Chats on Postage Stamps

by Frederick John Melville

I now come to the period of the active development of the idea, and so far from the stamp being a particular invention of the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, we must recognise that, beyond all controversy, the notion—whether for an impressed or an adhesive stamp is of little matter—was "in the air." It was stated before the Select Committee on Postage, on February 23, 1838, by a Mr. Louis, formerly Superintendent of Mails, that a plan for stamped covers was communicated to him "by Mr. Stead of Yarmouth, a gentleman who has interested himself a good deal about the Post Office."[1] The sheets of paper were to be stamped and sold to persons who would then be at liberty "to send their letters by conveyances not suitable to Post Office hours."

The scheme had been proposed to the Post Office according to Mr. Louis in his evidence "many years ago," and it is attributed by some writers to 1829, though I can trace no source for their information as to this date.

The plan, from the rather vague remembrance of the witness before the Committee, may have been simply one to introduce the Sardinian method of 1818 into this country, and in any case there are no concrete relics of Mr. Stead's ideas in the shape of essays. Mr. Charles Whiting, of the Beaufort House Press, entered the arena of postal reform some time prior to March, 1830, but we have no definite knowledge of his proposals previous to that date. In that year Mr. Whiting suggested the use of stamped bands for the prepayment of postage on printed matter.[2]

Mr. Whiting called his stamped wrappers "Go frees," and he is understood to have intended the plan to extend to written matter, if it proved successful in an experimental trial with printed matter. The plan did not get a trial, and no greater success attended the efforts of Mr. Charles Knight, the celebrated publisher, who suggested stamped wrappers as a means of collecting postage on newspapers, subject to the abolition of the "Taxes on Knowledge," which were the occasion of a vigorous campaign set on foot in 1834. According to Hansard, a resolution was moved by Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer, May 22, 1834, "that it is expedient to repeal the Stamp Duty on newspapers at the earliest possible period," and in the course of the debate the member for Hull, Mr. Matthew Davenport Hill, advocating the payment of a penny upon an unstamped newspaper sent by post, said: "To put an end to any objections that might be made as to the difficulty of collecting the money, he would adopt the suggestion of a person well qualified to give an opinion on the subject—he alluded to Mr. Knight, the publisher. That gentleman recommended that a stamped wrapper should be prepared for such newspapers as it was desired to send by post; and that each wrapper should be sold at the rate of a penny by the distributors of stamps in the same way as receipt stamps."[3]

Mr. Knight had made the proposal referred to in a private letter to Lord Althorp, Chancellor of the Exchequer.[4]

The ultimate result of the campaign was the reduction, not the abolition, of the Newspaper Tax, and, as the reduced tax of one penny for an ordinary newspaper included free transmission in the post, there was no need for the adoption of Mr. Knight's proposal at that time. It is to be noted, however, that Mr. Knight was an active supporter of Rowland Hill's plan a few years later, and that Hill was not unaware of the suggestion, for he wrote of it in his pamphlet that: "Availing myself of this excellent suggestion, I propose the following arrangement:—Let stamped covers and sheets of paper be supplied to the public from the Stamp Office or Post Office, as may be most convenient, and sold at such a price as to include the postage: letters so stamped might be put into the letter-box, as at present."

Dr. Gray, the eminent zoologist of the British Museum and one of the earliest scientific collectors of postage-stamps, made a somewhat ambiguous claim to the authorship of the proposal for the prepayment of postage by means of stamps. When challenged by Rowland Hill in The Athenæum,[5] he stated in that journal that "I have simply said I believe I was the first who proposed the system of a small uniform rate of postage to be prepaid by stamps." When Mr. Knight entered upon the Athenæum correspondence, Dr. Gray reminded him of an incident:

"In the spring of 1834 we [Knight and Gray] were fellow-passengers in the basket of a Blackheath coach, when the subject was discussed. I then stated, as I had frequently done before to other fellow-travellers, my views in relation to the prepayment of postage by stamps. These views Mr. Knight combated, and so little was he then prepared to adopt them that he exclaimed, as he quitted the coach at the corner of Fleet Street, 'Gray, you are more fit for Bedlam than for the British Museum.'" Knight, whose case has the advantage of attaining substantial record in Hansard and The Mirror of Parliament, disclaimed any connection with the incident, and left his friends to decide "whether the language, stated to have been used by me to a gentleman of scientific eminence, would not have been better suited to a costermonger returning from Greenwich fair than to mine."