Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing

Introduction

Introduction If any person had told the Parliament which met in perplexity and terror after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, . . . that the post-office would bring more into the exchequer than the excise and customs had brought in together under Charles the Second, that stage-coaches would run from London to York in twenty-four hours, that men would be in the habit of sailing without wind, and would be beginning to ride without horses, our ancestors would have given as much credit to the prediction as they gave to Gulliver’s Travels. Yet the prediction would have been true . . . —Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Southey’s Colloquies,” January 1830 In August 2005, a Sunderland UK legal firm, Gordon Brown Associates, received a surprise in the post: a letter the firm had sent in 1997 by recorded delivery to a business partner of a deceased client appeared in a routine mail delivery. Fortunately, the letter, which Royal Mail had simply marked “not collected,” did not contain pressing information. Someone living in Jane Austen ’s day expected it to take at least eight hours to travel a distance of eighty miles by stage coach. Gordon Brown Associates was “stunned,” however, that it took eight years for a letter meant to travel only a distance of two miles to be returned to sender. “Curiouser and curiouser,” how did this letter spend eight years in a postal twilight zone, a realm akin to Lewis Carroll’s topsy-turvy wonderland where letters meant to be delivered never are? Where exactly was this letter lying since 1997? Was it wedged behind a piece of processing machinery in a Sunderland post office? Perhaps the letter was stuck to the bottom of a carrier bag or caught in a mail chute? Sometimes letters miraculously appear after long absences because a Good Samaritan or prankster simply finds a lost letter and puts it in the mail. “‘To add insult to injury to the eight-year delay, we were charged £1 for the return,’” noted a partner in this firm.1 Tales of undelivered or long-lost letters sent by post—a form of communication that today’s media enthusiasts disparagingly call “snail mail”—make great news stories. A quick search on the Internet reveals many variations on 2 · Posting It the story of a letter never reaching its destination, even though Royal Mail claims that the amount of missing mail has dropped dramatically. According to a 2004 statistic, 99.92 percent of mail arrives safely.2 The Gordon Brown anecdote is humorous; not so, the situation confronting Royal Mail. Post office closures started around 1970, but the number has climbed. The government closed over 4,000 post offices between 1999 and 2007, and the future looks grave. In 2007, the government passed a proposal to close, by 2009, an additional 2,500 post offices or one-fifth of those remaining in the United Kingdom , the birthplace of Rowland Hill, the great innovator of postal reform and creator of the first postage stamp.3 In the Victorian age, large numbers of people went to their local post offices not only to send letters but to dispatch books, newspapers, and printed paper of all kinds; to deposit money in the Post Office Savings Bank (from 1861); to purchase money orders and later postal orders as a cheap means of transmitting money; to buy annuities; and, following the Post Office’s purchase of private telegraph companies and an act of Parliament which gave the Post Office control of the telegraph service in 1870, to send telegrams and, from 1882, to take advantage of the telephone facilities becoming available in major towns and cities.4 Local post offices were also public spaces, “special places to see and be seen” and “remarkable places where letters, correspondents, and expectant users of the network all came into contact.”5 In 1914, one third of all British civil servants worked for some branch of the Post Office. Moreover, as C. R. Perry notes in the opening chapter of The Victorian Post Office: The Growth of a Bureaucracy, “until the consolidation of the railway companies in 1922 the Post Office, handling a dauntingly wide variety of responsibilities from the management of long distance telephone communication to the sale of licenses for armorial bearings, comprised the largest business operation, public or private, in Great Britain” (3). From the Victorian era until the eve of World War I, the...