Goodbye to the letters of introduction

Spectator

a day ago

Re-reading Agatha Christie's A Murder is Announced this week (it's the summer holidays! I can relax like anyone else!), I was struck by one of Miss Marple's wise pronouncements:
And that's really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It's very much like St Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house – and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys… They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them. If somebody new came to live there, they brought letters of introduction, or they'd been in the same regiment or served in the same ship as someone there already. If anybody new – really new – really a stranger – came, well, they stuck out – everybody wondered about them and didn't rest till they found out.
Since 1950, when the book was published, letters of introduction have all but vanished, as anachronistic as spats and stove-pipe hats. I wonder when the last one was written, gravely bestowed on its recipient, and carried reverently (in a battered briefcase, no doubt), bearing hopes of social or financial success.
Decorous and polite, they hark back to an ordered world, and the exchange of reliable information about identity. A tip from the right person could be a conduit into Society, or smooth your way into a job. They boast an ancient lineage: the Ancient Egyptians used them; the Greeks had a manual which explained how to write them; Cicero got worked up about their formulaic nature. Important figures such as Benjamin Franklin were besieged by suppliants desiring their recommendations.
A good letter of introduction was like a passport. If a young man pitched up on your doorstep bearing one from your aunt or a bishop, you'd have a solid indicator of his trustworthiness. Further afield, they really were passports: the travel writer Patrick Leigh-Fermor bore letters which granted him passage to the crumbling palaces of Middle European aristocrats. In practice, they weren't always successful: there's a 19th-century painting by the artist David Wilkie which shows him approaching a potential patron with a letter of introduction. It's worthless, as the patron has no interest in him.
A more sinister application of this custom enabled the introducer to keep tabs on the introduced: an early form of an AirTag. When Lord Chesterfield gave letters of introduction to his son, Philip Stanhope, he warned 'at Leipsig I shall have an hundred invisible spies upon you; and shall be exactly informed of everything that you do, and of almost everything that you say.' They could have fatal consequences, at least in fiction: in The Iliad, the hero Bellerophon carries a missive to a king, which he believes is a letter of introduction. In fact, it contains instructions for his murder.
Benign or not, their absence, says Marple, is a factor of instability. In A Murder is Announced, identity is fluid. Various suspects present themselves as one thing, only to be revealed as impostors. In Miss Marple's pre-lapsarian world, this would have been nigh on impossible (although her view may be rosy-tinted). Even so, that ordered, hierarchical universe, in which you knew everyone from lord of the manor to muck-spreading labourer, has been smashed by the vast machinery of war.
Letters of introduction still eke out an existence in electronic form, though, like everything technology touches, they are much debased. In my twenties, if you were visiting somewhere new, whether in the UK or across the world, you'd be cc'ed into an excitable email from a mutual friend. 'Hi John, Philip's staying in Dorset for three weeks, it would be lovely if you could see him! He's not a murderer!' You would reply, 'Nice to e-meet you!', which is one of the cringiest phrases to have been spawned in recent times. Worse are those now conducted via a hurried WhatsApp: 'Just introducing Whizz here, who was at nursery school (I think???) with me. He'll be in London for two days in October. Have fun!' Little real information is given; we rely on the probity of the mutual friend and, if we are snoopy, on the internet.
Indeed, even sage old Marple could not have foreseen that. We have a much stranger situation than the one she bewails. Despite the reams of information available online, we have little to no guarantee of its truth. People lie on their CVs (even, or perhaps especially, prominent ones: ahem, Rachel Reeves). Curated or locked social media posts baffle and frustrate the inquisitive. Some people eschew social media altogether. Does that make them suspicious, or not? A message purporting to be from 'someone who wants to connect', or even one from a close friend or relative, could be written by an LLM, or be a front for a crook waiting to siphon off your life savings.
How then, are we to know when a new person in our lives is the real deal? Perhaps we will be reverting to St Mary Mead (though the people in 'the big house' are now more likely to be London blow-ins, and the plumbers will be earning more than the toffs). Maybe the physical letter of introduction, as opposed to its ersatz electronic counterpart, will return. Personal connections will become even more important than they already are. Aunts and bishops will once more be in high demand, while high-profile figures may once more be inundated with claims for their (literal) seal of approval.
Printed on headed writing paper, or even hand-written, and sealed in a thick envelope. These may be the only reliable way to confirm your bona fides. And who knows, they might gain their own social cachet, too. Time to start investing in sealing wax.