Yours very affectionately Rowland Hill
From a Photograph by the London Stereoscopic Co.
As some of that increasingly large portion of the public which knows nothing of the old postal system are under the erroneous impression that others than Rowland Hill suggested the use of postage stamps for letters, it is well to point out that the employment of such stamps before 1840, so far from cheapening or rendering easier the payment of postal charges, must have made them considerably dearer, and have yet further complicated the process of letter-“taxing.”[27]
Postage stamps, like railway tickets, are mere tokens of prepayment, and, however mentally hazy on the subject of the origin of postage stamps some of us may be, we can all easily understand how absurd, indeed impossible, introduction of the tickets would have been in the dark ages before railway trains began to run. Equally impossible would have been the employment, or even the suggestion, of stamps when letters were posted unpaid. Under the old system the letters of the unprivileged classes were rated, primarily, according to the distance travelled, though not necessarily the distance actually separating writer and recipient, because, although before 1840 railways existed, no close network of lines covered our land, providing, as it does to-day, direct and plentiful means of inter-communication; and therefore the Post Office, to suit its own convenience, often obliged some of its mail matter to perform very circuitous routes, thereby not only retarding delivery, but rendering still greater the already great variability of rates. “Thus, for example, letters from Loughton to Epping (places only 2 or 3 miles apart) were carried into London and out again, and charged a postage of 7d.—that being the rate under the old system for letters between post towns ranging from 30 to 50 miles apart.”[28] That this circumambulatory practice was responsible for waste of time as well as increase of cost is shown by the fact that of two letters, the one addressed to Highgate, and the other to Wolverhampton (120 miles further along the same coach road), and both posted in London at the same hour, the Highgate letter would be delivered last. As regards cost, an anomaly quite as absurd as the two foregoing existed in the case of letters between Wolverhampton and Brierley Hill which were carried by a cross-post passing through Dudley. If a letter went the whole way, the postage was 1d.; but if it stopped short at Dudley, 4d. was charged. Of the letters which performed circuitous routes, Scott, in the fortieth chapter of “Guy Mannering,” humorously remarks that, “There was a custom, not yet wholly obsolete, of causing a letter from one town to another, perhaps within the distance of 30 miles, to perform a circuit of 200 miles before delivery; which had the combined advantage of airing the epistle thoroughly, of adding some pence to the revenue of the Post Office, and of exercising the patience of the correspondents.”
The question of charge was still further complicated, because, secondarily, there existed “single,” “double,” “treble,” and yet heavier rates of postage; as when the treble rate was passed, further increase was reckoned by weight, the charge being quadrupled when the letter weighed an ounce, rising afterwards by a “single” postage for every additional quarter ounce. It was as well, perhaps, that the people who lived before the 'forties did not lead the feverish life of to-day. Otherwise, how would the post officials, to say nothing of the public, have remembered these positively bewildering details?
A “single” letter had to be written on a single sheet of paper, whose use probably gave rise to the practice of that now obsolete “cross” writing which often made an epistle all but illegible, but to which in those days of dear postage recourse was unavoidable when much matter had to be crammed into the limited compass of that single sheet. If a second sheet, or even the smallest piece of paper, were added to the first, the postage was doubled. The effect of fastening an adhesive stamp on to a single letter would therefore have been to subject the missive to a double charge; while to have affixed a stamp to an envelope containing a letter would have trebled the postage. In other words, a man living, say, 400 miles from his correspondent, would have to pay something like 4s. for the privilege of receiving from him a single sheet of paper carried in a wholly unnecessary cover bearing an equally unnecessary, because entirely useless, adornment in the shape of an adhesive stamp. For obvious reasons, therefore neither “the little bags called envelopes,” as in his pamphlet Rowland Hill quaintly described these novel adjuncts, nor the stamps, were, or could be, in use.[29]
One veracious anecdote will suffice to show what came of evasion, wilful or unintentional, of a hard and fast postal rule. A letter was once sent from London to Wolverhampton, containing an enclosure to which a small piece of paper had been fastened. The process called “candling” showed that the letter consisted of three parts; and the single postage being 10d., a charge was made of 2s. 6d.[30]
It will thus be seen that in reckoning the postage on a letter, distance, the number of enclosures (if any), and, finally, weight had to be taken into consideration. Nor should it be forgotten that of single inland letters the variations of charge amounted to over forty. Under so complicated a system, it was, save in very exceptional circumstances, far easier to collect the postage at the end of the letter's journey than at its beginning; and, in the absence of prepayment, of what possible use could stamps have been, or what man in his senses would have proposed them?[31] Had later-day ignorance of the actual state of things under the old postal system been less widespread than it is, any claim to authorship of postage stamps before reform of that system was attempted or achieved would, for lack of the credulous element among the public, scarcely have been hazarded.