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Predictions of the demise of letter writing are not new. The invention of the telegraph and the rise of the postcard were both seen as potential threats to a more leisurely, reflective form of communication. Yet by the close of the 20th century, more letters were being sent than ever, as social correspondence began to be supplemented by a boom in business mail.
From Europe’s most tech-savvy society, however, comes ominous news. As of next week, Denmark’s state-run postal service will end all letter deliveries after doing the rounds for 400 years. Around 1,500 jobs are being cut, and the country’s beloved red letterboxes are being sold off. It will still be possible for Danes to send a card or a love letter to someone far away next Christmas, but only via the shops of a smaller private company or a costly home collection.
Few industry observers doubt that other nations will eventually go down similar routes. To the dismay of the French public, La Poste has started to remove some of its postboxes, while Germany’s Deutsche Post is cutting thousands of jobs. In Britain, second‑class services have been reduced and letter volumes continue to drop, after falling from a peak of 20bn in the mid-2000s to 6.6bn in 2023-24.
That may at least partly be down to unpopular hikes in the price of a Royal Mail stamp. But the direction of travel is unarguable: the online world has hoovered up business transactions and offers us multiple forms of communicating with each other more or less instantaneously. In a world of notification alerts and a blur of fingers typing on tablets and phones, the romantic image of a solitary letter writer, seated at a lamplit desk, no longer speaks to our cultural desires or reality.
The interests of the minority who continue to depend on physical post will need to be safeguarded in coming transitions. Some of the rest of us will mourn the gradual passing of a genre into history. From Samuel Johnson to Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot, the most prolific exponents of the form have left us a precious patrimony, offering vivid insights into the quotidian reality of their times. In the hands of such authors, the art of writing letters became another branch of literature.
More widely, the social historian GM Trevelyan observed that letters “enabled the poor, for the first time in the history of man, to communicate with the loved ones from whom they were separated”. And for countless millions, the receipt of handwritten pages from a lover, a parent or a friend served as an intimate proxy for their presence. The time set aside and dedicated to writing a letter signified an emotional investment, made tangible in the envelope delivered through another’s door.
Transformation opens up new possibilities. Digitalisation is already enabling new ways of writing to emerge in an unpredictable world of literary experimentation. The Substack blog, for example, can be viewed as a kind of open letter to new online communities. On platforms such as WhatsApp, the speed of online exchanges has licensed a liberating informality that is tolerant of mistakes and encourages constant stylistic innovation.
In the Victorian golden age of the epistolary form, Lewis Carroll wrote that “the proper definition of a man is an animal that writes letters”. The future has yet to be written. Sadly though, it is unlikely to be arriving in an envelope.
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