Dead Letters Detectives: Critical Exhaustion and The Scarlet Letter Gina L. Vallis Dead Letter: (a) a writing etc. taken literally without reference to its spirit or intention, and so useless or ineffective; (b) a law no longer observed, a disused practice; (c) an unclaimed or undelivered letter. “1857 - Scott 24 + 26 on local Carrier Rate cover from Boston; stamps tied by black PAID killers. Neat small Ladies envelope.” 1 What is a dead letter? The first quotation above is a definition. The second quotation is a record of a dead letter from the dead letter office. The dead letter it describes originated in Boston in 1857 and was contained in a small envelope. This description was displayed in a column of the local newspaper at the time. The letter was never claimed by the person for whom it was intended. Yet it continues. Now it circulates in a website about dead letters, where I discovered it, and it appears here as a quotation in this study. Someone with the requisite training, such as a postal person, could probably explain the code that is used in this description of the letter, and then I would appear to know much more about this letter. But I would never know what is in the letter itself. What is left over from this particular dead letter is merely the history of its circulation, which I have here extended. According to the definition, a dead letter is a letter that does not reach its destination; it is writing that has lost its original purpose. It is, strangely, a law no longer acted upon. There is a certain relationship between a dead letter and the law. For example, dead letters give rise to such oddities as “dead letter detectives,” whose job it is to try to reunite the letter with its author or intended recipient. One report records that the most famous of these dead letter detectives was Mrs. Patti-Lyle Collins: “Mrs. Collins was described in The Saturday Evening Post in 1908 as ‘unquestionably the most highly skilled expert living.’” It turns out that Mrs. Collins displayed considerable skill in making sense of dead letters: “She was a skilled decipherer who could quickly translate by sound such destinations as ‘Reikzhieer, Stiejt-Kanedeka’ (Roxbury, State of Connecticut).” 2 In turn, in Timothy Quicksand’s 1831 article titled: “Dead Letters, 1 http://www.ballstonphilatelics.com/covers/us2.html 2 http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/resources/6a2c_deadletters.html 3 The New England Magazine 1 (Dec. 1831): 505-506. 2 http://www.postalmuseum.si.edu/resources/6a2c_deadletters.html