Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters

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Kate Thomas (Associate Professor of English, Associate Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College)

Postal Pleasures

Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters

Kate Thomas (Associate Professor of English, Associate Professor of English, Bryn Mawr College)

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English

Oxford University Press Inc
23 February 2012

Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 ; Postal & telecommunications industries

"In 1889 uniformed post-boys were discovered moonlighting in a West End brothel frequented by men of the upper classes. ""The Cleveland Street Scandal"" erupted and Victorian Britain faced the possibility that the Post Office-a bureaucratic backbone of nation and empire-was inspiring and servicing subversive sexual behavior. However, the unlikely alliance between sex and the postal service was not exactly the news the sensational press made it out to be.

Postal Pleasures explores the relationship between illicit sex and the Royal Mail from reforms initiated in 1840 up to the imperial end of the nineteenth century.

With a combination of historical details and literary analyses, Kate Thomas illustrates how the postal network, its uniformed employees, and its material trappings-envelopes, postmarks, stamps-were used to signal and circulate sexual intrigue.

For many, the idea of an envelope promiscuously jostling its neighbors in a post boy's bag, or the notion that secrets passed through the eyes and fingers of telegraph girls, was more stimulating than the actual contents of correspondence.

Writers like Anthony Trollope, Eliza Lynn Lynton, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others, invoked the postal system as both an instrument and a metaphor for sexual relations that crossed and double-crossed lines of class, marriage, and heterosexuality.

Postal Pleasures adds a new dimension to studies of the era as it uncovers the unlikely linkage between the Victorian Post Office and the queer networks it inspired."

By: Kate Thomas (Associate Professor of English Associate Professor of English Bryn Mawr College)
Imprint: Oxford University Press Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 155mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 348g
ISBN: 9780199731169
ISBN 10: 0199731160
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 23 February 2012
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

"Introduction: Victorians Go Postal 1. Postal Digressions: Mail and Sexual Scandal 2. ""This Little Queen's Head Can't be Untrue:"" Trollope's Postal Infidelities 3. A Queer Job for A Girl: the Communicative Touch in Trollope, Hardy and Lynn Linton 4. All Red Routes: Blood Brotherhood and the Post in Doyle, Kipling and Stoker 5. Post Script: Henry James's Public Servant Works Cited Index"

Kate Thomas is Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College.

Reviews for Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters

"""Postal Pleasures is innovative, authoritative, and well-written-an exemplary work in Victorian studies that skillfully integrates frameworks drawn from literary studies, cultural history, queer theory, and postcolonial studies."" --Sharon Marcus, author of Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England ""Traversing the busy crossroads between Victorian and queer studies, Postal Pleasures charts an exciting path through a superficially sexless bureaucracy. Thomas compellingly shows how, in the postal service, desire and selfhood are both media and mediation, and queerness less an identity than a mode of transaction. To sum it up in a phrase: ontology recapitulates philately."" --William A. Cohen, author of Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses ""Postal Pleasures is a pleasure to read, and it gains strength as it goes along, not least by introducing insightful readings of less well-known works which make us think differently about authors we thought we knew....Through her engaging, playful and convincing readings, Thomas has taken the universal and made it seem very queer, indeed."" --Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies"