The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago

By Pearson Hill and Rowland Hill

"The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago" by Pearson Hill, Rowland Hill. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 4064066066291

Book preview

Pearson Hill, Rowland Hill

The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago

Published by Good Press, 2022

[e-mail]

EAN 4064066066291

Table of Contents

IN MEMORIAM.

Rowland Hill.

CONCLUSION.

THE BENEFITS OF PENNY POSTAGE.

POST OFFICE REFORM;

IMPORTANCE

P R A C T I C A B I L I T Y.

BY ROWLAND HILL.

LONDON

PUBLISHED BY CHARLES KNIGHT AND CO.,

PREFACE.

THE POST OFFICE OF FIFTY YEARS AGO.

Among the many beneficent measures for which the first fifty years of Her Majesty's reign will always be gratefully remembered, few, perhaps, have conferred greater blessings upon the public at large, especially upon the poorer classes, than the reforms effected during that period in our postal system—reforms which, commencing in the United Kingdom soon after Her Majesty's accession, have now been extended to every civilised country in the world.

It is just fifty years since Sir Rowland Hill, with whom the great reform originated, published (in February, 1837) his celebrated pamphlet, and in the belief that it will be interesting to many now rejoicing in Her Majesty's Jubilee to be enabled to glance for a moment at the condition in which the public found itself in postal matters at the commencement of her beneficent reign, we reprint the ​pamphlet, giving at the same time a brief description of the older state of things, so that our readers may the more readily judge of the magnitude of the change which has been effected.

In these days, when postal facilities have so enormously extended, and cheap and rapid communication by letter has become so completely a part of our everyday life, like the air we breathe or the water we drink, few persons ever trouble themselves to think how it would be possible to exist without them; and those who are not old enough to remember the former state of things, under a postal system which the authorities at St. Martin's-le-Grand of that day regarded as almost a marvel of perfection, can hardly picture to themselves the inconvenience to which the public had then to submit.

As Miss Martineau points out in her History of the Thirty Years' Peace (1815—1845), we look back now with a sort of amazed compassion to the old Crusading times, when warrior-husbands and their wives, grey-headed parents and their brave sons, parted with the knowledge that it must be months or years before they could hear even of one another's existence. We wonder how they bore the depth of silence, and we feel the same now about the families of polar voyagers, but, till the commencement of Her Majesty's reign, it did not occur to many of us how like this was the fate of the largest classes in our own country. The fact is, ​there was no full and free epistolary intercourse in the country, except for those who, like Members of Parliament, had the command of franks. There were few families in the wide middle class who did not feel the cost of postage a heavy item in their expenditure; and if the young people sent letters home only once a fortnight, the amount at the year's end was a rather serious matter. But it was the vast multitude of the lower orders who suffered like the Crusading families of old and the geographical discoverers of all time. When once their families parted off from home, it was a separation almost like that of death. The hundreds of thousands of apprentices, of shopmen, of governesses, of domestic servants, were cut off from family relations as if seas or deserts lay between them and home.[1]

In those days, the visit of the postman, so far from being welcomed, was, as a rule, dreaded. Letters were almost always sent unpaid, and the heavy postage demanded for what might sometimes turn out to be merely trade circulars was a serious tax grudgingly paid, or, amongst the poorer classes, the letter had to be refused as too expensive a