Blackfriars: The Post Office Magazine: A Nineteenth-Century Network of “The Happy Ignorant”

In 1855, Anthony Trollope, who would serve thirty-three years in the British postal service, addressed the fact that many believed that government offices in general and the Post Office in particular “receive their recruits” from the “idle, the weak in mind, the infirm in body, the unambitious, the jolterheads, the ne’er-do-wells, the puny, and the diseased.”¹ While this evaluation was harsh, postal employees did score lower on the civil service exam than most other civil servants. During the mid-to-late nineteenth century, postal employees also found themselves in a number of scandals. For example, between 1873 and 1888, nearly a thousand postal employees were dismissed because of “intemperate habits,” and the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889 revealed a prostitution ring composed of telegraph boys.² Probably the most damning factor working against postal employees, however, was that the British public literally saw postal employees who were inefficient. Unlike other British civil servants, postal employees had direct, daily contact with the public, and the result was the Post Office became the “public whipping boy of the Departments.”³ Apparently, familiarity can breed contempt.

In September 1885, postal servants, specifically those in the Savings Bank department, began to work against such bad press by publishing the Blackfriars Magazine, which was in print for five years.⁴ Identifying public contempt as the impetus behind the Blackfriars Magazine, however, does not take a reader far. Like any specialist professional press periodical, Blackfriars celebrated the honor, wisdom, efficiency, and all-around goodness of those who served its institution. The magazine, however, seldom ran articles reacting to public outcry against postal employees; it rather strove to create a network of readers and writers who engaged in intellectual and cultural discussions. “Networking” for the Blackfriars’s readers and writers offered multiple professional advantages: freedom of thought and expression arising from the knowledge that this network was beyond the reach of public critique or official supervision; social and mental confidence, which had been undercut by the civil service examination process and consistent public criticism; and hope for improvements in their working conditions, for this network fought the internal strife borne of the bureaucratic system in which they worked.

Paramount to Blackfriars’s creation of such an empowering network for postal servants was its exposure of sham cultural elitism. This exposure was essential, for it invited the magazine’s writers and readers to acknowledge themselves as intelligent enough to enjoy contemporary culture and politics and, even more important, intelligent enough to enjoy those pursuits in ways that fortified connections between co-workers.

Differentiating between its readers and the cultured milieu, one representative anti-elitist article in the June 1886 issue opened by terming its writer and readers—all postal employees—the “happy ignorant.”⁵ The article placed postal employees in opposition to “pedantic hyper-critic[al]” art critics who dominated Royal Academy Exhibitions.⁶ According to the writer, such critics worried themselves and “others to death about some error in perspective, some weakness in drawing . . . which no one else in the world can see.”⁷ The Blackfriars’s writer then attacked art critics who bemoaned the “decay of intelligence in the masses.”⁸ Railing against this charge of unintelligence, the writer concluded by calling for levelheaded, “unprejudiced” appreciation of art.⁹

“The Tyranny of Fashion,” which appeared in January 1886, explicitly proclaimed Blackfriars’s disdain for acquiescing to current cultural commonplaces. It included definitive pronouncements, such as, “The effect of fashionable prejudice in literature and art is the creation of spurious taste and sham admiration,” and “[Many] bow to the popular prejudice, and avow a delight in, and intense admiration for, books which they have never read, and couldn’t read if they tried; music which is to them only a confused jumble of discords, or a tiresome repetition of uninteresting phrases; and pictures which to their eyes represent the likeness of nothing in earth or air.”¹⁰ The writer, Hamilton C. Somers, even speculated that by following the “fashion,” one might be falling into the trap of the “makers” of fashion, writing, “I...