This thesis examines the use and representation of letters (and other written messages) in Thomas Hardy's novels, and it considers how Hardy's writing engages with Victorian communication technologies. The 1895 Preface to Far from the Madding Crowd describes Hardy's fictional setting as a ‘a modern Wessex of railways, the penny post, mowing and reaping machines, union workhouses, lucifer matches, labourers who could read and write, and National school children'. The penny post, a communication revolution with an enormous social, economic, and cultural impact, was introduced on 10 January 1840, just a few months before Hardy was born. This thesis aims to demonstrate how a consideration of the material, technological and cultural conditions of communication in Victorian England might reshape our understanding of Hardy's novels, especially of the countless letters, notes, and telegrams which permeate his texts. The written messages in Hardy's novels serve as a means for exploring the process of human communication, and the way this process shapes individual identity, interpersonal relationships, and social interactions alike. Chapter I of this thesis relates Hardy's portrayal of letters to the historical transition from oral tradition to written culture. Chapter II enquires into the relationship between letter writing and notions of privacy and publicity in Hardy's novels. Chapters III and IV argue that Hardy uses letters so as to give a strikingly modern complexity to his representation of human subjectivity and intersubjectivity. The two final chapters investigate how the modalities and technological conditions of written communication influence the construction of Hardy's narratives, the design of his plots. Taken together, the six chapters examine Hardy's perception of one of the most fundamental human activities: communication.

The Penny Post (1851–1896), a religious working-class magazine, was published following a critical time for the Oxford Movement, a High Church movement in the Church of England. The Oxford Movement's ideas were leaving the academic atmosphere of Oxford and traveling throughout the local parishes, where the ideals of Tractarian teachings met the harsh realities of practice and the motivations and beliefs of the working-class parishioners. The upper-class paternalistic ideologies of the Oxford Movement were not reflected in the parishes, and the working-classes felt distanced from their place in religious worship. The Penny Post was published and written by Tractarian clergymen and followers to "triumph in the Working Man's Home," attempting to convince a working-class audience that the upper-class Tractarian clergymen and parishioners both understood and wanted to help the poorer peoples of society. However, an analysis of the Penny Post reveals that its creators had more complex motives and were targeting a more diverse audience than they claimed. Because of these complexities, the Penny Post's creators could not reconcile the discrepancies between working-class ideologies and upper-class ideologies; the Penny Post, in the end, undermined its own intended purposes. The elements of the magazine that attempted to address working-class concerns were overshadowed by other elements that, while appearing to address working-class concerns, directly targeted an upper-class audience. This dichotomy of purpose—simultaneously addressing different classes with different, often contradictory, beliefs—reveals the multifaceted nature of the Penny Post's efforts to reach their audiences. The Penny Post is a magazine that simultaneously addresses an upper-class audience and a working-class audience, a duality that creates ideological contradictions and tensions throughout the magazine. These tensions reflect the class issues within Victorian society and the ways religious movements dealt with those tensions in periodicals like the Penny Post. The Penny Post provides an important look into how the Oxford Movement, a movement not known for its understanding of and interest in the working classes, did attempt to reach and understand the working classes through periodical literature.