To the Letter

by Simon Garfield

  Trollope: when he wasn’t writing, he was putting up pillar boxes.

  Trollope’s own postal legacy is still contentious. His biographer Victoria Glendinning states that he was the principal cheerleader for the pillar box rather than its inventor, while Trollope claimed full credit. Trollope began as a postal desk clerk, feeling frustrated in the role. But he flourished in a new role as postal surveyor, taking on responsibility for boosting the rural postal system, connecting a vast administrative system with the most isolated outpost. He was a great supporter of Rowland Hill’s reforms, and he perceived his own role as grandly: ‘I was,’ he boasts in his autobiography, ‘a beneficent angel to the public, bringing everywhere with me an earlier, cheaper, and much more regular delivery of letters.’

  Before the pillar box was the letterbox, which may have originated in Italy in the sixteenth century. The tamburi of Florence were closed wooden boxes in which churchgoers could inform on those they believed had blasphemed or spoken against the state; one dropped a letter with a name through a slit. Postboxes in British post-receiving houses, usually built into walls or windows, existed from the beginning of the nineteenth century.

  Anthony Trollope’s version of the roadside pillar box, something he called his ‘iron stump’, also had its roots outside England. In November 1851, Trollope submitted a report after a visit to the Channel Islands: ‘There is, at present, no receiving office in St Heliers, and persons living in the distant parts of the town have to send nearly a mile to the principal office. I believe that a plan has obtained in France of fitting up letterboxes in posts fixed at the road side, and it may perhaps be thought advisable to try the operation of this system in St Heliers – postage stamps are sold in every street, and, therefore, all that is wanted is a safe receptacle for them.’

  A year later four pillar boxes were in place, including one in New Street ‘in front of Mr Fry’s, Painter and Glazier’. The first British mainland box appeared in September 1853 in Botchergate, Carlisle, and the first six boxes in central London were installed in April 1855, including one on the north side of Piccadilly, ‘Corner of Bolton Street, two yards west of Lamp Post’, and one in Fleet Street, ‘opposite the centre of the Sunday Times doorway’. The design was by the Post Office consulting engineer E.A. Cowper, who could soon proudly claim ‘I am glad to hear that not a single Letter has been stolen out of 212,000 posted’. Two years later the boxes carried iron notice plates on which were painted the times of collection. And thus the postal system came of age, and rapidly became the envy of the world. Its new efficiencies boosted more than letter-writing and the Treasury; it boosted employment too. It was now possible for entire families such as the Barkers to contemplate a lifetime’s career dedicated to the post.

  More Than Is Good for Me

  14232134 SIGMN. BARKER H.C., 30 WING, 1 COY., 9 AIR FORMATION SIGNALS, M.E.F.

  22nd–30th April 1944

  Dear Bessie,

  I think that I will now start to tell you something of myself and family from the Year Dot to the present day. I think this is necessary because I want to (it is very difficult to write – all I want to do is tell you I LOVE YOU) marry you very soon after I return to England, and I want us to do most of the ‘talking’ through the medium of our letters.

  I hope that you, too, will give me an abridged ‘something’, so that when we do, wonderfully, finally meet, we shall know more about each other than could be obtained by a contemporary or current correspondence. My ignorance of you can be judged by the fact that I don’t know if the B.I.M. stands for Ivy, Irene or Itma, I don’t know your birthday, or your birthplace. I want to know your food dislikes, if any; if and what you drink; whether you still smoke; how you housekeep or if someone else does it somehow. Please, please, please, tell me of and about yourself, so that I may breathe you in, and wallow in news of you. For by now you must have serious doubts of your ability to escape marrying me, and wondering what the Dickens you have done to deserve it.

  When I was born, my Father was 34, a postman, and getting about 25/- a week. The family was increased to six (I have two brothers and one sister), and had to move from rooms in one part of Holloway, N.7., to a four roomed house in another part. It came under a Slum Clearance scheme when I was 13, and we were rehoused in a 5 roomed house on the London County Council Estate at Tottenham, until I was 26, when we moved to our present place at Bromley, which my brother owns. I am the baby of the family. My sister is 33, my second brother, Archie is 36, my eldest, Herbert Redvers (after a Boer War General) is 38. Dad is 64, Mum, 62. My early memories are few. I remember digging big holes in our back yard and lining up for the pictures. I don’t know how much you recall of the last war? I remember the great fun of making cocoa after we had come back, seeing the R33 [a British patrol airship] which I thought was a Zeppelin; wanting to be a ‘Spethial Conthtable’ when I grew up; my Dad, a strange, awkward, red faced man, coming home from India.

  Things here (I’ll leave The Story of My Life II till later) are about the same, except that today we have gone into Khaki Drill which is much nicer than Battle Dress, and can be washed anytime one wants. I am playing chess as usual and bridge at night when possible. I’d like to creep away somewhere and do a bit of hard brooding about you, but I have to go through the motions of behaving normally, like you. Whatever I do I am conscious of the fact that you are in the same world, and it is a pretty great thought to be getting on with, rather overwhelming at times. I hope the time we are away from each other will not seem too painfully long, and that before 1999 we shall be able to TELL each other what now we can only think.

  I have enclosed a small photograph which I hope you accept more as a token than a likeness. I have had ‘better’ ones done since, but only had this one on me. You probably noticed the disappearing hair on the top of my head. Sometimes I think it is falling out quickly, and at others I persuade myself there are positive signs of growth. It is very convenient to have my present amount, but I really do hope I hold on to it.

  My autobiographical details seem to have been neglected. I suddenly dropped the idea under pressure of telling you that you are lovely. But I will potter along for a bit now. I was never christened. My mother had a lot to do at the time, it was somehow overlooked! Now she is very keen that I be ‘done’ but I am quite pleased with my status. I believe that if a child dies without being christened he must be buried in un-hallowed ground. That makes me very keen to rebel against the rubbish of that dictum.

  I went to Drayton Park (Highbury) LCC School. I was probably a very ordinary pupil but good at English. I never won a scholarship despite parental ambitions. When I had done very badly at Arithmetic once I had to stand up before a class. The headmaster said that a chap with a noble forehead like mine should have done much better. I was elected editor of a new school magazine, but somehow never got out an issue. I left too soon. I remember, at an Armistice treat when I was very young, putting a banana in my pocket to take it home to Mum. When I got home the banana was just pulp. I had the usual fights during playtime, and before and after school. I supported Cambridge, The Arsenal, and Surrey. (I got these from my eldest brother who has been a big influence on me throughout my life.) I only remember having one good hiding from my Dad, that was when I was about 11, I made a swing, tied one end to the mangle, and smashed it completely when it fell down under my weight.

  I started in the Post Office as a Boy Messenger at the M.O.D. on 8th March 1928. I enjoyed the experience. It was good to be earning money, and I spent most of my pocket money on secondhand books. I left in November 1930, when I started at the C.T.O. [Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation.] The first girl I ever went out with was a Girl Probationer, whom I took to see ‘Sunny Side Up’, one of the first talkies. I was Secretary of the Cricket Club, but my highest score was 16, and that must have been unusual or I shouldn’t remember it. I played little football. I must have been poor. I was ‘junior boy’ for nine mo
nths, and had a terrible time being dragged all over the kitchen by my seniors, ducked in the water, and generally leg-pulled with. One of my jobs then was to clear away the Controller’s tea tray. I remember still the pleasure of drinking the creamy milk he used to leave.

  I think of your breasts more than is good for me. I am sure you are not entirely disinterested in the fact that I have hairs on my chest. Then we start wondering other things. Where shall we live, do we want children; how about your age. You tell me you have £85.10 in the P.O.S.B. without knowing I am just writing you that I have £227. I think, and you think, of ‘Gifts’ at the same time because we are falling over ourselves in our desire to pay tribute to the other. Thank goodness you did not send me a cross. Really, I am scornful of such things. I have no patience with its religious intent, and I know very well that the gold-cross-laden women at home wear them as no more than lucky charms. I hope you didn’t seriously think of sending me any such thing. I must risk hurting you, my love – I hope you aren’t R.C. I’ll say no more for the present.

  I love you.

  Chris

  Chapter Ten

  A Letter Feels Like Immortality

  Let us assume that it is 1794, and you are a farm labourer in New Hampshire named Abner Sanger. What would you hear from others about life beyond the root crops? In early June you learn from someone with your interests at heart that there is a letter from your brother waiting for you in a Boston post office. The letter has been sent from northern Vermont, and may contain important news, because why else would you write in 1794? So you ask a local shopkeeper to pick it up when he next buys supplies in the city. Before this happens, your wife’s cousin spots the letter at the post office and thinks she’s doing you a good deed by picking it up and bringing it much closer to you; it is now in Keene, a town about 10 miles away. After a few days more farming, you go to Keene to collect it, but despite making enquiries at all the local stores and saloons, the letter is nowhere to be found. About ten days later, some two months after the letter was sent, your own son meets the brother of the shopkeeper you originally trusted with the letter retrieval, and he brings it back for you to read, or for someone to read it to you.*

  The story has neither a sad nor happy ending, for we don’t know what the letter said. But the postal news was as good as it gets: the letter got through, and two months may not have been considered a bad result. But its journey tells us other things, not least that the United States was not yet geared up for such specific postal adventures. No one brought the mail unless you organised a search party, and it was unlikely that anyone not involved in pressing matters of the day expected any. In the main, letters were intended for important city people who organised delivery among themselves; everyone else kept on farming.*

  The fact that something (or several things) had to change did not go unnoticed. Four years earlier, on 20 January 1790, Samuel Osgood, the postmaster general of the United States, declared the postal service ‘very defective’ in a variety of ways. The chief defect was that it was losing money; a secondary one was that it was open to abuse, and then there was the point that it wasn’t offering much of a service. And so Osgood drew up an official plan for improvement, and at the top of it was a speculative list of why things weren’t going so well. In part this read:

  1). ‘That there may be so few letters written that, under the best regulations, it would not amount to anything considerable.’ Remarkably (it may seem to us), Osgood’s financial calculations were based on the estimation that only about 100,000 people were sending letters regularly towards the end of the eighteenth century in the US; he surmised that each of these would write, on average, 30 letters a year.

  2) ‘The franking of letters may have been extended too far.’ As in Great Britain, free postage was a privilege extended to those in the administration of government, and, as in Great Britain, those in the administration of government frequently extended this privilege to their friends, and attained seats on boards of companies in exchange. One of the most notorious over-frankers was one of Osgood’s predecessors as postmaster general in the colonial era, Benjamin Franklin.

  3) ‘The rate of postage may have been too high in some instances, and too low in others.’ It cost 25 cents to send a single sheet the 400-odd miles between Albany and Pittsburgh, as much as a third of a non-farm labourer’s daily wage. If you wanted to send a letter between New York City and Alabama, you would pay 50 per cent more than the cost of sending a barrel of flour.*

  4) ‘Stage drivers and private post riders may have been the carriers of many letters which ought to have gone in the mail.’ As in England after the establishment of the Royal Mail, many private services offered unlicensed unofficial alternatives, offering cheaper rates and the promise, often unfulfilled, of a more secure delivery.

  5) ‘The Postmasters may have consulted their own interest in preference to the post.’ This was really a catch-all excuse: because so much of the postal system was inefficiently and randomly organized on a local level, it was ever unreliable and prey to personal whims. Unchecked, it was also open to embezzlement: payment received on the delivery of letters might not make it back to the office; postmasters enjoyed franking privileges too, which would be gifted for other privileges in return.

  What did Osgood propose? He suggested a ‘more energetic’ system based on better maps and surveys of the country, leading to swifter post roads; more accountable postal officers; and cheaper postage.* But the difference these plans made was modest. Until the mid 1840s, the post in the United States remained in disarray, but the disarray didn’t lead to disquiet. Americans seemed to accept the expanding size of their country as just something too vast for a viable post, and even the most literate seemed to reserve long-distance communication for special occasions.

  Appended to Osgood’s proposals was a detailed chart of the existing chief post offices and their revenues, which in many cases were pitiful. In a three-month period between October 1789 and January 1790, Philadelphia took in $1,530, of which $306 was paid to the postmaster as a salary. In New York the net revenue was $1,067. But in Springfield, Massachusetts the net revenue was $10; in Stamford, Connecticut, it was $3.05; and in Charleston, Maryland, it was $2.19. Samuel Osgood estimated that his country contained 3 million people.

  So slow progress ensued; it is possible to construct a new map of the United States by simply tracking the postal statutes. In December 1803, for example, after the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon had expanded US territory by an area now comprising 15 states, a certain Congressman Thomas attempted to reduce the mail distance between the city of Washington and New Orleans by about 500 miles. As things stood, Thomas noted, mail was transported ‘through the wilderness . . . a distance of more than fifteen hundred miles’. But by plotting a direct route, or as direct as the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia would allow, and by passing through land inhabited by ‘friendly Indians’, a new post road would not only be more secure, but would also provide regular subsistence for the first time to those charged with delivering the mail. It was resolved to establish a new route ‘through or near the ‘Tuckaubatchee settlement, to the Tombigbee settlement . . . and also from the Tombigbee settlement to Natchez’. But that was only one direct route, a journey of about 1,000 miles, and progress across the country was predictably slow.

  Those who opposed Osgood’s reforms, and the reforms of his successors in the next decades, often did so on the grounds that letter-writing was still a relatively insignificant social act. Government and other official business would find its own private channels if required, and the delivery of news (papers, pamphlets, journals – the prime content of the mail until 1850) would happily continue as before. But the expansion of post roads gradually bore fruit, and suggested that a literate public would respond to a more reliable post. On the Post Office Department’s recommendation, new roads were laid between venues not previously on the postal map, and hardly on
any map: in 1831 it was proposed to link the then tiny towns of Mobile, Alabama and Pascagoula, Mississippi; in 1833 the Ohio and Mississippi Mail Line was established as an exclusive steamboat postal route; by 1835 there were routes contracted between Jacksonville and Tallahassee, Florida, a distance of 163 miles, to run once a fortnight. And revenue increased. In 1829, net postage revenue for the previous year stood at $124,530 in New York City, a 30-fold increase from a projected annual income 40 years earlier. The same calculation in Springfield, Mass, was up from $40 to $1,407.

  But there were still many problems to overcome, not least the accepted social significance of letters within everyday life. Antebellum America was traditionally a place where letters were mainly the domain of business and trade transactions; beyond the leisured class, other more personal communications tended to be brief and important news bulletins. The delivery of private mail was designed to subsidise the delivery of newspapers, which traditionally went at a rate of one cent per package. And as in Great Britain before the Penny Black, the cost fell to the recipient. And if you could afford postage for personal letters, there was always the thought that you were spending it in vain. In 1840, when Nathaniel Hawthorne addressed his fiancée Sophia Peabody, he entrusted his message to the fates: ‘I know not whereabouts this letter will find thee,’ he wrote, ‘but I throw it upon the winds’.*