Moving toward new employment on Lady-Day, two rural labouring women encounter the wife of the gentleman with whom they, too, had been in love. They know that since they left the dairy where they had been working together she has been abandoned by her husband, that she is under financial duress and at risk of succumbing to the advances of the man who had deflowered her prior to her marriage. Moved by the other womanâs difficulties, they decide to do what is in their power to help. The one called Marian remarks that ââ[t]would be a thousand pities if he were to tole her away againâ, resolving that the other womanâs husband
can never be anything to us, Izz; and why should we grudge him to her, and not try to mend this quarrel? If he could onây know what straits sheâs put to, and whatâs hovering round, he might come to take care of his own.1 (493)
Izz agrees, equally ready to put jealousy aside, and wonders â[c]ould we let him know?â (493). They contemplate how they might come to the rescue, but it takes a month until they act. They do so by âuncork[ing] the penny ink-bottle they sharedâ (493) to write a letter, addressed to the gentlemanâs parentsâ residence. It reads as follows:
Honourâd SirâLook to your Wife if you do love her as much as she do love you. For she is sore put to by an Enemy in the shape of a Friend. Sir, there is one near her who ought to be Away. A woman should not be tryâd beyond her Strength, and continual dropping will wear away a Stoneâay, moreâa Diamond.From Two Well-Wishers. (493â4)
This letter will make no difference to the story, which moves towards its tragic conclusion as inexorably as if Marian and Izz had never sent it. Nonetheless, it is a remarkable instance of kindness and female solidarity. It becomes even more remarkable, perhaps, when it is considered that if the novel of which it forms part had been written just over 50 years earlier, it would not have featured in this shape. If Tess of the dâUrbervilles (1891) had been published in the first rather than in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the very idea of two poor, uneducated field women writing a letter to a gentleman, in which they criticise and attempt to modify his behaviour, would have seemed preposterous to contemporary readers. The notion that they could read and write would, in itself, have strained belief, let alone the fact that they could afford the purchase of ink and paper. Moreover, there would have been reason to doubt whether Angelâs parents would have been willing to pay postage for an unexpected letter, presumably written on rough paper and poorly spelt, signed only âFrom Two Well-Wishersâ. Writing in 1891, however, Thomas Hardy can present two field women who confidently believe that an anonymous letter, written and sent on behalf of their friend, whose precise location is unknown, to a man who is travelling around Brazil, and whose exact current location is likewise impossible to verify, addressed to âAngel Clare at the only place they had ever heard him to be connected with, Emminster Vicarageâ (494), will eventually reach the intended recipientâs hands. Marian and Izz pay one penny to send their letter, believing that this penny will re-establish communication between a man and woman separated by thousands of miles and an even wider emotional chasm.
What they do not know is that Angelâs wife, too, has been writing letters, and that none of these letters has reached him in time to protect her from the âEnemy in the shape of a Friendâ. Yet, although Marian and Izz cannot save Tess, it is highly significant that the postal service enables two poor, ill-educated labouring women to enter into contact with a man who is out of their reach, geographically, socially, and emotionally. The memorable scene from Hardyâs most iconic novel poignantly illustrates how nineteenth-century developments in communication technology, and none more so than the penny post, impacted upon the literary imagination and upon representational possibilities.
Rowland Hill and the Penny Post
Until the year Thomas Hardy was born, letters were usually paid for by the recipient. Letter-carriers had to document each stage of a letterâs journey on the folded and sealed sheets, and the person who delivered a letter at its destination had to calculate the sums. By holding the letter against a candle, he had to count how many sheets were included, since the price doubled with each additional piece of paper. Altogether, the process of delivery was time-consuming and ineffective, and a letter often cost a significant proportion of a familyâs weekly earnings.2 While Members of Parliament dispatched their mail free of charge, even for middle-class families using the postal service was a luxury.3 For the working classes, long-distance communication remained virtually impossible.4 Many people used alternative, often slow and unreliable, channels of communication, and every letter that was not delivered through the official postal system meant a loss of state revenue.5
In 1840, however, a few months before Hardy was born, the social reformer and educator Rowland Hill succeeded in implementing a measure for which he had tirelessly campaigned for three years: the penny post. Hillâs scheme had been launched in 1837 with the pamphlet Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability, a text seeking to denounce the evils of expensive postage and prove that the entire nationâand every British subjectâwould benefit from a transformation of the postal service.6 In Hillâs eyes, the current postal arrangements hampered successful trade; they prevented advances in education; and they kept private individuals, especially from the lower ranks, from maintaining affective ties with distant kin.7 He grandiloquently professed that
[w]hen it is considered how much the religious, moral, and intellectual progress of the people would be accelerated by the unobstructed circulation of letters, and of the many cheap and non-political publications of the day, the Post Office assumes the new and important character of a powerful engine of civilization; capable of performing a distinguished part in the great work of National education, but rendered feeble and inefficient by erroneous financial arrangements.8
The changes Hill envisaged were simple but radical.9 Convinced that obligatory prepayment for all letters would facilitate the circulation of the mail, Hill invented the postage stamp as we know it today. The âbit of paper [âŠ] covered at the back with a glutinous washâ and bearing the monarchâs portrait on the front not only accelerated postal deliveries, but became a powerful and popular emblem of nationhood.10 More important than the idea of prepayment, however, was Hillâs suggestion that the Post Office would become a more profitable and useful state department if postage were to be reduced drastically.11 Having offered calculations about the real cost involved in conveying a letter, Hill proposed that any letter weighing less than an ounce should cost no more than a single penny. This significantly lowered price, he believed, would encourage people from all ranks to make more frequent and regular use of the postal service.12 In other words, the new affordability of long-distance communication would automatically augment both demand and profits. Hill persistedâin the face of avid detractors, including the current Postmaster General, Thomas William Ansonâand circulated his ideas through a large variety of channels, including a sketch in a serial instalment of Charles Dickensâ Nicholas Nickleby (1838).13 The penny post was inaugurated on 10 January 1840, and on that day, as Hill noted in his journal, the General Post Office in London was âquite besieged by people preparing their lettersâ.14
On 2 June 1840, then, Thomas Hardy was born into a world in which letter writing and the use of the Post Office had ceased to be a privilege of the fewâa world shaped by a reliable, accessible, and affordable postal service, which treated the letters of every single individual, even MPs and the young Queen, in the same manner.15 This book will explore how a deeper consideration of the particular material, technological, and cultural conditions of communication in Victorian England can reshape the way we read Thomas Hardyâs works and revise our understanding of the role played by the countless letters and written messages within his texts.
In 1840, the number of letters dispatched through the Post Office doubled from 82.5 million, amounting to approximately four letters per person, to 168.8 million. By 1850, this number had increased to 350 million. Another 45 years later, when Hardy published Jude the Obscure (1895), nearly two billion letters travelled through the post.16 Throughout the nineteenth century, more and more âdelivery and access pointsâ were added to the existing postal infrastructure, in an effort to create an âever more accessible and inclusiveâ network, that would incorporate the remotest corners of Britain.17 In 1870, one year before Hardy published his first novel Desperate Remedies (1871), the Post Office took over the growing telegraph system, which rendered possible the virtually instantaneous transmission of written messages.18 The postal service became the single-largest employer in Britain; it was omnipresent in the daily lives of the Victorians, with local post offices, post boxes, and stamps, as well as telegraph offices and telegraph wires, and uniformed post-men and telegram boys, serving as tangible reminders of its ceaseless operations.19 The 1840 reform of the postal service was a communication revolution that transformed nineteenth-century Britain, setting in motion a process that foreshadowed how the internet has reconfigured understandings of the world in the twenty-first century.
In conjunction with the rapidly expanding railway and emerging telegraph system, the penny post transformed perceptions of geographical and temporal distance, seemingly âannihilating space and timeâ.20 As Christopher Keep asserts,
[f]rom a world in which the geographical horizons of the common person were often no wider than that of the parish in which he or she was born [âŠ] the emerging technologies helped produce a sense of the increasing interconnectedness of the villages, towns, and cities of Great Britain.21...