In Postal Pleasures, Kate Thomas suggests that nineteenth-century postal correspondence worked as a universal communication system that allowed sexual energy to circulate from “everyone” to “everyone” in a widely and wildly democratic and promiscuous way. According to Thomas, postal reform in the form of the prepaid penny stamp first issued in 1840 allowed correspondents to send a version of themselves in a miscellany of letters across the nation. The impact of this enhanced communication system was felt in the sexual energies that pulsed through it.

Thomas has found an interesting topic in the ways that the post fired the imagination and one that deserves this sort of close attention. By pulling together ideas about the post in nineteenth-century Britain, Thomas has quite rightly destabilized the idea of the Postal Service as an old and august institution that functioned as a steady and reliable indicator of the bureaucratic state and instead shown it as a culturally emerging institution that allowed a dangerous mixing of peoples and ideas. Sometimes the consideration of postal themes takes Kate Thomas into works by canonical authors such as Trollope, Hardy, Linton, Doyle, Kipling, Stoker, and James and sometimes into less canonical sources such as Home Office papers, documents from the Postal Archives, advertisements, and essays. Such intertextual analysis can demonstrate the workings of culture broadly and the ways that literary culture reflected and affected consumer culture and social practices. These readings can be valuable at showing the energies and tensions embedded in documents. The mastery of this book may lie in the detailed literary treatments of novels and particular historical materials Thomas brings to the surface.

The book's title suggests that the analysis explores the relationship between sexuality and the mail, but that is not quite what it does. Instead, it explores a certain sort of illicit sexuality in depth. Love letters of all stripes, naughty books, pornographic literature, pictures, postcards, birth control advertisements, magazines, and more used the mail to communicate about illicit sexuality. But Thomas does not mean that sort of sexuality. Instead, she particularly means a queer sexuality poised between same-sex love and homosocial desire. In effect, she offers queer readings about literature that touched on the post. The circulation of ideas affected the postal employees, according to Thomas. Postal boys and telegraph girls became the medium for the transfer of sexual energy and thereby became a sort of queer presence. In one chapter, her work on the Cleveland Street affair highlights the cross-class associations that postal employment made possible in emphasizing the ways that it allowed poor boys and rich men to interact. Further, her discussion of the livery of the postal boy as a uniform that declared boys outside of the family and outside of a carefully regulated association joins together with other research on livery (such as works by Matt Houlbrook) to suggest that uniforms had a multiplicity of associations that deserve careful readings.

Thomas places her discussion of postal themes in a national and an Anglo-American context. She sees the post as allowing a way of unifying communication at a racial level, particularly in attempts to create a penny post for “all red” routes that sought to link the Anglo-American world. The consideration of this idea allows her to use postcolonial theory to consider the “red” postal routes as the blood pulsing beneath the white skin of Anglo-American relations.

Thomas suggests that the rise of the penny post emerges concomitant with the postal plot. In the introduction, Thomas suggests that postal reform and the penny stamp allowed a shift of interest from epistolary fiction—and the insides of letters—into postal plots, in which letters are known by their exteriors. However, despite a faithful reading, I still do not know whether this is a standardized plot, like the marriage plot, or something else. Is there a canonical literature featuring the postal plot or is the “postal plot” Thomas's conception? More problematically, Thomas's new historicist methodology treats the work of social and cultural historians who have written about the post merely as staging material for the claims she wants to make. Thomas seeks to make historical claims on the basis of reading fiction and historical documents, but her claims underestimate the complexity of the historical archives from which she borrows and refuse the constructive work of historians who have researched this archive in depth in order to create narratives about it. Thomas should not be singularly taken to task for this practice, but the problem remains perplexing for a historian interested in interdisciplinary work. The dual system of documentation, with both in-line notations and footnotes, tends toward hypostasizing a split between “facts” of historians and the “interpretations” that Thomas is proposing. It suggests that Thomas does not engage the interpretative work of historians' narratives and does not engage with the conversation already taking place. Because of this problem and because Thomas's work considers literature as the connective fibers between the queer and the postal, Postal Pleasures might gain the most interest from scholars interested in nineteenth-century British literature and queer studies.