The Penny Post 1680 1918

Capturing actual dialogues of people discussing subjects as diverse as marriage, poverty, poetry, and the emotional lives of servants, 'The Pen and the People' will be enjoyed by everyone interested in history, literature, and the intimate experiences of ordinary people.

Although "snail mail" may seem old fashioned and outdated in the twenty-first century, Catherine Golden argues that the creation of the Penny Post in Victorian England was just as revolutionary in its time as e-mail and text messages are today. Until Queen Victoria instituted the Postal Reform Act of 1839, mail was a luxury affordable only by the rich. Allowing anyone, from any social class, to send a letter anywhere in the country for only a penny had multiple and profound cultural impacts. Golden demonstrates how cheap postage--which was quickly adopted in other countries--led to a postal "network" that can be viewed as a forerunner of computer-mediated communications. Indeed, the revolution in letter writing of the nineteenth century led to blackmail, frauds, unsolicited mass mailings, and junk mail--problems that remain with us today.

DIVLong before the invention of printing, let alone the availability of a daily newspaper, people desired to be informed. In the pre-industrial era news was gathered and shared through conversation and gossip, civic ceremony, celebration, sermons, and proclamations. The age of print brought pamphlets, edicts, ballads, journals, and the first news-sheets, expanding the news community from local to worldwide. This groundbreaking book tracks the history of news in ten countries over the course of four centuries. It evaluates the unexpected variety of ways in which information was transmitted in the premodern world as well as the impact of expanding news media on contemporary events and the lives of an ever-more-informed public. Andrew Pettegree investigates who controlled the news and who reported it; the use of news as a tool of political protest and religious reform; issues of privacy and titillation; the persistent need for news to be current and journalists trustworthy; and people’s changed sense of themselves as they experienced newly opened windows on the world. By the close of the eighteenth century, Pettegree concludes, transmission of news had become so efficient and widespread that European citizens—now aware of wars, revolutions, crime, disasters, scandals, and other events—were poised to emerge as actors in the great events unfolding around them./div

With readings of novels by Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Henry James, and others, this work explores the relationship between illicit sex and the postal service in Victorian Britain.

By 1840, the epistolary novel was dead. Letters in Victorian fiction, however, were unmistakably alive. Postal Plots explores how Victorian postal reforms unleashed a new and sometimes unruly population into the Victorian literary marketplace where they threatened the definition and development of the Victorian literary professional.

In 1714, king George I ushered in a remarkable 123-year period of energy that changed the face of Britain and ultimately had a profound effect on the modern era. The pioneers of modern capitalism, industry, democracy, literature, and even architecture flourished during this time and their innovations and influence spread throughout the British empire, including the United States. Now this rich cultural period in Britain is effectively surveyed and summarized for quick reference in a first-of-its-kind encyclopedia, which contains entries by British, Canadian, American, and Australian scholars specializing in everything from finance and the fine arts to politics and patent law. More than 380 illustrations, mostly rare engravings, enhance the coverage, which runs the whole gamut of political, economic, literary, intellectual, artistic, commercial, and social life, and spotlights some 600 prominent individuals and families.