 |
|
The viral spread of snail mail: A Q&A with Catherine Golden
We reported recently that Professor of English Catherine Golden – an expert on Victorian literature and 19th-century illustration and women writers – has written a new book that examines the impact of England's launch of the Penny Post in the early 19th century. She discusses her book in her podcast "Object Lessons from Victorian Postal Culture." In the following Q&A and excerpts from Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Writing, we share more of her intriguing conclusions.
You note that England's launch of the Penny Post was as revolutionary in its day as the arrival of email or texting today. What "communications technology" did it replace or make obsolete? Was it "viral" in its spread?
Catherine Golden
"Viral" is a good way to describe how quickly the Penny Post spread. People came in droves to their local post offices on January 10, 1840, opening day of the Penny Post, to prepay and post a letter; in fact, 112,000 letters were posted on opening day. The numbers of letters and daily deliveries increased steadily and dramatically; by 1860 in London, there were twelve daily deliveries of the post, with six daily deliveries in smaller cities.
The Penny Post eliminated the class-based franking system, which gave Members of Parliament and the Queen free carriage of mail. MPs often gave "franks" as favors to friends and even servants, but before the Penny Post, postage was so high that many working-class families simply could not afford it. (Postage typically cost over a day's wage.) Franking aside, prior to the Penny Post, postage was due on delivery and paid by the recipient, not the sender as is the practice today.
Stamped mail, a new "communications technology," in essence did away with isolation for the middle and working classes--many Victorians living away from their home towns prior to 1840 felt as isolated as if they lived in Timbuktu. The Penny Post also virtually eliminated irregular means of transport, such as letters tucked into delivery wagons or postal scams with codes on the outside of letters that the receivers would inspect for a message but not accept or pay for.
Did we see a rapid global proliferation of this wonderful new technology -- the stamp? When did we see it come to the U.S.?
The first ever postage stamp called the Penny Black was an instant success in Victorian Britain in 1840. The postage stamp -- featuring the bust of Queen Victoria and dubbed the "Queen's head" -- and the schemes of prepayment and of a uniform affordable rate became a model for other nations: two Swiss Cantons, Geneva and Zurich, quickly issued stamps in 1843, making what we now call Switzerland the first area in Europe to follow Hill's plan; Brazil, again in 1843, and the United States, in 1847, adopted the new technology of stamps and designed 5- and 10-cent postage stamps, featuring, respectively, Benjamin Franklin on a red-brown stamp and George Washington on a black stamp.
What other parallels do we find in the evolution of stamped mail and electronic mail?
I devote an entire chapter of Posting It to this intriguing question about how the Penny Post stands as a forerunner of computer-mediated communication. In brief, many of our current innovations in communication now sacrosanct to mobile professionals – the laptop, smart phones, and, most importantly, access to the Internet – have extended the Victorian invention of the Penny Post by inviting in an even wider range of readers, writers, and speakers. The Penny Post established a postal network that transcended geographical boundaries. Communications became regular, distance surmountable, and the world grew smaller – it continues to grow smaller every day on our electronic frontier as we usher in more cutting-edge technologies, such as global mobile phones, teleconferencing, Wi-Fi, and social networking sites. Specifically, the term "return of post" that Victorian letter writers used to direct receivers to reply by the next possible daily delivery anticipates the "return receipt requested" option some people select to ensure an e-mail is received.
Excerpts from Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing
Anticipating the laptop: "The laptop computer, made commercially available in 1981, builds upon its nineteenth-century precursor, the Victorian writing desk...In addition to rising literacy rates, desk production soared because the Penny Post made letter writing affordable across the social classes. Moreover, the grand display of writing products at the Great Exhibition of 1851 actually increased middle-class demand for these commodities, leading to the mass production of affordable, commercially-made desks for the populace." (p. 241)
Anticipating online shopping: "The rush of curious mailings in the Victorian period following postal reform -- plant specimens and tree cuttings, slugs, leeches, samples of corn and hops, manure, wet mosses, et cetera -- undeniably has a counterpart in our age of computer-mediated communication: online shopping." (pp. 249-250)
Anticipating computer viruses: "Disturbing parallels exist between the Penny Post and cyberspace, because crime and danger inevitably accompany innovation. The unsavory and even criminal activity tied to the Internet's vast distribution of information characterizes both the Victorian Penny Post and the telegraph that succeeded it ... Computer viruses are arguably cyberspace equivalents of noxious, poisonous parcels sent via the Victorian post." (p. 251)
A Victorian legacy unfolds: "Taken together, these century-spanning parallels appear to beg the question: along with our passion for progress, have we inherited a concomitant obsession with the complications and challenges that revolutionary change inevitably brings? If we stop a moment to gaze at our high-tech world through Victorian spectacles, we can see it as the unfolding of a Victorian legacy that has shaped and continues to shape our ever-changing communications technologies today." (pp. 254-255.)
Tags: victorian, catherine golden, email, new media
