A teacher from England named Sir Rowland Hill invented the postage stamp in 1837, although the first stamp in the world was issued in the 1840s. Roland Hill also created the first uniform postage rates that were based on weight rather than size. Hill's stamps made the prepayment of mail postage possible. Hills' idea for postage stamps based on weight  soon became a great achievement and were then used in many countries throughout the world. With this new policy of charging by weight many more people started using envelopes to mail documents. Hill’s brother Edwin Hill then invented a model of the envelope machine that folded paper into envelopes quickly enough to match the pace of the growing demand for postage stamps. I am speaking on this invention because letters were the way people would communicate throughout the Victorian period, specifically Middlemarch. 

Postage Stamp  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamp