Kate Thomas. Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN: 978-0199731169. Price: US$24.95/£15.99

Kate Thomas’s Postal Pleasures builds on well-established work on the role of the Penny Post in the nineteenth century, pointing to the way reformers like Rowland Hill envisioned it as a democratizing institution that could create national cohesion. Supposedly, by allowing all people the same rights to communicate at the same low rates, the Penny Post would organically circulate heteronormative familial affect throughout British space, binding citizens together in a natural extension of the nation and promoting moral and educational progress. So too, postal reformers saw improvements in international communication networks—both the post and the telegraph—as instrumental in maintaining imperial connections and building the discourse of international Anglo-Saxonism that would turn Britain’s potentially threatening “First Empire,” the United States, into an ally. Diverging from these well-trodden paths, Thomas marks out her own critical space in arguing that the same networks that nineteenth-century theorists said would create productive homogeneity across British and Anglo-Saxon spaces could also generate homoerotic effects. Through the analysis of such familiar queer writers as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James, and perhaps less clearly queer writers like Anthony Trollope and Rudyard Kipling, she shows not only how the social gender and sexual codes that grounded communication networks were constantly in flux, but that postal networks were always already queer. These networks, Thomas argues, served the purpose of making people “geographically connected, and giving them literal and figurative addresses or coordinates” (223), but identities could also be fluid and connections muddled, as evidenced by the Victorian fascination with postal plots in fictional rather than epistolary form. In postal plots, the appearance of envelopes—stamps, postmarks, addresses—and the incidents surrounding circulation and delivery (as well as the incidents in the transmission of telegrams) become more important than the content of the missives themselves. Delays, distance, and the intermediation of postal employees all indicate that communication is anything but direct. For Thomas, these postal plots stress texts’ detachment from rooted subjectivities as “a universal communication system […] allows for queer interactions to be undifferentiated and unmarked from straight ones” (8). The figure of the postal employee in particular remains the central figure throughout Postal Pleasures as Thomas tracks the various ways postal employees participate intimately in the lives of others. In most cases these are literary, but Thomas’s first chapter focuses on the historical accounts of the Cleveland Street Affair, which first became news in 1889. Thomas suggests that the recruitment of messenger boys into prostitution was facilitated by the post office itself, which promoted a homosocial domestic alternative to the heteronormative family. Moreover, messenger boys were eroticized in part as a result of their postal uniforms, which, when worn during sex, ensured that “[h]aving sex with a telegraph boy was a way of having sex with Queen and country, with officialdom” (46). The prosecution of the aristocratic men who hired these boys was intended to very publically detach the post office from associations with abuse and queerness, though Thomas’s reading of Oscar Wilde’s 1895 trial and Wilde’s postal communications with other men indicates that queer correspondence was constantly merging with—and perhaps indistinguishable from—straight correspondence. No treatment of the Victorian post office in literature would be complete without the inclusion of Anthony Trollope, who worked for the Post Office for over thirty years. Thomas devotes one full chapter and portions of two others to Trollope’s postal fictions and his autobiographical accounts of his work in the post office. As she notes, Trollope’s approach to writing was famously mechanical and driven by rigid word quotas, but it was also distinctly impersonal in that Trollope enjoyed taking on the personas of others …