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'In an 1817 letter to his friend Barron Field, Charles Lamb reflects on “the difficulty of writing from one end of the globe […] to another,” which is that correspondents are separated by time as well as space. He jokes that the confusion of “going by different chronologies” means that by the time Field receives the letter, half its truths will have become lies, and vice versa (Letters 2: 210). His essay “Distant Correspondents” (1822), subtitled “In a Letter to B. F. Esq. at Sydney, New South Wales,” develops this theme:
'The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to expect that one's thoughts should live so far. It is like writing for posterity. (282)'
(Introduction)
