The Penny Post
Before the Penny Post, letter writing and postage was vastly more of an expensive and strenuous ordeal. According to Nestor in “New Opportunities for Self-Reflection . . .”, the cost of postage from London to Edinbburgh could total “the better part of a day’s wages for some” (5). Therefore, communication through letters was a luxury only the more privileged could afford to do on a consistent basis. To add to this, the cost of postage pre-reform was to be paid by the recipient rather than the sender. For those less privileged, especially women, they had to rely on their wealthy relatives and friends to deliver their correspondences to them, creating a barrier of sorts of communication between those of higher and lower socio-economic privileges. These high prices and the subsequent inaccessibility of communication through letters for the lower classes resulted in public outcry for postal reform, for which Queen Victoria was a proponent of (Golden). By 1840, the Penny Post was introduced nationwide in England, through Queen Victoria’s Postal Reform Act of 1839. The induction of the national Penny Post allowed for vast change in communication; first, the sender would pay the cost of the postage. This way, those without direct access to finances could still easily receive correspondence. Second, the cost that was paid could be as low as one pence (thus the name of the Penny Post). For the first time, the price of postage was so low that those previously without the resources to send and receive letters pre-reform finally had a new, more simple avenue for communication. Similar to how the advent of the internet, social media, and cell phones revolutionized communication in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the Penny Post allowed for broad communication throughout Victorian England.
Nestor, Pauline. “New Opportunities for Self-Reflection and Self-Fashioning: Women, Letters and the Novel in Mid-Victorian England.”
Literature & History, vol. 19, no. 2, 2010, pp. 18–35.
Golden, Catherine J. Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing. University Press of Florida, 2009.
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