Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (71 page)

One of the people called to give evidence to the Select Committee on Postal Reform in 1838 was the paper maker John Dickinson. He referred to
“the new fashioned envelope with the four corners of the paper meeting under the seal”
. In other words, at that stage envelopes existed but were not in widespread use.

The upshot of the parliamentary deliberations was that Hill’s proposals were largely accepted. Gone was the idea of the recipient paying for the letter. Instead the sender would pay a uniform rate of one penny. Gone was the need to count sheets of paper, or to frank the envelope, and the cost of delivery was drastically reduced because Hill was convinced that this would result in a massive increase in volume which in turn would bring down the cost to the Post Office of delivering each item.

The result was the commissioning of the country’s first postage stamp, a gummed “Penny Black” with a portrait of the eighteen-year-old Queen Victoria based on the design for her coinage by William Wyon. It also led to the design of a penny wrapper—an envelope which people could buy which already had the postage paid.

A prize of £200 for the best design of the penny wrapper was awarded to William Mulready after a competition held in 1840. He came up with a flamboyant design with Britannia seated on a lion, dispatching post to the four corners of the globe via winged messengers. The public hated it, and the Mulready envelope was quickly withdrawn. However, the stamps, and the new postal system, were hugely popular.

In the very first year, no fewer than 68 million Penny Blacks were moistened and stuck down onto envelopes which had the advantage of completely concealing the contents. Even Queen Victoria was delighted with the stamp—so much so that she refused to countenance a change to her portrait, meaning that her youthful face was still adorning her stamps some 60 years later! Arguably, our postage stamp designers are flattering to a similar degree with our present monarch, although she has been allowed to age gradually as time goes by.

Before long, in back offices up and down the country, it was customary for a clerk to laboriously cut out an envelope-shape on paper, using a tin template. He would cut through perhaps two dozen sheets at a time, using a craft tool or sharp knife. The cut-outs would then be passed to another clerk for folding, and then to another for the side triangles to be glued together. The result: an envelope which ensured that the contents remained secure, private, and protected from the elements.

The first envelope-folding machine in this country resulted from a collaboration between Rowland Hill’s kid brother Edwin and Warren de la Rue in 1840 (i.e. almost immediately after the postage stamp was introduced, when it quickly became apparent that handmade envelopes could not keep pace with the new demand). Various other people came up with design improvements, and by the mid 1850s the modern envelope was being churned out by the million.

There is a rather nice story as to why Rowland Hill was so passionate about reforming the postal system. He explained to a parliamentary committee that he was inspired by the plight of a poor servant girl who was observed receiving a letter. Unable to pay the required fee of one shilling, she turned the letter round in her hand for a few seconds before returning it to the postman, declining to accept it because of the not inconsiderable cost. Horrified that such a potentially valuable and important missive should go unread for the sake of twelve pence, the gallant Rowland dashed forward and paid the fee, expecting gushing thanks from the grateful servant.

Not so, for she seemed not to care one way or the other. When challenged as to her indifference, she replied that she knew who it was from and when looking at the marks on the outside of the envelope could quite readily work out the contents, and had no need to pay a fee. It reminds me of the time when phone calls from a public phone box gave the caller a chance to Press Button A or B—and in that time you could just about shout a brief message for free down the line before being cut off!

Addendum: The window envelope? Patented 1902 by an American (what else could he be) called Americus Callahan. And airmail? The first mail to be delivered by air was in January 1785 in a cross channel balloon flight from Dover to Calais, carrying a letter from William Franklin addressed to Benjamin Franklin’s grandson. The first aerogramme (i.e. an envelope specifically designed for the purpose and which opens up to become a letter) is surprisingly modern—it was first issued in Iraq in 1933.

Black edged mourning envelopes? Popular immediately after the Penny post was introduced, as a way of preparing the recipient for “news from the grave” contained in the letter within. Dickens in
Nicholas Nickleby
(1839) and Thackeray in
Vanity Fair
(1848) both refer to the black edged envelopes as bringing news of a bereavement. The mourning envelope became part of the ritual of coping with death, and would be used by the family of the bereaved for up to twelve months (except for business letters which were always on plain white paper).

While we are on the subject of bereavement, for me, the saddest letters I came across when researching
The Journal of a Georgian Gentleman
were the ones detailing the illness and death of my ancestor Richard Hall’s sister-in-law from smallpox in 1769. Not only were the letters sent at almost hourly intervals to Richard from his brother-in-law as the disease progressed, but by a remarkable coincidence, they have all survived. Not only do I have all the letters which Richard received—I also have copies of the ones sent by him by way of reply! Read the book for the story of an extraordinary event which happened 250 years after the letters were written, whereby the whole correspondence was re-united!

Popular Pigeons and Slanderous Psittacines

by Grace Elliot

I
n Victorian times, bird keeping was a popular hobby amongst city communities. Native birds such as thrushes, bullfinches, and goldfinches were trapped at night in country villages and sent by train to the suburbs to be sold in markets at Greenwich, Hounslow, and Woolwich.

Bullfinches and goldfinches were especially popular, since they could be trained to sing and fetch a high price, several shillings each, whilst larks sold for six to eight pence apiece. There was even a market for dowdy birds such as house sparrows—once they were disguised with paint—but sadly when they preened they died of lead poisoning.

Even more unpleasant was the craze in the 1890s for “flying” greenfinches. These birds were sold for half a penny each, with a cotton thread tied to a leg. The idea was to bet on which bird could fly in circles longest before it dropped dead of exhaustion.

Keeping caged birds was widespread, even amongst prisoners held at the Tower of London. One prisoner wrote
An Epitaph on a Goldfinch
, on the death of his pet bird: “
Buried June 23, 1794 by a fellow prisoner in the Tower of London.”

The Spitalfields weavers of the 1840s also prized their birds. The breeding of fancy pigeons and canaries, Almond tumblers, Pouting horsemen, and Nuns, was taken very seriously. Bird shows were highly competitive, matching the fashion amongst wealthier classes for dog shows. It could be a dodgy business—the prize winning pigeons at a show in Islington had had their throats stitched back to improve their appearance—the perpetrators were found out and prosecuted.

London’s pigeons are descended from those that escaped from dovecotes in medieval times to roost amongst the city’s ledges and towers. In 1277, a man is recorded as falling from the belfry of St. Stephens, Walbrook, whilst trying to raid a pigeon’s nest, and in 1385, the Bishop of London complained of
“
malignant persons” who threw stones at pigeons resting in city churches.

One parrot owner was W.S. Gilbert, who wrote the words to accompany Sir Arthur Sullivan’s music. He owned a particularly fine parrot, reputedly the best talker in England. When a guest commented on the appearance of a second parrot in his hallway, Gilbert replied: “
The other parrot, who is a novice, belongs to Doctor Playfair. He is reading up with my bird, who takes pupils.”

However, pet birds were not popular with everyone. George Bernard Shaw was given a caged canary which he heartily disliked, calling it a “little green brute.” He was delighted when the bird was stolen and equally disappointed when a friend replaced it. His comment was: “
I’m a vegetarian and can’t eat it, and it’s too small to eat me.”

The Poor Always Among Us

by Phillip Brown

T
he nineteenth century saw a huge growth in the population of Great Britain.

By the end of the century, there were three times more people living in Great Britain than at the beginning. Families were getting larger, children began to survive infancy better, and immigration, particularly from Ireland, swelled the inner cities.

In the cities, jobs were scarce. Large numbers of both skilled and unskilled people were looking for work, so wages were low, barely above subsistence level. If work dried up, or was seasonal, men were laid off, and because they had hardly enough to live on when they were in work, they had no savings to fall back on.

In his book
The Victorian Underworld
, Kellow Chesney gives a graphic description of the conditions in which many were living:

Hideous slums, some of them acres wide, some no more than crannies of obscure misery, make up a substantial part of the, metropolis…. In big, once handsome houses, thirty or more people of all ages may inhabit a single room.

As the century progressed, the middle and wealthy classes, through a mixture of fear of the underclass (sounds familiar today) and genuine compassion, founded numerous societies to give aid and help, particularly to the “deserving poor”. A popular hymn still showed the distance to be travelled, however:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them, high and lowly,

And order’d their estate.

—The third verse of “All Things Bright and Beautiful”, first published in 1848 in
Hymns for Little Children
(London: Joseph Masters, 1848), by Cecil Frances Humphreys. In modern versions of this hymn, the third verse is omitted.

In earlier periods, Victorian artists had typically portrayed the poor of the countryside in rather a jolly way (where in reality, starvation was a shadow that stalked many rural workers—hence the flight to the cities).

But by the 1870s and 1880s, more realistic portrayals began to emerge in response to Dickens and other writers who were more hard hitting about the challenges faced by the poor. Yet even in
From Hand to Mouth—He Was One of the Few Who Would Not Beg
by Thomas Faed, you still felt that people knew their place, and of course such pictures were intended for the middle class patrons, who didn’t want poverty on their walls in its utmost reality. But at least the subject was being discussed and portrayed, and a few artists like Luke Fildes went as far as they dared.

Another attempt to bring problems to light was in the reforming journal
The Graphic
, edited by the social reformer William Luson Thomas, who believed strongly that art could bring about social reform. John Millais recommended him to Dickens who used him to illustrate
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
.

A brilliant morning shines on the old city. Its antiquities and ruins are surpassingly beautiful, with a lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the rich trees waving in the balmy air. Changes of glorious light from moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields—or, rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its yielding time—penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life. The cold stone tombs of centuries ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble corners of the building, fluttering there like wings.

—Charles Dickens,
Edwin Drood

In 1888, William Powell Frith portrayed what is almost a photograph of a typical London street, where the rich and poor did intermingle freely.

Herbert von Herkomer (born in Bavaria but settled in Bushey, Hertfordshire where he built Lululaund—named after his third wife—which was important in the British film industry) captured the real rural poor…though in the later
Eventide: A Scene in the Westminster Union
(1878) the finished picture was carefully “polished” to show the old age paupers happily drinking tea and content.

Domestic labour is seldom seen in Victorian art, though photography picked it up, particularly the fascinating if bizarre work of Arthur Munby, who photographed his future wife Hannah Cullwick as a scullery maid.

A governess was in an awkward position in the Victorian household, neither quite a servant nor a member of the family. As a sign of this social limbo, she often ate in isolation. She had a middle class background and education, but she was paid and not really part of the family. Being a governess was one of the few legitimate ways an unmarried middle class woman could support herself in that society. Her position was often depicted as one to be pitied.

Bordering constantly on poverty (and by popular repute, prostitution), the overworked seamstresses were the next level down if education did not allow them to seek a governess position. After several reports, distressed seamstress became something of a
cause celebre
. The public was barraged with newspaper articles, pamphlets, novels, short stories, poetry—the most famous of which is Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” from 1843:

With fingers weary and worn,

With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,

Plying her needle and thread—

Stitch! stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch

She sang the “Song of the Shirt.”

Popular literature was full of stories of a happy, healthy, and virtuous young woman leaving her home in the countryside to become a seamstress in the big city where she encounters an evil employer and/or seducer, and begins an irreversible decline leading to death and/or prostitution.

This brings me to the last and perhaps the best of the great Victorian painters who dealt with the final end of such women as in
Found Drowned
, the painting by George Frederic Watts of 1867. (Charles Dickens wrote
The Chimes
to highlight the issues.) This was by no means uncommon. Newspapers listed drownings from London bridges each morning.

I could go on to mention the
Past and Present
triptych of Augustus Egg and the importance of photography in documenting what is to us now a vanished world. But for anyone wanting the feel of the poor of London, just read Dickens or
London Labour and the London Poor
by Henry Mayhew (the founder of
Punch
).