During the hiatus in trans-Atlantic migration caused by the Great War, William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki discovered and demonstrated the extraordinary power of private correspondence as a source of insight into the psychological origins and consequences of mass migration. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (5 vols. [New York, 1918–20]) raised promises and problems that sociologists, analysts of language, and historians have been pursuing ever since. One of the strengths of David Gerber's contribution to this genre is a penetrating critique of the flawed methodology applied by his predecessors, the distortions imposed by political agendas and intellectual fashion, and the enduring illusion that letters are capable of “speaking for themselves” as authentic voices of the otherwise voiceless. The relentless diffusion of postmodernist precepts has validated academic celebration of the diversity of personal experience and discourse while undermining the quest for unifying models of behavior. Each of the millions of letters crossing the Atlantic in the nineteenth century is now widely regarded as a potentially significant source for the history of migration, with no clear ranking according to class, education, or celebrity. Though only tens of thousands of such letters are yet accessible in archives, the potential for retrieving further examples from unnumbered private collections is truly frightening. The challenge facing the growing band of epistolographers is how to select, organize, analyze, and exhibit personal testimony without either misrepresenting the evidence or creating a formless pastiche.

Almost every conceivable strategy has by now been applied and (by Gerber) found more or less wanting. Too much evidence precludes close textual and contextual analysis of individual correspondences, tending to create distorted analysis based on an impressionistic report. By restricting oneself to hundreds rather than thousands of letters, it may indeed become practicable to reproduce uncensored texts, to compile reliable content analyses, to give due weight to the preoccupations of correspondents, to dissect the discourse of individual writers, and to give meaning to opaque passages and silences through contextual study of the careers and social environments of particular writers and readers. Yet the resultant patterns and generalizations, being specific to the chosen sources, are liable to be upset by the next equally intricate study based on other sets of letters. At first sight, this vitiates any attempt at comparative or cumulative analysis, without which epistolography is reduced to a technical exercise or an entertainment.

The problem is deepened by the futility of trying to extract representative samples from the accessible body of letters, itself a small and presumably atypical subset of all surviving letters, which in turn constitute a minute proportion of all those written or received by millions of predominantly male, literate, and family-conscious correspondents. Any randomized sample would therefore incorporate the distorting effects of selective preservation and inegalitarian production. Better might be a stratified sample, in which the distribution of selected correspondents by sex, location, religion, or occupation would simulate collective profiles based on immigration or census data. To be useful, such samples must be large enough to allow separate analysis of the influence of each variable, meaningless if one's sample of correspondents be limited to a dozen or even a hundred. Fortunately, these problems of selection and interpretation are mitigated by the many regularities in form and content exhibited by published correspondence relating to different periods, places, and classes. The “emigrant letter,” it seems, became a transnational institution with many shared and distinctive practices, forms, and functions. The challenge remains to establish and test the character and extent of local and temporal variations within this genre. How does Gerber cope, in practice, with these seemingly intractable problems of methodology?

His approach is dual, combining close contextual scrutiny of four collections with illustrative use of about seventy others, admittedly selected for their convenient accessibility—twenty-eight had already been transcribed and edited, mostly by Charlotte Erickson in her superb Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in Nineteenth-Century America (Coral Gables, FL, 1972). Almost all the letters under discussion were written by rather than to emigrants, so excluding a vital source of testimony illuminating the origins and consequences of migration. Unlike most recent editors, Gerber is intolerant of poor expression and ever ready to judge the caliber of his correspondents. A minister's daughter is praised for her “extraordinary articulateness,” in contrast to “more mundane stylists” lacking “the capacity for introspection” or “the technical abilities to achieve such complex thoughts in prose” (308, 232, 301). Gerber's condescension backfires in his portrayal of John Barker, a semiliterate Lincolnshire blacksmith and farmer who settled in Indiana and failed to grasp the basic need to write an outline or revise his first draft (86). It is true that “the net effect” of Barker's prose, when reproduced unsympathetically without any editorial intervention, is to suggest an undisciplined stream of consciousness amounting to “chaos.” Yet any reader, past or present, troubling herself to insert appropriate punctuation and sentence breaks, would perceive that Barker's distracting asides served a rhetorical function by highlighting important personal news through a change of tone (Gerber's two examples convey a wry comment about his daughter's marriage prospects and his horrified response to a son's narrow escape from drowning). Vernacular letters, however rough and ill phrased, often carry greater power and persuasiveness than the authoritative pronouncements of academic discourse.

Gerber's readings of the four principal collections in part 2 are thought provoking and densely documented but difficult to assess in the absence of the original texts. His brief extracts give little indication of the design or rhetoric of the letters, though three of the four main correspondents (two men and two women) were obviously well educated, sophisticated, and thus thoroughly unlike the great majority of British immigrants to nineteenth-century America. No attempt is made to analyze the content or language of these collections, one of which includes 482 letters from which he merely took “research notes” double-checked by an assistant (392). Yet Gerber has the skill and sensibility to draw memorable portraits of his subjects: Thomas Spencer Niblock, a clergyman's son forever failing to make his way in the United States, Canada, and Australia; Catherine Grayston Bond (also studied by Erickson), a laborer's daughter whose letters to her sister in Lancashire conveyed little of her sociability and prosperity but much of her determination to maintain family bonds; Mary Ann Wodrow Archbald, a daughter of the manse for whom success in New York State only enhanced her sense of Scottishness and of loss; and Dr. Thomas Steel, another Scot who, like Niblock, long relied on parental handouts yet yearned to induce his father and sister to join him in Wisconsin. As microstudies, supplemented by the full text of at least some letters, these four chapters might have become a valuable book in themselves.

The core of Gerber's study is a probing but ultimately unsatisfactory interrogation of the full dossier, with little biographical or local background and no attempt to assess or portray the preoccupations expressed in correspondence. Gerber skates over the material motives for maintaining trans-Atlantic correspondence, the portrayal of home and host countries, and attitudes toward ethnicity and religion (though all these themes force their way into the microstudies in pt. 2). Instead, he raises a series of issues and questions about migration that can be resolved, if at all, only through personal testimony. For Gerber, the production of letters is inseparable from the complex process of “negotiation” by which emigrants sought continuity of “self” (or “identity”) as their material and human environments were transformed. Central to this endeavor was the maintenance of emotional bonds with the family of origin and the development of strategies to counteract physical and practical disconnection. Letters expressed, promoted, and also embodied these emotional requisites in their format, rhetorical structure, deployment of personal pronouns, and very existence. The process of composition and production is deftly related to broader theories of identity, the ethics of lying, transnational cultures and networks, modernization, and much else. Though critical of Thomas and Znaniecki for their awkward handling of epistolary evidence and their reductionist model of psychological dysfunction, Gerber shares their belief that letters point not merely to the diversity of individual experience but also to universal psychological problems (generating variant individual responses). He eloquently maintains that personal relationships were more important than ethnic affiliation in shaping and reshaping the identity of emigrants. This supposition might have been strengthened (or otherwise) by a matching analysis of what correspondents had to say about race, nationality, and neighborhood (a major theme in most published collections). Though subtle, quite erudite, and aptly illustrated by extracts from often-unfamiliar letters, Gerber's interpretation is untestable in the absence of methodical analysis dissecting a clearly defined body of evidence.