THE GENERAL POST-OFFICE.
The General Post-Office, the great heart of the English postal system, is a fine and, now that so many district offices are opened in London, very convenient building. On the ground-floor the different offices attached to the Circulation and Mail departments are located. Upstairs we find the Secretary's department, that of the Receiver and Accountant-General, and other branches of the Circulation Office. Approaching the large hall of the General Post-Office, through one of the three-columned porticoes, we post our letter, and as it is now nearly six o'clock P.M. we stand aside, for a few minutes only, to witness one of the most stirring scenes in the metropolis. Throughout the day, one side of the hall presents a busy enough scene, and its boxes, open for the receipt of correspondence for all parts of the world, are constantly beset with people. Not only do these huge slits still gape for letters, but the large windows, closed through the day, are thrown wide open as a quarter to six chimes from the neighbouring clocks. It is then that an impetuous crowd enters the hall, and letters and newspapers begin to fall in quite a literary hail-storm. The newspaper window, ever yawning for more, is presently surrounded and besieged by an array of boys of all ages and costumes, together with children of a larger growth, who are all alike pushing, heaving, and surging in one great mass. The window, with tremendous gape, is assaulted with showers of papers which fly thicker and faster than the driven snow. Now it is that small boys of eleven and twelve years of age, panting, Sinbad-like, under the weight of huge bundles of newspapers, manage somehow to dart about and make rapid sorties into other ranks of boys, utterly disregarding the cries of the official policemen, who vainly endeavour to reduce the tumult into something like post-office order. If the lads cannot quietly and easily disembogue, they will whiz their missiles of intelligence over other people's heads, now and then sweeping off hats and caps with the force of shot. The gathering every moment increases in number and intensifies in purpose; arms, legs, sacks, baskets, heads, bundles, and woollen comforters—for whoever saw a veritable newspaper-boy without that appendage?—seem to be getting into a state of confusion and disagreeable communism, and "yet the cry is still they come." Heaps of papers of widely-opposed political views are thrown in together; no longer placed carefully in the openings, they are now sent in in sackfuls and basketfuls, while over the heads of the surging crowd were flying back the empty sacks, thrown out of the office by the porters inside. Semi-official legends, with a very strong smack of probability about them, tell of sundry boys being thrown in, seized, emptied, and thrown out again void. As six o'clock approaches still nearer and nearer, the turmoil increases more perceptibly, for the intelligent British public is fully alive to the awful truth that the Post-Office officials never allow a minute of grace, and that "Newspaper Fair" must be over when the last stroke of six is heard. One, in rush files of laggard boys who have purposely loitered, in the hope of a little pleasurable excitement; two, and grown men hurry in with their last sacks; three, the struggle resembles nothing so much as a pantomimic mêlée; four, a Babel of tongues vociferating desperately; five, final and furious showers of papers, sacks, and bags; and six, when all the windows fall like so many swords of Damocles, and the slits close with such a sudden and simultaneous snap, that we naturally suppose it to be a part of the Post-Office operations that attempts should be made to guillotine a score of hands; and then all is over so far as the outsiders are concerned.
Among the letter-boxes, scenes somewhat similar have been enacted. Letters of every shape and colour, and of all weights have unceasingly poured in; tidings of life and death, hope and despair, success and failure, triumph and defeat, joy and sorrow; letters from friends and notes from lawyers, appeals from children and stern advice from parents, offers from anxious-hearted young gentlemen, and "first yesses" or refusals from young maidens; letters containing that snug appointment so long promised you, and "little bills" with requests for immediate payment, "together with six-and-eightpence;" cream-coloured missives telling of happy consummations, and black-edged envelopes telling of death and the grave; sober-looking advice notes, doubtless telling when "our Mr. Puffwell" would do himself the honour of calling on you, and elegant-looking billets in which business is never mentioned, all jostled each other for a short time; but the stream of gladness and of woe was stopped, at least for one night, when the last stroke of six was heard. The Post-Office, like a huge monster, to which one writer has likened it, has swallowed an enormous meal, and gorged to the full, it must now commence the process of digestion. While laggard boys, to whom cartoons by one "William Hogarth" should be shown, are muttering "too late," and retiring discomfited, we, having obtained the requisite "open sesame," will make our way to the interior of the building. Threading our course through several passages, we soon find ourselves among enormous apartments well lit up, where hundreds of human beings are moving about, lifting, shuffling, stamping, and sorting huge piles of letters, and still more enormous piles of newspapers, in what seems at first sight hopeless confusion, but in what is really the most admirable order. In the newspaper-room, men have been engaged not only in emptying the sacks flung in by strong-armed men and weak-legged boys, but also in raking up the single papers into large baskets, and conveying them up and down "hoists," into various divisions of the building. Some estimate of the value of these mechanical appliances, moved of course by steam power, may be formed from the fact that hundreds of tons of paper pass up and down these lifts every week. As many of the newspapers escape from their covers in the excitement of posting, each night two or three officers are busily engaged during the whole time of despatch, in endeavouring to restore wrappers to newspapers found without any address. Great as is the care exercised in this respect, it will occasionally happen that wrong newspapers will find their way into loose wrappers not belonging to them, and under the circumstances it would be by no means a matter of wonder if—as has been more than once pointed out—Mr. Bright should, instead of his Morning Star, receive a copy of the Saturday Review, or an evangelical curate the Guardian or Punch, in place of his Record paper.
In the letter-room the officers are no less busily engaged: a number of them are constantly at work during the hours of the despatch, in the operation of placing each letter with the address and postage label uppermost, so as to facilitate the process of stamping. In the General Post-Office the stamping is partly effected by machinery and partly by hand, and consists simply in imprinting upon each letter the date, hour, and place of posting, while at the same time the Queen's head with which the letter is ornamented and franked gets disfigured.[154] It will easily be imagined that a letter containing a box of pills stands a very good chance of being damaged under this manipulation, as a good stamper will strike about fifty letters in a minute. Unpaid letters are kept apart, as they require stamping in a different coloured ink and with the double postage. Such letters create much extra labour, and are a source of incessant trouble to the Department, inasmuch as from the time of their posting in London to their delivery at the Land's End or John O'Groat's, every officer through whose hands they may pass has to keep a cash account of them. The double postage on such letters is more than earned by the Post-Office. All unfastened and torn letters, too, are picked out and conveyed to another portion of the large room, and it requires the unremitting attention of several busy individuals to finish the work left undone by the British public. It is scarcely credible that above 250 letters daily are posted open, and bearing not the slightest mark of ever having been fastened in any way; but such is the fact. A fruitful source of extra work to this branch of the office arises through the posting of flimsy boxes containing feathers, slippers, and other récherché articles of female dress, pill-boxes containing jewellery, and even bottles. The latter, however, are detained, glass articles and sharp instruments of any sort, whenever detected, being returned to the senders. These frail things, thrown in and buried under the heaps of correspondence, get crushed and broken, yet all are made up again carefully and resealed.
When the letters have been stamped, and those insufficiently paid picked out, they are carried away to undergo the process of sorting. In this operation they are very rapidly divided into "roads," representing a line of large towns: thus, letters for Derby, Loughborough, Nottingham, Lincoln, &c. might be placed in companionship in one division or "road," and Bilston, Wednesbury, Walsall, West Bromwich, &c. in another. When this primary divisional sorting is finished, the letters are divided and subdivided over and over again, with the exception of those for the various travelling sorting-carriages upon the different lines of railway, which remain in divisions corresponding with various portions of the country through which the several mail-trains run. It is into one of these divisions that our own letter falls, to be seen again, however, when we come to describe the Travelling Post-Offices. During the time occupied in making up the mails, the Circulation Branch of the General Post-Office presents a busy scene, yet retains the utmost order and regularity. Hundreds of men are engaged in the various operations of sorting and sub-sorting, yet all proceeds really noiselessly, and as if the hundreds and thousands of letters representing the commerce and intelligence of the English people could not be treated too carefully. Every now and again the sorter pauses in his rapid movements, and places a letter on one side. In some cases this signifies that he has detected a letter containing a coin of some sort; and when such letters have been posted without being registered by the sender, the Department takes this duty upon itself, charging a double fee on delivery. The number of letters of this class detected in London alone during the first six months after the plan was brought into operation, was upwards of 58,000. Letters which cannot be read, or letters imperfectly addressed, are also thrown on one side and conveyed to another part of the Circulation Branch, where gentlemen whose extraordinary faculty of discernment have gained them the singularly inappropriate name of "blind officers" sit in state.