Required Reading: The Dead Letter Office

The lawyer-narrator in "Bartleby" comments, "Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?" Melville quite purposefully gives only one fact about Bartleby, his perplexing scrivener -- and even that fact is ambiguous being that it is only based on hearsay. Bartleby's previous job is said have been as a sorter in the Dead Letter Office in the post office.

So, what's the Dead Letter Office? Here's an informative 1992 article from the National Postal Museum, giving a brief history of the office. This is required reading:

In the years before World War I thousands of letters handled by this country's postal service went undelivered. They ended up in the waste bin because they were addressed improperly or incompletely, or were illegible. When local postal workers were stumped about what to do with a letter they couldn't deliver they forwarded the stray mail to the Dead Letter Office.

This wasn't the letter morgue you might imagine. Here, the misguided missives were not simply forgotten. Instead, a group of skilled dead letter detectives set about to discover the correct destinations so that the mail might get delivered.

one day's collection of "dead letter"

Basically, dead letter clerks handled three types of mystery mail: Misdirected letters, which were those which had all of the right information necessary to get them delivered, but for some reason were sidetracked, largely either because they weren't handled correctly by postal employees or had been abandoned at the designated post office; "Blind Readings," so called because to the average postal worker the address would appear as though it was read blindfolded; and prank mail.

Only the Dead Letter Office had the authority to open letters which couldn't seem to get delivered. Once opened, the contents of letters were considered sacred, so much so that the dead letter clerks were—and still are—forbidden to read any more of the communications than absolutely necessary to determine where the letters should go.

At the end of the 19th century it was not uncommon for the clerks in the Dead Letter Office to handle as many as 23,000 pieces of "dead" mail daily. Unfortunately, scarcely more than 40 percent of these letters ultimately got to the proper destination, although not for lack of effort. The rest generally were sold as scrap paper.

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