In 1835, Great Britain was the world leader in commerce. Its empire was truly impressive, with colonies spanning the globe, including Canada, India, and Australia. At its zenith, Great Britain controlled nearly 25 percent of the earth’s land surface. Communication by mail was imperative to the administration of its empire.
The British Post Office was run as a government agency, as were the post offices of other nations, with the purpose of producing revenue for the government. At the turn of the nineteenth century, partly because of the high cost of the Napoleonic wars, postage rates were raised rapidly. (A government subsidizing its post office is a distinctly modern phenomenon; any nineteenth-century postmaster general who could not produce a profit for his government soon found himself unemployed.)
A Different System
Indeed, postage rates were very high in the early nineteenth century. For example, it cost more than a day’s pay for an average worker to send a letter from London to Scotland, some 300 miles. Postage on a letter sent from London to America or London to Australia could cost a family a week’s wages. Letters from home to travelers or emigrants were rare, and were often written in tiny handwriting, barely legible, so as to cram in as much information as possible for the lowest cost. The cost of postage was determined by various factors, including the distance the letter was to travel, the number of sheets in the letter, and the route by which the letter was being sent. One route was often far cheaper than another, leaving the sender to weigh the benefits of speed versus increased cost. In any case, by modern standards, service was slow, risky, and exorbitant in price.
Letter senders were not required to prepay postage because many letters never reached their destination. Rather, the addressee could decide whether he wished to accept a letter when he received it. If, after examination of the outside, he chose to accept it, he paid the postman. Fraud was common. For example, there was a clever scheme that was used to announce births. The proud parents would address a letter to a relative, using the last name of that relative together with the first name of their newborn. As a result, the relatives would not only know that the child had been born and was healthy (a major concern in the early nineteenth century), but they would also learn the child’s name and sex. As the most salient information was already transmitted via the address, the letter could be refused. Address codes of this type were common; although no exact documentation of postal fraud of this type is available, it was well known by and a serious concern to the postal officials at the time.
