In Which the Author Cobbles Together Tantalizing Snippets and Calls It a Blog Post

I have a cold. Not miserable. Yet. But I looked at what I had considered blogging about today and decided it was just too much to bear. Party for pity? Yes, please. One only. So, instead, I offer you some enticing tidbits sure to warm any fan of Regency-set fiction.

Author Regina Jeffers has an interesting post on her blog about letters during the Regency period, including information on franking (basically, using something to indicate you didn’t have to pay postage) and seals. 

Author Victoria Hinshaw has a fabulous post about Osterley Park on the Number One London blog. Osterley Park is the basis for Carrolton Park in Never Envy an Earl. The blog has awesome pictures!

And author Elaine Bach, on Caroline Warfield’s wonderful blog, shares the horrifying details about Regency-era medicine. 

I’m taking notes on that one. Book 3 of the Grace-by-the-Sea series features a hero who is the new spa physician. I found a great medical manual dating from the late 1700s, on Google Books. I can tell you, reading it is not for the faint of heart.

Makes a cold seem positively invigorating!

Today, My Heart Belongs to . . . the Letter Carrier

I hope you had a lovely Valentine’s Day yesterday! It was a day eagerly awaited by many a young nineteenth century lass and lad in England. Thousands of Valentine letters were exchanged in London alone. In fact, the 1835 Post-Master General’s report cites an additional 50,000 or 60,000 pieces of mail through the London Twopenny Post around Valentine’s Day. The hundred or so letter carriers in London had to be given additional money for refreshments just to see them through their arduous work. In a bigger city, they might make deliveries as many as six times a day!

However, even with their help, figuring out how to get your Valentine from your fingers to your true love wasn’t for the faint of heart. You could hand it to the postman, if you caught him on one of his rounds, or you could take it to the Post Office near you, which could be at a shop or an inn if you were in a smaller town or village. Later in the century, post boxes appeared to collect letters in certain areas. Some villages didn’t even have post offices or boxes, requiring you to walk miles to post a letter or to take the chance of paying a private firm to deliver your message for you. Many such firms went bankrupt before letters were even delivered.

Then too, each sheet of paper cost money to send, to be paid by the person who received it. While England was at war with France, postage costs kept increasing. Postage was also higher the farther the letter had to travel. As you can imagine, the cost put a burden on the average working man or lady, not to mention the underemployed teen.

So, letter writers got creative. Instead of using more than one sheet, they wrote on both sides of the one, vertically, horizontally, and then kitty corner! Such cross writing was notoriously difficult to read, particularly squinting over candlelight. Then too, some friends or family who lived far apart arranged a code. If a letter arrived from the friend with your name misspelled or perhaps the address lettered wrong, why you knew that the friend was well and you could refuse to pay for the letter. There were also tales of people writing with milk along the margins of newspapers, which were free to mail, so that a friend could read the note over the heat of a flame.

Letters that were refused ended up in the Dead Letter Office. I can imagine it looking something like the Library of Congress in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, although this is what one looked like in America in the early twentieth century. (Tires? Really?) Post Office employees often had to open the mail to determine how else it might find it rightful home. But in the early nineteenth century in England, Post Office employees were allowed to open and read your mail under other circumstances too, such as if you were suspected of being a traitor to England (“Dear Napoleon—I love you!”), evading Customs (“Dear Aunt Charlotte, that case of Brussels lace is safely stored in the cave under Peasbury Abbey.”, or involved in a robbery (“Dear Susan, I am delighted to relate that I was able to make away with that diamond ring you always wanted.”). If you were in jail for bankruptcy, the Post Office even sent all your mail to the solicitor in charge of prosecuting the case!

I’m just thankful for mail carriers today. They deliver author copies, fan mail, royalty statements, and all manner of things designed to make a writer’s heart go pitter-patter, even when it isn’t Valentine’s Day.

Txt, 19th c stl: Pt 2

So you’ve written (and possibly cross-written!) your letter. How did it get to its recipient?

Well, it very much depended on when and where you were.

If you were sending, say, a note of invitation to a friend who lived in the same town, the simplest way to get it to her would be to have a servant or family member deliver it. Footmen often served as messengers (and I’m sure appreciated a chance to step out of the house!)

If however, you didn’t have servants to deliver notes, what did you do? If you were in London, you were in luck: a postal system for the city came into being during the late seventeenth century, and through 1801 it cost a penny to send a letter (and with four to eight pick-ups and deliveries a day, it was speedy as well). Mail coaches started traveling scheduled routes in 1794, but by 1805 the price of delivery in London had risen to 2 pennies, and by 1812 a fee system based on distance was in place: fourpence for delivery within fifteen miles, rising to 17 pence for 700 miles. Charges doubled for more than one sheet of paper, which was why cross-writing letters was such a popular practice. And lastly, it was the recipient of the letter who paid the postage upon delivery, not the sender—so it was very important to consider to whom you were writing, and whether they could afford to hear from you!

Now, if you were lucky and had a good friend or family member who was a Member of Parliament or a peer, you could get him to “frank” your letter—sign his name and write his address on the outside of the letter—and it would be delivered free of charge. We still see this today in the US in items mailed by congressmen.

In 1837, Sir Rowland Hill (not to be confused with the Waterloo general Lord Rowland Hill) sponsored a parliamentary bill to reform the postal system: his recommendations included the use of envelopes and pre-payment of postage. An adhesive stamp affixed to letters was eventually agreed upon as the best method of proof that postage had been paid, and in May 1840 the “Penny Black”, the first postage stamp, was introduced. It featured the young Queen Victoria's profile, as you can see here.

The establishment of the penny post had a direct bearing on the establishment of another custom: Christmas cards. In 1843 Sir Henry Cole (who later became the first director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is one of my favorite places in London) decided he didn’t have time to write all the Christmas greeting letters that it was customary to exchange and hired artist and printer John Horseley to design an illustrated card that he could send instead. A thousand or so copies were printed, and what Sir Henry didn’t use, Horseley sold for a shilling each. This was a tad pricey, but the idea caught on the following year when a rival printer, W.C.T. Dobson, printed and sold his own Christmas cards, which sold reasonably well thanks to the fact that it cost only a penny to mail them. By 1862, large scale production of Christmas cards was underway.


And on a completely unrelated note, this is our 250th post!


Next Tuesday: The Young Bluestockings Book Club will discuss Mairelon the Magician by Patricia C. Wrede. See you there!