Celebrated [19th century] writers gave a considerable amount of space in their letters on the subject of letters themselves - not least the early nineteenth-century debate over whether it was disrespectful to the Church to write on a Sunday (consensus: personal letters acceptable, business ones less so). And they were particularly interested in the vagaries of the postal service, and what likelihood their letters had of reaching their destination. In 1835 Thomas Carlyle sent a transatlantic letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson in which he marvelled at the divine madness of the system. A letter from Emerson had taken two months to reach him, but still Carlyle felt grateful: 'As the Atlantic is so broad and deep, ought we not rather to esteem it a beneficent miracle that messages can arrive at all; that a little slip of paper will skim over all these weltering floods, and other inextricable confusions; and come at last, in the hand of the Twopenny Postman, safe to your lurking-place, like green leaf in the bill of Noah's Dove'.
In another letter to Emerson four months later, Carlyle bemoans the state of England; there is poverty everywhere, there is the threat of cholera, and worst of all, it seems, is all this newfangled technological progress, a comment we may hear echoes of today. 'What with railways, steamships, printing-presses, it has surely become a most monstrous "tissue" this life of ours'. Fortunately for him, it was still possible to defeat the technology of the postal service. Writing to his mother in 1836, he is delighted that the parliamentary summer recess is over, because, now that 'certain "honourable members" having got back to town again', he may once more obtain free postage by abusing their free franking privileges.
- Simon Garfield, To the Letter, Edinburgh, 2013, p222-3.
See also:
History: Early overland mails between Auckland & Wellington, 23 March 2019
Books: Emily Dickinson's postal book group, 2 September 2014
History: Posting the empire as the royal word, 9 January 2013
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