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The first part of this mini series of how we should conduct our communications in life ended with the love letter, and it stands as proof that written communication is one of humanities greatest achievements. There are some written dialogues that even sink into the public consciousness to stand the test of time.Writing evolved over centuries, and yet today we take it for granted, because literacy is so high today in Western societies. We even believe that when something becomes so ubiquitous, it doesn't need words at all. But being too verbose can also get in the way of communication - it can even create an air of insincerity. Communicating doesn't always have to be with words. For example, you might find that sometimes too many words can get in the way of a relationship, while some relationships get in the choice of words you wish to use.
I don't think many of us realise the power our words can have on ourselves and others. When used the wrong way, words can cut so deep the scars may never heal. But words can also build unstoppable confidence and self esteem when they're used in a way right for you. So experts advise we should do ourselves a huge favour and watch our words and use them wisely. Whether you're speaking words to others or speaking them to yourself in the form of thoughts, somebody is always listening.
So your words are one of the most powerful tools you have in this life. And whether it's your health, your career, your family, or any area of your life, what you say determines how others (and you) "feel". Subsequently, we should be careful what we say and do because all of it comes back to you. Good or bad, however you perceive it, it's just how the world is wired.
Everything is about communication. If you say things that build people up and let them know they're loved - it can make their day. And over time, it can change lives. But if you're negative or down all the time, you'll just go backwards in life and take the people around you along for the ride. In such instances, word-negativity can obstruct communication, and such relationships can make communication difficult - and not only in couples, i.e., a father wanting the son to make good on his own unfulfilled dreams, the son defining himself by rejecting his father, with neither communicating these real issues that divide them, arguing instead on what might be ultimately superficial issues.
Arguably this also highlights the difference between the spoken and written word; what we can't say out loud we can often get out on to paper (or email) and thus some of us feel we can express our feelings more honestly in writing rather than through spoken dialogue. There is even evidence that love letters may improve and heal our minds, and often writing to ourselves in times of crisis may be beneficial. Some experts believe what we say to others is not nearly as important as what we say to ourselves.
All day, every day, our minds are flooded with thoughts that direct us to leading the lives that we live. This self talk determines our success, and our failures. If you want to make an improvement in any aspect of your life; whether related to health, fitness, career success or personal accomplishments, start by changing your self talk - you may be surprised to see what happens. What most people are unaware of is our self talk becomes instructions to our subconscious, whose duty is to carry out the "orders" given to it by the conscious area of our mind. The subconscious is our own personal servo-mechanism that works on our behalf 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Thus, writing yourself love letters may not be as hopeless as we might think. And even though verbal skills are essential for effective communication, writing a letter to explain the way you feel to a loved one can enhance a relationship. Even though the love letter may be a dying art form along with handwriting, we still write to our loved ones via electronic epistles.
10 old letter-writing tips that work for emails.
A very moving example of this is a moving love letter by the girlfriend of a French photographer killed in Syria. It was read out on BBC radio, where the presenter was so overcome by emotion that he fell silent on air for more than ten seconds after hearing the eulogy. After his lengthy pause following the reading of the poem, the presenter tried to continue with the weather with poignant sub-text: "cloudy across the entire UK, sunny spells are possible almost anywhere".
And so, too, is it with the words we communicate to one another, because as the proverb says, "death and life are in the power of the tongue". I've personally experienced the positivity of my own words, too, and as a result I truly believe that we need to become more aware of how important the art of communication is in our lives. This is why such a series is was worth sharing, and going back in history we can see that sharing our thoughts and feelings via the yo-yo effect of the love letter has long been a tradition that has been nurtured as an aid to self-depiction.
Communicating one's self in the old world
For the 17th Century, this back-and-forth exchange of love for love-letter writing Puritans meant their word was their bond. Living in the what was becoming the largest city in Europe, London was a hot bed of vice, theatre and prostitution, and Puritans working in the city with wives in the countryside, it was a test of their beliefs in a Godly family and community, and an intense personal devotion to God himself. Puritans of the time wanted to purify the Church of England and the country and rid it of its Roman Catholic past; they were interested in a new, clean and pure future, and London as a growing city of sin was worrisome to Puritans.
Love, however, was able to blossom through the exchange of letters, although it wasn't always easy to communicate. Things were not peaceful; through the 1620s Puritans came under increasing pressure to conform to what they hated - the new pro-ceremonial mainstream promoted by the bishops and at court. They felt strangers on Earth, but suck to their beliefs as the way to true reward, peace, comfort and contentment.
Before 1635, when the Royal Mail was opened up to everyone, there was no organised large-scale postal service. The way in which letters were carried throughout the 16th and 17th Century is often very ad hoc. Before the 1635 reforms and the English Civil War, the forms of address that people would use were often very vague. But by the end of the 17th Century, things were becoming more official, much more efficient, organised, regular and secure. The letter was becoming increasingly personal and private.
This shift is connected to the post and the changing nature of literacy, where people are able to put down on paper personal thoughts and emotions in a way that they hadn't done in the past. Some describe it as the birth of privacy, and one of the other things seen in this period is the rise of the love letter. The way in which individuals are articulating emotion in a way that they haven't previously. The private letter was a new type of vehicle for private emotion, and this makes for one of the most revelatory paradoxes of the century.
Because lovers could write to each other without fear of reserve in private, historians can see these people more clearly in their writings than almost anyone from any earlier time. It allows us to see even further into a world, which was expanding overseas. And what the letter could do for people in an expanding world is very apparent by 17th Century entrepreneurs, who tried to use writing to make their fortune.
In the West Indies, the English Caribbean was just opening, and the British had started to establish footholds on Barbados, Saint Kitts, Nevis and Montserrat. These would become the money pump at the heart of the British colonial empire, but early on they were a cockpit of frontier competition between young English, French and Dutchmen, all hungry to make their fortunes. These men knew they had to rely on their pens for their transatlantic enterprises to thrive.
This meant writing letters to summon help from home - to family and friends asking them to sponsor them financially until they made it rich; the formula was that communication plus investment (in something like tobacco) should equal cash. Early settlers in Barbados were quite successful in growing tobacco, and the demand back in London was huge. Both men and women were smoking it, partly as a stimulant, and partly as a medicine - even sick sheep in 17th Century Wiltshire are documented to have been given tobacco to perk them up.
Tobacco had been an exotic novelty in England since the previous century, first becoming available in England in 1573 and costing huge sums of money reflecting its exotic nature. In the BBC documentary "Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England", Dr Ian Mortimer notes:
Smoking polarises opinion in Elizabethan England - some people will assure you it has medicinal properties, but others aren't convinced. The Swiss traveller Thomas Planter noted in 1599 that the English loved to smoke, writing that it made them "riotous and merry and rather drowsy, just as if they were drunk though the effect soon passes - and they use it so abundantly because of the pleasure it gives. I am told the inside of one man's veins after death was found to be covered in soot just like a chimney". As well as being viewed as a dangerous vice and a health risk, smoking had its social detractors, too. Many believed that tobacco made your breath smell like the "piss of a fox".
In 1577, Dr John Dee, Welsh mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist, navigator, imperialist and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I suggests the establishment of a British Empire. Empire building in the New World continued in the 17th Century. Entrepreneurs back in the West Indies wanted to make much of this new world. Within the experience of the average 17th Century Englishman, it was different, challenging and a virgin place - a frontier society. And once the transition was made from tobacco to sugar, then the population literally exploded. From 6,000 males in the 1630s to a population of 70,000 in the 1650s, meant that families on both sides of the Atlantic were kept together by writing. It was a social bond between these divided parts. There was need to constantly inform each other about their situations.
Conversations that would have once taken place in homes now took the form of letters, In these stream of letters we can discover emblems of the puritanical frame of mind, words that are proper, godly, and serious, while right on the other end of the 17th Century English life are the tricksters and chancers that use writing for their own ends. These were the wild strain, were words and schemes poured out across great distances as they left to make their fortune, and where the powers of seduction and persuasion were their main currency in finding people to help them achieve their aim in grabbing the riches which transatlantic trade would deliver within a decade or two.
For both groups the written word was of equal use; in letters that were taking two and half months each way to cross the 4,000 miles of ocean that separated families and sponsors, many of the entrepreneurs that failed were typical of a certain type of 17th Century Englishman that is revealed in some of the correspondence of that time - those just edging into literacy, dependent on it for their life scheme, with their letters stretched across the width of the Atlantic.
The great 17th Century expansion which saw the literate English embrace the world ocean wasn't limited to the West Indies, however. Through the late 1620s devout Puritans were being increasingly marginalised in their own country, as Crown and Church turned against the Puritan way. As an escape route, in a movement that would bring great radical change, a small group of English Puritans crossed the Atlantic to settle in New England in 1600s. When we understand how this communicates to our modern world today, and the zealous, almost barbaric attitude Americans have towards what they see as "foreign" or "heathen", it begins to make some sense. The puritanical zeal of the American is being communicated in a very real way in modern times.
How distance made communication stronger
“There must be a beginning of any great matter, but the continuing unto the end until it thoroughly be finished yields the true glory.”
— Sir Francis Drake, Letter to Sir Francis Walsingham, 17th May 1587
Back in the 17th Century, writing played a major part in the lives of people, and distance was a reason for that writing to increase - giving people a way to stay in touch, or to ask others for support. And in this expanding and increasingly literate world, these twin aspects of the 17th Century were intimately bound up with each other. Written communication allowed England's engagement with the world to stretch and swell. At the same time, accounts of the exotic and foreign deeply stimulated the English imagination.
Some historians say there is no piece of 17th Century writing which embodies that relationship more richly than the world-straddling seamen, and workers of huge shipping companies that became the first multinational corporations in the world, with their remarkable accounts of stories detailing ambitions fulfilled, and their taste for the exotic.
For instance, the East India Company was an English and later (from 1707) British joint-stock company formed for pursuing trade with the East Indies, but which ended up trading mainly with the Indian subcontinent, North-west frontier province and Balochistan. In 1672, Britain went to war with the Dutch, fighting for the lucrative trade in all the valuable goods of the east - spices and silks, coffee and calico.
During this time, from the world of itinerant of working men that ballooned in the 17th Century, some began to write as public declarations, with an audience in mind; like many ancient mariners and foreign correspondents, these writers wanted to grab people back home by the collar and show them what they had gone through in strange, distant lands. For such people, their horizons had felt limited, and they had wanted a challenge in life. In the late 1650s, many feeling this way decided to leave the confines of their villages and see the world.
As London was accelerating into its late 17th Century boom, young people from all over the country entered the city of promise, where at its heart was a river - a route to the wider world. Some historians say there is a fascinating link; as the country expanded in its connections with the world, the people's own perceptions of themselves expanded along with it. Via ships, both Britain and its people could both go global. With a sense of adventure, people went to sea to see the world, and they reported back in their writings.
They literally had the whole world in their hands, and could go anywhere they liked, to Suriname, to Barbados, to New England, to the coast of Africa. Anything was possible, and that is what is different in that century. It is a kind of new world, ready to be grabbed, and many people set out on a career that embraced the world. By joining one of the boom businesses of the 17th Century, the global reach was extraordinary.
If not a trading company, people could join the navy. In 1603, the navy had only 41 ships and 8,000 sailors, but as the century drew to a close, those numbers had increased fivefold. The navy was a chance for a whole new scale of life for men, but there was no place for weakness. It was a place for strong men doing capable things, and as a reflection of the dangers of a life at sea, people could acquire dignity through the life of a sailor. The impressive nature of the world back then, and the equally impressive energies and enterprise of such people made their writings a hymn to adventure, and self-congratulation - the bigger they saw the world, the bigger they became themselves stuffed to over-brim with the marvellous things they have seen and captured in their writing.
Books such as these that came out were a measure of the multiple expansions going on in the 17th Century. Village boys became world citizens, from a frame of mind that once only knew cows and sheep to exotic animals, and literacy brought this world back home to its readers. And the people that could describe such a world made them men they could otherwise never have been. And it showed them a world they could have never otherwise have known.
It is a great statement as to the value and dignity of life, to be able to the climb the ladder to success, to see the world, and prosper because of it. But writing wasn't only there to record the century's global expansiveness, it also helped drive that expansion. By the 1660s, British trade across the Atlantic was expanding dramatically. Slaves from Africa, beef from Ireland, wine from Madeira, sugar from the Caribbean, all of that depended on a dense network of written words. Instructions, orders, receipts, commissions, complaints - and at the centre of that web, driving the expansion and deeply knowable, because their writing survives, were the networking businessmen, communicating every moment of the day. These obsessively corresponding international wheeler-dealers lived in a time when sugar, one of the great new stimulants of the century, would soon remake the world.
By 1670, the Caribbean was producing well over half of all the sugar consumed in England. This highly desirable commodity was about to create a new class of British sugar oligarchs, part of that group of aggressive Englishmen who were ruthlessly starting to make their fortune out of the sugar boom. Incredibly entrepreneurial, fiercely energetic, hungry for more, always on the make, these men's lives were devoted to one thing and one thing only - money. Fluently literate, these businessmen would become the writers of a vast compendium of demanding and imperious letters whose tone is completely unmistakable today. Urgent, businesslike, often furious, sometimes capable of a kind of commercial charm, but in the end, interested only in their own needs self-promotion and every-growing material wealth.
For such people, writing was the all-important tool. Its key quality was to convey information at a distance. Writing shrank distance and so made possible that new phenomenon, the transatlantic businessman. Their businesses relied on global commodities such as sugar, and sugar needed labour, and the place to get the place labour was Africa.
Their business relied on slaves, and from their writings there is no doubt that they thought of the trade in human beings as a completely straightforward commercial transaction. Such businesses like sugar, built on human blood and suffering became one of the most important of the 17th Century, and these businessmen were right at the heart of it. By 1684, there were over 46,000 African slaves in Barbados - more than the population of whites.
The dark side of communication
“That for which all virtue now is sold,
And almost every vice - almighty gold.”
— Ben Jonson, "The Forest", 1616
This other, gruesome human dimension to this global expansion occasionally leaks out of the edges of what 17th Century correspondence remains today, but writing, essentially an instrument of power and control, remained the reserve of the whites. The landowners, the estate owners, were literate, bringing that literacy from England, but slaves were forbidden to learn to read and write. Their European owners meticulously documented them, however, and that's how we know what little we know about them today.
The writings reveal a brutal world. Punishments would range from castration on one hand to perhaps mild mutilation on the other hand. Hands, fingers, noses and ears cut off, some with feet cut off in extreme cases. And then you have stories of slave workers being buried up to their necks in the ground in an ants' nest and the ants being allowed to literally eat them alive by pouring molasses or treacle on them.
In law in the Caribbean, slaves were defined as property. They are not quite people, they are belongings; in that time in people's wills slaves were even listed as part of the estate, along with its furniture, paintings, prints, the books and the boats. In some cases you find references to slaves and other stock, which would have been cows, sheep, horses and goats. This also shows that the basic need for writing in these circumstances was economic. You need to keep records. You need to look after your business, and know whether you're making a profit. The literacy of their society was based on the tenement that cash is king.
Indeed money drove the appetite for discovery in their century, and the previous "Golden Age" of the Elizabethan era. In the 1550s, adventurer John Hawkins embarked on a revolutionary moneymaking venture. He began to sell slaves from Africa to the Spanish colonies in the Caribbean. His voyage was such a success that Queen Elizabeth invested in his following expedition. What seems to us to be a completely immoral business was not an issue for ambitious Englishmen eager to exploit their new world.
Perhaps the most famous adventurer of them all was Sir Francis Drake, who is the very embodiment of an Elizabethan self-made man. From humble beginnings in Devon, he rises to become one of the richest and most celebrated men in the kingdom. In 1577, he set out in command of a fleet of five ships with 200 men. Three years later, having sailed round the world, he returned with just one ship and 56 men - but a mountain of treasure.
Drake was a privateer, a state-sanctioned pirate with his famous flagship the Golden Hinde. On his voyage around the world, he extended English knowledge of the Pacific Ocean and beyond, but he also plundered as much as he could. No one knows exactly how much he brought back from the ships and ports he attacked, but the Spanish - from whom he stole most of it - estimated his loot was worth £600,000 - roughly twice the English government's annual revenue. With stolen Spanish gold, Drake the lowly provincial bought himself a place at the top of Elizabethan society - and became one of the most famous men of his age.
Most Englishmen basked in Drake's glory, who shared his fortune with the Crown for which he was knighted. Through sheer determination and reckless courage, Drake manages to steal and fight his way into the upper echelons of Elizabethan society. His knighthood was recognition by the establishment that men like Drake was the key to England's future - but such exploration had also awoken a darker side to human nature.
Before the slaving expeditions of the 1560s, there were only a handful of black men and women in England, but by 1596, the numbers rose to such an extent that the Queen orders the deportation of as many as possible on the grounds that there are too many unemployed people in the country. Sounding like something from British society today, those that remained experienced a rising tide of racism, as once curious attitudes turned hostile.
In Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus", a black character is described in delighting in rape and murder. And in Reginald Scott's "Discovery of Witchcraft", it's even claimed that the devil himself has black skin. The majority of black men and women were to be found serving in the houses of the powerful and in ports, especially London and Plymouth. Money had brought them over, money had abused them - some records also show that rich men were lending out their black servants to friends and neighbours for sexual novelty and experimentation.
This is not to say that money per se is "evil", but rather as modern times show, we have shifted the focus on money itself and its accumulation, rather than seeing money as just a means for greater things. Money has to serve, not to rule. Money in itself is not important, it's what we do with the potential that income allows that really matters. Money isn't everything, and yet as history shows us, it's the energy for which people kill each other and expend so much sweat and blood to survive until the end comes.
Especially when you're constantly bombarded with advertising, living in a very consumerist society and being brainwashed into thinking you need the best of everything to be happy, a lack of money can leave even the most optimistic person depressed. It can also cause social alienation, and in modern societies, some of us use money as though it could buy us bragging rights, or to project ourselves in a flamboyant way - which traditionally in cultures past has been frowned upon, but which are now shifting towards the view that we should be working hard to "win" money rather than people.
It's about becoming who you are, not just what you own. When we make money such a central issue in our day-to-day living, we see profit margins as the important lines drawn across our lives. We begin to see other people as commodities, and disseminate them in terms of profitability and monetary value, rather than look at them as a priceless whole that offers value to enrich our lives in ways no money can buy.
Back in the 17th Century, there was profit in slaving, and profit in sugar, and thanks to expanding businesses, London was fast becoming the world's greatest metropolis, the exchanging centre of this word web. The city couldn't have been more different than the Caribbean, for the real secret of Caribbean moneymaking in the city was fingers in pies. And the place where the pies were made was London. And again it was all down to communication.
Writing allowed businessmen to conduct their business across the transatlantic, but with each letter taking four months to get a reply, the level of stress was overwhelming. Businessmen were finding it difficult to keep up with the London pace, and people were making use of all ingenious means to defraud each other. Anxious letters written at the time are a measure of just how difficult it was to run a 17th Century transatlantic network.
Geography had expanded to the point where communication had become almost impossible. Only the size of the profits could have made such a pressurized life tolerable. The vision of their life was that they had a world of business to do, one in which their businesses had expanded to embrace an ocean. And as a product of that tautened and strained world there's one modern quality that emerges which emerges from every page of correspondence from 17th Century businessmen - stress.
Read about natural stress-busters.
This was the beginning of modern working life as we know it, emerging out of the capital city, which grew remarkably fast in the course of the 17th Century. From a city of 200,000 in 1600, London grew to 575,000 by the end of the century - more than doubling and nearly tripling in 100 years. Overtaking Paris in around 1660, it became the largest city in western Europe. Experts say the reason for this fast boom numbered two things - being a capital city with a port. The key commodities for the Atlantic trades were tobacco and sugar, and there were enormous increases in the imports of those commodities. It was estimated that there was enough tobacco there for half the population to consume half a pipe of tobacco a day.
As a result of this new business, London became a more diverse and vibrant place, a hubbub of different voices from different corners of the world. The Royal Exchange was described as early as 1607 as like a babel, with so many different voices. There's an engraving of the Exchange in the 1640s done by Wenceslaus Hollar in which we can see Ottoman Turks clearly visible with their silk head wear and Muscovites with their fur hats. Historians say there was a type of vitality, a real buzz in the Exchange because of it.
Entrepreneurs were at the centre of that buzz, and money was running in their blood. But the boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate trade were completely blurred. Everyone was on the make, it seemed, and it was expected they would be. At least half of English overseas trade came from smuggling. Anything from wool and wine to spirits and fine linen. And the transatlantic letter connections of the businessmen provided the perfect set up for some deeply profitable black market shenanigans.
Deliberately smoky and complicated schemes designed to throw the authorities off the track were hatched via written correspondence; deals were arranged across the Atlantic to smuggle goods across to the Caribbean to make money, and vice versa. The monies gambled in these exploits were in for profits, and it was a minor triumph for the world of the letter. Only by arranging it all in advance, with agents and co-smugglers across different countries could the authorities be tricked so cleverly, slipping through the cracks of already existing legal networks.
This shadowy side of communication where people use their own argot for clandestine motives, in a way, is a kind of emblem of the modern world. International contraband, officials making money out of their knowledge of the way the system works, and to do it with the world's most advanced information technology of the century, the letter. All the anxiety that came off the communications of businessmen were either funnelled into coffers, or given out in great losses, but the ones that succeeded became what they had always wanted to be - rich enough to retire early.
What is most clear is that neither the riches nor 17th Century business would have been possible without the letter as a mode of communication. This was global success built on words, not as a vehicle for poetry or philosophy, but as a way of squeezing money our of an increasingly juicy world. Entrepreneurial colonial merchants were the engine of the Atlantic trade, high on blood sugar. And there's a straightforward connection between African slaves, growing and selling sugar, the development of London as a global entrepôt, and the creation of the British empire. None of it would have happened, unless the businessmen had a quill in their hands, illustrating the importance of communication and how, in a very real sense, the empire of the British was founded on ink and paper.
And today although we have moved away from the physical material of ink and paper to an extent, we are still communicating with words, and like people of the past centuries, we are still struggling to find a balance between living and making a living. If few find fulfilment in their everyday lives, it's because there are always a thousand ways to get bogged down in one's own misfortune. A lack of communication enhances this, because unless we can communicate sufficiently internally and externally, such issues will always arise.
Imagine all the years that still lie ahead of you, and imagine spending them just like you did all the ones that came before. Then, imagine how you would feel should you manage to just be yourself, to live a successful life, not in the image you project or communicate for the rest of the world, but just in the one you want for yourself. This also shows that correct communication requires courage, because what holds us back is our habits, our comfort, the fear of risk, the fear of failure. But loving communication will also force us to ask ourselves what happened to put us into the position we find ourselves today.
In taking stock of our situation, all of us together, need to steel our determination to eliminate all forms of extreme miscommunication and speculation about each other, and thus one day manage to live, at last, in a world of peace, a world of respect and preservation of all living things, a world where joy will be the only value worth sharing. And if we continue to communicate with love, that day is not so far off.
Read more in this series: -1 -3 -4 -5 -6
Yours in love,
