Discover famous historical letters with the Letters for the Ages series

Monday 12 July 1802

Francois Toussaint L’Ouverture asks Napoleon to free his family

I will not conceal my faults from you. I have committed some. What man is exempt? […] I alone ought to be responsible for my conduct to the Government I have served.

New week = new hope? The leader and architect of the Haitian Revolution Francois Toussaint L’Ouverture had been tricked into being arrested at the orders of Napoleon, and his wife and children were arrested the next day, separately from him. Toussaint L’Ouverture himself was transported to France to be imprisoned far from the then-French colony of Saint Domingue. Ten days landing in France, he penned a dignified letter addressed directly to Napoleon with hopes of securing his family’s release from political charges that were asserted were his alone. He also added that he, like Napoleon, was just a revolutionary spirit with a supportive family who, like Napoleon’s family, should be treated justly.

Read the whole letter here.

Tuesday 13 November 1849

Charles Dickens reacts to the public execution of a murderous couple

I have seen, habitually, some of the worst sources of general contamination and corruption in this country, and I think there are not many phases of London life that could surprise me… [But] I stand astounded and appalled by the wickedness [public executions] exhibit.

One Tuesday morning, famed novelist Charles Dickens headed to the Horsemonger-lane Gaol in south London to observe the crowds which had formed to watch the hanging of Frederick and Maria Manning. The murderous couple had ambushed and shot Maria’s lover, then buried him under their kitchen floor: a gruesome tale that appealed perfectly to the Victorian public’s morbid fascination with crime. Dickens, best known for his salubrious descriptions of life in the Victorian era (you may know of his novels such as Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, and David Copperfield), found the audience’s behaviour that morning as shocking as the abysmal living conditions of London’s grim industrial underworld, and immediately wrote an open letter urging that executions should take place outside of public view to improve public morality.

Read the whole letter here.

Wednesday 1 March 1933

Frida Kahlo checks in on Georgia O’Keefe’s mental health

Every day since I called you and many times before months ago I wanted to write you a letter. I wrote you many, but every one seemed more stupid and empty and I torn them up… I am sending this one because I promised it to you… Please Georgia dear if you can’t write, ask Stieglitz to do it for you and let me know how are you feeling will you?

How do you reach out to a friend after they’ve had a mental breakdown? The defiant Mexican artist Frida Kahlo known her self-portraits was also just like the rest of us: thinking, writing, rewriting, and rethinking for months until it’s almost too late and you send whatever you have. When Kahlo learned that Georgia O’Keeffe, another famed woman artist, had been suffering mental breakdowns, she offered to visit in-person for emotional support. Hardly a stranger to physical and mental suffering herself, Kahlo’s letter is rough around the edges but full of candid sincerity.

Read the whole letter here.

Thursday 13 January 1898

Émile Zola ruffles the French government’s feathers (‘J’accuse!’)

As for the people I accuse, I do not know them, I never saw them, I have against them neither resentment nor hatred. To me, they are only entities, spirits of social evil. And the act I am hereby accomplishing is only a revolutionary means to hasten the explosion of truth and justice.

Duality is sometimes writing novels about the petty squabbles of working in retail (in the nineteenth century), and other times penning open letters that get you onto the government’s hitlist. Émile Zola, the French writer known for his scathing social commentary on everyday life, did both. He was outraged by the Dreyfus Affair which saw a Jewish French captain wrongly convicted of espionage. ‘J’accuse’ levelled accusations of a government cover-up and was emblazoned on the front page of a popular newspaper. It was highly effective, and the case was reopened the following year in 1899. Zola died in 1902 of carbon monoxide poisoning, with some suspecting he had been murdered for the censorious letter.

Read the whole letter here.

Friday 10 January 1913

Emmeline Pankhurst demands the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) to commit to militant protest

If any woman refrains from militant protest against the injury done by the Government and the House of Commons to women and to the race, she will share the responsibility for the crime. Submission under such circumstances will be itself a crime.

Choose your fighter: peaceful or violent protest? Pioneering suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst woke up and chose violence. In fact she saw it as the only real option. All fired up for the weekend, she wrote this letter to the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) urging its members to join her in taking militant action such as window-smashing and arson, to ensure the passage of a government bill granting women the vote. Of course, this was a controversial tactic: Emmeline’s own daughters Adela and Sylvia would leave the union in disagreement with their mother’s extremisme.  

Read the whole letter here. You can also read another letter here by Emmeline Pankhurst’s daughter, Sylvia. Finf out more about letters by historical activists in Letters for the Ages: Behind Bars.

Saturday 20 November 1998

Wladyslaw Szpilman honours the German officer who helped him hide in Nazi-occupied Warsaw

Any help to Jews at that time was punished with death. Without his help I wouldn’t have survived. Unfortunately my efforts to free this officer from Russian captivity after the war were unsuccessful, and he died in a camp in Stalingrad in 1952.

Does the name ‘The Pianist’ ring a bell? Though the critically acclaimed 2002 film itself only normally runs for 150 minutes, memory of the real experience inspiring it stayed with Wladislaw Szpilman for a lifetime. Fifty-four years after he was first discovered and given a cover by German officer Wilm Hosenfeld at the close of the Second World War, Szpilman wrote an open letter to Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre, to remind the world of the humanity he found in dark times.

Read the whole letter here.

Sunday 30 July 1775

Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa reminds Marie Antoinette not to meddle in politics

Your luck can all too easily change, and by your own fault you may well find yourself plunged into deepest misery. That is the result of your terrible dissipation which prevents your being assiduous about anything serious. What have you read? And after that you dare to opine on the greatest State matters, on the choice of ministers?

Mother knowns best. That’s probably what Maria Theresa was thinking when she wrote this stern letter to her daughter Marie Antoinette of guillotine fame. As the only woman to rule as Holy Roman Empress in her own right, Maria Theresa was all too familiar with the challenges faced by an eighteenth-century woman in politics. Partly a statement of what a Queen of France should (and should not!) do, and partly the advice of a mother looking out for her daughter, Maria Theresa’s words are also hauntingly prescient. (Yes, she died before the French Revolution and her daughter’s eventual execution.)