I have collected letters according to their content. My suggestions are by no means exhaustive. They represent my own interests and efforts at categorization:.
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War Letters
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Letters concerning Death
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Love Letters
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Prison Letters
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Letters from Exile
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Letters to the Editor
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Letters to Children
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Business Letters
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Travel Letters
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Letters to Parents
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Political Letters
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Miscellaneous Letters
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Investigating individual letters can be an adventure in reading.
Since letters are written by real people, there is probably no subject, no issue, no idea reflecting human concerns that can’t be found in their pages. Great inventions were first announced by letter, great discoveries, too. Columbus wrote Queen Isabella about his exploratuibs among “the Indian natives.” Baber, a Turkish Mogul, described the failure of an attempt to poison him.
The specific content of letters can be used as a springboard for further discussion—for the light shed on a historical figure, period, event; for the many ways of facing traumatic situations, from the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that buried Pompeii (Pliny the younger to Tacitus) to facing a firing squad (Dostoyevsky to his brother); for the range of emotions in love and marriage, from mercenary calculations (Du Barry to an admirer) to mad passion (Napoleon to Josephine); for the experience of prison, from pathetic pleas for life (Ann Boleyn to Henry VIII) to eloquent, political optimism (Martin Luther King from a Birmingham Jail).
But to understand a specific letter, studying its social and historical context may also become necessary. Although the “Last Letters from Stalingrad” are moving documents representing the anguish of any doomed soldier, local details and references and the almost universal tone of angry despair become clear only if one knows something about the German Third Reich, the Nazi mythos of heroic self-sacrifice for Hitler, as well as the military situation of the 6th German Army, surrounded by the Russians, hopelessly cut off from their supply lines, and abandoned to the bitter Russian winter. Against that background the opportunity to write a final letter (and the men knew this) means something quite different the passionate, lively letter Admiral Nelson wrote to his wife on the eve of the Battle of Trafalgar. He didn’t know then that he would not survive his greatest victory.
Similarly, a discussion of British pluck and optimism during the Victorian Age will deepen one’s understanding of Robert Falcon Scott’s last letter to his wife, addressed with supreme detachment “To my Widow,” and his “Message to the Public,” in which he explains the reasons why the Antarctic expedition failed. Both were written during a blizzard in sub-40-degree weather, while he waited for death to overtake him.
The study and reading of letters, then, can become as much a method, a perspective for exploring particular subjects, as a subject matter in itself.