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Fathers have neverstopped trying

Romance · 2026-10-31

There is something hopeful and a little absurd about a father writing to his child. He sits down to fold everything he has learned, at great expense, into a few sheets of paper, and posts it to someone who is somewhere else and already growing beyond his reach. It has never quite worked, and fathers have never stopped trying. Here are ten such letters, written across nearly two and a half centuries, each one caught in the season it was written, with some account of what became of the child who opened it.

I. Lord Chesterfield to Philip Stanhope, 1740s–1760s

In October 1746 Lord Chesterfield was fifty-two and writing from the spa town of Bath, and before the autumn was out he would be one of George II’s Secretaries of State, with Britain at war in Europe. His son Philip was fourteen and had been born outside marriage. He was traveling to Switzerland with a tutor, and had just written home about the road: the nights on straw, the black bread, the carriage that broke down.

The boy was his father’s great design. Chesterfield meant to make this illegitimate son a polished diplomat, perhaps even his successor, and he wrote him hundreds of letters to that end, fretting over his laziness and his awkwardness, and admitting that most of them might simply blow away, like the scraps of paper the two of them had once sent up a kite string. His love had terms. It would last, he wrote, exactly as long as Philip deserved it.

What he asked for above everything was attention, because nothing is done well without it, from books down to dancing. Use every spare quarter of an hour, he urged; study how people really behave; keep your own counsel; and give your merits the polish of charm, since even gold loses its luster unpolished. The line that outlived him came in a letter of 1747: “take care of the minutes; for hours will take care of themselves.”

Philip mastered the substance and never the graces. He became a Member of Parliament and then envoy at Dresden, where James Boswell found him sensible and civil, if no charmer. He died in 1768 at thirty-six, and only then, it is generally believed, did his father learn of a secret wife, Eugenia Peters, and two small grandsons. After the earl’s own death she published the letters, and they became a classic of manners, though Samuel Johnson sneered that they taught a harlot’s morals and a dancing master’s manners. Generations of strangers have read them since. The one reader they were meant for seems mostly to have let them blow away.

Read the letters at Project Gutenberg, in plain text from 1746 on, or, easier on a phone, through the same edition’s book page, with web and e-book versions.

II. Charles Dickens to Edward “Plorn” Dickens, September 1868

In September 1868 Charles Dickens was fifty-six, home from an exhausting reading tour of America, with farewell readings in Britain still before him; his marriage had been over for ten years. His youngest son, Edward, whom the family called Plorn, was sixteen and, in his father’s eyes, drifting. A photograph from that year shows the boy armed for the Australian outback, with shadows under his eyes that the costume does not hide.

Dickens had settled the boy’s future himself: a sheep station in Australia, where his brother Alfred had gone before him. As Plorn left, his father wrote him a few parting words to read over in quiet moments, as he had for each son who went away. Life, he told him, is half made up of partings. Days later he admitted to a friend that it had been a hard parting at the last.

The counsel came from a man who had earned his own bread before he was Plorn’s age, and there was no ornament in it. Find a steady purpose and hold to it. Never cheat anyone in a bargain, and never bear down on people who depend on you. Treat others as you would be treated, keep up your prayers, and let the New Testament guide you. And always “do whatever you have to do as well as you can do it.”

They never saw each other again; Dickens died in June 1870. Plorn found his feet on Momba station, in the dry far west of New South Wales, and married in 1880, but a bad season in 1882 cost him his share in a station near Bourke. He sat for Wilcannia in the colonial parliament from 1889 to 1894, passed other years in modest government inspector’s posts, and died at Moree in 1902, forty-nine years old and in debt. He had kept the decency his father asked of him. It was the steady purpose that never quite paid.

Read the full letter at Plough.

III. Albert Einstein to Hans Albert Einstein, November 4, 1915

Berlin, November 1915, the second autumn of the war. Albert Einstein was thirty-six and racing to finish the general theory of relativity, bringing a new paper before the Prussian Academy every week that month while the mathematician David Hilbert pressed toward the same answer. His wife, Mileva, had taken their sons back to Zurich, and Hans Albert, eleven, had told his father that his visits there felt awkward.

Then a letter from the boy arrived at last, and Einstein confessed he had begun to fear Hans Albert would never write to him again. He proposed that they meet away from Zurich and spend a whole month together every year, so that his son would know he had a father who loved him. Almost in passing, the way another man might mention the weather, he added that he had just finished some of the finest work of his life.

What he wished for the boy was the joy of being lost in something. Piano and carpentry, he wrote, were the best pursuits at that age, better even than school, and he should play the pieces he loved, not only the ones his teacher set. He himself was sometimes so wrapped up in his work that he forgot his lunch. That was how one learned most: by “doing something with such enjoyment that you don’t notice that the time passes.”

Within weeks it had gone wrong, in the ordinary way of families. A prickly exchange over a seventy-franc pair of skis, then the closing of wartime borders, sank the holiday visit they had planned; yet on Christmas Day Einstein wrote that he kept taking the boys’ postcard of drawings out to look at it again. Hans Albert became an engineer, wrote his doctorate on how rivers carry sediment, and from 1947 taught at Berkeley. After years of friction he spent long hours at his father’s bedside in 1955. The boy steered toward carpentry gave his life to the slow, absorbing question of how water moves stone.

Read the full letter, in English translation, at Flashbak.

IV. Sherwood Anderson to John Anderson, 1926–27

By April 1927 Sherwood Anderson, who had written Winesburg, Ohio, was fifty and back in America after a winter in Paris, and the bright season of his reputation was ending. Ernest Hemingway, once his protégé, had mocked his style in a parody the year before, and the Paris trip had brought spells of illness and depression. His son John, eighteen, had stayed behind to study painting at the Académie Julian, on Gertrude Stein’s advice.

Years before, Anderson had walked out on John’s mother and the children to become a writer, and now the boy had chosen the same uncertain trade. A year earlier he had warned him that art was a hard way to make a living, and urged him to see many kinds of people at first hand. Now he wrote to steady a young painter alone in Paris.

Make hundreds of drawings, he told him, of an apple or a dish of turnips, until the hand moves of its own accord and sets down what you feel. Study the Rembrandts at the Louvre, distrust whatever is merely fashionable, and stay humble. The search never ends; he himself had written for fifteen years before he produced anything solid. And the point of it all was never to make pictures that would sell: “It is to save yourself.”

Paris, it seems, worked. Stein took to John, and noticed that once his parents had gone the shy, awkward boy turned into an assured young man; decades later he would remember that year as a golden time. He went on painting, and a self-portrait of his from 1938 is in Princeton’s Graphic Arts Collection; he lived until 1995. His father had written that it wasn’t John’s success he wanted, only a decent attitude toward people and work. By that measure the letter found its mark.

Read excerpts from both the 1926 and 1927 letters at The Marginalian.

V. LeRoy Pollock to Jackson Pollock, 1928

In 1928 LeRoy Pollock, a farmer who had become a surveyor, was working away from home and hoping for snowstorms, which would give him an excuse to come back to the orange groves of California. There is something of the whole man in that wish. His youngest son, Jackson, was sixteen; he had dropped out of Riverside High after months of struggle, sweated through a summer job in the mountains, and was starting at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.

Jackson had written about the summer, about school and about his ideas on religion, and LeRoy, whom letters from his five boys left swelled up with pride, wrote back. His worries were the quiet kind: a son who was struggling, a family that had, as he bluntly put it, failed financially, a job that might not last. His hope was simpler. He wanted his boys to turn out good and useful.

So he told Jackson to take an interest in everything, sports and studies and friends, and the small things too, insects and birds, flowers and leaves. Don’t be too solemn, he wrote; a little mischief keeps the balance. Believe what your own conscience tells you, and don’t worry, either about what you can’t help or about what you can. The secret of success, he thought, was “to be fully awake to everything about you.”

Expelled from Manual Arts, Jackson went east to New York in 1930 to study painting. LeRoy died of a heart infection in 1933, years before the poured and dripped canvases that made his son famous. Asked by Hans Hofmann whether he worked from nature, Pollock answered, by Lee Krasner’s account, that he was nature. But the half of his father’s advice about not worrying never took. The drinking that began in his teens never let him go, and in 1956 he died at forty-four in a drunk-driving crash that also killed a passenger. He had stayed awake to everything, and found peace in almost nothing.

Read the full letter at The Marginalian.

VI. Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira, summer 1928

In the summer of 1928 Jawaharlal Nehru was thirty-eight, a rising Congress leader in a year of protests against the all-British Simon Commission, and he was down on the plains at Allahabad. His only child, Indira, was ten and up in the hills at Mussoorie. They were lately home from a long stay in Europe, and his letters kept wandering back to what they had seen there together, among them an ancient skull that a Heidelberg professor kept locked in a safe.

When they were together she was always asking him questions. Apart, he answered by post, and the answers grew into the story of the earth and its peoples, a history of the world sent up the mountain one envelope at a time. He wanted her to see the whole world and not only her own country, though he told her plainly that India was poor and ruled by foreigners. The letters end when the summer did.

Learn to read the world itself, he told her. A smooth pebble was once a jagged chip of mountain rock, rolled round by streams, and if you learn nature’s alphabet it will tell you its story. Think of other peoples as cousins, of war as barbarous, and of civilization as people working together for the good of all. The way to begin was to “go to the great Book of Nature itself.”

Premchand translated the letters into Hindi, and later the letters Nehru wrote her from prison grew into Glimpses of World History. Indira became prime minister, from 1966 to 1977 and again from 1980, and was assassinated in 1984; her record, the Emergency of 1975 to 1977 above all, is fiercely contested still. But the lessons about nature stayed with her. She remarked long afterward that her father’s letters had taught her how rocks and stones and trees tell their stories, and in office she championed conservation, from the Stockholm environment conference of 1972 to Project Tiger.

Read the letters in the original 1929 edition, free to read and download on the Internet Archive; a 2004 edition can be borrowed there with a free account.

VII. F. Scott Fitzgerald to Scottie, August 8, 1933

August 1933, at La Paix, a rambling Victorian house he rented outside Baltimore. F. Scott Fitzgerald was thirty-six, drinking heavily, deep in debt, and grinding out Tender Is the Night in what he would later call his smoky study, not far from the Johns Hopkins clinic where his wife, Zelda, had been treated. Their only child, Scottie, was eleven and away at summer camp.

She had written to say that she was happy. He wrote back that he had never believed much in happiness, nor in misery either, a stern creed for the chronicler of the Jazz Age; he asked for proof that she was keeping up her French, and threatened, by way of a joke, to spank the White Cat for her impertinence. What he did believe in, he said, was duty: virtue rewarded, and neglected duties punished twice over.

Then he made her a list. Worry about courage, it said, and cleanliness, and efficiency, and, this being 1933, horsemanship. Don’t worry about popular opinion, or the past, or the future, or triumph, or boys, or parents, or insects in general. Ask yourself instead what you are really aiming at, how good you honestly are, whether you understand people, and whether you are looking after your body. At the hinge of the list was a single line: “Don’t worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault.”

Scottie was at Vassar when her father died in December 1940. She became a journalist and wrote for The New Yorker, and as his fame came back she guarded her parents’ reputations fiercely. In 1965 she wrote the introduction to the published collection of his letters to her, edited by Andrew Turnbull, the landlord’s son from La Paix. She died in 1986. He had feared she would drift; she made her own life in words instead.

Read the letter, lightly trimmed, at Farnam Street; the full text is in Letters to His Daughter (1965).

VIII. John Steinbeck to Thom Steinbeck, November 10, 1958

New York, November 1958. John Steinbeck was fifty-six, the author of The Grapes of Wrath, living in Manhattan with his third wife, Elaine, and bogged down among King Arthur’s knights, whose legends he was retelling. His elder son, Thom, fourteen and the child of his second marriage, was away at boarding school, and wrote home that he had fallen in love with a girl named Susan.

Fourteen is the age at which love arrives all at once and without instructions, and the boy had written to ask for them. Steinbeck answered the day the letter came. Thom had insisted this was not puppy love, and his father took him at his word, understanding that what the boy wanted to know was what to do about it. Elaine would write her own reply and gladly arrange for Susan to visit. What he feared was that someone would make the feeling seem small.

Being in love, he wrote, is about the best thing that can happen to anyone. There is a selfish love that makes a person mean and small, and a generous kind that sets free a strength and courage and kindness you never knew you had. Try to live up to the one you love. Tell her so, minding her shyness; and if the feeling is not returned, it is no less good for that. Above all there was no hurry: “Nothing good gets away.”

We do not know what became of Susan. Thom studied animation and film, joined the Army, and reached Vietnam during the Tet Offensive of 1968, serving for months as a helicopter door gunner; later he went back as a journalist. He became a writer and screenwriter, fought a long war with alcohol, and spent years in court defending his father’s legacy. When he died in 2016, at seventy-two, his wife, Gail, remembered a wonderful and loving husband. If she is any judge, he found the generous kind.

Read the full letter at Thrive Global.

IX. Ronald Reagan to Michael Reagan, June 1971

June 1971. Ronald Reagan was sixty, in his second term as governor of California and locked in a bruising fight over welfare reform with the Democratic legislature. His son Michael was twenty-six. Reagan and his first wife, the actress Jane Wyman, had adopted him as a newborn and divorced when he was small, and now he was about to marry Pamela Putnam.

On the eve of the wedding Reagan sent him an item he had mentioned earlier, with a torn-up IOU, and remarked that he could stop there but would not. He had heard every joke the cynics tell about marriage, and he wanted his son to hear the other side, above all about fidelity. Michael had been sent away to boarding schools as a boy and knew what an unhappy home does to the people in it. Here was his chance to get it right.

A marriage, Reagan wrote, is whatever you make of it, and you take out only what you put in. Cheating takes no great manhood; it takes a great deal more to stay loved by a woman who has seen you unshaven, sick and snoring. Somehow a wife knows, even with no lipstick on any collar, and a little of the magic goes when she does. The reward is to come home at the end of the day to someone “waiting for the sound of his footsteps.” In a postscript he told Michael to say he loved her at least once a day.

That marriage did not last; they were divorced in 1972. In 1975 Michael married Colleen Sterns, and that one did, through about fifty years and two children; he credited her with leading him to faith. He became a conservative talk-radio host, and the title of his memoir, On the Outside Looking In, says a good deal about his childhood. He died in January 2026, at eighty. The letter took, though only on the second try.

Read the full letter at Upworthy.

X. Ted Hughes to Nicholas Hughes, 1986

In 1986 Ted Hughes was in his middle fifties and Britain’s Poet Laureate, still living in the long shadow of Sylvia Plath’s death in 1963, when their son Nicholas was a baby. Nick was twenty-four now, an Oxford zoology graduate working in Alaska; a few years before, his father had visited him at Lake Victoria, where Nick was studying the Nile perch.

Hughes had sensed that his son was under some strain. The letter hints at a relationship that had turned into a trap, and Nick had confessed that in certain situations he still felt very childish. Hughes, who had kept a public silence about his marriage for decades, admitted that he and Plath had spent their American years so wrapped up in each other and in their writing that he never really explored the country, and he urged his son not to waste his own chance.

Then he told him what he had come to believe about people. Everyone, however capable they look, is still a child inside, hiding behind an armor built at about the age of eight, and that child is the real person. It comes alive only when life throws it into the front line, and if weeks go by without that struggle, you have stopped growing. In the end, he wrote, “The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest.”

Nick stayed in Alaska, took his doctorate there and became a professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, an authority on grayling, salmon and trout, before leaving to start a pottery. Ted died in 1998. In March 2009, after a long struggle with depression, Nick took his own life in Fairbanks; he was forty-seven. His sister Frieda said that fishing had been his deep bond with their father, and that he kept a boyish enthusiasm for whatever came next. He lived boldly and on his own terms, and depression is not something a letter can cure.

Read the full letter, as printed in Letters of Ted Hughes, at Letters of Note.

Afterword

Read side by side, the ten letters keep returning to a few things, as though the fathers had been comparing notes across the centuries.

They all believe in attention. Across two hundred and forty years they tell their children that a life is only as good as the attention paid to it: Chesterfield with his minutes, Einstein with his forgotten lunch, LeRoy Pollock with his wide-awake boy, Nehru with his talking pebble, Anderson with his hundreds of drawings.

They believe, too, in a decency that ranks above winning. Dickens forbids a mean advantage. Anderson wants a decent attitude more than success. LeRoy cares less about money than about sons who turn out good and useful. Fitzgerald tells his daughter not to worry about triumph or rivals, and Reagan makes fidelity the real proof of a man. Most of these fathers had won a great deal in the world, and still they put character first.

Nearly every letter is also a confession. Almost all were written across some distance, a divorce, a war, an ocean, a boarding school, a hill station, and many carry the father’s own regret: Chesterfield’s idle youth, Anderson’s wish that he had learned to work with his hands, LeRoy Pollock’s admission that he had failed financially, Reagan’s broken first marriage, Hughes’s lost years in America. Half the advice is addressed to the young man the father used to be.

And the advice lands sideways, when it lands at all. Philip never acquired the polish, but Boswell liked him. Plorn never grew rich, but he stayed decent. Hans Albert found his absorption in rivers rather than pianos, and Indira carried her father’s lessons about nature into the policy of a nation. The rules rarely stick. The love does, and so does the example.

Read Ted Hughes’s letter first. Most of the others tell a child how to behave; his explains how people work. Everyone, even the most impressive person you know, is partly still eight years old inside, and courage means letting that child out. It will change the way you read the other nine, and its closing lines are the finest few sentences on living boldly in the whole collection. If you have two minutes rather than ten, begin with Steinbeck.

Sources

Beyond the letters themselves (linked above), the facts come from these pages: