To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  ‘It is my daily errand. I always fetch the letters when I am here. It saves trouble, and is a something to get me out. A walk before breakfast does me good.’

  ‘Not a walk in the rain, I should imagine.’

  ‘No, but it did not absolutely rain when I set out.’

  Mr. John Knightley smiled, and replied,

  ‘That is to say, you chose to have your walk, for you were not six yards from your own door when I had the pleasure of meeting you; and Henry and John had seen more drops than they could count long before. The post-office has a great charm at one period of our lives. When you have lived to my age, you will begin to think letters are never worth going through the rain for.’

  There was a little blush, and then this answer,

  ‘I must not hope to be ever situated as you are, in the midst of every dearest connexion, and therefore I cannot expect that simply growing older should make me indifferent about letters.’

  ‘Indifferent! Oh! no – I never conceived you could become indifferent. Letters are no matter of indifference; they are generally a very positive curse.’

  ‘You are speaking of letters of business; mine are letters of friendship.’

  ‘I have often thought them the worst of the two,’ replied he coolly. ‘Business, you know, may bring money, but friendship hardly ever does.’

  A short time later, the subject of letters crops up again, and this time Jane defends the entire institution:

  ‘The post-office is a wonderful establishment!’ said she. – ‘The regularity and despatch of it! If one thinks of all that it has to do, and all that it does so well, it is really astonishing!’

  ‘It is certainly very well regulated.’

  ‘So seldom that any negligence or blunder appears! So seldom that a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the kingdom, is even carried wrong – and not one in a million, I suppose, actually lost! And when one considers the variety of hands, and of bad hands too, that are to be deciphered, it increases the wonder.’

  Inevitably, it is letters (and the knowledge contained within them) that will expose the relationship between Churchill and Fairfax, and it is a long, self-justifying letter printed in full from Churchill that helps bring the novel to a close. By choosing to have letters do so much work for her throughout her books, but rejecting her initial inclination to use letters and nothing else, Austen goes a long way in bridging the gap between old and new forms of fiction, and between the eighteenth century and the nineteenth.

  ‘It ends really suddenly,’ Professor Mullan says of the epistolary novel. ‘The high point is the 1780s; 30 years on from Richardson it’s still very strong. But in the first decade of the nineteenth century it just goes off a cliff. What are the answers? There’s a literary critical answer, which is that writers begin to discover ways of doing interior life – a style that doesn’t require this extraordinary artificial form. Austen is a key to that, because she sort of discovers this free-indirect technique which she bequeaths to many of the great nineteenth century writers, although very few of them acknowledge their debt. And people weren’t all going “Jane Austen is a goddess and she’s cracked it”, so it’s hard to make the case for her immediate and dramatic influence.’

  So there must have been other reasons, and one of them was simple. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, it became clear to novelists that letters were just too artificial; it came to be seen as an eighteenth-century thing. ‘It belonged to a past age,’ Mullan says, ‘and the whole point of the novel for most writers was that it sell, that it be fashionable, that it be novel. It became clear to everybody that if you wanted to write a novel of today, you couldn’t do this letters thing anymore.’*

  Leaving Professor Mullan’s office as a student enters for a tutorial, I remember one other reason for the dichotomy between the letters in her fiction and in her life: censorship. Some of this she performed herself: as in her novels, Austen knew that letters are often read aloud and passed around, and when Austen learnt that her letters to Cassandra were also being read by her niece Fanny Knight she noted beautifully: ‘I am gratified by her having pleasure in what I write – but I wish the knowledge of my being exposed to her discerning Criticism may not hurt my stile, by inducing too great a solicitude. I begin already to weigh my words and sentences more than I did, and am looking about for a sentiment, an illustration, or a metaphor in every corner of the room. Could my Ideas flow as fast as the rain in the store-closet it would be charming.’

  But there is a still harsher censorship – the rash and destructive judgements of others that have purposely obscured our view of Austen for all time. Not long after her death, Cassandra burned a large number of her letters and cut others (literally cut: some of her existing correspondence has been scissored and pasted). This was partly to protect her sister’s reputation – her vituperative personal outbursts would not have endeared her either to her living acquaintances or future fans; and it was partly to protect herself, as Cassandra had no doubt written about one of the darkest times in her life following the death of her fiancé, and Austen had no doubt replied with heartfelt consolation. We are left with something slightly more than Austen Lite, but we can only guess at how significant this loss has been.

  What we do know is that after Cassandra had a good fillet, Jane Austen’s more distant relatives also had a go themselves. Her nephew, James Edward Austen-Leigh, amended further letters in his Memoir of his aunt in 1869, while her great-nephew Lord Brabourne continued the tradition in the first collection of her letters 15 years later. Brabourne keenly protected her prim and saintly reputation, omitting anything remotely caustic and anything relating to sex or the female body. Austen’s observation of ‘naked cherubs’ on a mantelpiece was deemed unsuitable and disappeared, while a description of a sleepless night caused by having ‘too much cloathes over my stomach’ was changed to ‘over me’. A solid, restored (but still sorely incomplete) edition of her letters only appeared in the 1950s, by which time it was apparent that Austen had written a rather different version of herself than the one we have been allowed to see. ‘If I am a wild beast, I cannot help it,’ she wrote to Cassandra in 1813, towards the end of her life. ‘It is not my fault.’

  When Jane Austen died in 1817 it cost 4d to send a light letter from one end of Hampshire to another. The same letter would cost 8d from London to Brighton, 10d to Nottingham and at least 1s to Scotland. The prices had been raised frequently to pay for the Napoleonic wars, and varied according to whether they were carried by mail coach or, for longer and more costly distances, coastal steamer.

  Despite the high charges, it wasn’t only Jane Fairfax who thought the mail a miraculous thing. Celebrated writers gave a considerable amount of space in their letters on the subject of letters themselves – not least the early nineteenth-century debate over whether it was disrespectful to the Church to write on a Sunday (consensus: personal letters acceptable, business ones less so). And they were particularly interested in the vagaries of the postal service, and what likelihood their letters had of reaching their destination. In 1835, Thomas Carlyle sent a transatlantic letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson in which he marvelled at the divine madness of the system. A letter from Emerson had taken two months to reach him, but still Carlyle felt grateful: ‘As the Atlantic is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions; and come at last, in the hand of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of Noah’s Dove?’*

  In another letter to Emerson four months later, Carlyle bemoans the state of England; there is poverty everywhere, there is the threat of cholera, and worst of all, it seems, is all this newfangled technological progress, a comment we may hear echoes of today. ‘What with railways, steamships, printing-presses, it has surely
become a most monstrous “tissue” this life of ours.’ Fortunately for him, it was still possible to defeat the technology of the postal service. Writing to his mother in 1836, he is delighted that the parliamentary summer recess is over, because, now that ‘certain “honourable members” having got back to town again’, he may once more obtain free postage by abusing their free franking privileges (he mentions one particularly obliging member, a man called Mill). And his other cheat, more ingenious, was a personal coding system applied to the mailing of newspapers, which travelled at a much cheaper rate: ‘I have sent the Examiner forward these two last weeks, to Jenny at Manchester to be sent on to you . . . I know not whether either Rob or Jenny care about reading Newspapers; but doubtless they will always like to see the two strokes on the back. When I send them two strokes, you are to take their two strokes for a sign that all is well here too.’

  The code of strokes was familiar not only to men and women of letters; in the first part of the nineteenth century the cost of postage ensured that it was a familiar dodge for a great many. As postage was paid by the recipient, the charge could as easily be refused as accepted. But often a letter would be refused and still achieve its sender’s aim, for the marks on an envelope – perhaps strokes, symbols or a brief letter code – would indicate everything from a simple yes/no reply to a question or a furtive declaration of love.*

  For a century or so before 1840 the Post Office managed all but the very last step of the delivery with moderate efficiency. But the payment by recipient was a slow enough process even if the recipient was available when the postman called; it was like paying a utility bill every day. As disquiet about this inconvenience grew, the outgoing secretary of the Post Office, Sir Francis Freeling, began to feel concerned. He complained that throughout his career he had run the most effective service possible, and carried out his duties to the letter. ‘Where else in the world does the merchant or manufacturer have the materials of his trade carried for him gratuitously or at so low a rate as to leave no margin of profit?’*

  One of his main parliamentary opponents was Robert Wallace, MP for Greenock, whose admonishing speeches came to the attention of a civil servant named Rowland Hill. Hill conducted his own research into the postal system, and published a pamphlet noting not only the abnormalities and corruptions, but also that revenue from postage had been gradually falling in recent years despite the huge potential profits to be made. His suggested improvements transformed postal networks throughout the world.

  Hill proposed a uniform postal charge of one penny per half-ounce for any letter sent within the British Isles, and reasoned that the cost should be paid in advance. To this end he drew on a previous idea of Charles Knight for a prepaid letter envelope, but it was his second idea that guaranteed his place in history: ‘A bit of paper just large enough to bear the stamp, and covered at the back with a glutinous wash which the user might, by applying a little moisture, attach to the back of the letter.’ How would one prove that postage had been paid? With the application of an adhesive stamp, initially referred to as a ‘label’. And Hill envisaged another breakthrough: ‘Probably it would soon be unnecessary even to await the opening of the door, as every house might be provided with a letterbox into which the Letter Carrier would drop the letters, and having knocked, he would pass on as fast as he could walk.’

  The principal opposition to these novelties came from the postmaster general, Lord Lichfield, who complained that ‘of all the wild and visionary schemes which I have ever heard or read of, it is the most extravagant!’ But his was a lonely voice: the House of Commons voted in favour of penny postage in July 1839, and Hill was offered a new job at the Treasury.

  But how was the new stamp to look? The basics we now take for granted – the size, the monarch’s head, the licking – were all up for discussion. Uniform penny postage was introduced four months before the new adhesive labels were ready, with hand stamps from about three hundred towns being used in their place. There was an immediate increase in the amount of post through the system, despite some bafflement over the need to prepay. But there was an immediate incentive to welcome the new system: prepaid letters would cost one penny, whereas those paid on delivery would cost two.

  The Treasury announced a competition to find a design for the new stamp. A notice in The Times requested that ‘artists, men of science, and the public in general, may have an opportunity of offering any suggestions or proposals as to the manner in which the stamp may best be brought into use’. There were awards of £100 and £200 offered to those who could not only design something attractive, but could also solve the tricky issues of forgery and security. But none of the 2,600 entries satisfied. A Treasury committee praised the public’s ingenuity, but finally the stamp, with Queen Victoria’s head in profile, was designed and produced by a group of professional men already known to Hill and the inland revenue for their role in the printing of bank notes and other official documents.

  Post offices received their first two Penny Blacks at the end of April 1840, with clear instructions on how they should be issued and cancelled (the stamps had to be cut from large sheets – perforations were not introduced until 1854). Postmasters also received an example of prepaid postal stationery, an envelope and letter sheet design by William Mulready containing images of elephants, lions, Britannia and people engrossed in their mail deliveries, an illustration whose parodies by London stationers and satirical magazines hastened its withdrawal.

  The stamps – the Penny Black and the Two Pence Blue – went on sale on Friday 1 May 1840, along with the prepaid envelopes, and a revolution got under way. ‘Great bustle at the Stamp Office,’ Rowland Hill recorded in his diary that evening. On the following day he noted, ‘£2,500 worth of stamps sold yesterday’. By 6 May, the day the stamps were first intended for use, 22,993 sheets of 240 stamps each had been issued to 253 post offices, and on 22 May, Hill recorded, ‘The demand for the labels is enormous, the printers supply more than half a million per day, and even this is not enough.’

  The advance was as significant as the birth of inter-city railways a decade before. And like the railways, the postal reforms were a symbol of the popular will. In 1839, one year before reform, the number of letters carried in the UK was 75,907,572. In 1840 the number more than doubled to 168,768,344. Ten years later the number was 347,069,071.

  Hill was soon convincing sceptical householders to have rectangular panels cut into their doors, and in London he introduced the concept of postal districts to ease sorting and delivery. By the time of his retirement in 1864, half the world had adopted his reforms; no single person had contributed more to the global communication of ideas.

  And beyond this, Hill may be credited with inventing an entirely new hobby, a perfect solitary companion to letter-writing. Men and women began collecting stamps as soon as stamps began, a hobby considered eccentric from the start. Sheets of Penny Blacks and Two Pence Blues contained 240 stamps, and to limit forgeries and enable the tracing of portions of a sheet, each stamp had a letter in the two bottom corners. The rows running down the sheet had the same letter in the left corner, while the right corner progressed alphabetically. The first row went AA, AB, AC and so on, and thirteen rows down it went MA, MB, MC . . . There were twenty horizontal rows of twelve, and some people who got a lot of post thought it would be fun to collect the set (while everyone else thought they ought to get out more).

  One of the first mentions of the new hobby appeared in a German magazine in 1845, which noted, much in the manner of comedian Bob Newhart describing Raleigh’s attempt to promote tobacco, how the English Post Office sold ‘small square pieces of paper bearing the head of the Queen, and these are stuck on the letter to be franked’. The writer observed that the queen’s head looked very pretty, and that the English ‘reveal their strange character by collecting these stamps’.

  Rowland Hill commemorated – where else? – on stamps marking universal penny postage.<
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  The first collector we are aware of was a woman known as ‘E.D.’, who advertised in The Times in 1841: ‘A young lady, being desirous of covering her dressing room with cancelled postage stamps, has been so far encouraged in her wish by private friends as to have succeeded in collecting sixteen thousand. These, however, being insufficient, she will be greatly obliged, if any good-natured person who may have these otherwise useless little articles at their disposal, would assist her in her whimsical project.’ There were two addresses to which to send the stamps, one in Leadenhall Street in the City, one in Hackney. There are no further records of E.D.’s collection, nor are there pictures of her room, which must have been a shade on the dark side, but these days might have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize. By the following year she had competition. Punch noted that ‘a new mania has bitten the industriously idle ladies of England . . . They betray more anxiety to treasure up the Queen’s heads than Harry the Eighth did to get rid of them.’

  There was one more essential accoutrement to postal pleasure in this period – the pillar box. Its stated inventor, a Post Office employee for 33 years, would soon be famous for other things, the overproduction of dull novels. Anthony Trollope, whom Henry James called ‘the dullest Briton of them all’ (after sharing a transatlantic steamer with him), loved nothing more than the smooth and efficient productivity of modern life, and when he gave up his job at the Post Office in 1867 he continued his fascination with the post in his fiction. His detractors found this entirely apt, seeing him, in the words of historian Kate Thomas, as ‘more of a postman than he is a novelist’.

  Trollope simply wrote too much. In his autobiography he wrote of how inspiration was for aesthetes and the lazy; he preferred something he called ‘mechanical genius’, which meant 18-hour days at a writing desk. To achieve this he had carpenters build special desks in his ship cabins and a special lap apparatus to enable him to write on trains. He was as infatuated as Austen with the fictional potency of the letter, and not by chance did he consider Pride and Prejudice the best novel ever written in English. The fate of the characters in one of his own novels, John Caldigate (1879), a tale of bigamy and fraud, turned principally on the forensic detection work conducted on an envelope and stamp. The novel also featured that rarest of things: a postal worker as hero.