcard sublime.”
167

Postcards are a fantastical medium regardless of the image depicted. Alloulah is
correct in calling postcards of colonial subjects “the reflection of a reflection” but
misleading in assuming that postcards always attempt to hide the fact that they convey
fantasies (64). Alloulah ends his book with one final example of the “colonial postcard”
– “An Arabian woman with the Yachmak” (126). The woman’s face, all but her eyes, is
covered by her veil yet her breasts are indecently exposed. This very same postcard
image is featured in a book by William Ouellette, published approximate five years
before Alloula’s book, called Fantasy Postcards. “Fantasy postcards” is also the name of
a recognized postcard genre at the turn of the century – one that is difficult to pin down
because of what Ouellette terms in his preface as “unintentional fantasies” (13). Other
postcards in his book also repeat the tropes from The Colonial Harem, though with
Western women. The point is not to deny that postcards were part of the colonial
apparatus and fed a system of inequality but rather to recognize how colonialism stems
from the analogous desire for a personal world picture. That includes understanding how
the postcard impulse ultimately subverts itself.
A writer for Scribner’s in 1910 describes resenting that his friends will send him
“post-cards in black and white, post-cards in colors, post-cards of all the famous pictures,
of all the cathedrals, views, mountains, hotels, donkeys, peasants, in all tourist-Europe”
and complains that the postcard “symbolizes the triumph of the commonplace, of the
cheap-and-easy, the utter capitulation of individuality” (“The Point of View” 379). The
postcard fantasy that all would be represented and that one could find a postcard that
perfectly expressed one’s subjective experience ends by emptying out the world of
168

meaning. This reversal becomes the center of the increasingly dark literature to which
we now will turn.

II.

Rudyard Kipling, one of the most popular and celebrated writers in the history of
British literature, is today a vexed figure for literary critics. He is viewed as a major
spokesperson for British imperial aspirations and could easily be dismissed as a writer of
imperialist, and racist, propaganda. Yet this is not consistent with his nuanced style.
Even writers who disliked him on account of his ideology, such as Max Beerbohm,
recognized him as a genius. Henry James, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway counted
themselves among his admirers. As one critic states it, “One of the perennial questions
that swirl about Rudyard Kipling is how readers who vehemently object to his
conservative and imperialist politics can nonetheless take deep pleasure in his art, even
when that art is underwritten by the very politics they despise” (McBratney 536).
Kipling most perfectly represents the imperial tenor of his day. Born in 1865 in
India to an Anglo-Indian family, he was sent to England to be educated when he was five
before returning to India at sixteen and leaving again to seek his literary fortune at
twenty-four. His experience in India, despite its extreme otherness, is seen as part of his
own British heritage. Under the logic of empire, whereby what is imperial is national,
Kipling can be perceived as almost hyper-British because of that aspect of his identity.
Yet he is always something of an outsider as well. His criticism of colonial officials,
169

though not colonialism itself, put him into conflict with his initial Anglo-Indian
readership. During that time he claims an affiliation with a metropolitan audience. After
his move to London, however, he quickly satirizes conditions there. As Ann Parry
argues, neither side, it seems to Kipling, “understood the reality of empire” (28). His
ability to encompass disparate realities and present his own view as authoritative is part
of what gives rise to his prominence as a writer of the British Empire.
His iconic status is firmly established in 1907 when he becomes the first British
writer to win the Nobel Prize in literature. In his somewhat equivocal presentation
speech, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, Carl David af Wirsén, signals a
dichotomy between “idealist” writers and “writers who seem primarily concerned with
mere externals and who have won renown especially for their vivid word-picturings of
the various phases of the strenuous, pulsating life of our own times, that life which is
often chequered and fretted by the painful struggle for existence and by all its
concomitant worries and embarrassments.” The former is exemplified by Tennyson and
the latter is associated with Kipling. Elsewhere the secretary makes clear that, of the two,
idealism is the trait that is especially important for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Ultimately the Academy’s choice of Kipling rests on the fact that Kipling manages also
to display idealist characteristics: “However, the gift of observation alone, be it ever so
closely true to nature, would not suffice as a qualification in this instance. There is
something else by which his poetical gifts are revealed. His marvellous power of
imagination enables him to give us not only copies from nature but also visions out of his
own inner consciousness.”
170

An alignment with the world of “idealism” or “imagination” is especially
important at this time to distinguish Kipling’s work from merely mechanical
reproduction, part of a discourse that surfaces with the invention of photography. The
presentation speech hints at this by saying about Kipling that “even the most cursory
observer sees immediately his absolutely unique power of observation, capable of
reproducing with astounding accuracy the minutest detail from real life.” The repetition
of the word “observe” drives the point that anyone can observe. That Kipling can do it so
well and reproduce it so accurately is astounding, but it is not necessarily art. For his
work to become art, an organizing, imaginative, subjectivity is required. If perfect
reproducibility is the dream of photography, a totality of images that are assembled and
interpreted by an individual is the fantasy of the postcard.
The speech also highlights his connection to the press, part of what makes up the
Kipling persona, especially as it relates to his powers of “observation.” Kipling began
working at a newspaper as his very first job upon his return to India as a teenager. His
first short stories also appeared in the newspapers which subsequently employed him. By
1912 when Kipling writes his short story “The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat,” he
has long been an internationally famous literary figure, but he highlights his love-hate
relationship with the press in this satire.
In the story, three of the four main protagonists, including a narrator who is
reminiscent of Kipling himself, are involved in the newspaper business. While motoring
through the English countryside, they find themselves ill-treated by the justice system in
a provincial town. They, along with another fellow sufferer and owner of music halls,
171

Bat Masquerier, decide to enact their revenge using a variety of media outlets. Rather
than simply writing a defamatory news story about the miscarriage of justice in Huckley,
the group unleashes the postcarding principle. They write up Huckley from different
angles and one by one release these small views to the public which collects them. The
protagonists use “real” representations of people, sights, and events in the town, but
caption everything to give Huckley the overall impression of a backwards and primitive
place. What ensues, in essence, is the reverse colonization of the town of Huckley by
which the protagonists take over the town, “governing” it at a distance. Once the process
has begun and is disseminated, it becomes self-perpetuating.
From the beginning of the story, Kipling builds in an intentional slippage between
modernity and primitivism, usually associated with the metropole and the colonies
respectively. On the one hand, it would seem that the four gentleman, Woodhouse,
Ollyett, Pallant (a Member of Parliament) and the Narrator; are the representatives of
modernity and the metropole. They are introduced driving a car (speeding, in fact) and
discussing a business proposition related to the newspaper world; they present a perfect
picture of the kind of person the League targets in Flowerdew’s novel in my previous
chapter. But on the other hand, they are treated as “savages” by the justice system in
Huckley, especially by the chairman of the Bench, Sir Thomas Ingell, also a Member of
Parliament. As a representative of British authority, it is not a coincidence that Kipling
writes of Sir Thomas’s voice that it would have justified revolt throughout empires,” and
revolt against his rule is exactly what happens (149). In that context, the colonial
association of Ollyett having “coir-matting-coloured hair” becomes salient. Similarly,
172

Bat Masquerier is taunted by Sir Thomas as having a home address in Jerusalem. What
happens to the town of Huckley can be read in this light as reverse colonization.
Though a fictional village, Huckley represents the quintessential rural heart of
England. Huckley is described as “a little pale-yellow market-town with a small, Jubilee
clock-tower and a large corn-exchange” underlying British agrarian roots and loyalty to
the Crown (149). A model for the town may have been, by dint of name, proximity to
London, and association to Kipling (who spent time there), the village/town of Hockley
in Essex. Hockley gained recognition in 1889 when a railroad connection to London was
established (a possible name change of the village by a railway company is invented in
the story). Huckley is treated by Kipling as the kind of place that is both central to
British identity and marginal at the same time. There is something regressive about how
stolidly provincial Huckley is yet the interest of the story, something bordering on horror,
comes from precisely that fact. It is the last place imaginable that would be appropriated
and taken out of context.
The group’s scheme for revenge involves portraying Huckley as a primitive place,
one in which the powers that be, namely Sir Thomas, are not fit to govern. Woodhouse,
Ollyett, and the Narrator begin that process through a series of seemingly random articles
strategically placed in the newspapers they run. The first, written by the Narrator, is a
short article on a hoopoe, a comparatively rare bird in England, that “had been seen at
Huckley and had, ‘of course, been shot by the local sportsmen’” (155). To add to the
haphazard feel of the piece, the Narrator gives a careless rendition of the ancient Jewish
tale of how the hoopoe got its crest from King Solomon. This first article sends the
173

message that the inhabitants of Huckley are known brutes but also provides random and
conversational bits of information. The second article, similar to the first, collects
seemingly unrelated facts about Huckley merely to provide an impression of the place for
the “Mobiquity” series (descriptions of what can be seen on motor-bike rides around
London). The details about the village that are featured in this article include: “the
neglected adenoids of the village children,” the “glutinous native drawl,” pregnant cattle,
and the “gipsy-like” and “swart” face of their owner (Sir Thomas). While some of these
details have definite colonial connotations, such as poor health care for children and
mangling the English language, others, such as the pregnant cattle, are fairly neutral.
Simply slandering the village, and by extension Sir Thomas, would be rather
straightforward, but the group has the very colonization of Huckley in mind.
Ollyett claims that these initial articles establish an “arresting atmosphere” around
Huckley. This functions according to postcard principles of framing and captioning
where the same photograph would often be used to convey very different impressions.
Various details of the town are isolated, or even invented and associated with the name of
the town, represented, and then made available for commentary. The success of their
short paragraph on the hoopoe is secured when the group receives letters from two
inhabitants of Huckley contradicting the shooting and one letter from the Rector
commenting on the fable. The personal adoption of the information about Huckley, even
if adopted for the purposes of refutation, is ultimately what allows the colonization of the
village. This is so important that, after the hoopoe article, Ollyett writes a letter to the
newspaper from a fictitious person commenting on the possible name change of Huckley.
174

It satisfactorily leads to a flurry of correspondence between individuals who think the
idea preposterous as well as the Rector who goes into more detail about the possible
origins of the town’s name. It is the text of the letters combined with the images the
newspapers have provided that leads to the domination of Huckley. Once Huckley is an
object of observation, it becomes a mine for competing interests.
Central to the goal is what Ollyett calls “the liftable stick, which means the
‘arresting’ quotation of six or seven lines,” referred by him also as “the secret of power”
(156). The group is counting on everything they write being disseminated by individuals
as well as other papers. Every time another newspaper covers the same story, the group
notes it and looks on with satisfaction. Since between their members they actually hold
control of several publications, that had been their plan from the beginning with the
pseudonymous Cake and Bun switching off opportunities to publish articles involving
Huckley. Doing so gives the illusion of various centers of power. The main thing,
however, is for Huckley to be taken apart and circulated in various forms. This proves to
be the case when Ollyett, as editor of the Bun, surprisingly refuses to publish a letter sent
by a doctor on the condition of the adenoids of children in Huckley, saying it is of no
interest to his readers. The move proves profitable when said doctor submits it to a
completely unconnected newspaper where it is published. The group’s purpose is served
even when this is done by competing groups, the most obvious of which belongs to Sir
Thomas himself. He has another newspaper write up an account of Huckley as “a model
village,” which only adds fuel to the fire leading the editors to express that they could not
have done a better job themselves.
175

What becomes “liftable” is more than a few lines of text. We see this first when
Pallant brings a copy of The Bun to a Parliamentary meeting and raises it for all to see.
Earlier, Pallant had asked Ollyett to put in a short paragraph on the possibility of Sir
Thomas’s cows having foot-and-mouth disease and Ollyett reluctantly agrees without
knowing why. During the House session, it becomes clear: Pallant brings in the article
right after the heated discussion on the prohibition of importing Irish cattle due to the
same cause. Though Kipling himself was firmly against Home Rule for Ireland, his story
aligns the havoc that the newspapermen wreck on Huckley with the lack of self-
determination of the Irish people.
Another cliché that the group’s work advances is the assumption that “primitive”
people cannot be trusted with objects of cultural value, even the culture being spoken of
is their own. Ollyett is filled with glee when, during the course of his weekend visits to
Huckley for “research”, he discovers “material” that can be used to that effect. The first
is the fact that a “leper’s window” in Huckley’s church had been covered over when a
new lavatory was installed. This rare architectural feature exists in several old English
churches, like the Anglican church in Eastwood which neighbors the real-life Hockley.
The second is a fourteenth-century font that lay forgotten in a shed. News of this travesty
is first broken in a serious architectural weekly. It produces the expected quotations from
learned as well as popular mediums. At this point, the group has been so successful in
the displacement of Huckley’s identity that the public reacts with an air of recognition,
“Of course! This is just what Huckley would do!” (177). From this primary
displacement, a material displacement is just a short step away. Ollyett has already
176

bought the font for the relatively small sum of 15 pounds and Woodhouse donates it the
Victoria and Albert Museum. The cultural import of this displacement is, ironically,
perpetuated by the villagers themselves. The sexton of the village complains that his own
wife is selling postcards featuring a photo of the font when it had been housed in the
sexton’s shed. The appearance of actual postcards is almost incidental to the postcarding
of the village that has already taken place.
The Narrator, similarly, “rescues” a native dance from obscurity, as any good
colonial anthropologist would do. Kipling writes that the Narrator found the basis for his
article on the village dance in William Hone’s Every-Day Book (1826) but invents the
name, the “Gubby”. The Narrator comments on the book being an easy source for his
purposes. Already a miscellany of odd practices from the past, it provides ready fodder
for the type of attention he wishes to bestow on Huckley. By writing that the dance is
still practiced “in all its poignant purity at Huckley, that last home of significant
mediæval survivals,” he both identifies Huckley as backward and invites its appropriation
(164).
Up until this point in the story, the media men still feel dependent on the “raw”
material of the village that they then work into the public image of Huckley that they
desire. After the invention of the “Gubby,” this changes dramatically, both figuratively
and literally. Bat Masquerier sends in his team of music hall entertainers to create the
mise-en-scène for “The Geoplanarians' Annual Banquet and Exercises.” Ollyett is
impatient for the Narrator to publish his piece on the “Gubby” because that fiction serves
as the new basis on what is to come. Medieval thought is alive and well in Huckley.
177

While an actual society that believes the world is flat exists, Masquerier pays the
extraordinary sum of 2000 pounds to completely fabricate Huckley’s adherence to that
philosophy. His group plies the villagers with food and drink and they “vote
unanimously” that the world is flat. To solidify and connect the work that they have done
up until this point, Masquerier’s group invents the steps to the “Gubby,” and film and
photograph it en plein air. For both of these “events,” the conversion into media form is
what matters.
Throughout the process of the group’s virtual take-over of Huckley, a tension
exists between dealing with the village in abstract and dealing with it concretely. After
the initial incident, the only “primary” materials from Huckley that the group takes back
to London is the parish history written by the Rector and, not coincidentally, picture
postcards. The Narrator is the first to draw attention to the usefulness of abstraction.
While Ollyett visits Huckley in the initial stages of their plan every weekend, the
Narrator deals with it “in the abstract” and then is surprised at his success in creating an
image of Huckley. Bat Masquerier, likewise, is the mastermind behind the Geoplanarian
banquet at a distance. While it seems to be a mere accident that the Narrator deals with
Huckley abstractly, Masquerier’s choice is intentional: “Local colour is all right after
you've got your idea. Before that, it’s a mere nuisance” (178). Abstraction helps in the
process of isolating details and facts about Huckley which are then rearranged and
reproduced out of context. This is easily done with items in the parish history but
postcards are themselves isolated details, always signaling to a greater and ultimately
unassemblable whole. When the group returns to Huckley, the village as a whole seems
178

small in comparison to what they have created. The different parts enumerated, “the
alcoholic pub; the village green; the Baptist chapel; the church; the sexton's shed…”
produce less of an impact together than they had when dispersed in their various forms.
Postcard-like, when framed and commented upon, they create an ever-expanding world.
In some ways, it also may be called an ever-contracting world. The public “asked
for news about Huckley – where and what it might be, and how it talked – it knew how it
danced – and how it thought in its wonderful soul. And then, in all the zealous, merciless
press, Huckley was laid out for it to look at, as a drop of pond water is exposed on the
sheet of a magic-lantern show” (175). The magic-lantern show is an apt metaphor for the
public magnification of the microscopic but the postcard best epitomizes both individual
images coming together and the appropriation of Huckley for personal gain. Once the
postcarding has begun, it is difficult to stop because each series is potentially limitless.
Every angle or monument in a new light can be made into another postcard. The village
of Huckley then can be used to write any message. The Masquerier recognizes this when
he admits, “We couldn't stop it if we wanted to now. It's got to burn itself out. I'm not in
charge anymore” (189). Reuters covers Huckley news, the real Geoplanarian society
arrives, and in the end, Pallant turns the village into a political issue. In the meantime,
the villagers make such a small amount of money from the increased traffic as to not be
worth the trouble. Masquerier, on the other hand, has recouped his investment by
2500%.
The postcarding of Huckley clearly has effects very similar to that of colonialism
itself in its cultural, economic, and political implications. The town literally has been
179

written on – Sir Thomas’s gates are now stenciled with the words “The Earth is flat”,
thanks to Masquerier’s corrosive aniline dye. Yet the Narrator and Woodhouse are not
pleased with their “revenge” at the story’s close. The one-time victims recognize that the
postcard fantasy coming true is actually a nightmare. The irony is that, by creating “the
village that voted the Earth was flat,” to them the world now has become flat – flat as any
postcard.

III.

However disturbing Kipling’s “The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat” is, the
text retains its comic certitudes and offers moments of relief. Its media men may be
outsiders to the village, but they remain Englishman; and whatever they do, they are
(with the possible exception of Bat Masquerier whom Ollyett calls “The Absolutely
Amoral Soul”), men of conscience. Comic, conscientious, English, they never (as
Kipling points out on various occasions) lose their composure. Bram Stoker’s Dracula
raises precisely the fear of losing this composure, to the point of losing one’s
composition. The threat at first appears to come from without – a vampire from
Transylvania named Dracula, a foreigner to England and even the human race.
Ultimately, however, the threat comes from within – and unlike Kipling’s world, it
threatens to undo England itself. Not only does Dracula use modern telecommunications
and essentially mail himself to England, not only does an ideal Englishwoman become a
vampire herself, but the main characters have more in common with that uncanny
180

foreigner than we might expect. From the beginning, when Jonathan Harker travels to
Transylvania, the novel is obsessed with proving how different the human (and especially
English) characters actually are from the vampire.
This is an important task for the novel because the vampires are already in
England – in fact, every character who has ever sent a postcard or even gone where a
postcard might originate is himself intrinsically related to the vampire. To be an
English(wo)man abroad, in the world of postcards, is to be parasitic upon it – taking in
sights and people which are then used as a representation of one’s self. The terrifying
idea of Stoker’s novel is that when Dracula lands on England’s shore, landing in that
most postcardic of sites, Whitby, and travelling to the postcard’s production capital,
London, there is nothing left for him to do: England has already been emptied of meaning
by its modern media. The character of Dracula is introduced, or even invented, by the
characters as an antidote (one as strange as a garlic garland). He is the embodiment of
the already present danger – reified so that he may be expelled. The novel Dracula
enacts a strange battle between the postcard and the postcard sender: the postcard that
threatens to subsume the world in simulacra may actually flatten out its senders as well.
The onus of the novel is to differentiate the two, allowing the sender to emerge
victorious. Significantly, one of the novel’s working titles, changed only weeks before
publication, was The Un-dead – in other words, the living.
To make the case that Dracula is not, in fact, about Dracula, requires a major shift
in perspective. Readers often comment on how paradoxically charming the Count is
when they first meet him in Transylvania through Jonathan Harker’s eyes. Indeed, he
181

seems much more interesting than the future vampire hunter. It is easy to overlook how
rarely Dracula actually speaks once in England, despite his language lessons from
Harker. Ultimately, Dracula becomes a vehicle, a medium, for the story of the human
characters, even as their lives intertwine around their common goal. We might go so far
as to say that the characters themselves exist only when they are fighting the vampire –
and if he did not exist (as indeed, he may not) they would have to invent him. Dracula
cannot act truly independently because he is their medium, though one which threatens to
become monstrously autonomous. Can they be reduced to only what can be conveyed
through him? In postcard-like manner, the vampire makes visible the replacement of the
original with its reproduction which, in fact, has already been occurring. Only by
simultaneously reclaiming the power of mass media for themselves and humanizing
Dracula, can the vampire hunters be at rest with their own vampiric tendencies.
Jennifer Wicke’s landmark essay “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media”
is the first to draw attention to the fact that “the social force most analogous to Count
Dracula’s as depicted in the novel is none other than mass culture, the developing
technologies of the media in its many forms, as mass transport, tourism, photography and
lithography in image production, and mass-produced narrative” (469). She makes no
mention of the postcard, ostensibly because postcards themselves do not appear within
the novel. Yet it is the postcard form which draws the different media together and is
able to encompass Dracula’s contradictory qualities, as well as go virtually unnoticed
when need be, as Dracula himself does. The postcard combines text and image (which
may take on any appearance whatsoever) and it travels. Emotive ties between the sender
182

and recipient, as well as advances in technology, allow the postcard to circulate. Its
materiality at times can be of the utmost importance while at other times seems almost to
disappear when the text is being viewed. Most importantly, the picture postcard seeks to
subsume everything in its cataloguing tendencies.
To say that Dracula’s equation with the postcard medium condemns modern
media is to miss the point. Much of the novel’s intrigue comes from the fact that not only
is the vampire parasitic, but that it is parasitic, by definition, on what is deemed
extremely good. Dracula would proceed quite differently were it not for the fact that he
requires sacred earth for his coffin, even importing it from Transylvania. As Van Helsing
points out, “For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all
good; in soil barren of holy memories, it cannot rest” (213). Moreover, Harker discovers
that “just as their hideous bodies could only rest in sacred earth, so the holiest love was
the recruiting sergeant for their ghastly ranks” when he realizes that he would be next in
line after his wife to become a vampire, just as Lucy in vampire guise tempts her former
fiancé (259-60). Whether “holy memories” or “the holiest of loves,” Dracula feeds on
narratives not of his own making. Yet the vampire hunters do the same thing when they
are tourists. Their response to Dracula’s soil is, significantly, not to desecrate it (as
would logically follow), but to “make it more holy still” (260). Likewise, they seek to
utilize newspapers and telegrams better than the Count is able and pursue him back into
Transylvania after his failed invasion of London, thereby reasserting the “purity” of both
modern media and imperialism for Stoker.
183

In fact, Dracula always requires the volition of human characters in order to
function. The vampire must have permission to enter into any home and, as a general
rule, whenever he comes into direct contact with people, he elicits their consent, only
finally blurring the line of their free will. We first see this when Dracula politely
welcomes Harker as a guest into his castle, inviting him to “Enter freely and of your own
will” (22). Stoker writes this passage to suggest the inability of vampires to force
humans into their lairs but he adds the following line to Dracula’s welcoming speech:
“Come freely. Go freely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!” (22). While
these words may seem ironic, considering that Harker comes to write of almost nothing
in his journal but that he is imprisoned in Dracula’s castle with no way out, they are a
crucial component to how Dracula operates. Dracula’s postcard-like colonization
requires the circulation of Harker’s identity, if not actually himself. Dracula can only use
what he has been given. This is later seen when Dracula has Harker write letters back to
England, which are more postcards than letters since the Count makes it clear that he will
be reading every word written on “the thinnest foreign post” (37). From there it is a short
step to Dracula leaving the castle dressed in Harker’s suit and the expected moment of
Harker himself becoming one of Dracula’s minions, his will becoming indistinguishable
from that of Dracula.
What seems to create the most fear in the characters, particularly in Harker, is the
possibility that Dracula does not really exist – that Harker himself invented him. The
reality of the vampire is not established for him (as well as for the other characters) until
halfway through the novel. Confirmation of Dracula’s existence as an entity outside of
184

Harker’s own imagination, when it finally comes, “seems to have made a new man out of
[him]” (168). He says, “It was the doubt as to the reality of the whole thing that knocked
me over. I felt impotent, and in the dark, and distrustful. But, now that I know, I am not
afraid, even of the Count” (168). However, this doubt as to Dracula’s autonomous reality
continues throughout the novel, voiced by various characters. The same holds true of
vampires in general – Lucy being no exception.
Significantly, Harker and the others only believe by mutual corroboration; they
rely on each other to make Dracula “real,” let alone work to together the vampire.
Nicolas Daly, in his incisive essay “Incorporated Bodies: Dracula and the Rise of
Professionalism,” claims that more attention is paid to “the little band of men” and how
they come together, than to Dracula himself. Going one step further, I posit that the
focus of the novel is on demonstrating the difference between Dracula and the vampire
hunters, despite deceptive similarities. The positioning of the characters as a group with
a mission attempts to solve a key problem in the text. It allows them to retain their
individuality even as it requires them to become a function, whereas the essence of
becoming a vampire is losing one’s unique essence. Even so, one review of Dracula
which appeared shortly after it was published opines, “The people who band themselves
together to run the vampire into the earth have no real individuality or being” (835).
Rather than a mere stylistic flaw, the lack of “real individuality or being” in the vampire
hunters is central to what is at stake, so to speak, in Dracula.
The male characters seem to be “vampirized” in this sense even before the start of
the novel. One of the most intriguing ways is that Arthur Holmwood, Quincey Morris,
185

and Dr. Seward appear to have worked together as part of a colonialist venture before
reuniting to fight Dracula. Locations given by Morris include islands in the South
Pacific, Lake Titicaca in the Andes, and Korea. Also included is the ambiguous location
of “in the prairies” (62). There is a postcard-like quality to the naming of these far-flung
sites without any intimation of what they may have been doing there, and they acquire an
oddly general air. Especially odd is the fact that the men are not all British, which seems
to preclude their missions from being a national venture. Van Helsing is added to the
mix by way of his recounting of the time Seward sucked the blood from a knife wound to
prevent him from getting gangrene. The overtones of the vampire are unmistakable as is
the vagueness of the circumstances surrounding the knife. Morris is likewise called a
“moral Viking,” linking him to Dracula and the claim is made that “if America can go on
breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed” (156). From the
beginning, the band of vampire hunters share a nebulous imperial and communal past
with Dracula. As Van Helsing characterizes Dracula, “he is known everywhere that men
have been. In old Greece, in old Rome, he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in
India, even in the Chermosese, and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he,
and the peoples for him at this day. He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander,
the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar” (211). Clearly, Dracula has not
been the only one roaming the world. Harker’s trip to Transylvania is, in one sense, what
allows his later initiation into the band of vampire hunters.
The story of a very modern and imperial incursion is what sets the plot in motion
– Harker’s rather than Dracula’s. Beginning with Stephen Arata’s well-known essay “The
186

Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” first published
twenty years ago, one longstanding interpretation of Dracula was as representing the
“primitive” foreigner who invades the civilized world. Arata points out that Dracula
differs from other invasion narratives of the time because the vampire does not come
from another modern, civilized country to the metropolis of London, but rather from the
backwaters of Transylvania. Ironically, it is this very show of difference which is
suspect. Rather than a case of reverse colonization, the very conditions by which the
British have become a powerful empire seem to be what allow Dracula to infiltrate.
When Harker presents the reader with the familiar trope of traveling from West to
East, from civilization into barbarism, he comments on “the most Western of splendid
bridges over the Danube” (9). This last reference to a “Western” feat of engineering
technology highlights Western superiority when juxtaposed with Eastern backwardness,
but also poses a threat. At the same time that the bridge emblematizes specifically
Western skill and gives access to a foreign region, it hints at the possibility of invasion.
Harker makes the point again by a negative example: “It is an old tradition that [roads in
the Carpathians] are not to be kept in too good order. Of old the Hospadars would not
repair them, lest the Turks should think that they were preparing to bring in foreign
troops, and so hasten the war which was always really at loading point” (15). Much is
made explicitly of the difference between but East and West but, rather than a battle
between opposites, Dracula merges almost seamlessly with London’s modernity and is
enabled by Western technology.
187

Harker’s trip rehearses the preconditions of vampirism in postcard terms. The
story begins “innocently” enough in the genre of travel narrative. Jonathan Harker’s
journal starts by chronicling his travels into Transylvania in recognizable tropes. He
comments on train schedules, regional foods, the landscape, and the different ethnic
groups. Harker reveals his desire to see the non-modern as he enters Transylvania. He
writes, “Count Dracula had directed me to go to the Golden Krone Hotel, which I found,
to my great delight, to be thoroughly old-fashioned, for of course I wanted to see all I
could of the ways of the country,” (11). Even after he begins to fear his situation, he
continues giving descriptions of food and his surroundings: “The Count himself came
forward and took off the cover of a dish, and I fell at once on an excellent roast chicken.
This, with some cheese and a salad and a bottle of old Tokay…was my supper” (23). In a
sense, he goes in search of postcard-like material that he can send back to his fiancée
Mina, specifically framing the picturesque.
Yet Harker’s trip is one of business rather than pleasure. His journey is an
excellent example of the interconnectedness of travel and colonialism. Like any good
traveler/colonialist, he has done his research ahead of time in London’s British Museum
Library because he believes “that some foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to
have some importance in dealing with a noble of that country” (9-10). Harker looks at
maps and descriptions of different ethnicities not merely because of personal curiosity but
because they may be related to his business venture. There are even moments, such as
during his description of the Slovaks, which almost could be interpreted as testing the
regional security: “The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks, who are more
188

barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers,
white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over
with brass nails” (11). He seems to be expressing relief when he continues, “They are,
however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion” (11).
When Harker is first addressed in the text, it is as “The Herr Englishman” and, indeed, he
comes to stand for his entire nation.
Harker’s research in the British Museum Library has its equivalent in Dracula’s
home library where Harker finds “a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of
them, and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers. A table in the centre was littered
with English magazines and newspapers, though none of them were of very recent date.
The books were of the most varied kind – history, geography, politics, political economy,
botany, geology, law – all relating to England and English life and customs and manners”
(25). With the voracious appetite of the postcard, every aspect of English life must be
represented. Ironically, Dracula learns all he can about the British only in order to erase
any particularity when he turns them into vampires.
What he, in his latent state, lacks is a sender: he must subsume a personal identity
in order to be circulated. Count Dracula appears to summon Harker to Transylvania
merely so that Dracula may leave it. In this process, Harker is flattened rather than being
the agent he thought he was. Dracula’s new “friend,” is clearly seen as a replacement for
the limitations of his books, which Dracula also calls friends: “[These friends], ever
since I had the idea of going to London, have given me many, many hours of pleasure.
Through them I have come to know your great England; and to know her is to love her”
189

(25). Through Harker, Dracula hopes to learn a living and popular idiom. His English
language is indeed for the most part correct, but he has not been able to convert it to a
modern state. He takes the phrase “to know her is to love her” from Samuel Rogers’s
1814 poem “Jacqueline” but, like his knowledge of London, it is a second-hand
experience of English culture, from books. To rectify this, Dracula, besides “asking
questions on every conceivable subject” (a parallel with Dracula’s assorted library),
prioritizes “chatting” with Harker (30). This is the banal message which is necessary to
include on the back of a postcard in order to send it through the mail. Stoker presents
Dracula in Transylvania as being in a pre-circulated postcard state, which the Count longs
to supersede.
Interestingly, Dracula himself ultimately desires not to be known. While being
known signals mastery for him in Transylvania, not being known, or being
undifferentiated from the common Englishman, is what signals mastery for Dracula in
England. The novel gives no other reason for Dracula choosing London out of any place
in the world except the following: Dracula longs “to go through the crowded streets of
your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its
life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is” (25-26). If Dracula’s statement
is to be believed, what matters most to him is the ability to circulate through the modern
metropolis rather than stagnating at its periphery, and to absorb in their totality all of its
qualities. London seems to be chosen, ironically, because its inhabitants are already
primed to be vampires. The indistinctness of the individual in the big city is what calls to
Dracula. By becoming more British than the British, and therefore undifferentiated from
190

the British, he can slowly replace them in an act that further flattens humanity. As
Harker fears, “this was the being [he] was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps,
for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood,
and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless” (53-
4). After the first few chapters, once Dracula departs for London, the reader rarely hears
his voice again, even filtered through other subjectivities as it is. Interestingly, this seems
to be a sign of his power: he is able to do exactly what he said he wanted to do.
Despite only ever having spoken of wanting to reside in London, Dracula’s first
stop on the British isle is a seaside resort, Whitby. Ostensibly this is to attract less
attention, but, melodramatically, it is also there where he finds Lucy and Mina, and
begins to feed on the former. Yet, that does not fully explain Stoker’s choice. Whitby
seems to be chosen particularly because it resembles Dracula’s former home. It also
allows Mina to play the part of the tourist and connect her a priori to Dracula. In Mina’s
journal, we find a description of the town that rivals Harker’s travelogue of Transylvania.
She describes the landscape, the history, the monuments, the legends and even Whitby’s
colorful characters. Moreover, as Auerbach and Skal point out, “like a domestic
reflection of wild Transylvania, Whitby is a vulnerable city that bears the scars of
invasions” (63). Mina’s journal further resembles a postcard when writes the most iconic
of postcard phrases, “I wonder where Jonathan is and if he is thinking of me! I wish he
were here” (69). Perhaps the oddest parallel is that Mina, too, shows a preference for the
graveyard of St. Mary’s Church, calling it “the nicest spot in Whitby” (63).
191

Dracula’s next appearances are also at well-known tourist destinations. In the
excerpt from the Pall Mall Gazette, it becomes clear that Dracula has visited the Regent’s
Park Zoo. The visit is notable for the ways it collapses distinctions between the vampire
and the common Londoner. Narrated mainly in the Cockney accents of the zookeeper,
Thomas Bilder, the article recounts the suspicious circumstances surrounding the
disappearance of a wolf from the zoo. Just as Dracula has a unique relationship with
certain animals both by taking on their shape and by being able to command them, Bilder
and his wife joke about their own resemblances to the wolves. When discussing Dracula,
the zookeeper expresses surprise that Dracula is just as capable as himself at handling the
wolves, which changes the keeper’s dislike to affinity. But perhaps most interestingly,
linguistic roles become blurry. Whereas previously it was Dracula who sought to imitate
Harker’s speech, Bilder mentions his own imitation of Dracula’s manner: “Says I, a-
imitatin’ of him” (127). Yet in Bilder’s narration, it appears that Dracula acquires
something of a Cockney accent while speaking with the zookeeper in such phrases as
“I’m used to ‘em” and “I ‘ave made pets of several” after opening with the more standard
“Keeper, these wolves seem upset at something” (127, 126). Whether this is a result of
Bilder narrating in his own voice or Dracula imitating him is ambiguous. The Pall Mall
Gazette article is an unexpected mise-en-abyme of the novel as a whole. Its main thrust
shows up once more, briefly, when a doctor expresses the opinion that the bite marks
appearing on local children were caused either by the bats “which are so numerous on the
northern heights of London” or by “some wild specimen from the South” which may
have escaped from the zoo – not being able to differentiate the two (174).
192

The vampire, fittingly, also spends his time wandering down the central London
artery of Piccadilly. Once again, Londoners, here Mina specifically, and Dracula already
seem to have the same tastes: they enjoy the energy of the crowd. She and Jonathan head
to Piccadilly in the first place because Hyde Park is too desolate: “There were very few
people there, and it was sad-looking and desolate to see so many empty chairs” (155-6).
Moreover she and Dracula, while people watching, are drawn to observing the same
woman. Mina also explicitly enjoys the freedom of not being known by anyone around
her. Mina and Dracula not only both engage in the banal activities of the masses, they
prefer to be lost in them. The conflict of the novel arises not because Londoners and
vampires are so different, but because they are so much alike.
The subtle but striking affinities between Dracula and Mina will become more
explicit after her “baptism of blood,” performed when the vampire forces her to drink his
blood. In another rare moment when Dracula speaks, he informs Mina, “Now you shall
come to my call. When my brain says, ‘Come!’ to you, you shall cross land or sea to do
my bidding” (252). On the one hand, this “baptism” transforms Mina into a quasi-
vampire. As such, she will lose her volition – essentially, what constitutes her as an
entity separate from Dracula. The psychiatric patient Renfield, serves as an earlier
example of this and an explicit “experiment.”
On the other hand, the Count’s telepathic powers will also be his undoing in more
ways than one. The band of vampire hunters discovers that, to a limited degree, through
hypnotizing Mina they are able to access Dracula’s thoughts. Oddly, when Professor
Van Helsing first hypnotizes Mina, the voice that initially speaks appears to be neither
193

Mina’s (as recognized by Harker) nor Dracula’s as he has spoken thus far in the novel:
“her voice had a sad dreaminess which was new to [Harker]” (272). In those first
moments, the depersonalization of vampirism is made evident – Mina’s hypnotism
suggests that there is another side to Dracula which is normally inaccessible even to the
vampire. She herself is to be able to retain some aspect of her individuality because she
next answers in “the same tone” that she uses “when reading her shorthand notes” (272).
Mina’s training in different mediums has prepared her to be able to “interpret” herself
when she is no longer herself.
The timing of this discovery of Mina’s “power” is not a coincidence. It comes
right after another surprising realization of Mina’s: “That poor soul who has wrought all
this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he too is
destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality” (269).
Part of the success of the vampire hunters comes from their ability to differentiate the
vampire, to humanize him. Mina’s ability, in particular, to see him as a human individual
helps her fight off her own vampirism. Mina’s declaration is her epiphany, begun by the
research Van Helsing receives from his friend Professor Arminius, which tells of what
Dracula was like when he was a man. How Dracula himself, in that case, comes to be a
vampire is unclear. Mina is satisfied that her theory is true at Dracula’s death when, even
though his disintegration happens in “almost the drawing of a breath,” she carefully
notices his expression change to “a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined
might have rested [on his face]” (325).
194

The vampire hunters’ ultimate victory is ensured, in part, by the fact that they are
able to see Dracula as a unique individual. They discover that, even among vampires,
Dracula is set apart: “Were another of the Un-dead, like him, to try to do what he has
done, perhaps not all the centuries of the world that have been, or that will be, could aid
him. With this one, all the forces of nature that are occult and deep and strong must have
worked together in some wondrous way” (278). This is due to his own personal, human,
qualities of when he was alive, but also the mysterious telluric forces of Transylvania.
With Dracula dead, thanks to their identification of his singularity, they have nothing
more to fear. In the process, he had also becomes reidentified with Transylvania rather
than England, which leaves Transylvania free for the taking. Even while on the most
dangerous part of the hunt, Mina comments on how much she would like to be a tourist
there: “To stop and see people, and learn something of their life, and to fill our minds and
memories with all the colour and picturesqueness of the whole wild, beautiful country
and the quaint people!” (311). It is little wonder that the novel ends with a view of Castle
Dracula on their return trip.
The postcard, and control of modern media, has been returned to its sender.
Throughout the novel, Dracula functions as a means for the vampire hunters to become
visible rather than being truly autonomous himself. He is their mirror image and the
horror comes not from how dissimilar he is from them but how, being their
representation, he actually may succeed in replacing them. Vanquishing him depends
upon both differentiating themselves from him and identifying him as an individual.
195

By way of conclusion, we return to Rudyard Kipling. It appears that Bram Stoker
was not the only one to publish writing on vampires in 1897. Explicitly inspired by the
painting by his cousin, Sir Philip Burne-Jones (son of Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward
Burne-Jones), entitled The Vampire, Kipling wrote his poem of the same title. An edition
of the poem was published the following year with an image of Burne-Jones’s painting as
the frontispiece, combining image and text. Kipling’s poem, like the painting, depicts a
woman who cruelly feeds off the man who loves her. A reviewer for The New York
Times in 1902 describes both the painting and the poem in this way: “Sir Philip’s
illustration is quite as flat, unmoved, and untrue of ring as the verses: it does not represent
Kipling’s idea any more than Kipling’s verses represent it. There is no vampire about it”
(“British Literary Painter” 8). Yet what Kipling’s poem has that Burne-Jones’s painting
does not is the terrifyingly vague “suggestion in Kipling’s verse that the man – some man
– any man, is the victim of the woman – some woman – any woman, who uses and
abuses him and remains always an overrated enigma who ‘never could understand’” (8).
The vampire as subject matter appears to be less vampiric, and terrifying, than media
themselves.

196

Bibliography

Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. 1981. Trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Print.

Arata, Stephen. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse
Colonization.” Victorian Studies. 33.4 (1990): 621-45. JSTOR. Web. 26 May 2008.

Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.

Bayne, Samuel Gamble. Derricks of Destiny: An Autobiography. New York:
Brentano’s, 1924. Print.

---. A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909. Print.

---. “Great Irishmen.” Editorial. New York Times 24 May 1912: 12. Proquest Historical
Newspapers. Web. 4 Apr. 2009.

---. On an Irish Jaunting-car Through Donegal and Connemara. New York: Harper,
1902. Print.

---. Quicksteps Through Scandinavia: With a Retreat from Moscow. New York: Harpers
& Brothers, 1908. Print.

---. “The Woolworth Building.” New York Times 6 June 1913: 10. Proquest Historical
Newspapers. Web. 3 May 2009.

Bell, Millicent. “Introduction: A Critical History.” The Cambridge Companion to Edith
Wharton. Ed. Millicent Bell. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1995. 1-19. Print.

Best, Jonathan. Philippine Picture Postcards. Makati: Bookmark, 1994. Print.

The Birth of a Nation. Dir. D.W. Griffith. Epoch Producing Co., 1915. Film.

Borus, Daniel H. Writing Realism: Howells, James, and Norris in the Mass Market.
Chapel Hill, NC: The U of North Carolina P, 1989. Print.

“A British Literary Painter.” New York Times. 20 Mar 1902: 8. Proquest Historical
Newspapers. Web. 7 Apr. 2011.

197

“The Brussels Anarchist.” The Scotsman. 18 Nov. 1902: 5. The Scotsman Digital
Archive. Web. 23 Feb. 2012.

Burne-Jones, Philip. The Vampire. 1897. Oil on canvas. Private Collection.

Burt, Mary Elizabeth. Literary landmarks; a guide to good reading for young people,
and teachers' assistant; with a carefully selected list of seven hundred books. Boston,
1892. Internet Archive. Web. 3 June 2009.

Buzard, James. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to
Culture, 1800-1918. Oxford, England: Oxford UP 1992. Print.

Cannadine, David. “The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British
Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c. 1820-1977.” The Invention of Tradition.
Ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983. 101-164.
Print.

“Cartolyrica.” The Picture Postcard. Vol. 3. London, 1902. Print.

“Chattell v. Turner.” The Times Law Reports. Ed. Arthur Russell. Vol. 7. London, 1895-
6. 360-2. Google Books. Web. 6 May 2010.

Cole, George Watson. Postcards: the World in Miniature; a plan for their systematic
arrangement. Priv. pub., 1935. Print.

Corelli, Marie. The Treasure of Heaven. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1906.
Print.

Corkett, Frederick T. “The Production and Collection of the Pictorial Postcard.” Journal
of the Society of the Arts 54 (1906): 622-33. Google Books. Web. 16 Feb. 2010.

“Counterfeit Gladstone Postcards.” New York Times 4 Oct. 1895: 16. Proquest
Historical Newspapers. Web. 15 Apr. 2010.

Cresswell, Beatrix F. “To My Friend” The Picture Postcard. Vol 3. London, 1902.
Print.

Crowley, John William. The Dean of American Letters: The Late Career of William
Dean Howells. Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. Print.

“A Curious Hindu Character Card.” The Picture Postcard. Vol. 1. London, 1901. Print.

198

Daly, Nicolas. “Incorporated Bodies: Dracula and the Rise of Professionalism.” Texas
Studies in Language and Literature. 39.2 (1997): 181-203. JSTOR. Web. 15 Mar. 2010.

Dare, Phyllis. From School to Stage. London, 1907. Google Books. Web. 12 Feb. 2009.

Derrida, Jacques. La carte postale: de Socrate à Freud et au-delà. Paris: Flammarion,
1980. Print.

Devins, John Bancroft. The Classic Mediterranean. New York: American Tract Society,
1910. Print.

Diamond, Michael. Victorian Sensation: The Spectacular, the Shocking, and the
Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Anthem Press, 2003. Print.

Dillingham, William B. “The Kipling Question.” The Sewanee Review. 109.3 (2001):
447-453. Print.

Rev. of Dracula. The Athenaeum. 26 June 1897: 835. Google Books. Web. 6 Apr. 2010.

Ely, N.E.S. “The Picture Postcard.” The Black Cat. Oct. 1906: 1-9. Google Books. Web.
7 Apr. 2009.

“Flowerdew, Herbert.” The Oxford Companion to Edwardian Literature. Ed. Sandra
Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell, and David Trotter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1997. Print.

Flowerdew, Herbert. The Motor Kuklux. Ed. Frank Munsey. The Cavalier 7, 14, 21, 28
Mar. 1914. Print.

---. The Seventh Postcard. London: Greening and Co, 1914. Print.

Forbes, William Cameron. The Romance of Business. Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1921. Print.

Forster, E.M. Where Angels Fear to Tread. 1905. New York: Dover Publications, 1993.
Print.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 1977. Trans. Alan
Sheridan. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. Print.

Godfrey, Denis. E.M. Forster’s Other Kingdom. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1968.
Print.

199

Halbert, Pierre. Le miroir de vertu et chemin de bien viure…Auec le stile de composer
toutes sortes de letters. Paris, 1571. Google Books. Web. 13 May 2010.

Handy, Ellen. “Postcard Sublime: William Henry Jackson's Western Landscapes” From
Albums to the Academy: Postcards and Art History. Ed. Jordana Mendelson. Spec. issue
of Visual Resources 17.4 (2001). 418-434. Print.

Heinsberger, Ph. “Untitled.” The Post Card. 27 Dec. 1889. Print.

Hone, William. Every-Day Book. 2 vols. London, 1826. Print.

Howells, William Dean. Literary Friends and Acquaintance. New York: Harpers and
Brothers, 1900. Print.

---. My Literary Passions: Criticism and Fiction. New York: Harper 1910. Print.

---. Roman Holidays and Others. New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1908. Print.

---. Venetian Life. New York, 1866. Print.

---. Venetian Life. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1891. Print.

---. Venetian Life. New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1907. Print.

Howitt, William. Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets. London, 1847.
Print.

Hubbard, Elbert. The Book of Business. East Aurora, New York: The Roycrofters, 1913.
Print.

---. The Romance of Business. East Aurora, New York: The Roycrofters, 1917. Print.

Johnson, Constance and Burges. The Private Code and Post Card Cypher: A Telegraph
and Post-Card Code-book for Family Use. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1914. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses. 1921. Project Gutenberg. Web. 24 Jan. 2009.

Kimball, Richard B. Undercurrents of Wall-Street: A Romance of Business. New York:
G.P. Putnam, 1862. Google Books. Web. 25 June 2009.

“King of the Belgians Attacked.” New York Times 16 Nov. 1902: 5. Proquest Historical
Newspapers. Web. 23 Apr. 2009.

200

King’s How to See New York: A Complete Trustworthy Guidebook. New York: King,
Moses Inc., 1914. Internet Archive. Web. 15 Jan. 2009.

Kipling, Rudyard. “The Village That Voted the Earth Was Flat.” 1912. A Diversity of
Creatures. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1925. 147-194. Print.

---. The Vampire: A Poem, Written for a Picture by Philip Burne-Jones exhibited at the
New Gallery in London, 1897. Washington, 1898. Hathi Trust Digital Library. Web. 12
Jan. 2012.

“The Lady Novelist in the City.” Financial Times [London]. 16 Apr. 1902: 4. Microfilm.

“Life Model/Song Cards.” The Picture Postcard Annual and Directory. Vol. 2
Rotherham, 1907. Print.

McBratney, John. Rev. of Politics and Awe in Rudyard Kipling’s Fiction, by
Peter Havholm. Journal of British Studies. 48.2 (2009): 536-8. JSTOR. Web. 15 Oct.
2011.

“Marie Corelli Brings Suit.” New York Times 13 May 1906: 10. Proquest Historical
Newspapers. Web. 13 Apr. 2010.

Menke, Richard. Telegraphic Realism: Victorian Fiction and Other Information
Systems. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008. Print.

Mills, Arthur J. “The Picture Postcard Girls.” London: Star Music Publishing Co, 1908.
Print.

“Miss Sedgwick’s Latest Novel.” New York Times 28 May 1910: N.p. Proquest
Historical Newspapers. Web. 11 May 2009.

Munro, H.H. “Clovis on the Alleged Romance of Business.” The Square Egg And Other
Sketches with Three Plays. New York: Viking Press, 1924. 135-136. Print.

New York, Metropolis of the Western World. New York: Foster and Reynolds Co., 1910.
Internet Archive. Web. 16 Jan. 2009.

“Northern Europe by Verbal Kodak.” New York Times 8 Aug. 1908: BR435. Proquest
Historical Newspapers. Web. 4 Apr. 2009.

Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880-
1940. Print.

201

Ouelette, William. Fantasy Postcards. London: Sphere, 1976. Print.

“Our Booking Office.” Punch, or the London Charivari 10 Feb. 1915: 19-20. Internet
Archive. Web. 15 May 2010.

“A Parisian Swindler.” Godey’s Lady’s Book. Philadelphia, Aug. 1873. Accessible
Archives. Web. 2 June 2009.

Parry, Ann. The Poetry of Rudyard Kipling: Rousing the Nation. Buckingham: Open UP,
1992. Print.

Patterson, Martha. Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman,
1895-1915. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2005. Print.

“A Picture card romance. A Tale of nineteen postcards and two letters,” The Picture
Postcard. Vol. 1. London, 1900. Print.

The Picture Postcard. Ed. E.W. Richardson. 8 Vols. London, 1900-7. Print.

The Picture Postcard Annual and Directory. 2 Vols. Rotherham, 1906-7. Print.

“The Point of View”. Scribner’s. 44 (1908): 377-380. Google Books. Web. 14 Jan. 2012.

Poole, Deborah. “An Image of ‘Our Indian’: Type Photographs and Racial Sentiments in
Oaxaca, 1920–1940.” The Hispanic American Historical Review. 84.1 (2004): 37-82.
Print.

“Postal Card Irony.” New York Times 31 Aug. 1905: 6. Proquest Historical Newspapers.
Web. 20 Apr. 2009.

“Postal Information.” The World Almanac and Encyclopedia. New York: Press
Publishing Co., 1904. Internet Archive. Web. 27 Nov. 2011.

“A Post-Card Anniversary.” Harper’s Weekly 23 Apr. 1910. Harpweek. Web. 26 June
2009.

“Post-card Libels.” New York Times 21 Nov. 1871: 4. Proquest Historical Newspapers.
Web. 11 Apr. 2009.

“Post-card Notes.” Punch, or the London Charivari. 19 Aug. 1903: 118. Internet
Archive. Web. 20 Feb 2010.

The Post Card. Vol. 1 Roselle, NJ, 1889. Print.
202

“Post Card Fad Increasing.” New York Daily Tribune. 28 July 1901: 9. Proquest
Historical Newspapers. Web. 29 May 2010.

The Postcard Connoisseur: a monthly magazine of announcement and criticism for post-
card collectors with descriptions & specimens. London, 1904. Print.

“Postcard Rulings.” The Publishers’ Weekly. 19 Oct. 1907: 1146. Google Books. Web. 20
Oct. 2011.

The Poster and Post-card Collector. London, 1903. Print.

“The Prince of Pilsen: The People in the Piece.” The Play Pictorial 22.4 (1904): 143-4.
Google Books. Web. 12 Sep. 2009.

Pizer, Donald. The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism:
Howells to London. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1995. Print.

“Queen Natalie’s Wrath.” New York Times 7 Oct. 1900: 7. Proquest Historical
Newspapers. Web. 11 Apr. 2010.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. American Fiction: An Historical and Critical Survey. New
York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1936. Print.

Rawnsley, Hardwicke Drummond. The Child and the Cinematograph Show and the
Picture Post-Card Evil. N.p., 1913. Print.

Rogers, Samuel. “Jacqueline.” London, 1814. Google Books. Web. 13 Nov. 2011.

“Sadgrove v. Hole.” British Ruling Cases. Vol 1. Rochester, N.Y., 1911. 459-469.
Google Books. Web. 6 May 2009.

Schor, Naomi. “Cartes Postales: Representing Paris 1900”. Critical Inquiry. 18.2
(1992): 188-244. Print.

Sedgwick, Anne Douglas. Franklin Winslow Kane. New York: The Century Co., 1910.
Print.

---. A Portrait in Letters. Ed. Basil de Sélincourt. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.,
1936. Print.

Sedgwick, Henry Dwight. The New American Type and Other Essays. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Co., 1908. Print.

203

Showalter, Elaine. “The Custom of the Country: Spragg and the Art of the Deal.” The
Cambridge Companion to Edith Wharton. Ed. Millicent Bell. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge UP, 1995. 87-97. Print.

Sims, George R. Living London. 3 Vols. London, 1902. Print.

Staff, Frank. The Picture Postcard and Its Origins. New York: Frederick A. Praeger,
1967. Print.

Steiber, Nancy. “Postcards and the Invention of Old Amsterdam around 1900.”
Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity. Ed. David Prochaska and Jordana
Mendelson. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania Press UP, 2010. 24-41. Print.

Stevens, Norman D. ed. Postcards in the Library: Invaluable Visual Sources. New York:
Haworth Press, 1995. Print

Stiles, Leslie. “Why Do They Call Me a Gibson Girl?” London, New York: Francis, Day
& Hunter, 1906. Print.

Stoddard, Richard Henry. Poets' Homes: Pen and Pencil Sketches of American Poets
and their Homes. London, 1877. Print.

Stoker, Bram. Bram Stoker's Notes for Dracula. Annotated and Transcribed by Robert
Eighteen-Bisang, and Elizabeth R. Miller. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. Pub, 2008.
Print.

---. Dracula. 1897. New York: Norton, 1997. Print.

Swift, Lindsay. Literary Landmarks of Boston: A Visitor’s Guide to Points of Literary
Interest in and about Boston. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1922. Print.

“Table Talk.” American Photography. 3.1 (1909): 49. Google Books. Web. 19 Mar.
2009.

Tejedo, Isabel Fernández. Recuerdo de México: la tarjeta postal mexicana, 1882-1930.
Mexico: Banobras, 1994. Print.

Thornwell, Emily. The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility, in Manners, Dress, and
Conversation... also a Useful Instructor in Letter Writing...Etc. New York, 1856. Google
Books. Web. 3 Apr. 2009.

Underwood, John C. Literature and Insurgency: Ten Studies in Racial Evolution. New
York: M. Kennerly, 1914. Print.
204

Wall, E.J. and H. Snowden Ward. The Photographic Picture Post-Card, for Personal
Use and for Profit. London, 1906. Print.

Walpole, Hugh. Rev. of Franklin Winslow Kane, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick. Anne
Douglas Sedgwick; an interview, and appreciations by William Lyon Phelps [and
others]. Ed. Esther Forbes. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920. N. pag. Internet Archive.
Web. 17 Oct. 2009.

Watson-Thomas, E. Letter. The Picture Postcard. Vol. 3. London, 1902. Print.

Wharton, Edith. The Custom of the Country. New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1913. Print.
---. The House of Mirth. New York, 1905. Print.

Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media.” ELH. 59 (1992): 467-
493. Print.

Wirsén, Carl David af. Nobel Academy. 10 Dec. 1907. Presentation speech.
Nobelprize.org. Web. 13 Dec. 2011.

Wolowski, Louis. La Carte Postale en Diverse Pays. Paris, 1873. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press, 1929. Print.

Worth, Aaron. "Edith Wharton's Poetics of Telecommunications." Studies in American
Fiction 36 (2008): 95-121. Print.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

The biopoetic: toward a posthuman epic

PDF

The organic metaphor demystified: rhetoric of environmental change and environmental preservation in contemporary American nature writing

PDF

A place in the total library: artists' books between art and literature

PDF

Embracing the demon: the monstrous child in Japanese literature and cinema, 1946-2008

PDF

The social life of nations: a comparative study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction, 1888-1906

PDF

Cicero's Academica and the foundation of a Roman academy

Asset Metadata

Creator Cure, Monica (author)

Core Title Text with a view: turn of the century literature and the invention of the postcard

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publication Date 07/31/2017

Defense Date 04/25/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Bram,Edith,Edward Morgan,Forster,Howells,Kipling,OAI-PMH Harvest,postcards,Rudyard,Stoker,Wharton,William Dean

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Schor, Hilary M. (committee chair), Gambrell, Alice (committee member), Norindr, Panivong (committee member)

Creator Email cure@usc.edu,monica.cure@biola.edu,romphoenix@yahoo.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-79147

Unique identifier UC11289177

Identifier usctheses-c3-79147 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CureMonica-1088.pdf

Dmrecord 79147

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Cure, Monica

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA