Historical Letters

Alexander Pope to Jonathan Swift, 1737

Alexander Pope · 23 March 1737

Pope, growing old himself, asks his old friend Jonathan Swift to leave Ireland and come live near him in England for their remaining years.

Ludwig van Beethoven to Franz Wegeler, 1826

Ludwig van Beethoven · 7 October 1826

Confined to bed, Beethoven writes with warmth to Franz Wegeler, the friend of his youth, recalling old kindnesses and reporting his recent honors.

Michael Faraday to John Tyndall, 1855

Michael Faraday · 6 October 1855 · Sydenham

After a bruising scientific meeting, the elder Faraday advises the younger Tyndall to be 'a little dull of apprehension' where a slight seems meant, and quick to see good will.

Emily Dickinson to Samuel and Mary Bowles, 1858

Emily Dickinson · c. 1858

Dickinson writes two short notes to her friend Samuel Bowles and his wife, thanking them for a gift and declaring that friends are the only wealth she wants.

George Sand to Gustave Flaubert, 1866

George Sand · 28 September 1866 · Nohant

Sand happily agrees to visit Flaubert at Croisset and teases him about growing older together as friends.

Frederick Douglass to Harriet Tubman, 1868

Frederick Douglass · 29 August 1868 · Rochester, New York

Asked for a word of commendation, Douglass measures the difference between his public fame and Tubman's unwitnessed work: 'I have wrought in the day — you in the night.'

Cicero to Quintus Cicero, 58 BC

Marcus Tullius Cicero · 13 June 58 BC · Thessalonica · also Grief

Exiled from Rome and blaming himself for his brother's ruin, Cicero writes an anguished letter begging Quintus not to grieve on his account.

Thomas More to Margaret Roper, 1535

Thomas More · 5 July 1535

The night before his execution, Thomas More writes a farewell letter to his daughter Margaret, sending blessings and small keepsakes to his family.

Benjamin Franklin to William Franklin, 1784

Benjamin Franklin · 16 August 1784 · Passy

Franklin writes to his estranged son William, a Loyalist during the Revolution, agreeing to renew contact and sending his grandson to visit.

Jane Austen to Anna Austen, 1814

Jane Austen · 9–18 September 1814 · Chawton, Hampshire

Austen reads her niece's novel-in-progress and answers with pages of exact, affectionate criticism — including the line about three or four families in a country village.

Harriet Beecher Stowe to Georgiana May, 1838

Harriet Beecher Stowe · 21 June 1838

Stowe gives her friend Georgiana May a comic, exhausted account of one ordinary morning caring for her three small children.

Abraham Lincoln to John D. Johnston, 1851

Abraham Lincoln · 12 January 1851 · Springfield

Lincoln writes to his stepbrother with religious consolation for their dying father, explaining that his own affairs keep him from visiting.

Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, 1653

Dorothy Osborne · autumn 1653

Osborne writes to William Temple about a rumored bad marriage and reflects on how little sense most people bring to choosing a spouse.

John Keats to Fanny Brawne, 1819

John Keats · 8 July 1819

Keats, away from London, writes Fanny Brawne an intense love letter describing how completely she has taken over his thoughts.

Robert Browning to Elizabeth Barrett, 1845

Robert Browning · 10 January 1845 · New Cross, Hatcham, Surrey

After reading her poems, Robert Browning writes to Elizabeth Barrett for the first time, telling her he loves both her work and her.

Elizabeth Barrett to Robert Browning, 1845

Elizabeth Barrett · 11 January 1845 · 50 Wimpole Street

Barrett writes back to Browning the next day, moved that a poet she admires has praised her work so warmly.

Sullivan Ballou to Sarah Ballou, 1861

Sullivan Ballou · 14 July 1861 · Camp Clark, Washington, D.C.

Anticipating he may not survive the coming battle, Ballou writes his wife a farewell letter about his love for her and his duty to his country.

John Calvin to Pierre Viret, 1549

John Calvin · 7 April 1549

Calvin writes to his friend Viret that he is bearing the death of his wife with as much self-control as grief allows.

Michelangelo to Giorgio Vasari, 1556

Michelangelo Buonarroti · 23 February 1556 · Rome · also Friendship

Michelangelo, in his eighties, tells Vasari that the death of his devoted servant Urbino, after twenty-six years, has taught him how to face his own death.

Oliver Cromwell to Valentine Walton, 1644

Oliver Cromwell · 5 July 1644 · Before York · also Doubt and faith

Writing three days after Marston Moor, Cromwell reports a victory and then tells his brother-in-law that his eldest son is dead.

Samuel Johnson to Lucy Porter, 1759

Samuel Johnson · 23 January 1759

Johnson writes to his stepdaughter, grieving that he cannot make up to his late mother for how he treated her while she lived.

Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1804

Abigail Adams · 20 May 1804 · Quincy

Abigail Adams writes to console Thomas Jefferson on the death of his daughter Maria, whom Adams had cared for years earlier.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Karl Friedrich Zelter, 1830

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · 21 November 1830 · Weimar

Goethe answers his friend Zelter's letter of sympathy after the death of Goethe's only surviving son, in restrained but grief-stricken terms.

Abraham Lincoln to Fanny McCullough, 1862

Abraham Lincoln · 23 December 1862 · Washington, D.C.

In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln writes to the grieving daughter of a friend killed in action: 'You are sure to be happy again.'

Abigail Adams to John Adams, 1775

Abigail Adams · 8-10 September 1775 · Braintree

During a dysentery epidemic that has struck her own household, Abigail Adams reports days of illness and a neighborhood losing children and adults to the same disease.

Adam Smith to William Strahan, 1776

Adam Smith · 9 November 1776 · Kirkaldy, Fifeshire

Eleven weeks after David Hume's death, Adam Smith gives a detailed account of his friend's calm, even cheerful, conduct through his final illness.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Thomas Poole, 1796

Samuel Taylor Coleridge · 5 November 1796

Coleridge describes a night of agonizing facial pain and the laudanum he took to ease it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe to Calvin Stowe, 1849

Harriet Beecher Stowe · 29 June - 23 July 1849 · also Grief

Over several weeks of a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe writes to her husband urging him to stay away, and the letter ends as their young son is dying.

Ivan Turgenev to Leo Tolstoy, 1883

Ivan Turgenev · June or July 1883

Dying of cancer, Turgenev sent a last plea urging the estranged Tolstoy to return to his fiction; it survives only as quoted by Henry James in a memorial essay.

Leonardo da Vinci to Ludovico Sforza, c. 1482

Leonardo da Vinci · c. 1482

Leonardo da Vinci drafts a job-application letter to Ludovico Sforza, listing his skills as a military engineer before mentioning, almost as an afterthought, that he also paints and sculpts.

John Keats to George and Tom Keats, 1817

John Keats · 21–27 December 1817 · Hampstead

The letter in which Keats, writing home about plays and dinner parties, arrives at 'Negative Capability' — being in uncertainties without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

Franz Liszt to Pierre Wolff, 1832

Franz Liszt · 2 and 8 May 1832 · Paris

After hearing Paganini perform, Liszt describes a fortnight of feverish self-study and the near-delirious ambition driving him to become a great artist.

Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams, 1848

Charlotte Brontë · 3 April 1848

Writing under her pen name, Currer Bell, Charlotte Brontë tells her publisher's reader that a hostile review of Jane Eyre has left her more encouraged than hurt.

Ralph Waldo Emerson to Walt Whitman, 1855

Ralph Waldo Emerson · 21 July 1855 · Concord, Massachusetts

After reading the unsigned first edition of Leaves of Grass, Emerson writes an unsolicited fan letter to its unknown author, Walt Whitman.

George Eliot to John Blackwood, 1859

George Eliot · 24 February 1859

Anxious for reassurance about Adam Bede's reception, George Eliot thanks her publisher for reports of praise and admits how much she needs encouragement.

George Eliot to Sara Hennell, 1843

George Eliot · 9 October 1843

Writing under her birth name, Marian Evans, the future George Eliot works out, at length, why she no longer thinks it right to argue people out of their religious beliefs.

Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, 1860

Charles Darwin · 22 May 1860 · Down, Kent

Six months after the Origin, Darwin tells his closest American ally exactly where they disagree about design and Providence — and admits he is bewildered.

Thomas Henry Huxley to Charles Kingsley, 1860

Thomas Henry Huxley · 23 September 1860 · also Grief

Replying to a letter of religious consolation after his young son's death, Huxley lays out, point by point, why he cannot make himself believe in personal immortality.

Cicero to Terentia, 58 BC

Marcus Tullius Cicero · 29 April 58 BC · Brundisium · also Family

Exiled from Rome, Cicero writes to his wife Terentia that he is too grief-stricken to write often, and asks her to look after their children and decide whether to join him.

Dorothy Osborne to William Temple, 1653

Dorothy Osborne · 2 January 1653

Dorothy Osborne scolds William Temple for passing within a few miles of her home without stopping to visit, and explains why she cannot easily leave her ailing father to see him.

Robert Louis Stevenson to Sidney Colvin, 1891

Robert Louis Stevenson · 5 September 1891 (?)

Living in Samoa, Stevenson tells his friend Sidney Colvin that a question about homesickness sent him a month deep into his grandfather's diaries, drafting a family history of Scottish lighthouse engineers, and admits that thinking of the Scottish coast is almost enough to make him weep.