Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (review)

In Posting It, Catherine Golden offers more than a history of nineteenth-century postal reform. Golden's study does rehearse the various claims about the need for reformed postage. Along with this narrative, though, Golden provides a wealth of information about the material culture of the post and about the communications revolution that postal reform initiated. Throughout Posting It, Golden's careful readings of the many novels and paintings that reference the post and postal products emphasize the parallels between how Victorians experienced technological and communications innovations and how twenty-firstcentury consumers have experienced a wide variety of technological innovations. Golden also considers a variety of extraliterary sources, including advertisements, Valentines and postal records to support her claims. Through her investigations of letter writing itself, Golden shows that Victorian ways of thinking about relationships and communication changed dramatically in the wake of cheap postage. Likewise, by examining material artifacts of the post, from stamps and mail slots to writing desks and other curiosities, Golden shows how postal reform changed the face of Victorian homes. She also argues that the stamps, envelopes and other postal products helped to cement concepts of British identity in opposition to cultural others. Through each strand of her argument, Golden shows how attending to the postal revolution can reveal the ways that improved communication set the stage for other "revolutionary events" beginning with the repeal of the Corn Laws.

Golden divides her study of the Victorian post into two sections: "Reforms" and "Outcomes." In each section, she engages prereform examples to demonstrate changes to the culture, communication and identity of British people that are bound up in postal reform. Additionally, she tests the effects of reform by comparing the reality of the reformed post to the promises made by reformers in the years leading up to the 1840 legislation. The wide variety of source material included in Posting It allows Golden to argue that postal reform provides a space where contemporary scholars can "gain insight into nineteenth-century society and Victorian notions of nation, gender, social class and status, aesthetics, identity, privacy, public space and authority—all key concepts in our critical discourse today" (7).

In her first "Reform" chapter, Golden considers the reasons "Why the Victorians Needed a Revolution in Letter Writing." She shows the ways that reformers linked expensive postage to hardship and broken families. Reformers, including Roland Hill, the "face" of the Victorian post office, made postal reform an emotional issue. Golden demonstrates that in doing so reformers linked cheap postage to an ideal of the happy family and to a promise of moral improvement throughout Victorian society. Golden also shows the frustration of antireform voices, including the Quarterly Review's John Wilson Croker, and at the ways sentiment was used to cloud what they saw as a political and economic issue. These antireform activists complained that the tales deployed by reformers were sentimental and overstated at best and, at worst, were outright fabrications. In presenting these two sides, Golden also examines the stories themselves, analyzing the common elements in emotional pleas and their limited range, most of which seem to have been apocryphal. Still, Golden demonstrates the real need for reform in a society where a laborer could pay more than a day's wages to receive a letter.

Golden's second "Reform" chapter examines the postal products that came to represent the reform. These included Mulready envelopes, whose decorative depictions of Britain, its colonies and the post itself drew extensive attention by caricaturists. Although the Mulreadies were quickly abandoned, as Golden shows over the course of the century penny and two-penny stamps featuring the head of a very young Queen Victoria came to represent a link between a hopeful young reign and the new postal reform that followed closely on its heels. Even as Victoria aged, Golden claims, the stamps continued to remind Victorians of a time when both empire and post seemed to promise a future of unblemished benefit for...