The Brontë Cabinet

by Deborah Lutz

  Prank, fan, and hate mail took on an added dimension when the addressee felt obliged to pay for it. After she published her controversial political writing, Charlotte’s friend Harriet Martineau received piles of mail consisting of “envelopes, made heavy by all manner of devices, with a slip of newspaper in the middle, containing prose paragraphs, or copies of verse, full of insults.” When she published her 1832 Illustrations of Political Economy, the postmaster explained that she had to send for her own mail because a wheelbarrow was required. 9

  A letter, with the receiver paying its postage, had better be worth the cost, so felt many a conscientious, or merely anxious, writer such as Charlotte. Letter writing had a certain art to it, made more urgent by payment upon delivery. Manuals proliferated to teach this art, most of them directed at women encouraged to keep up correspondence with their female friends, seen as a conventionally “feminine” expression of their sentimentality. Charlotte, like many letter writers of her time, worked to make her letters vital, sufficiently engaging for the reader to get her money’s worth. Writing without much to say could be grounds for anger on the addressee’s part. “My letters are scarcely worth the postage,” Charlotte excused herself to Ellen, “and therefore I have till now, delayed answering your last communication.” Charlotte also apologizes for writing too often: “you will be tired of paying the postage of my letters,” she writes to Ellen, “but necessity must plead my excuse for their frequent recurrence.” 10

  Keeping one’s letter confined to one sheet served as a politeness to the reader, since additional sheets, and even an envelope, added postage. Most personal letters of the early nineteenth century, including Charlotte’s to Ellen, consisted of one page folded and sealed so that the address could be written directly on the letter. The return address was often either not included or written on the inside, after the signature. Some correspondents, such as Ellen, cross-wrote to save on postage or on the expense of paper. The cross-writer, instead of using a second page to continue a letter, turned the first sheet horizontally, and wrote over (“crossed”) the original text at a right angle. The trick to making a letter like this legible was to carefully space the first page, so that the “crossed” writing could fit in the extra spaces between words. The practice took a very neat hand, and reading it was also something of a skill. Charlotte and their friend Mary Taylor often complained of the difficulty of reading Ellen’s cross-writing because she wasn’t always neat about it. Anne crossed letters beautifully; one she wrote to Ellen Nussey shows her clever skill. Charlotte rarely cross-wrote, and when she did, it was a chore to read. Some valued cross-writing because the difficulty in reading it made letters more private. A secret message could be “dropt in the secure shade of a crossed letter,” one nostalgic writer lamented after crossing went out of fashion. A related but rarer method used sometimes by Jane Austen when writing to her sister, Cassandra, involved filling a page, then turning the top side to the bottom and writing in between the lines. Austen probably did this when she discovered unplanned things still needing to be said after she had filled up the front and back. Or perhaps she deliberately wanted to hide some lines from all but the most dedicated reader. Such letters are so very difficult to read that one suspects some obscurantism. Another means of keeping parts of letters secret, especially when it was customary to pass letters around the family, was to write a line or two at the very top or bottom of a letter. The receiver cut this section off after reading it, then could hand the letter around safely, without the censoring being obvious. 11

  With the official mail so cumbersome and dear, ways of circumventing it mushroomed. So widespread were illicit modes of mail conveyance and contraband letter carriers in the early nineteenth century that more than half of all letters arrived at their destinations through illegal means. Crafty letter senders developed various stratagems for getting around the cost of regular mail. Smuggling a letter in a folded-up newspaper, which passed through the mail postage free at this time, was one oft-used means. Cigars, tobacco, collars, seaweed, gloves, handkerchiefs, music, needlework patterns, sermons, and stockings were all found stashed in newspapers by the post office. Writing a message on the newspaper itself, using a form of invisible ink (milk sometimes served for this purpose), was another way of avoiding delivery costs. Letters traveled in packages, a practice prevalent although against the rules, packages being, illogically, generally cheaper than letters. Charlotte would tuck little notes, on lightweight paper, among needlework presents for Ellen. 12

  One could have a friend who was traveling in the right direction carry one’s letter by hand. Charlotte often sent letters to Ellen this way, thus saving her friend the postage. She would sometimes hold a letter, hoping someone she knew could hand deliver it. “I have been waiting a long time,” Charlotte explained to Ellen, “for an opportunity of sending you a letter by private hand—but as none such occurs I have determined to write by post.” Ellen once had her brother carry a letter to Charlotte when she was teaching at Roe Head. “As I stood at the dining-room window,” Charlotte tells Ellen, “I saw your brother (George) as he whirled past, toss your little packet over the wall.” Charlotte used this romantic mode of letter conveyance for fictional purposes in Villette. As Lucy Snowe saunters in the back garden of the school one night, an ivory box falls at her feet, tossed from a window overlooking the garden. From the box spills a bunch of violets and a folded bit of pink paper. Lucy reads this billet-doux meant for another woman. 13

  One time Ellen’s scheme for avoiding postage on a letter to Charlotte misfired. On a visit to Ellen’s house, Charlotte accidently left behind her umbrella. She arranged to have it sent to an inn in Bradford. Charlotte asked her local mail carrier to call for it, but he kept forgetting. It sat there for about a month. Ellen had secreted in it a letter for Charlotte, and when it was finally retrieved, she reported to Ellen on the debacle: “Judging by the date of your letter . . . precisely one month and four days intervened between the period in which it was written and that which brought it to my hands. I received it last Monday and till that time it continued to lie snugly enclosed in the umbrella at the Bull’s Head Inn.” 14

  It was no wonder people felt free to cheat the post, since many of the wealthy posted letters without paying. The Parliament passed bills so that their members’ letters traveled postage free. This franking privilege—which meant the members had to sign the outside of their letters—was widely abused. The MPs “franked” letters for others in their family. Much worse, they often lent their signature to a wide circle of acquaintances. Franks were sometimes sold, and officials even partially paid their servants in franks. The fact that those most able to afford to send letters didn’t have to pay, leaving those least able to afford it carrying the burden of financing the entire system, stunk of corruption. In response, some localities set up their own system of charging a penny for letters sent and received within their small radius. With Charlotte at home in Haworth and Ellen at her family home in Birstall, near Leeds, they both resided within the Bradford district. Hand-stamped “Bradford Yorks Py Post,” Charlotte’s notes of the 1830s carry evidence of passing through postal hands during a small window of time and place. 15

  Ripe for reform, the post service changed radically in 1840 when it instituted a countrywide penny post. All letters weighing under half an ounce traveled anywhere in England for one penny. The sender now prepaid postage. Charlotte wrote jubilantly to Ellen in January 1840: “I intend to take full advantage of this penny postage and to write to you often . . . that is as often as I have time.” It was primarily the railroads that made this cheap rate possible. The first rail lines opened in the 1830s and expanded speedily; trains carried specially built mail cars, which replaced the horse-drawn mail coach. With the advent of the penny post, the number of letters sent nationwide exploded. Now all but the very poor could afford to correspond. 16

  All sorts of other changes in letter writing resulted, many traceable in Charlotte’s letters to Ellen. At first,
a one-penny cover, in the form of an official envelope, carried the new national prepayment. A competition for the design, won by the artist William Mulready, led to elaborately illustrated covers, which never took off. More sedate envelopes with a pink, round embossed picture of Queen Victoria’s head replaced Mulready’s covers. Charlotte occasionally used these envelopes to send her letters. Preprinted envelopes and cheap postage led to a new fashion of sending cards to celebrate Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and birthdays. Souvenir stationery was another new idea; one example sold by John Greenwood’s Haworth shop in the 1860s had an illustration of the parsonage and text identifying it as the “Home of the Brontës.” 17

  What really took off were “postage labels”—what came to be called “stamps”—with the same stylized depiction of the queen. Nicknamed the “penny black,” since the first ones were black, they shifted in color to brown then red, a transition that can be followed on Charlotte’s letters. The sender moistened the “glutinous wash” on the back of the stamp to adhere it to paper. Arguments made against the adoption of the penny black included the fear that the stamp would spread cholera through saliva. Ultimately, not only would the stamp become the most popular form of prepaying, but also a craze for stamp collecting took hold almost immediately. One lady fancied papering her entire dressing room with used stamps. She took out an advertisement in the London Times in October 1842 asking “good-natured souls” to send her their canceled stamps. Some of the stamps on Charlotte’s envelopes were cut out, presumably to add to someone’s collection, although perhaps for illicit reuse, which was possible if the black cancellation ink hadn’t been properly applied. Stamps even served as currency, easily sent through the mail and redeemable at any post office. Charlotte often used them to pay off debts: “I enclose a postage stamp for the 1/2d. you were to pay for me at the Station,” she tells Ellen. She even referred to letters synecdochically by their stamps: “let your recklessly lavished ‘Queen’s Heads’ repose for a while” was her plea to one too generous in his correspondence. 18

  Almost as exciting as stamps, envelopes (of the unofficial variety) had been used in the past only by those who didn’t pay postage, but now these “little bags,” as they were sometimes called, became standard. Charlotte began replacing the large letter sheets that she needed to carry the address and seal along with her message, with smaller ones so they would fit into delicate envelopes, many the size of business cards. Charlotte would occasionally tuck letters written by others alongside her own note to Ellen, so Ellen could find out other people’s news firsthand. Charlotte took advantage of these little bags to add a sample of wallpaper that was being put up in the parsonage, in a letter to Elizabeth Gaskell. In another letter, Charlotte requested of a friend, “When you write again put another violet into the letter.” She tucked a pair of baby socks she knit in a note and posted them to the mother of her publisher George Smith. “Any peculant Post-Office Clerk,” she scrawled in a postscript, “who shall mistake the contents of this letter for a Bank-Note will find himself in the wrong box.” For Ellen, she folded a “scrubby yard of lace” in a letter, worrying again about postal clerks: “I hope such as it is they will not pick it out of the envelope at the Bradford Post Office, where they generally take the liberty of opening letters when they feel soft as if they contained anything.” Ellen often replied in kind, putting some “pretty little cuffs” in a letter for Charlotte, which led postal clerks to open it, evidenced by the paper being burned when they melted the wax and by their sloppy attempt to hide it with a “blank seal.” 19

  Seals weren’t just for keeping out nosy or greedy postmen. Charlotte’s relish for them rivaled her fascination with paper. Seals on documents and boxes ensured that any tampering with the contents could be found out from the state of the seal. Sealing something lent it depth to the curious, as if the seal gave it a secret life. Charlotte’s love of seals dated back to her early stories, where in one the Duke of Wellington is handed a letter written in blood, with a seal that says, “Le message d’un revenant” (missive from a ghost). In another story, the Marquis of Douro gives the woman he loves a book not just wrapped in the fancy paper mentioned earlier, but also “sealed in green wax, with the motto, ‘L’amour jamais.’ ” A book with a seal reminded Charlotte of the minds of others, which were also “sealed volumes,” or “hieroglyphical scrolls, which I can not easily either unseal or decipher.” But Ellen’s mind, Charlotte told her, opened to her as they became more intimate with their first letters. They brought to light the “turnings, windings, inconsistencies and obscurities” of her nature. 20

  Some seals actually told anyone what they shut up, working as, in effect, anti-seals. When a family member died, Charlotte used black-edged mourning stationery with black seals. When she sent out announcements of her marriage, she asked Ellen to buy her white sealing wax. In the 1840s, Charlotte began sealing her envelopes to Ellen with adhesive wafers made of colored paper with preprinted phrases and mottos. These paper seals with text had their heyday during the ten years when envelopes became widely used but lacked any gumming, one of the many new goods at the Great Exhibition in 1851. Simple sheets of specially shaped paper folded around letters, these envelopes of the 1840s required seals to hold them closed, like the single letter sheet of the past. Envelopes still carried traditional sealing-wax seals (generally made of shellac and vermillion in the nineteenth century, rather than actual wax), but new types of seals met the demand of a growing mass of correspondents. Paper wafer seals came out simultaneously with the penny stamp, sharing the same technology of the “wash” that stuck to paper when dampened. Bought in packets, such as “Cooper’s original Gold and Silver Enamelled wafers, second series improved,” found in Charlotte’s desk, or in round cardboard boxes—Charlotte had a small royal-blue one—paper seals were launched in February 1840, with some picturing Queen Victoria’s royal arms joined to Prince Albert’s. Used at Windsor a week before the two were married, they made explicit the romance of seals. 21

  Letters put on a public face when posted, signaled by wafers that promoted causes, such as vegetarianism, phonography (a form of shorthand), and temperance, for instance, as on one unusually large seal: “Thousands of women / have been robbed of / their health, rights, / comfort, homes, and / even lives by intem- / perate relations. Tee- / totalism will prevent / all this; therefore wo- / men should promote it.” Political progressives, such as chartists, suffragists, and antiwar agitators, had their messages printed on wafers: “The Six Points and no mistake / Complete / Suffrage”; “Where drums beat, laws are silent.” One could buy a wafer picturing Byron, Walter Scott, Napoleon (idolized by some Britons, including the Brontës), the Duke of Wellington, or Shakespeare. The principal dance steps of the polka appeared on a series of six hand-colored wafers. Paper seals featured national monuments and historic places, like Westminster Abbey, Tintern Abbey, and an underground railway tunnel. Businesses used seals as advertisements. One of the first was for the Cheltenham and Great Western Union Railway, and the publishers who would bring out Charlotte’s novels had their own: “Forwarded by / Smith, Elder and Co. / 65 Cornhill, London.” 22

  The palpable whole of the folded, enveloped, addressed, and sealed letter being sent out into the world said something about the letter-writing self. Charlotte’s wafers to Ellen—colored blue, mustard, or pink and shaped like diamonds, squares, or rectangles—each had a printed text. Some of the wafers may have perpetuated private jokes or messages between them, and perhaps a sort of dialogue was kept up through wafers, now lost since none of Ellen’s letters survive. “Delay not,” “To You,” “All’s / Well,” and “Post Paid” related directly to the post. Sentimental mottos showed affection or love, like “Forget / me not,” “Farewell,” “Remember me,” and “Absent / not forgot.” Others had sayings in French, like the seal in Charlotte’s childhood story: “L’Esperance” (hope), “Si je puis” (if I can), “Toujours / le meme” (always the same), and “Chacun à son goût” (Everyone has hi
s taste). A few gave advice—“Be wise today”—and a couple had quasi-spiritual messages, such as “Hope is / my Anchor.” “Truth” states one, enigmatically; another trumpets the truism (which isn’t very true) that “Time / explains all”—possibly a final comment on Charlotte’s worry noted in the letter that the marriage of Ellen’s brother to a wealthy woman might not bode well for the future equality of their relationship. 23

  Motto wafers were, by their very nature, flirtatious. They said, don’t look into these private contents, yet here is a brief message for you to read—like “Absent / not forgot”—with information about the relationship represented within. They pointed to riches contained inside, sweetening the desire to open them. Charlotte’s flirting with Ellen through seals gained another layer when she altered their messages using ink, such as one that appears to have said “L’Amour”—it is difficult to make out—which Charlotte effaced with a swarm of little dots. She played at being angry because Ellen secretly put gifts for the Brontë family in Charlotte’s trunk when she was leaving Ellen’s house: a fire screen for Patrick, a jar of crabapple cheese for Anne, a collar and apples for Emily, a cap for Tabby. “You ought first to be tenderly kissed and then afterwards as tenderly whipped,” Charlotte says in the letter. 24