This book explores the surge in writing by the newly literate in France, Spain and Italy at the end of the 19th century through to the First World War. This surge was impelled by separation caused by emigration or conscription. The author examines the handwriting and its genres per se, on the one hand, and in addition offers case studies that show how the writing's content (as ‘new history from below’) can correct or complicate received historical notions.
The study is based in part on Lyons's own research in relatively new archives of the writings of ordinary people (letters, memory books, diaries) in Italy and Spain and the older archives of military censors in France and Italy. However, it also engages with a great amount of published primary sources and secondary analysis, for which it serves as a lucid introduction and guide.
The author is clear-eyed about what is often moving material, pointing out strategies of rhetoric and ruse, disguise and silence, maintenance of networks and authority, and careful husbandry of self-image. He confirms that these writers found themselves compelled by circumstance to write in spite of the great challenges involved, and that their fluency improved as they learned by doing.
Lyons is interested in the notion of identity, personal and national, at a time in which people were forced by war or the market to leave their home communities. He shows how writing expressed and confirmed personal identity in times of great trial, on the one hand, and how this writing provides hints to the degree that national identity had become adopted by people in Spain, France and Italy and in these nations' regions. For the latter he has fascinating chapters on the bicultural regions of Alsace and Trentino as they changed hands in the First World War, seen through the letters and memoirs of soldiers and inhabitants.
In spite of the author's allergy to statistical approaches, I wondered whether a little more quantification was called for; it would have been helpful to know roughly how many letters he had read before making a given set of assertions, or the rough proportions of a given topic in French censors' samples. The author's impression is that the Italian soldiers whose letters he examined did not identify with Italy as much as French soldiers did with France, but he himself wonders how representative his Italian sources are (p. 252). There should be methods to get at least partway beyond impressions.
Lyons points to the immense value of correspondence for identifying neighbourhood and family networks and understanding different levels of intimacy and trust within these networks. Correspondents specified who could be told what, and what could be read to the group or left out. His chapter on love letters as a kind of safe and secret personal buffer zone during the First World War is especially good.
Inevitably, a survey that covers many topics touches on aspects one would like to know more about: for this reader, one aspect would be how manuals for letter-writing affected epistolary commonplaces. Another would be the importance of picture postcards and photographs in making mail a multi-sensory experience. The author's few paragraphs on photographs (pp. 214–15) are revealing, and this reader would have wanted more. Millions of photographs were exchanged with these letters. In the case of picture postcards, the wide choice available by 1905 almost everywhere in Western Europe permitted the use of appropriate pictures for recipients and sentiments.
Unlike his French and Italian, the author's Spanish is, alas, not always up to snuff. When the reader can check the original Spanish in footnotes or illustration, the English renderings often prove to be slightly off and sometimes downright mistaken. When José Manuel Rodríguez (p. 195) tells his mother ‘de lo contrario guardarlo bien’ he means ‘if not, hide it well’ not ‘take care to say the opposite’. Manuel Pérez (pp. 185 and 190) did not see a pig killed, but ate pork preserved in lard that his relatives had slaughtered previously. Did Yndalecio's mother (p. 44) have a cold (estaba constipada) rather than being ‘constipated’? These errors do not affect the important insights of the chapters on emigration, but they are disconcerting, easily avoidable and easily corrected in a later edition.
Anyone working with the written sources of ordinary people will learn from this book and the many individuals whose stories it tells. For those working on rural people of France and Southern Europe, it is especially helpful, providing leads on archives, published sources, scholarship and a kind of running, guerrilla critique of accepted notions. Lyons's own writing is direct and unaffected.
