The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia - Smithsonian ...

n u m b e r 5 5 • 1 2 3and prepaid postal stationery (Mulready letter sheets andenvelopes), which Hill believed would be more popularfor personal letters than stamps—although the Victorianpublic proved him wrong. As Douglas Muir aptly notes,“Derision was the common response to the Mulready design.It was caricatured in words and imitative drawings.” 6Some Victorians objected to the allegorical- pictorialhistoricaldesign of Britannia overseeing a glorious postaloutreach extending to all four corners of the globe whileothers, for example, opposed it for practical reasons—thedesign left little space for an address. Moreover, as soonas the Mulready design appeared, caricaturists lampoonedit. The Victorian public, which refused to purchase theofficially commissioned design, bought in droves caricatureenvelopes ridiculing the Irish (a dig at the Irish- bornacademy- trained artist and designer William Mulready) aswell as the monarchy, the Opium Wars, social practices,and major politicians of the day. 7 The Penny Black, incontrast, won instant success. Demand for stamps far exceededthe number of available postage stamps when theyfirst appeared in May 1840. 8 The stamp and the schemeof prepaid, affordable, uniform postage quickly became amodel for other nations; the United States, for example,issued its first postage stamps in 1847, featuring GeorgeWashington on the ten- cent stamp and Benjamin Franklinon the five- cent stamp. 9In Hill’s heyday, Punch, the Victorian Londoner’sNew Yorker, dubbed the hallowed postal reformer “SirRowland Le Grand,” and Queen Victoria knighted himin 1860. 10 Today Rowland Hill is no longer a householdname, even in Britain. On a January 2008 visit to the NationalPortrait Gallery in London, I sadly discovered thatHill’s portrait has been relegated to storage. 11 Nonetheless,Hill’s legacy resonates today. The system he designedbrought the Victorians postal blessings—it facilitatedfamily ties, promoted business, and spread informationto an ever- widening postal “network” that anticipatescomputer- mediated communication—but it also becamea tool for blackmail, unsolicited mass mailings, and junkmail, problems that remain with us today. 12Victorian Commodity CultureThe Victorians manufactured and imported a range ofmaterials for consumption, including fiction, food, drink,clothing, and—of importance to this essay—postal ephemera.In fact, modern day consumerism has its roots in theVictorian age of production and consumption. Britain wasthe undisputed leader of the Industrial Revolution, whichled to an increase in speed of work and production, grantingopportunities for leisure, choice, shopping, and collectinga host of Victorian things, such as postage stamps.The Great Exhibition of 1851, the first ever world’s fair,held at the Crystal Palace in London, showcased technological,economic, and military achievements and, in turn,created a greater demand for consumer products. Onceconnected with sin and indulgence, consumerism becamea form of self- expression—identity intertwined withbooks readers chose for their libraries, foods people ate,fashions they wore, and, post- 1840, goods they boughtfor daily life, including correspondence. Traveling inkwells,decorative stamp boxes, steel- nibbed pens, colorfulstationery, envelopes with innovative gummed flaps,an envelope- folding machine, envelope cases, and writingdesks of various styles appear in the Official Descriptiveand Illustrated Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851among exhibitions of art and architecture, handicrafts,geological displays, steel- making equipment, and then innovativeappliances. Did the Victorians anticipate that inpassing Uniform Penny Postage, they would foster a newfield of industry? (Figure 2)Over two decades ago, Asa Briggs established the importanceof commodities as “emissaries” 13 of nineteenthcenturyculture in a now seminal work entitled VictorianThings. Setting a precedent for critical inquiry of householdgoods, song lyrics, museum artifacts, and postagestamps, Briggs calls attention to things Victorians“designed, named, made, advertised, bought and sold,listed, counted, collected, gave to others, threw away orbequeathed.” 14 Writing desks, pictorial envelopes, andvalentines quintessentially are, to recall Briggs’s terms,“emissaries” of culture and civilization, transmitting informationabout aesthetics, gender, social class, and Empire.These collectible commodities tell us what the Victorianstreasured and commemorated and carry opinions on currentevents, customs, humor, prejudices, and preferences.Writing Desks from the Inside OutLewis Carroll’s writing- desk riddle, which appears inone of literature’s most famous tea party scenes, directsour attention to the growing popularity of an item demandedby and created for women and men of the middleand upper classes. Carroll’s own postal products piggybackedon the popularity of his enduring Alice’s Adventuresin Wonderland. Different from other manuals on themarket, Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter- Writingseems, in the words of Carroll’s biographer Morton