Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (review)

For readers unfamiliar with the history of the British penny post, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing will be a helpful tutor. In part one, "Reforms," Catherine J. Golden describes the reasons cheap postage was initially desired by Britons and ultimately effected by the Postage Duties Bill of 1839, which instituted standardized, prepaid postage for letters. Part two, "Outcomes," pursues the implications of cheap postage in Victorian culture, considering in some detail the " jobs, hobbies, innovative postal practices, and telling material objects" that postal reforms helped to inspire (115). The great success of this book is its lively heterogeneity: Golden challenges readers to consider fact and fiction, postage stamps and writing desks, images and anecdotes, valentines and blackmail. The single failing of this volume is a species of flat-footedness that surrogates interpretation. Despite some lovely connections made in passing—such as the ever-youthful image on the "Queen's head" stamp recalled in its inverse as the changeable picture of Dorian Gray (106)—readers will find more literal-minded description than critical insight in the pages of Posting It.

The prime mover behind British postal reform was one Rowland Hill, and Golden's first chapter is organized around a group of anecdotes that worked—most of them retrospectively—to make sense of his accomplishments: the boy from a poor family sent to a pawn shop to raise money to pay an impatient letter-carrier for a letter, in the bad old days before cheap, prepaid postage. The moral discourse of reform locates letter writing as a boon for families and by implication for nation and empire. The chapter ends by considering the Henry Cole dialogue, "A Report of an Imaginary Scene at Windsor Castle Respecting the Uniform Penny Postage" (1838), 40,000 copies of which were bound into part thirteen of Charles Dickens's serial Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) in April 1839. Cole's dialogue, Golden writes, is "more an object of material culture than literature per se, [and] it carries political meaning, revealing how Cole attempted to script Queen Victoria's approval of Uniform Penny Postage years before it actually came to pass" (77). Categories like the literary, the material, and the political tend to remain static for Golden. One is asked to imagine "if Nicholas Nickleby were a man and not a literary character" ("he, like his creator, would have supported postal reform") (81) rather than to explore the ways in which literariness and epistolarity, or realism and networked communication, may have changed in relation to one another during the nineteenth century. Later, Golden tantalizingly suggests in passing that, partly as a result of postal reform, "letter writing begins to intersect diaristic genres" (199).

The category of greatest interest to Golden is the material, and Posting It self-consciously pursues "a Victorian material culture studies approach" in line with the work of Asa Briggs and others (6). To that end, Golden includes wonderful material from and about the Great Exhibition of 1851, which so assiduously and earnestly categorized the manufactures of Britain while representing the Empire to itself. Golden's chapter 3 is billed as an account of "The Rise of Postal Products from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Vanity Fair (1848) to the pages of the Great Exhibition Catalogue (1851)," and it renders material goods in loving detail. In particular, Golden describes a stamp case designed by Lewis Carroll, an envelope-folding machine that garnered appreciative attention at the Crystal Palace, and then the Victorian writing desk, a portable and personal accoutrement as apparently ubiquitous as it is unnoticed within Victorian arts and letters today. Golden notes that writing desks are mentioned in fully "6 percent of the manufacturers' narratives in volume 2, section 3, class 26" of the Exhibition catalogue (a category that includes everything from furniture to Japanned goods) (139), and they "paved the way for subsequent innovations" (135), such as the briefcase, the laptop, and the smart...