Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. See “Letter arrives eight years late,” BBC News, and “Was It Really Lost in the Mail?” CBS News, which states: “Some of these long-lost letters probably really were stuck in a mail chute or behind a piece of postal processing machinery—but not all.” 2. See “Letter arrives eight years late.” See “Greetings from 1956” for incidents of longlost US letters. 3. “2,500 post offices face closure,” BBC News, and “2,500 more post offices to close,” BBC News. Demonstrations proved unsuccessful in, for example, Lacock, UK, where locals and public figures recently protested the closure of the local post office. One prominent protestor was Dame Judi Dench, who recently filmed Cranford in Lacock. The determination to close the post office came in March 2008. See “Post office loses battle,” by Scott McPherson, in Wiltshire Gazette & Herald, March 20, 2008. 4. By 1857, most large English towns were connected by telegraph service, and we can date the first telephone exchange in London to 1879; see Pool, What Jane Austen Ate, 152, and “Key Dates” and the online exhibition Victorian Innovation at the British Postal Museum & Archive Web site. 5. Henkin, The Postal Age, 80, 64. Though Henkin’s observations pertain to the nineteenth -century Unites States Post Office, they apply equally well to post offices in Victorian Britain. 6. For more information, see Robinson, British Post Office, 403. (I capitalize Post Office throughout this book to signal its identity as one of Britain’s largest and most important bureaucratic institutions.) 7. See C. R. Perry, Victorian Post Office, 19. 8. C. R. Perry, Victorian Post Office, discusses changes in nineteenth-century communications technologies at length. The British Post Office’s takeover of the telephone occurred in 1912. Of course, telegraphs are now obsolete, and while landlines are in decline, mobile phone use is booming globally. 9. See “2,500 more post offices to close,” BBC News. 10. In “Community impact of PO closures,” BBC News, a 68-year-old woman comments on using her post office for post, finance, information, and socializing: “‘a lot of elderly come to visit and use it too.’” 11. “2,500 post offices face closure,” BBC News. 12. Breen’s cartoon appeared in the Life section of the Saratogian, July 10, 2008. 13. See “Key Dates” and the online exhibition Victorian Innovation at the British Postal Museum & Archive Web site. In 1846, London-based mail coach service essentially ended, although horses still carried post in rural areas. 14. Though Henkin’s point refers specifically to the American postal system, it also applies to the British Penny Post, which got going sooner. 15. For more on these points and a fuller quotation from Cole, see Asa Briggs, Victorian Things, 327, 333. 16. Zurich issued the 6 Rappen and 4 Rappen on March 1, 1843; Geneva released the Double Geneva on October 1, 1843. The Canton of Basel issued the Basel Dove on July 1, 1845. Brazil produced the Bull’s Eye stamp on August 1, 1843, and on July 1, 1847, the United States issued 5- and 10-cent stamps featuring, respectively, Benjamin Franklin on a redbrown stamp and George Washington on a black stamp. 17. In the growing area of Victorian material culture studies, I include Valerie Steele’s groundbreaking 2001 work, The Corset: A Cultural History; conferences, such as “Victorian Materialities,” North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), October 10–13, 2007, University of Victoria, Canada; and a forthcoming collection, Material Possessions: The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain, edited by Dr. Deidre McMahon and Dr. Janet Myers. 18. Briggs titles chapter 1 of Victorian Things, “Things as Emissaries”—a term he attributes to T. S. Eliot. An epigraph to this chapter from Eliot’s 1947 Notes Toward the Definition of Culture reads, “Even the humblest material artefact [sic] which is the product and symbol of a particular civilization, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes” (11). 19. Later in Victoria’s reign, certain British dominions and colonies (e.g. India and Canada ) used an older effigy of Victoria on stamps. 20. I recommend Humphreys’s “Dickens’s Use of Letters in Bleak House.” 21. See Letters of Lewis Carroll, ed. Cohen; Letters of Anthony Trollope, ed. Booth; and Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, ed. Ray. 22. See Barker, ed., The Brontës: A Life. Richard Redgrave illustrates the effect of receiving a mourning letter in his 1844 painting, The...