-
3. “Why Is a Raven . . . ?”: 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)
- University Press of Florida
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chapter 3 “Why Is a Raven . . . ?” 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) Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. —Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 1935 Two landmarks frame postal reform in nineteenth-century Britain in part 1 of Posting It: on January 10, 1840, cheap, affordable mail extended across England ; in May, 1860, George Elgar Hicks exhibited The General Post Office, One Minute to Six at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, commemorating St. Martin’s-le-Grand as an institution integral to Victorian life. Part 2, “Outcomes ,” takes as its starting point these twenty intervening years (1840–1860) in which Britain experienced an arguably unexpected outcome of postal reform —a steady rise in postal products that accompanied the advent of cheap postage. Did the Victorians anticipate that in this age of mechanical reproduction , the passing of Uniform Penny Postage would foster a new field of industry ? Cheap postage and the ushering in of prepaid stationery and postage stamps led to the creation of jobs, hobbies, innovative postal practices, and telling material objects. Modern day consumerism has its roots in the Victorian age of production and consumption. The Industrial Revolution led to an increase in speed of work and production and granted opportunities for leisure, choice, shopping, and collecting. Britain was the undisputed leader of the Industrial Revolution; the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first World’s Fair held in London at the Crystal Palace, showcased technological, economic, and military achievements of the civilized world and, in turn, created a demand for more consumer products . The Victorians manufactured and imported a range of materials for con- • 116 · Posting It sumption, including fiction, food, drink, clothing, and postal ephemera. Once connected with sin and indulgence, consumerism and, in turn, consumption became forms of self-expression. Victorian identity became intertwined with the books readers chose for their libraries, the foods people ate, the beverages they drank, the fashions they wore, and, post-1840, the goods they increasingly bought for the activities of daily life, including correspondence. A bewildering array of high-end and mass-produced postal products were among the emissaries of progress exhibited in the Great Exhibition of 1851. Pillar boxes, envelopes (plain and pictorial), pens, inkwells, stamp boxes, letter holders, wafers and seals, letter clips, scales, writing manuals, and portable writing desks, in turn, represent the post as a growing commercial enterprise. This chapter lays out this array of postal products included in the Great Exhibition of 1851 and features material objects in which the Victorians invested meaning and sentiment. Pictorial envelopes, letter-writing manuals, and, in particular, writing desks are material memories—physical reminders of the past that transmit knowledge of decorum, social class, political views, gender , and aesthetics of the period. Sources as diverse as temperance envelopes, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Official Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition (1851), and William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair illuminate a commercial boom accompanying the Victorian revolution in letter writing, informing us about the Victorian age and the Victorians who created, bought, collected, and used these products. Writing desks, which we might aptly call Victorian laptops, tell us about privacy , security, and portability at a time when heating was inefficient, houses were not yet electrified, and people of the upper reaches made long visits to friends and family lasting weeks and months. While the outside of the box carries meaning about aesthetics, gender, and social class, the inside, including the key lock and hidden drawers, reveals the importance of privacy; in making this valuable item of furniture a plot device in Vanity Fair, Thackeray, in turn, illustrates how the writing desk functioned as a private, transportable space to save and safeguard possessions, billets-doux, and secrets. Pillar Boxes and Letter Boxes We can trace roadside pillar boxes—a now standard fixture in British cities and the countryside—to Uniform Penny Postage of 1840. As more people took advantage of the post, and letter writing continued to rise, the pillar box offered a convenient way to send letters. Not a British invention, pillar boxes appeared on the Continent in Paris as early as 1653.1 However, we can credit [34.201.122.150] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:37 GMT) “Why Is a Raven . . . ?” · 117 pillar boxes in Britain to Anthony Trollope, who—though...