Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing

5. Benefits and Blessings: Letters Home, Friendship, Death Notices, Courtship, and Valentines by Penny Post

• Chapter 5 Benefits and Blessings Letters Home, Friendship, Death Notices, Courtship, and Valentines by Penny Post Far more important is the opening of the Post Office to hundreds and thousands of these industrious workers than an increase of earnings would be; for the restoration of access to home, which might then be an expensive indulgence, is now a matter of course for all; a benefit enjoyed without hesitation or remorse. . . . And who shall say to how many this privilege has been equivalent to peace of mind—in how many cases to the preservation of innocence and a good name? —Harriet Martineau, Letter to Thomas Wilde, MP, May 15, 1843 Letter writing soared following postal reform: an estimated 337,500,000 letters passed through the United Kingdom in 1849,1 nine years after the Penny Post came into effect and six years after Martineau retrospectively blessed the Penny Post for “restoration of access to home . . . for all.” Writing in Household Words in 1850, Charles Dickens and W. H. Wills cite this statistic along with an interesting anecdote about a visitor to the central Post Office in St. Martin’s-le-Grand—a destination not only for Londoners but for tourists, foreign dignitaries, and authors, like Dickens, who came to the General Post Office to witness the amazing amount of correspondence passing through it daily. Dickens’s astonished visitor queries a postal official: “‘The increase is attributable to the penny system?’” “‘Entirely,’” the postal official replies (8). I privilege this anecdote alongside Martineau’s view that the Penny Post aided “the preservation of innocence and a good name,” because both foreground benefits at the very heart of the Victorian revolution in letter writing. Dickens pictures “great sheepskin bags of letters tumbling in from the receiving houses.” The letters “were from all parts of London to all parts of London and to the provinces and to the far-off quarters of the globe” (7). In fact, 194 · Posting It as discussed in chapter 2, many of these far-off lands are represented by ethnic stereotypes on the officially commissioned Mulready stationery. Affordable postage increased citywide and nationwide letter-based traffic, conveying urgent information in an age of rapid industrialization, migratory employment, and emigration.2 With the creation of the World Postal Union in Bern, Switzerland , on October 9, 1874, cheap postage expanded worldwide, resulting in a relatively flat, cheap international rate and a transnational postal space that linked Britain with most of Europe, Turkey, Egypt, and the United States. Following the formation of this organization, more countries swiftly joined the union.3 Writing nearly twenty-five years before the creation of what David Henkin calls this “postal zone without national borders” (178) and ten years after the passing of the Penny Post, Dickens also directs our attention to London mailbags crammed with telltale envelopes headed to local and distant locations: “An acute postman might guess the broad tenour of their contents by their covers:—business letters are in big envelopes, official letters in long ones, and lawyers’ letters in none at all; the tinted and lace-bordered mean Valentines, the black-bordered tell of grief, and the radiant with white enamel announce marriage ” (7). In Dickensian fashion, these missives announce the best of times— love, success, triumph, and joy—and the worst of times—death, despair, failure, and sorrow. Wishing to “peep” into the contents of these envelopes, William Lewins in Her Majesty’s Mails (1864) likewise celebrates the diversity of letters “jostling each other quite contentedly” in a postman’s mailbag: If we could but get a peep, what a much greater variety within! Here, without doubt, are tidings of life and death, hope and despair, success and failure, triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow; letters from friends, and notes from lawyers, appeals from children and stern advice or remonstrance from parents, offers from anxious-hearted young gentlemen, and “first yesses” or refusals from young maidens; letters containing that snug appointment so long promised, and “little bills” with requests for immediate payment, “together with six-and-eightpence.” Here are cream-coloured missives, which will doubtless be found to tell of happy consummations, and black-edged envelopes which will still more certainly tell of death and the grave; sober-looking advice-notes, doubtless telling when our “Mr. Puffwell” will “do himself the honour of calling” upon you, and elegant-looking billets in which “shocking business” is never mentioned, are here all jostling each other quite contentedly, and will do so for many hours...