Comments on: Victorian post vs. e-mail: Everything old is new again

By: Rosie Mole

Rosie Mole — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 01:10:23 +0000

Very interesting blog. Pity about the picture of Jane Austen though.

Sadly Jane Austen died in 1817. Queen Victoria did not ascend the throne until 1836!

By: karen wester newton

karen wester newton — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:15:58 +0000

Heck, the Brits had multiple deliveries per day well into the 20th Century. I recall reading a Dorothy L. Sayers novel where a character was always "waiting for the next post" until the last one of the day finally arrived. As far as the Victorians, telegrams were closer to email than letters. Someone even wrote a book about it called The Victorian Internet. As someone has pointed out, both required a certain amount of income. Sadly, Jane Austen's sister burned most of her letters after she died. Even then, she left quite a lot of them. One of her earliest fiction efforts, Lady Susan was written as an epistolary novel.

By: Dhamu

Dhamu — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 23:05:41 +0000

It’s not totally true to say that, despite changing from paper books to ebook devices, “the things [people] are reading will remain the same.” Having a device has made me read many more short stories than I would have bought magazines or anthologies. I’ll also try freebies from new authors I wouldn’t have gambled money on in print, and read older authors whose works I wouldn’t have tracked down in paper format.

By: Sarah Milstein

Sarah Milstein — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 19:01:21 +0000

@GJN: In my original post (on Radar), I explained that the Austen show at the Morgan Library has a display showing that mail was multi-daily during Austen’s time, and I provide a link with more info on 18th and 19th century mails. The rest of the details you mention–costs, distance, folded rather than stuffed, etc–are on the money and were evident in the show.

By: David Lomax

David Lomax — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 01:31:56 +0000

Let’s remember that even in the heyday of the Victorian postal system, it was only available to those who were literate (a much smaller percentage than today, naturally), those who had time to write (again, smaller) and those who could afford the mails. I daresay it’s likely that fewer people in those days could pay for regular postage than have access to the Internet today. Different standards.

By: GJN

GJN — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:08:43 +0000

Perhaps toward the end of the nineteenth century mail was delivered six times a day, but this certainly was not the case in Jane Austen’s time. She died, as I recall, in 1817 well before the modernization of the English mails.

The Wikipedia states:” In the United Kingdom, prior to 1840 the postal system was expensive, confusing and seen as corrupt. Letters were paid for by the recipient rather than the sender, and were charged according to the distance the letter had travelled and the number of sheets of paper it contained. If there is one man who can be said to have changed the face of the postal service forever it is Sir Rowland Hill, with his reforms of the postal system based on the concept of penny postage, and his solution of pre payment. ] In his proposal Hill also called for official pre-printed envelopes and adhesive postage stamps as alternative ways of getting the sender to pay for the postage, at a time when prepayment was optional, which led to the invention of the postage stamp, the Penny Black.”

By: Chris Meadows

Chris Meadows — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:45:54 +0000

On the other hand, we wouldn’t have the letters either if they’d been caught in a house fire, or deemed not important enough to keep.

By: Deran

Deran — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 22:20:24 +0000

The central difference is that we have the Austen letters, had they been tweeting, chatting and emailing, we would have no record from their correspondence. This will be the lament of future historians and biographers; no paper trail. Yes, I know, there are some sites trying to archive things off the internet, but they will collect only the tiniest fraction of what was said and done in this digital age.