I’m back
with a real post this week! Yay!
Last night
I finished reading The Brontë Cabinet by Deborah Lutz, which I highly
recommend. It’s a joint biography of the
Brontës through nine items. One of the
items was a letter Charlotte had written which had been torn apart and sewn
back together. The chapter about letters
discussed them more broadly; the torn one was just a small part of the
chapter. In talking about letters, Lutz
went briefly into the history of the postal system and different types of items
that were used by the Brontës. One of
the items mentioned was Mulready stationery.
This is
probably going to be a shorter post since Mulreadys didn’t last long, so a bit
of background on what was going on with postage at the time. Before 1840 (when postal reforms went into
effect), in England, postage was paid by the sheet of paper, with the envelope
counting as a piece of paper; was paid by the mileage the item had to travel;
and was paid by the recipient of the mail.
In 1840,
postal reform took place. Both stamps
and letter sheets were introduced.
Stamps were what you think they are, a small square you could stick on
any item going through the mail, as long as it had enough postage. Letter sheets were preprinted and prepaid
sheets of paper that would be folded up to create the letter and the envelope
in one. If you’ve ever used or seen air
mail sheets, the letter sheets were like that.
William
Mulready was the person who came up with the design that was printed on the
letter sheets. Mulready was a well-known
Irish artist, living in London at this time.
He was commissioned to create the illustrations for the letter
sheets. His illustrations had Britannia
at the top and center; on either side were symbols of Asia and North America,
showing the reach of the British Empire.
The illustration also showed that the mail was prepaid, with different
colors of ink being used for different postage: black for one penny, blue for
two penny. Because they were just blue
or black inked images, a lot of people hand-colored them in.
Rowland
Hill was a postal officer and one of the men who helped with postal
reform. He was sure that stamps would be
a folly and that Mulready stationery would take over. However, almost immediately it became
apparent that people preferred stamps.
Mulready’s design was overly complex and was mocked and caricatured
almost immediately. Stationery creators
and sellers also didn’t like it because then they couldn’t sell their product,
whereas stamps could be used on anything.
People thought the government was trying to control the supply of
envelopes by developing the letter sheets, too.
Mulready
stationery went on sale May 1, and was valid in the mail starting on May
6. By May 12, Hill realized it wasn’t
going well, and within two months the stationery was being replaced by more and
different stamps. The supply of Mulreadys
that were in shops were used until they were gone, but distributors weren’t
distributing them anymore. What was left
of the Mulreadys were destroyed, eventually having the middles punched out so
the part without printing could be reused.
These middles were sold as waste paper or were recycled.
So that’s
it about Mulready stationery. They only
lasted from May to November 1840.
They’re such an interesting part of postal reform and history; I’m
surprised I haven’t come across them before.
