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Chapter 4 Unwanted Missives and the Spread of Vice “Curious Things,” Slander, and Blackmail from Household Words to the Fiction of George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Anthony Trollope Will clerks write only to their fathers, and girls to their mothers? Will not letters of romance or love, intrigue or mischief, increase in at least equal proportions ? —John Wilson Croker, “Post-Office Reform,” 1839 PostalpropagandaalignedhighpostagewithviceandcorruptionandthePenny Postwithgoodnessandrighteousness.Reformiststorieshighlightfamiliestorn asunder, taxed too heavily to communicate, and poor folk scrambling to find necessary funds to accept a death notice, only to learn that in the meantime the missive has been returned to sender. Images of mothers pawning their clothing to pay for a letter, children going without bread for postage, and the death of poor Rose Maydew in “ONLY A POSTAGE. [A TALE ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE EFFECTS OF HIGH POSTAGES.]” transformed the unreformed Post Office into a robber of virtue, basic human needs, and even life itself.1 Postal reform stories also offered hope: “‘many young persons of both sexes, who are continually drawn to this metropolis [London] from distant parts of the kingdom, and are thenceforth cut off from their communication with their early guardians, might, under different circumstances, be kept from entering upon vicious courses, to which the temptations are so great, and against which the restraints, in their case, are so few.’”2 Such testimonials—which circulated broadly in diverse sources, including pamphlets by Rowland Hill and W. H. Ashurst, the writings of Harriet Martineau, articles in The Post Circular, and Henry Cole’s “A Report of an Imaginary Scene at Windsor Castle Respecting the Uniform Penny Postage” (bound into part 13 of Charles Dickens’s popular serial Nicholas Nickleby [1838–39])—arguably reached “the heart of a large • 154 · Posting It class of people” (Administration 20) who supported the Penny Post for its vision of moral, educational, political, and social reform. What came of these utopian dreams? Within one year following the Penny Post, the mailing of letters increased 112.4 percent. From this enormous surge in 1841, there was a minor slowdown to an annual letter-mailing increase rate of 105.6 percent until 1850, after which the mailing of letters increased by 62.5 percent each year between 1850 and 1860.3 “Before the introduction of the Penny Post, most letters were probably sent for business purposes,” explains M. J. Daunton in Royal Mail; afterward “there was . . . an increase in personal correspondence” (79). The lowering of postage undeniably increased the volume of the post, and the public welcomed both of these developments as blessings, the focus of chapter 5. However, the Penny Post also stimulated unwanted, unsolicited mass mailings, collectively referred to as junk mail and spam today, as well as clandestine and dangerous missives and “mischief,” as John Wilson Croker had predicted, publicly exposing arguably preexisting problems and accelerating the spread of vice, not virtue. To quote the terms of an 1844 pamphlet entitled Administration of the Post Office from the Introduction of Mr. Rowland Hill’s Plan of Penny Postage up to the Present Time, the Penny Post brought neither “the solid comforts of revenue” nor “the luxury of feeling” that spurred this measure into law (22). Postal historians, including Howard Robinson, have thoroughly explored the immediate financial loss and eventual monetary gains the Post Office experienced following reform, effectively answering Administration’s revenue argument. What remains compelling is the pamphlet’s claim against the “dexterity” with which “the snare of Cheap Postage was spread; that it was represented as a case, not of mere business, but of feeling, and won immediate access to the heart of a large class of people” (20). The Penny Post may have succeeded by making cheap postage a case of feeling, but it did not win the hearts of all people, even as the volume of mail continued to climb. As Pearson Hill points out in The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago (1887), in the first five years following Uniform Penny Postage, a disgruntled minority, many of whom opposed Hill’s plan in the first place, continued to view it “with the most determined hostility” (21), even after it received Parliamentary approval and the Queen’s consent. To anti-Hillites, the Penny Post in its inclusiveness and affordability invited a host of ways to manipulate the weak or unsuspecting through fraud, slander, and blackmail. Some opponents of the measure, such as Croker, a prominent Tory politician, recognized that postal reform would bring about a mix of vice...

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