Exchanging handwritten poems was a common practice

[breathedout]

Exchanging handwritten poems was a common practice among respectable young women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The tradition began in part as an adaptation to the social stigma against published women authors. Women exchanged handwritten poems and copied friends’ compositions into their own commonplace books, so they could circulate their writings without offending propriety by having their writings appear in print. Friends valued these handwritten gifts for material and emotional reasons. […] Most of all, poems had value as gifts because they signaled emotional intimacy and trust between the giver and the getter. Poems symbolized a connection that ran deeper than superficial pleasantries.

Even copying out the work of a famous author for a friend was a sign of emotional intimacy. Choosing just the right lines required familiarity, a knowledge of poetry, and good taste. Writing personalized verses required something more—creativity, of course, but also the willingness to pin your heart on your sleeve. Fashionable ladies of the time might have breezily composed poems for each other without much effort. But the daughters of ordinary families in Massachusetts assigned a great deal of importance to the task. They wrote poems to amuse each other, but also to convey true sentiments and to establish lasting intimacies. To make the task easier, most aspiring poets chose to write in an established genre like the acrostic, where the first letter of each line spelled out a name. More confident poets wrote rebuses, or poems that contained secret messages to be decoded.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

Sound familiar, fandom?