The Underground Economy of Club Love Letters
A century before texting, Seattle's gentlemen of leisure found ways to bypass the stuffy, anti-romance rules of private social clubs.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
There is an unwritten, unacknowledged law that none of the club paper shall be taken out of the club house. Why this should be enforced is what no fellow can find out. But it is a law and no mistake. Charley, when he writes to his sweetheart, wishes to use club stationery, yet by any stretch of his chivalric soul he cannot write to the dear girl from the club house, where the love-bearing pages will go forth all scented and tainted with tobacco smoke, and, mayhap, bearing clinging associations of horrid masculine club life that is being wafted upon the air. It would never do. Yet how can it be done? Simply in this way: He must—yea, steal—some note paper, watch it carefully, and secrete it upon his person until he has reached his own little room, where he may write to his girl as sweetly as he likes. So, when Ethel gets a note from Charley upon club paper, she knows that the dear, sweet boy has stolen it. Some crusty, crabbed old bachelor, too old to feel young, too hollow and foolish to kiss, must have had a hand in making such a bar against love. So say we all of us.
“Some crusty, crabbed old bachelor, too old to feel young, too hollow and foolish to kiss, must have had a hand in making such a bar against love.”
While private men's clubs were once the gatekeepers of etiquette and 'proper' correspondence, today's digital platforms have replaced them, though we still struggle with the same tensions between private social spaces and the desire for authentic human connection. This glimpse into the 1891 'underground' of letter-writing reveals that even the most rigid institutional rules were eventually subverted by the pursuit of romance.
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