CHAPTER I

SIR ROWLAND HILL

COBDEN AS A CITIZEN

A Chapter in Manchester History. Containing a facsimile of Cobden's

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THE LIFE OF RICHARD COBDEN

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LONDON: T. FISHER UNWIN.

[Illustration: SIR ROWLAND HILL, K.C.B., D.C.L., F.R.S., F.R.A.S.

_By permission of Messrs. De La Rue._]

SIR ROWLAND HILL

THE STORY OF A GREAT REFORM

TOLD BY HIS DAUGHTER

[Illustration: FACSIMILE OF THE

ORIGINAL SKETCH FOR

THE POSTAGE STAMP]

LONDON

T. FISHER UNWIN

ADELPHI TERRACE

MCMVII

[_All rights reserved._]

IN LOVING MEMORY OF

ROWLAND HILL AND CAROLINE PEARSON

(Born December 3, 1795, (Born November 25, 1796,

Died August 27, 1879) Died May 27, 1881)

THIS BOOK IS WRITTEN

BY

THEIR LAST REMAINING IMMEDIATE DESCENDANT

ELEANOR C. SMYTH

“A fond desire to preserve the memory of those we love from

oblivion is an almost universal sentiment.”

—(Lord Dufferin on his mother—_Songs, Poems, and

Verses_. By HELEN, LADY DUFFERIN.)

“Reform does not spell ruin, lads—remember Rowland Hill!”

—(_Punch_ on the Postal Reform Jubilee, 1890.)

PREFACE

In Gladstone's “'musings for the good of man,'” writes John Morley

in his Life of the dead statesman (ii. 56, 57), the “Liberation of

Intercourse, to borrow his own larger name for Free Trade, figured

in his mind's eye as one of the promoting conditions of abundant

employment.... He recalled the days when our predecessors thought

it must be for man's good to have 'most of the avenues by which

the mind and also the hand of man conveyed and exchanged their

respective products' blocked or narrowed by regulation and taxation.

Dissemination of news, travelling, letters, transit of goods, were

all made as costly and difficult as the legislation could make them.

'I rank,' he said, 'the introduction of cheap postage for letters,

documents, patterns, and printed matter, and the abolition of all

taxes on printed matter, in the catalogue of free legislation. These

great measures may well take their place beside the abolition of

prohibitions and protective duties, the simplifying of revenue laws,

and the repeal of the Navigation Act, as forming together the great

code of industrial emancipation.'” To the above the biographer adds

that in Gladstone's article in the _Nineteenth Century_ on Free Trade,

Railways, and Commerce, he divided the credit of our material progress

between the two great factors, the Liberation of Intercourse and the

Improvement of Locomotion.

In view of the occasional attempts to revive the pernicious franking

privilege, and of the frequently recurring warfare between Free Trade

and the rival system, whose epitaph we owe to Disraeli, but whose

unquiet spirit apparently declines to rest within its tomb, the

present seems a fitting time to write the story of the old reform

to which Gladstone alluded—“the introduction of cheap postage for

letters,” etc., the narrative being prefaced by a notice of the

reformer, his family, and some of his friends who are not mentioned in

later pages.

My cousin, Dr Birkbeck Hill's “Life of Sir Rowland Hill and History

of Penny Postage” is an elaborate work, and therefore valuable as

a source of information to be drawn upon by any future historian

of that reform and of the period, now so far removed from our own,

which the reformer's long life covered. Before Dr Hill's death he

gave me permission to take from his pages such material as I cared

to incorporate with my own shorter, more anecdotal story. This has

been done, but my narrative also contains much that has not appeared

elsewhere, because, as the one of my father's children most intimately

associated with his home life, unto me were given opportunities of

acquiring knowledge which were not accessible to my cousin.

Before my brother, Mr Pearson Hill, died, he read through the greater

portion of my work; and although since then much has been remodelled,

omitted, and added, the narrative ought to be substantially correct.

He supplied sundry details, and more than one anecdote, and is

responsible for the story of Lord Canning's curious revelation which

has appeared in no previous work. In all that my brother wrote his

actual words have been, as far as possible, retained. The tribute to

his memory in the first chapter on the Post Office was written after

his decease.

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

PREFACE ix

INTRODUCTORY 1

I. THE OLD POSTAL SYSTEM 39

II. SOME EARLY POSTAL REFORMERS 70

III. THE PLAN 92

IV. EXIT THE OLD SYSTEM 119

V. AT THE TREASURY 148

VI. THE STAMPS 185

VII. AT THE POST OFFICE 211

VIII. AT THE POST OFFICE (_Continued_) 245

IX. THE SUNSET OF LIFE 286

APPENDIX—RESULTS OF POSTAL REFORM 306

INDEX 311

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SIR ROWLAND HILL (_Portrait by Rajon_) _Frontispiece_

FIRST SKETCH OF POSTAGE STAMP _Title-page_

ROWLAND HILL'S BIRTHPLACE, KIDDERMINSTER 7

BRUCE CASTLE SCHOOL 15

THOMAS WRIGHT HILL 17

JOSEPH PEARSON (_Bust by Chantrey_) 26

SIR ROWLAND HILL (_Photo by the London Stereoscopic Co._) 49

FACSIMILE OF ROWLAND HILL'S WRITING 97

NO. 2 BURTON CRESCENT 109

CAROLINE PEARSON, LADY HILL 141

NO. 1 ORME SQUARE 149

AN OLD POST OFFICE 157

THE MULREADY ENVELOPE 205

SIR ROWLAND HILL (_Photo by Maull & Polyblank_) 209

EARLY TRAVELLING POST OFFICE WITH MAIL-BAGS EXCHANGE APPARATUS 240

PEARSON HILL 244

SIR ROWLAND HILL (_“Graphic” portrait_) 286

THE STATUE, KIDDERMINSTER 301

INTRODUCTORY

The earliest of the postal reformer's forefathers to achieve fame

that outlives him was Sir Rowland Hill, mercer, and Lord Mayor

of London in 1549, a native of Hodnet, Shropshire, who founded a

Grammar School at Drayton, benefited the London Blue Coat School,

was a builder of bridges, and is mentioned by John Stowe. From his

brother are descended the three Rowland Hills famous in more modern

times—the preacher, the warrior, and the author of Penny Postage.

Some of the preacher's witticisms are still remembered, though they

are often attributed to his brother cleric, Sydney Smith; Napier, in

his “Peninsular War,” speaks very highly of the warrior, who, had

Wellington fallen at Waterloo, would have taken the Duke's place, and

who succeeded him as Commander-in-Chief when, in 1828, Wellington

became Prime Minister. A later common ancestor of the three, a landed

proprietor, married twice, and the first wife's children were thrown

upon the world to fight their way as best as they could, my paternal

grandfather's great-grandfather being one of the dispossessed. But

even the blackest cloud has its silver lining; and the fall, by

teaching the young people self-help, probably brought out the latent

good stuff that was in them. At any rate, family tradition preserves

memory of not a few men and women—Hills, or of the stocks with which

they married—of whom their descendants have reason to be proud.

There was, for example, John Hill, who served among “the twelve

good men and true” on a certain trial, was the only one of them

who declined to accept a bribe, and, the fact becoming known, was

handsomely complimented by the presiding judge. Thenceforth, whenever

the Assizes in that part of the country came round again, John used

to be asked after as “the honest juror.” At least two of my father's

forebears, a Symonds and a Hill, refused to cast their political votes

to order, and were punished for their sturdy independence. The one

lived to see a hospital erected in Shrewsbury out of the large fortune

for some two hundred years ago of £30,000 which should have come to

his wife, the testator's sister; the other, a baker and corn merchant,

son to “the honest juror,” saw his supply of fuel required to bake his

bread cut off by the local squire, a candidate for Parliament, for

whom the worthy baker had dared to refuse to vote. Ovens then were

heated by wood, which in this case came from the squire's estate. When

next James Hill made the usual application, the faggots were not to be

had. He was not discouraged. Wood, he reflected, was dear; coal—much

seldomer used then than now—was cheap. He mixed the two, and found the

plan succeed, lessened the proportion of wood, and finally dispensed

with it altogether. His example was followed by other people: the

demand for the squire's firewood languished, and the boycotted voter

was presently requested to purchase afresh. “An instance,” says Dr

Birkbeck Hill, “of a new kind of faggot vote.”

Another son of “the honest juror” was the first person to grow

potatoes in Kidderminster. Some two centuries earlier “the useful

tuber” was brought to England; but even in times much nearer our

own, so slowly did information travel, that till about 1750 the only

denizen of that town who seems to have known of its existence was

this second John Hill. When the seeds he sowed came up, blossomed,

and turned to berries, these last were cooked and brought to table.

Happily no one could eat them; and so the finger of scorn was pointed

at the luckless innovator. The plants withered unheeded; but later,

the ground being wanted for other crops, was dug up, when, to the

amazement of all beholders and hearers, a plentiful supply of fine

potatoes was revealed.

On the spindle side also Rowland Hill's family could boast ancestors

of whom none need feel ashamed. Among these was the high-spirited,

well-dowered orphan girl who, like Clarissa Harlowe, fled from home

to escape wedlock with the detested suitor her guardians sought

to force upon her. But, unlike Richardson's hapless heroine, this

fugitive lived into middle age, maintained herself by her own

handiwork—spinning—never sought even to recover her lost fortune,

married, left descendants, and fatally risked her life while preparing

for burial the pestilence-smitten neighbour whose poor remains his

own craven relatives had abandoned. Though she perished untimely,

recollection of her married name was preserved to reappear in that

of a great-grandson, Matthew _Davenport_ Hill. The husband of Mrs

Davenport's only daughter, William Lea, was a man little swayed by the

superstitions of his time, as he showed when he broke through a mob of

ignorant boors engaged in hounding into a pond a terrified old woman

they declared to be a witch, strode into the water, lifted her in his

arms, and, heedless of hostile demonstration, bore her to his own home

to be nursed back into such strength and sanity as were recoverable.

A son of William Lea, during the dreadful cholera visitation of 1832,

played, as Provost of Haddington, a part as fearlessly unselfish as

that of his grandmother in earlier days, but without losing his life,

for his days were long in the land. His sister was Rowland Hill's

mother.

On both sides the stocks seem to have been of stern Puritan

extraction, theologically narrow, inflexibly honest, terribly

in earnest, of healthy life, fine physique—nonagenarians not

infrequently. John Symonds, son to him whose wife forfeited succession

to her brother, Mr Millington's fortune, because both men were

sturdily obstinate in the matter of political creed, was, though a

layman, great at extempore prayer and sermon-making. When any young

man came a-wooing to one of his bonnie daughters, the father would

take the suitor to an inner sanctum, there to be tested as to his

ability to get through the like devotional exercises. If the young man

failed to come up to the requisite standard he was dismissed, and the

damsel reserved for some more proficient rival—James Hill being one of

the latter sort. How many suitors of the present day would creditably

emerge from that ordeal?

Through this sturdy old Puritan we claim kinship with the

Somersetshire family, of whom John Addington Symonds was one,

and therefore with the Stracheys; while from other sources comes

a collateral descent from “Hudibras” Butler, who seems to have

endowed with some of his own genuine wit certain later Hills; as

also a relationship with that line of distinguished medical men, the

Mackenzies, and with the Rev. Morell Mackenzie, who played a hero's

part at the long-ago wreck of the _Pegasus_.

A neighbour of James Hill was a recluse, who, perhaps, not finding

the society of a small provincial town so companionable as the books

he loved, forbore “to herd with narrow foreheads,” but made of

James a congenial friend. When this man died, the task fell to his

executors, James Hill and another, to divide his modest estate. Among

the few bequests were two books to young Tom, James's son, a boy

with a passion for reading, but possessed of few books, one being a

much-mutilated copy of “Robinson Crusoe,” which tantalisingly began

with the thrilling words, “more than thirty dancing round a fire.”

The fellow executor, knowing well the reputation for uncanny ways

with which local gossip had endowed the deceased, earnestly advised

his colleague to destroy the volumes, and not permit them to sully

young Tom's mind. “Oh, let the boy have the books,” said James Hill,

and straightway the legacy was placed in the youthful hands. It

consisted of a “Manual of Geography” and Euclid's “Elements.” The

effect of their perusal was not to send the reader to perdition, but

to call forth an innate love for mathematics, and, through them, a

lifelong devotion to astronomy, tastes he was destined to pass on in

undiminished ardour to his third son, the postal reformer.

Thomas Wright Hill was brought up in the straitest-laced of Puritan

sects, and he has left a graphic description of the mode in which,

as a small boy of seven, he passed each Sunday. The windows of the

house, darkened by their closed outside shutters, made mirrors in

which he saw his melancholy little face reflected; his toys were

put away; there were three chapel services, occupying in all some

five and a half hours, to which he was taken, and the intervals

between each were filled by long extempore prayers and sermon-reading

at home, all week-day conversation being rigidly ruled out. The

sabbatical observance commenced on Saturday night and terminated on

Sunday evening with “a cheerful supper,” as though literally “the

evening and the morning were the first day”—an arrangement which,

coupled with the habit of bestowing not Christian but Hebrew names

upon the children, gives colour to the oft-made allegation that our

Puritan ancestors drew their inspiration from the Old rather than

from the New Testament. The only portion of these Sunday theological

exercises which the poor little fellow really understood was the

simple Bible teaching that the tenderly-loved mother gave to him and

to his younger brother. While as a young man residing in Birmingham,

however, he passed under the influence of Priestley, and became one

of his most devoted disciples, several of whom, at the time of the

disgraceful “Church and King” riots of 1791, volunteered to defend

the learned doctor's house.[1] But Priestley declined all defence,

and the volunteers retired, leaving only young Tom, who would not

desert his beloved master's threatened dwelling. The Priestley family

had found refuge elsewhere, but his disciple stayed alone in the

twilight of the barred and shuttered house, which speedily fell a prey

to its assailants. Our grandfather used often to tell us children

of the events of those terrible days when the mob held the town at

their mercy, and were seriously opposed only when, having destroyed

so much property belonging to Nonconformity, they next turned their

tireless energy towards Conformity's possessions. His affianced wife

was as courageous as he, for when while driving in a friend's carriage

through Birmingham's streets some of the rioters stopped the horses,

and bade her utter the cry “Church and King,” she refused, and was

suffered to pass on unmolested. Was it her bravery or her comeliness,

or both, that won for her immunity from harm?

[Illustration:

By permission of the Proprietors of the “_Illustrated London

News_.”

ROWLAND HILL'S BIRTHPLACE, KIDDERMINSTER.]

The third son of this young couple, Rowland, the future postal

reformer, first saw the light in a house at Kidderminster wherein

his father was born, which had already sheltered some generations

of Hills, and whose garden was the scene of the potato story. The

child was weakly, and, being threatened with spinal trouble, passed

much of his infancy in a recumbent position. But the fragile form

held a dauntless little soul, and the almost abnormally large brain

behind the too pallid forehead was a very active one. As he lay prone,

playing with the toys his mother suspended to a cord stretched within

easy reach above him; and, later, working out mental arithmetical

problems, in which exercise he found delight, and to the weaving of

alluring daydreams, he presently fell to longing for some career—what

it should be he knew not—that should leave his country the better

for his having lived in it. The thoughts of boys are often, the poet

tells us, “long, long thoughts,” but it is not given to every one to

see those daydreams realised. Though what is boy (or girl) worth who

has not at times entertained healthily ambitious longings for a great

future?

As he grew stronger he presently came to help his father in the school

the latter had established at Birmingham, in which his two elder

brothers, aged fifteen and fourteen, were already at work. The family

was far from affluent, and its young members were well aware that on

their own exertions depended their future success. For them there was

no royal road to learning or to anything else; and even as children

they learned to be self-reliant. From the age of twelve onwards, my

father, indeed, was self-supporting. Like Chaucer's poor parson, the

young Hill brothers learned while they taught, even sometimes while on

their way to give a lesson, as did my father when on a several miles

long walk to teach an equally ignorant boy the art of Navigation;

and perhaps because life had to be taken so seriously, they valued

the hardly-acquired knowledge all the more highly. Their father early

accustomed his children to discuss with him and with each other the

questions of the time—a time which must always loom large in the

history of our land. Though he mingled in the talk, “it was,” my Uncle

Matthew said, “a match of mind against mind, in which the rules of

fair play were duly observed; and we put forth our little strength

without fear. The sword of authority was not thrown into the scale....

We were,” added the writer, “born to a burning hatred of tyranny.”[2]

And no wonder, for in the early years of the last century tyranny was

a living, active force.

If, to quote Blackstone, “punishment of unreasonable severity”

with a view to “preventing crimes and amending the manners of a

people” constitute a specific form of tyranny, the fact that in

1795, the year of Rowland Hill's birth, the pillory, the stocks,

and the whipping-post were still in use sufficiently attests this

“unreasonable severity.” In March 1789, less than seven years before

his birth, a yet more terrible punishment was still in force. A

woman—the last thus “judicially murdered”—was burnt at the stake; and

a writer in _Notes and Queries_, of 21st September 1851, tells its

readers that he was present on the occasion. Her offence was coining,

and she was mercifully strangled before being executed. Women were

burnt at the stake long after that awful death penalty was abolished

in the case of the more favoured sex. The savage cruelty of the

criminal code at this time and later is also indicated by the fact

that over 150 offences were punishable by death. Even in 1822, a date

within the recollection of persons still living, and notwithstanding

the efforts made by Sir Samuel Romilly and others to humanise that

code, capital punishment was still terribly common. In that year,

on two consecutive Monday mornings, my father, arriving by coach

in London from Birmingham, passed within sight of Newgate. Outside

its walls, on the first occasion, the horrified passengers counted

nineteen bodies hanging in a row; on the second, twenty-one.

During my father's childhood and youth this country was almost

constantly engaged in war. Within half a mile of my grandfather's

house the forging of gun barrels went on all but incessantly, the

work beginning before dawn and lasting till long after nightfall. The

scarcely-ending din of the hammers was varied only by the occasional

rattle from the proof shed; and the shocks and jars had disastrous

effect upon my grandmother's brewings of beer. Meanwhile “The Great

Shadow,” graphically depicted by Sir A. Conan Doyle, was an actual

dread that darkened our land for years. And the shadow of press-gang

raids was a yet greater dread alike to the men who encountered them,

sometimes to disappear for ever, and to the women who were frequently

bereft of their bread-winners. It is, however, pleasant to remember

that sometimes the would-be captors became the captured. A merchant

vessel lying in quarantine in Southampton Water, her yellow flag

duly displayed, but hanging in the calm weather so limply that it was

hardly observable, was boarded by a press-gang who thought to do a

clever thing by impressing some of the sailors. These, seeing what

was the invaders' errand, let them come peaceably on deck, when the

quarantine officer took possession of boat and gang, and detained both

for six weeks.

For those whose means were small—a numerous class at that time—there

was scant patronage of public conveyances, such as they were. Thus the

young Hill brothers had to depend on their own walking powers when

minded to visit the world that lay beyond their narrow horizon. And to

walking tours, often of great length, they were much given in holiday

time, tours which took them to distant places of historic interest, of

which Rowland brought back memorials in his sketch book. Beautiful,

indeed, were the then green lanes of the Midlands, though here and

there they were disfigured by the presence of some lonely gibbet,

the chains holding its dismal “fruit” clanking mournfully in windy

weather. Whenever it was possible, the wayfarer made a round to avoid

passing the gruesome object.

One part of the country, lying between Birmingham and Wolverhampton,

a lonely heath long since covered with factories and houses, known

as the “Lie Waste,” was also not pleasant to traverse, though the

lads occasionally had to do so. A small collection of huts of

mud-and-wattle construction sheltered some of our native savages—for

they were nothing else—whose like has happily long been “improved off

the face” of the land. These uncouth beings habitually and literally

went “on all fours.” Whether the attitude was assumed in consequence

of the low roofs of their dwellings, or the outcasts chose that mode

of progression in imitation of the animals which were their ordinary

companions, history does not say, but they moved with wonderful

celerity both in and out of doors. At sight of any passer-by they

were apt to “rear,” and then oaths, obscene language, and missiles of

whatever sort was handy would be their mildest greeting, while more

formidable attack was likely to be the lot of those who ventured too

near their lairs. Among these people the Hill boys often noticed a

remarkably handsome girl, as great a savage as the rest.

As the three elder brothers grew well into their teens, much of

the school government fell to their lot, always with the parental

sanction, and ere long it was changed in character, and became

a miniature republic.[3] Trial by jury for serious offences was

instituted, the judge being my grandfather or one of his sons, and the

jury the culprit's fellow-pupils. Corporal punishment, then perhaps

universal in schools, was abolished, and the lads, being treated as

reasonable creatures, early learned to be a self-respecting because a

self-governing community. The system, which in this restricted space

cannot be described in detail, was pre-eminently a success, since it

turned out pupils who did it and themselves credit. “All the good I

ever learned was learned at Hazelwood,” I once heard say a cheery old

clergy-man, probably one of the last surviving “boys.” The teaching

was efficiently carried on, and the development of individual talent

was wisely encouraged, the pupils out of school hours being allowed to

exercise the vocation to which each was inclined, or which, owing to

this practice, was discovered in each. Thus in boyhood Follet Osler,

the inventor of the anemometer and other scientific instruments, was

enabled to bring to light those mechanical abilities which, till he

exhibited their promise during his hours of voluntary work, were

unsuspected even by his nearest of kin. Again, Thomas Creswick, R.A.,

found an outlet for his love of art in drawing, though, being a very

little fellow when he began, some of these studies—of public buildings

in Birmingham—were very funny, the perspective generally having the

“Anglo-Saxon” peculiarities, and each edifice being afflicted with

a “list” out of the perpendicular as pronounced as that of Pisa's

leaning tower—or nearly so.

The fame of the “Hazelwood system” spread afar, and many of our then

most distinguished fellow-countrymen visited the school. Among the

rest, Bentham gave it his hearty approval; and Captain Basil Hall, the

writer of once popular books for boys, spoke of the evident existence

of friendly terms between masters and pupils, declared the system to

be “a curious epitome of real life,” and added that the boys were not

converted into little men, but remained boys, only with heads and

hands fully employed on topics they liked.

Visitors also came from foreign lands. Bernadotte's son, Prince

Oscar, afterwards first king of Sweden of that name, travelled to

Hazelwood, examined the novel system, and, later, established at

Stockholm a “Hillska Scola.” From France, among other people, came M.

Jullien, once secretary to Robespierre—what thrilling tales of the

Great Revolution must he not have been able to tell!—and afterwards

a wise philanthropist and eminent writer on education. He sent a son

to Hazelwood. President Jefferson, when organising the University

of Virginia, asked for a copy of “Public Education,”[4] the work

describing the system and the joint production of Rowland, who found

the ideas, Matthew, who supplied the composition, and, as regards a

few suggestions, of a younger brother, Arthur. Greece, Spain, far-off

Mexico even, in course of time sent pupils either to Hazelwood or to

Bruce Castle, Tottenham, to which then picturesque and somewhat remote

London suburb the school was ultimately transferred. “His Excellency,

the Tripolitan Ambassador,” wrote my father in his diary of 1823, “has

informed us that he has sent to Tripoli for six young Africans; and

the Algerine Ambassador, not to be outdone by his piratical brother,

has sent for a dozen from Algiers.”[5] Happily, neither contingent

put in an appearance. In both cases the enthusiasm evoked seems to

have been short-lived.

[Illustration:

By permission of Messrs. De La Rue.

BRUCE CASTLE SCHOOL, TOTTENHAM.]

An old Hazelwood pupil, Mr E. Edwards, in his written sketch of “Sir

Rowland Hill,” said of the school that no similar establishment “in

the world, probably at that time, contained such an array of costly

models, instruments, apparatus, and books. There was an observatory

upon the top of the house fitted with powerful astronomical

instruments. The best microscopes obtainable were at hand. Models

of steam and other engines were all over the place. Air-pumps and

electrical machines were familiar objects. Maps, then comparatively

rare, lined the walls. Drawing and mathematical instruments were

provided in profusion. Etching was taught, and a copper press was

there for printing the pupils' efforts in that way. A lithographic

press and stones of various sizes were provided, so that the young

artists might print copies of their drawings to send to their admiring

relatives. Finally, a complete printing press with ample founts of

type was set up to enable the boys themselves to print a monthly

magazine connected with the school and its doings.” Other attractions

were a well fitted-up carpenter's shop; a band, the musicians being

the pupils; the training of the boys in vocal music; a theatre in

which the manager, elocution teacher, scene painter, etc., were

the young Hill brothers, the _costumière_ their sister Caroline,

and the actors the pupils; the control of a sum of money for school

purposes; and the use of a metallic coinage received as payment for

the voluntary work already mentioned, and by which certain privileges

could be purchased.[6]

My grandfather inspired his sons and pupils with a longing to acquire

knowledge, at the same time so completely winning their hearts by

his good comradeship, that they readily joined him in the long and

frequent walks of which he was fond, and in the course of which his

walking stick was wont to serve to make rough drawings of problems,

etc., in road or pathway. “His mathematical explanations,” wrote

another old pupil in the “Essays of a Birmingham Manufacturer” (W. L.

Sargent), “were very clear; and he looked at the bearings of every

subject irrespective of its conventionalities. His definition of a

straight line has been said to be the best in existence.”[7]

[Illustration:

By permission of Messrs. Thos. De La Rue.

THOMAS WRIGHT HILL.]

In my father's “Life,” Dr Birkbeck Hill, when writing of his

recollections of our grandfather, said that it seemed “as if the

aged man were always seated in perpetual sunshine. How much of

the brightness and warmth must have come from his own cheerful

temperament?... His Sunday morning breakfasts live in the memory

like a landscape of Claude's.” At these entertainments the old man

would sit in his easy-chair, at the head of the largest table the

house could boast, in a circle of small, adoring grandchildren, the

intervening, severe generation being absent; and of all the joyous

crowd his perhaps was the youngest heart. There were other feasts,

those of reason and the flow of soul, with which he also delighted

his young descendants: stories of the long struggle in the revolted

“American Colonies,” of the Great French Revolution, and of other

interesting historical dramas which he could well remember, and

equally well describe.

His old pupils would come long distances to see him; and on one

occasion several of them subscribed to present him with a large

telescope, bearing on it a graven tribute of their affectionate

regard. This greatly prized gift was in use till within a short time

of his last illness.

Young Rowland had a strong bent towards art, as he showed when, at

the age of thirteen, he won the prize, a handsome box of water-colour

paints, offered by the proprietor of the _London School Magazine_ for

“the best original landscape drawing by the youth of all England,

under the age of sixteen.” He painted the scenery for the school

theatre, and made many water-colour sketches in different parts of

our island, his style much resembling that of David Cox. He was an

admirer of Turner long before Ruskin “discovered” that great painter;

and, as his diary shows, marvelled at the wondrous rendering of

atmospheric effects exhibited in his idol's pictures. Nearly all my

father's scenery and sketches perished in a fire which partially burnt

down Hazelwood School; and few are now in existence. After the age

of seventeen he gave up painting, being far too busy to devote time

to art, but he remained a picture-lover to the end of his days. Once

during the long war with France he had an adventure which might have

proved serious. He was sketching Dover Castle, when a soldier came

out of the fortress and told him to cease work. Not liking the man's

manner, the youthful artist went on painting unconcernedly. Presently

a file of soldiers, headed by a corporal, appeared, and he was

peremptorily ordered to withdraw. Then the reason for the interference

was revealed: he was taken for a spy. My father at once laid aside his

brush; he had no wish to be shot.

In 1835 Rowland Hill resigned to a younger brother, Arthur,[8] the

head-mastership of Bruce Castle School, and accepted the post of

secretary to the Colonisation Commissioners for South Australia,

whose chairman was Colonel Torrens.[9] Another commissioner was John

Shaw Lefevre, later a famous speaker of the House of Commons, who, as

Lord Eversley, lived to a patriarchal age. But the prime mover in the

scheme for colonising this portion of the “Island Continent” was that

public-spirited man, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. William IV. took much

interest in the project, and stipulated that the chief city should

bear the name of his consort—Adelaide.

The Commissioners were capable men, and were ably assisted by

the South Australian Company, which much about the same time was

started mainly through the exertions of Mr G. F. Angas. Among the

many excellent rules laid down by the Commissioners was one which

insisted on the making of a regular and efficient survey both of

the emigrant ships and of the food they carried. As sailing vessels

were then the only transports, the voyage lasted several months, and

the comfort of the passengers was of no small importance. “When,”

said my father in his diary, “defects and blemishes were brought to

light by the accuracy of the survey, and the stipulated consequences

enforced, an outcry arose as if the connection between promise and

performance were an unheard-of and most unwarrantable innovation.

After a time, however, as our practice became recognised, evasive

attempts grew rare, the first expense being found to be the least.”

He often visited the port of departure, and witnessed the shipping

off of the emigrants—always an interesting occasion, and one which

gave opportunities of personal supervision of matters. Being once at

Plymouth, my mother and he boarded a vessel about to sail for the new

colony. Among the passengers was a bright young Devonian, apparently

an agriculturist; and my father, observing him, said to my mother:

“I feel sure that man will do well.” The remark was overheard, but

the Devonian made no sign. He went to Australia poor, and returned

wealthy, bought an estate close to his birth-place which was in the

market, and there settled. But before sailing hither, he bought at one

of the Adelaide banks the finest one of several gold nuggets there

displayed, and, armed with this, presented himself at my father's

house, placed his gift in my mother's hand, and told how the casual

remark made forty years before had helped to spur him on to success.

The story of Rowland Hill and a mysteriously vanished rotatory

printing press may be told here.

In 1790 Mr William Nicholson devised a scheme for applying to ordinary

type printing the already established process of printing calico by

revolving cylinders. The impressions were to be taken from his press

upon successive sheets of paper, as no means of producing continuous

rolls had as yet been invented; but the machine worked far from

satisfactorily, and practically came to nothing. A quarter of a

century later Mr Edward Cowper applied Nicholson's idea to stereotype

plates bent to a cylindrical surface. But till the advent of “Hill's

machine” (described at the Patent Office as “A.D. 1835, No. 6762”)

all plans for fixing movable types on a cylinder had failed. It is

therefore incontestable that the first practical scheme of printing on

a continuous roll of paper by revolving cylinders was invented and set

to work by Rowland Hill in the year named. The machine was intended

mainly for the rapid printing of newspapers, but the refusal of the

Treasury to allow an arrangement by which the Government stamp could

be affixed by an ingenious mechanical device as the scroll passed

through the press—a refusal withdrawn later—deferred for many years

the introduction of any rotatory printing machine.

The apparatus was kept at my Uncle Matthew's chambers in Chancery

Lane, and was often shown to members of the trade and others. Although

driven by hand only, it threw off impressions at the rate of 7,000 or

8,000 an hour, a much higher speed than that hitherto attained by any

other machine. But from 1836 onwards my father's attention was almost

wholly taken up with his postal reform, and it was only after his

retirement from the Post Office in 1864 that his mind reverted to the

subject of the printing press. Several years before the latter date

his brother had left London; but of the rotatory printing machine,

bulky and ponderous as it was, a few small odds and ends—afterwards

exhibited at the Caxton Exhibition in 1877—alone remained.

In 1866 the once well-known “Walter Press” was first used in the

_Times_ office. Of this machine my father has said that “except as

regards the apparatus for cutting and distributing the printed sheets,

and excepting further that the 'Walter Press' (entered at the Patent

Office as “A.D. 1866, No. 3222”) is only adapted for printing from

stereotype plates, while mine would not only print from stereotype

plates, but, what is more difficult, from movable types also, the two

machines are almost identical.” He added that “the enormous difficulty

of bringing a complex machine into practical use—a difficulty familiar

to every inventor—has been most successfully overcome by Messrs

Calverley and Macdonald, the patentees.”

By whom and through what agency the machine patented in 1835 was

apparently transported from Chancery Lane to Printing House Square is

a mystery which at this distant date is hardly likely to be made clear.

It has always been a tradition in our family that the courtship

between Rowland Hill and Caroline Pearson began when their united

ages amounted to eleven years only, the boy being by twelve months the

elder. The families on both sides lived at the time at Wolverhampton,

and the first kiss is said to have been exchanged inside a large

culvert which crossed beneath the Tettenhall Road in the neighbourhood

of the Hills' house, and served to conduct a tiny rivulet, apt in

wet weather to become a swollen stream, into its chosen channel

on the other side the way. The boy delighted to creep within this

shelter—often dry in summer—and listen to the rumbling overhead of

the passing vehicles. Noisy, ponderous wains some of these were,

with wheels of great width and strength, and other timbers in like

proportion; but to the small listener the noisier the more enjoyable.

These wains have long vanished from the roads they helped to wear

out, the railway goods trains having superseded them, although of

late years the heavy traction engines, often drawing large trucks

after them, seem likely to occupy the place filled by their forgotten

predecessors. Little Rowland naturally wished to share the enchanting

treat with “Car,” as he generally called his new friend, and hand in

hand the “wee things” set off one day to the Tettenhall Road. Many

years later the elderly husband made a sentimental journey to the

spot, and was amazed at the culvert's apparent shrinkage in size.

Surely, a most prosaic spot for the beginning of a courtship!

The father of this little girl was Joseph Pearson, a man held in such

high esteem by his fellow-citizens that after the passing of the great

Reform Bill in 1832 he was asked to become one of Wolverhampton's

first two members.[10] He was, however, too old for the wear and tear

of Parliamentary life, though when the General Election came on he

threw himself with all his accustomed zeal into the struggle, and was,

as a consequence, presently laid up with a temporary ailment, which

caused one of his political foes to declare that “If Mr Pearson's gout

would only last three weeks longer we might get our man in.” These

words coming to Mr Pearson's ears, he rose from his sick-bed, gout or

no gout, and plunged afresh into the fray, with so much energy that

“we” did _not_ “get our man in,” but the other side did.

“He was,” once said a many years old friend, “conspicuous for his

breadth of mind, kindness of heart, and public spirit.” He hated the

cruel sports common in his time, and sought unceasingly to put them

down. One day, while passing the local bull-ring, he saw a crowd of

rough miners and others preparing to bait a bull. He at once strode

into their midst, liberated the animal, pulled up or broke off the

stake, and carried it away on his shoulder. Was it his pluck, or his

widespread popularity that won the forbearance of the semi-savage

by-standers? At any rate, not a hostile finger was laid upon him.

Meanwhile, he remembered that if brutalising pastimes are put down,

it is but right that better things should be set in their place. Thus

the local Mechanics' Institute, British Schools, Dispensary, and

other beneficent undertakings, including rational sports for every

class, owed their origin chiefly to him; and, aided by his friend John

Mander, and by the Rev. John Carter, a poor, hard-working Catholic

priest, he founded the Wolverhampton Free Library.

Joseph Pearson was one of the most hospitable and genial of men,

and, for his time, a person of some culture. He detested cliques and

coteries, those paralysing products of small provincial towns, and

would have naught to do with them. Men of great variety of views

met round his dinner-table, and whenever it seemed necessary he

would preface the repast with the request that theology and politics

should be avoided. With his Catholic neighbours—Staffordshire was a

stronghold of the “Old Religion”—the sturdy Nonconformist was on the

happiest of terms, and to listen to the conversation of the often

well-travelled, well-educated priests was to him a never-failing

pleasure. For Catholic Emancipation he strove heartily and long. With

all sects he was friendly, but chiefly his heart went out to those who

in any way had suffered for their faith. One effect of this then not

too common breadth of view was seen when, after his death, men of all

denominations followed him to his grave, and the handsomest of the

several journalistic tributes to his memory appeared in the columns

of his inveterate political and theological opponent, the local Tory

paper. A ward in the Hospital and a street were called after the

whilom “king of Wolverhampton.”[11]

[Illustration:

_From a Photograph by Messrs. Whiteley & Co._

_The bust was the last work of Sir Francis Chantry._

JOSEPH PEARSON.]

He had three daughters, of whom my mother was the eldest. His wife

died young, and before her sixteenth year Caroline became mistress

of his house, and thus acquired the ease of manner and knowledge of

social duties which made of her the charming hostess who, in later

years, presided over her husband's London house. She will make a brief

reappearance in other pages of this work.

Joseph Pearson's youngest daughter, Clara, was a beautiful girl,

a frequent “toast” at social gatherings in the three counties of

Stafford, Warwick, and Worcester—for toasts in honour of reigning

belles were still drunk at festivities in provincial Assembly Rooms

and elsewhere, what time the nineteenth century was in its teens.

When very young she became engaged to her cousin, Lieutenant

(afterwards Captain) Alexander Pearson, R.N., who at the time of

Napoleon's sojourn at St Helena was stationed there, being attached

to the man-of-war commanded by Admiral Plampin. One gift which

Lieutenant Pearson gave my aunt she kept to the end of her life—a lock

of Napoleon's hair. Lieutenant Pearson often saw the ex-Emperor, and,

many years after, described him to us children—how, for instance, he

would stand, silent and with folded arms, gazing long and fixedly

seaward as though waiting for the rescue which never came. The

lieutenant was one of the several young naval officers who worshipped

at the shrine of the somewhat hoydenish Miss “Betsy” Balcombe, who

comes into most stories of St. Helena of that time. Wholly unabashed

by consideration of the illustrious captive's former greatness, she

made of him a playmate—perhaps a willing one, for life must have

been terribly dreary to one whose occupation, like that of Othello,

was gone. Occasionally she shocked her hearers by addressing the

ex-Emperor as “Boney,” though it is possible that the appellation

so frequently heard in the mouths of his British enemies had no

osseous association in his own ears, but was accepted as an endearing

diminutive. One day, in the presence of several witnesses, our cousin

being among them, she possessed herself of a sword, flourished it

playfully before her, hemmed Napoleon into a corner, and, holding

the blade above his head, laughingly exclaimed: “Maintenant j'ai

vaincu le vanqueur du monde!” But there was no answering laugh; the

superstitious Corsican turned pale, made some short, unintelligible

reply, left the room, and was depressed and taciturn for the rest of

the day. It was surmised that he took the somewhat tactless jest for

an omen that a chief who had been beaten by a woman would never again

lead an army of men.

During Rowland Hill's prime, and until the final breakdown of his

health, our house was a favourite haunt of the more intimate of his

many clever friends. Scientific, medical, legal, artistic, literary,

and other prominent men met, exchanged views, indulged in deep talk,

bandied repartee, and told good stories at breakfast and dinner

parties; the economists mustering in force, and plainly testifying by

their bearing and conversation that, whatever ignorant people may say

of the science they never study, its professors are often the very

reverse of dismal. If Dr Southwood Smith[12] and Mr (later Sir Edwin)

Chadwick's talk at times ran gruesomely on details of “intramural

interment,” the former, at least, had much quaint humour, and was

deservedly popular; while Dr Neil Arnott, whose chief hobbies were

fabled to be those sadly prosaic things, stoves, water-beds, and

ventilation, but who was actually a distinguished physician, natural

philosopher, author, and traveller, was even, when long past sixty,

one of the gayest and youngest of our guests: a mimic, but never an

ill-natured one, a spinner of amusing yarns, and frankly idolised by

the juvenile members of the family whose minds he mercifully never

attempted to improve.

Charles Wentworth Dilke,[13] founder of the _Athenæum_ newspaper,

a famous journalist and influential man of letters, at whose house

one met every writer, to say nothing of other men and women, worth

knowing, was another charming old man, to listen to whose talk was a

liberal education. Did we walk with him on Hampstead Heath, where once

he had a country house, he became an animated guide-book guiltless of

a dull page, telling us of older times than our own, and of dead and

gone worthies who had been guests at “Wentworth House.” On this much

worn, initial-carven, wooden seat used often to sit Keats listening

to the nightingales, and, maybe, thinking of Fanny Brawne. At another

spot the weakly-framed poet had soundly thrashed a British rough

who was beating his wife. Across yonder footpath used to come from

Highgate “the archangel a little damaged,” as Charles Lamb called

Coleridge. At that road corner, in a previous century, were wont

to gather the visitors returning from the Well Walk “pump-room,”

chalybeate spring, and promenade, till they were in sufficient force

to be safe from highwaymen or footpads who frequented the then lonely

road to London. In a yet earlier century certain gallant Spanish

gentlemen attached to Philip and Mary's court, rescued some English

ladies from molestation by English ruffians; and memorials of this

episode live in the still traceable circle of trees whose predecessors

were planted by the grateful ladies, and in the name of the once

quaint old hostelry hard by, and of the road known as the Spaniards.

Another wanderer about Hampstead's hills and dales was the great

Thackeray, who was often accompanied by some of the family of Mr

Crowe, a former editor of the _Daily News_, and father to Eyre Crowe,

R.A., and Sir Joseph Archer Crowe. These wanderings seem to have

suggested a few of the names bestowed by Thackeray on the characters

in his novels, such as “Jack Belsize” and “Lord Highgate,” while the

title of “Marquess of Steyne” is reminiscent of another Thackerayan

haunt—“Dr” Brighton. Hampstead still better knew Dickens, who is

mentioned later in these pages. The two writers are often called

rivals; yet novels and men were wholly unlike. Each was a peerless

genius in his own line, and each adorned any company in which he

moved. Yet, while Dickens was the life and soul of every circle,

Thackeray—perhaps the only male novelist who could draw a woman

absolutely true to life[14]—always struck us as rather silent and

self-absorbed, like one who is studying the people around him with a

view to their reproduction in as yet unwritten pages. His six feet

of height and proportionate breadth, his wealth of grey hair, and

the spectacles he was said never to be seen without, made of him a

notable figure everywhere. Yet, however outwardly awe-inspiring, he

was the kindliest of satirists, the truest of friends, and has been

fitly described as “the man who had the heart of a woman.”[15] At the

Athenæum Club he was often seen writing by the hour together in some

quiet corner, evidently unconscious of his surroundings, at times

enjoying a voiceless laugh, or again, perhaps when telling of Colonel

Newcome's death, with “a moisture upon his cheek which was not dew.”

Another literary friend—we had many—was William Henry Wills, also

mentioned later: a kind friend to struggling authors, who did not a

little to start Miss Mulock on her career as authoress, and who made

her known to us. He once told us a curious story about an old uncle

with whom as a lad he used to stay in the days before the invasion of

the west country by railways with their tendency to modernisation of

out-of-the-way places. This ancient man lived in a large ancestral

mansion, and literally “dined in hall” with his entire household.

There was a sanded floor—formerly, no doubt, rush-strewn—and the

family and their “retainers” sat down together at a very long table

to the midday repast, the servants taking their place literally

“below the salt,” which was represented by a large bowl filled with

that necessary concomitant. In how many other country houses did

this mediæval custom last into the first third of the nineteenth

century?[16] Mrs Wills—only sister to the Chambers brothers, William

and Robert, who, together with our other publisher friend, Charles

Knight, did so much to cheapen the cost and in every way to raise

the tone of literature—was, in addition to possessing great charm of

manner, an admirable amateur actress, and an unrivalled singer of

Scottish songs.

Hampstead, midway in the nineteenth century, was still a picturesque

little town, possessed of several stately old houses—one known as Sir

Harry Vane's—whose gardens were in some cases entered through tall,

wide, iron gates of elaborate design which now would be accounted

priceless. It was still the resort of artists, many of whom visited

the pleasant house of Edwin Wilkins Field, conspicuous among the

public-spirited men who rescued from the builder-fiend the Heath, and

made of it a London “lung” and a joy for ever; himself a lawyer, the

inspirer of the Limited Liability Act, and an accomplished amateur

water-colour painter. His first wife was a niece of Rogers, the

banker-poet, famous for his breakfast parties and table talk. At Mr

Field's house we came first to know Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., the

famous sea-scape painter, and his family, who were musical as well as

artistic, and gave delightful parties. It was said that Stanfield was

familiar with the build and rig of a ship down to its minutest detail,

because he and his lifelong friend and fellow Royal Academician,

David Roberts, ran away from school together to sea at a time when

life on the ocean wave seemed to most boys the ideal existence.

To the last, Stanfield looked like an old sea-dog, and was bluff,

hearty and genial. Hampstead still remembers him with pride; and

“Stanfield House,” wherein the first really good local Free Library

was sheltered, is so called because for nearly twenty years it was his

dwelling.

At the Fields' house, among other celebrities, artistic, literary and

legal, we also met Turner; and it was to “Squire's Mount,” and at a

crowded evening party there that a characteristic anecdote of this

eccentric, gifted painter belongs. The taciturn, gloomy-looking guest

had taken an early farewell of host and hostess, and disappeared,

only to return some minutes later, wonderfully and fearfully

apparelled, and silently commence a search about the drawing-room.

Suddenly he seemed to recollect, approached a sofa on which sat three

handsomely-attired ladies, whose indignant countenances were a sight

for gods and men when the abruptly-mannered artist called on them to

rise. He then half dived beneath the seat, drew forth a dreadfully

shabby umbrella of the “Gamp” species, and, taking no more notice of

the irate three than if they had been so many chairs, withdrew—this

time for good. Turner had a hearty contempt for the Claude worship,

and was resolved to expose its hollowness. He bequeathed to the nation

two of his finest oil paintings on condition that they were placed

in the Trafalgar Square Gallery beside two of Claude's which already

hung there, and to this day act as foils. A custodian of the Gallery

once told me that he was present when Turner visited the room in which

were the two Claudes, took a foot-rule from his pocket and measured

their frames, doubtless in order that his own should be of like

dimensions.

Other artists whom we knew were Mulready, Cooke—as famous for his

splendid collection of old Venetian glass as for his pictures—Creswick

and Elmore; but much as Rowland Hill loved art, the men of science,

such as Airy, the Astronomer Royal; Smyth, the “Astronomical Admiral”;

Wheatstone, Lyell; Graham, the Master of the Mint; Sabine, the

Herschels, and others were to him the most congenial company. After

them were counted in his regard the medical men, philosophers and

economists, such as Harley, Coulson, Fergusson, the Clarkes, Sir Henry

Thompson—the last to die of his old friends—and Bentham, Robert Owen,

James and John Stuart Mill—these last four being among the earliest

great men he knew, and counting in some ways as his mentors.

Of his literary friends no two held a higher place in his esteem

than Maria Edgeworth and Harriet Martineau. Of the latter and of her

able, untiring help in promoting the cause of Penny Postage, mention

will appear later. The former, my father, and his brother Arthur, as

young men, visited at her Irish home, making the pilgrimage thither

which Scott and many other literary adorers had made or were destined

to make, one of the most interesting being that of Mrs. Richmond

Ritchie, Thackeray's daughter, of which she tells us in her editorial

preface to a recent edition of “Castle Rackrent.” The two brothers

had looked forward to meet a charming woman, but she exceeded their

expectations, and the visit remained in the memory of both as a

red-letter day.[17]

Among literary men, besides those already mentioned, or to be named

later, were Leigh Hunt, De Quincey—who when under the influence of

opium did the strangest things, being one day discovered by my father

and a friend hiding in some East End slum under the wholly erroneous

impression that “enemies” were seeking to molest him—Sir John Bowring,

Dr Roget, author of “The Thesaurus,” and the Kinglakes. “Eothen,” as

the writer of that once famous book of travels and of “The Invasion of

the Crimea,” was habitually called by his friends, was a delightful

talker; and his brother, the doctor, was equally gifted, if less

fluent, while his sister was declared by Thackeray to be the cleverest

woman he ever met.

Dr Roget was a most cultivated man, with the exquisite polish and

stately bearing of that now wholly extinct species, the gentlemen of

the old school. He was one of the many tourists from England who,

happening to be in France after the break-up of the short-lived

Peace of Amiens, were detained in that country by Napoleon. Though a

foreigner, Dr Roget had lived so long in England, and, as his book

proves, knew our language so well, that he could easily have passed

for a native of these isles; and thus readily fell a victim to the

Corsican's unjustifiable action. Happily for himself, Dr Roget

remembered that Napoleon had recently annexed Geneva to France; and

he therefore, as a Genevese, protested against his detention on the

ground that the annexation had made of him a French subject. The plea

was allowed; he returned to England, and finally settled here; but the

friend who had accompanied him on the tour, together with the many

other _détenus_, remained in France for several years.

Political friends were also numerous, some of whom will be mentioned

in later pages. Of others, our most frequent visitors were the

brilliant talker Roebuck, once known as “Dog Tear 'Em” of the House

of Commons; the two Forsters, father and son, who, in turn and for

many years, represented Berwick-upon-Tweed; J. B. Smith (Stockport);

and Benjamin Smith (Norwich), at whose house we met some of the

arctic explorers of the mid-nineteenth century, congenial friends

of a descendant of the discoverer of Smith's Sound, and with whose

clever daughters, Madame Bodichon being the eldest, we of the younger

generation were intimate. At one time we saw a good deal also of Sir

Benjamin Hawes, who, when appointed Under-Secretary to the Colonies

in Lord John Russell's Administration of 1846, said to my parents:

“Heaven help the Colonies, for I know nothing at all about them!”—an

ignorance shared by many other people in those days of seldom distant

travel.

My father's legal friends included Denman, Wilde, Mellor, Manning,

Brougham, and others; and racy was the talk when some of these

gathered round “the mahogany tree,” for the extremely small jokes

which to-day produce “roars of laughter” in Court were then little in

favour, or failed to reach the honour of reproduction in print.

Quite as interesting as any of the other people we mingled with were

the foreign political exiles who became honoured guests in many

households; and some of these terrible revolutionists were in reality

the mildest mannered and most estimable of men. Herr Jansa, the great

violinist, was paying a visit to this country in 1849, and out of

pure kindness of heart volunteered to play at a concert at Willis's

rooms got up for the benefit of the many Hungarian refugees recently

landed here. For this “crime” the then young Emperor Francis Joseph

caused the old man to be banished; though what was Austria's loss was

Britain's gain, as he spent some years among us respected and beloved

by all who knew him. We met him oftenest at the house of Sir Joshua

Walmsley, where, as Miss Walmsley was an accomplished pianist, very

enjoyable musical parties were given. The Hungarian refugees, several

of whom were wonderful musicians, were long with us; and some, like

Dr Zerffi, remained here altogether. The Italian exiles, Mazzini,

Rufini, Gallenga, Panizzi—afterwards Sir Antonio, Principal Librarian

at the British Museum, and planner of the Reading Room there—and

others came to speak and write English better than many English

people. Poerio, Settembrini, and other victims of King “Bomba”—whose

sufferings inspired Gladstone to write his famous “Two Letters”—were

not here long; Garibaldi was an infrequent bird of passage, as was

also Kossuth. Kinkel, the German journalist, a man of fine presence,

had been sentenced to lifelong incarceration at Spandau after the

Berlin massacre—from which Dr Oswald and his sister with difficulty

escaped—but cleverly broke prison and took refuge in England; Louis

Blanc, historian and most diminutive of men, made his home for some

years among us; and there were many more. Quite a variety of languages

was heard in the London drawing-rooms of that time, conversation was

anything but commonplace; and what thrillingly interesting days those

were!

The story of my father's connection with the London, Brighton, and

South Coast Railway, and of that portion of his life which followed

his retirement from the Post Office, will be alluded to later in this

work.

As it is well not to overburden the narrative with notes, those of

mere reference to volume and page of Dr Hill's “Life” of my father

are generally omitted from the present story; though if verification

of statements made be required, the index to my cousin's book should

render the task easy, at least as regards all matter taken from that

“Life.”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Another volunteer was a young man named Clark, one of whose sons

afterwards married T. W. Hill's elder daughter. An acquaintance

of Clark's, politically a foe, sought to save his friend's house

from destruction by writing upon it the shibboleth, “Church and

King.” But like Millais' Huguenot knight, Clark scorned to shelter

himself or property under a false badge, and promptly effaced the

kindly-intentioned inscription.

[2] “Remains of T. W. Hill.” By M. D. Hill, p. 124.

[3] “Six years have now elapsed,” wrote my father in 1823, “since we

placed a great part of the government of the school in the hands of

the boys themselves; and during the whole of that time the headmaster

has never once exercised his right of veto upon their proceedings.”

[4] Its full title was “Plans for the Government and Liberal Education

of Boys in Large Numbers,” and the work speedily went into a second

edition.

[5] Algeria was not conquered by France till 1830; and until the

beginning of the nineteenth century our shores were still liable

to piratical raids. One such (in Norway) is introduced in Miss

Martineau's story, “Feats on the Fiords.” The pirates, during hundreds

of years, periodically swept the European coasts, and carried off

people into slavery, penetrating at times even so far north as

Iceland. What was the condition of these North African pirate States

prior to the French conquest is told by Mr S. L. Poole in “The Barbery

Corsairs” (“Story of the Nations” series).

[6] It was a visit paid to Bruce Castle School which caused De

Quincey, in that chapter of his “Autobiographic Sketches” entitled

“My Brother,” to write: “Different, O Rowland Hill, are the laws of

thy establishment, for other are the echoes heard amid the ancient

halls of Bruce. There it is possible for the timid child to be happy,

for the child destined to an early grave to reap his brief harvest

in peace. Wherefore were there no such asylums in those days? Man

flourished then as now. Wherefore did he not put forth his power upon

establishments that might cultivate happiness as well as knowledge.”

The stories of brutalities inflicted upon weakly boys in some of our

large schools of to-day might tempt not a few parents to echo De

Quincey's pathetic lament, though perhaps in less archaic language.

[7] It is as follows:—“A straight line is a line in which, if any two

points be taken, the part intercepted shall be less than any other

line in which these points can be found.”

[8] He was an ideal schoolmaster and an enthusiastic Shakespearean,

his readings from the bard being much in the same cultured style as

those of the late Mr Brandram. Whenever it was bruited about the

house that “Uncle Arthur was going 'to do' Shakespeare,” there always

trooped into the room a crowd of eager nieces, nephews, and others,

just as in a larger house members troop in when a favourite orator is

“up.” At his own request, a monetary testimonial raised by his old

pupils to do him honour was devoted to the purchase of a lifeboat

(called by his name) to be stationed at one of our coast resorts.

[9] Colonel Torrens, after whom a river and a lake in South Australia

were named, had a distinguished career. For his spirited defence in

1811 of the island of Anholt he was awarded a sword of honour. But

he was much more than a soldier, however valorous and able. He was a

writer on economics and other important problems of the day; was one

of the founders of the Political Economy Club, and of the _Globe_

newspaper, then an advocate of somewhat advanced views; and interested

himself in several philanthropic movements. His son, Sir Robert

Torrens, sometime M.P. for Cambridge, lived for many years in South

Australia, and was its first Premier. While there he drew up the plan

of “The Transfer of Land by Registration,” which became an Act bearing

his name, and is one of the measures sometimes cited as proof that

the Daughter States are in sundry ways well ahead of their Mother. In

consequence of the good work the plan has accomplished in the land of

its origin, it has been adopted by other colonies, and is a standard

work on the list of Cobden Club publications. Colonel Torrens's eldest

granddaughter married Rowland Hill's only son.

[10] The candidates ultimately chosen were the Hon. Charles Pelham

Villiers, who represented the constituency for sixty-three years—from

January 1835 till his death in January 1898—and Mr Thomas Thornley of

Liverpool. Both men, as we shall see, served on that select Committee

on Postage which sat to enquire as to the merits of my father's plan

of postal reform, and helped to cause its adoption. The two men were

long known locally as “Mr Pearson's members.” Mr Villiers will be

remembered as the man who, for several years in succession, brought in

an Annual Motion on behalf of Free Trade, and as being for a longer

while, perhaps, than any other Parliamentarian, “the Father of the

House”; but the fact is not so well known that he came near to not

representing Wolverhampton at all. The election agent who “discovered”

him in London described him in a letter to my grandfather (who was

chairman of the local Liberal Association) as “a young gentleman

named Villiers, a thorough free-trader, of good connexions, and good

address.” Thus his advent was eagerly looked for. Always given to

procrastination, the candidate, however, was so long in making his

appearance or communicating with the constituents, that his place

was about to be taken by a more energetic person who went so far as

to issue his address and begin his canvass. Only just in time for

nomination did Mr Villiers drive into Wolverhampton. Whereupon Mr

Throckmorton gracefully retired.

[11] He died in July 1838, in the midst of the agitation for the

postal reform, in which he took an enthusiastic interest.

[12] Grandfather to Miss Octavia Hill.

[13] His son was one of the Commissioners who aided Prince Albert to

inaugurate the Great Exhibition of 1851, and was created a baronet in

recognition of his services.

[14] What other man ever depicted a Becky Sharpe, a Beatrix Esmond, a

Mrs Bute Crawley, or a Lady Kew—to say nothing of minor characters?

[15] “Thackeray's London.” By W. H. Rideing.

[16] Less than half a century before the time described by Mr Wills,

the mother of Sir Humphrey Davy left the fact on record that in

Penzance, a town of 2,000 inhabitants, there were but one cart, one

carpet, no such thing as a silver fork, no merchandise brought to the

place save that carried by pack-horses, and every one who travelled

went on horseback. On this state of things Palmer's mail coaches had a

most rousing effect.

[17] When Miss Edgeworth's father in 1804 wrote the preface to her

“Popular Tales,” he quoted Burke as saying that in the United Kingdom

one person in every hundred could read, and added that he hoped

his daughter's works would attract the attention of a good many

“thousands.” Millions of readers were probably undreamed of. The

schoolmaster has made some progress since those days.

CHAPTER I

THE OLD POSTAL SYSTEM

“Postage is one of the worst of our taxes. Few taxes, if any,

have so injurious a tendency as the tax upon the communication

by letters. I cannot doubt that a taxation upon communication

by letters must bear heavily upon commerce; it is, in fact,

taxing the conversation of people who live at a distance from

each other. The communication of letters by persons living at a

distance is the same as a communication by word of mouth between

persons living in the same town. You might as well tax words

spoken upon the Royal Exchange as the communications of various

persons living in Manchester, Liverpool, and London.”—Lord

ASHBURTON, a conservative peer.

“We build National Galleries, and furnish them with pictures;

we propose to create public walks for the air and health and

exercise of the community at the general cost of the country.

I do not think that either of these, useful and valuable as

they are to the community, and fit as they are for Government

to sanction, are more conducive to the moral and social

advancement of the community than the facility of intercourse by

post.”—SAMUEL JONES LOYD (Lord OVERSTONE), banker and financier.

“It is commercial suicide to restrict the free transmission of

letters.”—(Sir) WILLIAM BROWN, a Liverpool merchant.

“We are cut off from our relatives by the high rates of

postage.”—G. HENSON, a working hosier of Nottingham.

In a short sketch of the postal reform written by my brother,[18]

in the year of the late Queen's first jubilee—which was also the

jubilee of the publication of our father's “Post Office Reform,” the

pamphlet that swept away the old system—the following passage from

Miss Martineau's “History of the Thirty Years' Peace, 1815-1845” is

quoted with excellent effect. From a novel point of view, and in

somewhat startling colours, it presents us with a picture of the

state of things which, under that old system, existed in our country

through four-tenths (less one year) of the nineteenth century, and is

therefore within the recollection of people still living.

We look back now, Miss Martineau says,[19] with a sort of amazed

compassion to the old crusading days when warrior husbands and their

wives, grey-headed parents and their brave sons parted, with the

knowledge that it must be months or years before they could hear

even of one another's existence. We wonder how they bore the depth

of silence, and we feel the same now about the families of polar

voyagers;[20] but till the commencement of Her Majesty's reign it did

not occur to many of us how like to this was the fate of the largest

classes in our own country. The fact is that there was no full and

free epistolary intercourse in the country except for those who,

like Members of Parliament, had the command of franks. There were

few families in the wide middle class who did not feel the cost of

postage to be a heavy item in their expenditure; and if the young

people sent letters home only once a fortnight, the amount at the

year's end was a rather serious matter. But it was the vast multitude

of the poorer classes who suffered, like the crusading families of

old, and the geographical discoverers of all time. When the young

people went out into the world the separation between them and those

left behind was almost like that of death. The hundreds of thousands

of apprentices, of shopmen, of governesses, of domestic servants, were

cut off from family relations as effectually as if seas or deserts

divided them (vol. iv. p. 11).

Yet it was not so much the number of miles of severance or the

paucity of means of communication that raised walls of oblivion

between members of those poorer families which form the large

majority of our race; for by 1840—the year when the postal reform was

established—communication between even distant places was becoming

comparatively easy. Separation was mainly caused by dear postal

charges. Fourpence carried a letter 15 miles only; the average rate,

even taking into account the many penny letters circulated by the

local town-posts—which, it is said, numbered some two hundred, the

greater part being very profitable undertakings—was 6-1/4d.[21] Mr

Brewin of Cirencester, in his evidence before the Parliamentary

Committee of 1838 (Third Report), put the case with startling effect

when he said: “Sixpence is a third of a poor man's daily income. If

a gentleman whose fortune is a thousand a year, or £3 a day, had to

pay one-third of his daily income—a sovereign—for a letter, how often

would he write letters of friendship?”

But Mr Brewin's illustration, admirable as it is, did not cover the

entire case. And, first, it is worth pointing out that the “poor man's

daily income” was not only actually smaller, but, generally speaking,

it had also smaller purchasing power in the 'thirties than it came

to have later in the century when freer trade and lighter taxation

prevailed. The real hardship, however, was that too often the man

“whose fortune is a thousand a year”—and sometimes much more—was,

unlike his poorer brother on 1s. 6d. a day, exempt altogether from

postal charges.

For the franking system is a hoary iniquity. It dates back

considerably more than two hundred years. To such an extent was the

practice, legally or illegally, carried, that, as Mr Joyce, in his

“History of the Post Office,” tells us: “In Great Britain alone the

postage represented by the franked letters, excluding those which

were, or which purported to be, 'On His Majesty's Service,' amounted

in 1716 to what was, for that time relatively to the total Post Office

revenue, the enormous sum of £17,500 a year” (p. 142). By 1838 the

number of franked missives was some 7,000,000 a year. Of these, rather

less that 5,000,000 were “double” letters, about 2,000,000 eight-fold

letters, and some 77,000 thirteen-fold letters, free carriage of

which caused a loss to the revenue during the twelvemonths of about

£1,065,000.

The franking privilege—which enabled its possessor to write his name

outside a letter, thereby rendering it exempt from postal charge—was

in vogue long before it received formal recognition by Parliament, and

is indeed said to have been given by way of bribe to the Commons what

time the Post Office became a Crown monopoly. The first intention was

that franking should be enjoyed only by Members during each session;

but later it was practised in and out of session. When the measure

came before the House, a few Members condemned it as “shabby,” “a

poor mendicant proviso,” etc. But the Bill was passed. The Upper

House rejected it. Then the Commons, with a knowledge of human nature

creditable to their understanding if to nothing else, inserted a

clause providing that the Lords' letters should also be franked;

whereupon the Bill became an Act.

The old system worked with great tenderness towards the “haves,” and

with corresponding harshness towards the “have nots.” It enabled

some members of the favoured classes to send by post free of charge

such things as fifteen couples of hounds, two maid servants, a cow,

two bales of stockings, a deal case containing flitches of bacon, a

huge feather-bed, and other bulky products, animate and inanimate.

“The 'Ambassador's bag,'” said Mr Roebuck one night in the House of

Commons, “was often unduly weighted. Coats, lace, boots, and other

articles were sent by it; even a pianoforte, and a horse!”[22]

On the other hand, the unfavoured many were heavily taxed for the

transmission of missives often smaller, easier of carriage, and

lighter of weight; and were so taxed to make up for the immunity

enjoyed by the favoured few, since the revenue, at all costs,

must be maintained. Thus to Rowland Hill's parents, and to many

thousands more, in those days of slender income and heavy taxation,

the postman's knock was a sound of dread. The accepted letter might

prove to be a worthless circular or other useless sheet, on which the

too-trusting recipient had thrown away the money needed for necessary

things whose purchase must be deferred.

Incredibly high the postal rates sometimes were. A packet weighing

32 oz. was once sent from Deal to London. The postage was over £6,

being, as Rowland Hill's informant remarked, four times as much as

the charge for an inside place by the coach.[23] Again, a parcel of

official papers, small enough to slip inside an ordinary pocket, was

sent from Dublin to another Irish town addressed to Sir John Burgogne.

By mistake it was charged as a letter instead of as a parcel, and

cost £11! For that amount the whole mail-coach plying between the two

towns, with places for seven passengers and their luggage, might have

been hired. Extreme cases these perhaps, but that they could and did

happen argued something rotten in the state of—the old system.

The peers of the realm and the Members of Parliament could not only

frank their own letters, but those also of their friends, who,

perhaps, in nine cases out of ten could well afford to do without

such help. The number of franks which privileged people could write

was limited by law,[24] but was frequently exceeded if a donor hated

to say “No,” or found that compliance with requests enhanced his

popularity, or was to his advantage. Members of Parliament sometimes

signed franks by the packet, and gave them to constituents and

friends. It was an easy, inexpensive way of making a present, or of

practising a little bribery and corruption. The chief offenders were

said to be the banker Members, who, in one day (of 1794), sent 103,000

franked letters through the London Post Office alone. No wonder a

“banker's frank” came to be a byword. Franks were also sometimes given

to servants instead of, or to eke out, their wages; and the servants,

being then as a rule illiterate, sold the franks again.

Forgery of franks was extensively practised, since to imitate a

man's writing is not difficult. Mr Joyce tells us that, under the

old system, the proportion of counterfeit to genuine franks varied

from half to three-quarters of the entire number. Why forgery should

be resorted to is easy to understand. The _un_privileged nursed a

natural grudge against the privileged, and saw no harm in occasionally

enjoying a like immunity from postal charges. Prosecutions availed

little as deterrents. Even the fate of the Rev. Dr Dodd, hanged at

Tyburn in 1771 for the offence, could not check the practice.

The strictness of the rules against forging the frank on a letter, so

long a capital offence, contrasted strangely with the extraordinary

laxity of those relating to the franking of newspapers. To pass freely

through the post, a newspaper, like a letter, had to be franked by a

peer or a Member of Parliament. But no pretence was ever made that

the signatures were genuine; and not only was anybody at liberty to

write the name of peer or Member, but the publishers themselves were

accustomed to issue the newspapers with their customer's name and

address, and the franking signature already _printed_ on each cover!

Indeed, were this useless form to be disregarded, the paper was

counted as an unpaid letter, and became liable to a charge of perhaps

several shillings.

The cost of conveying newspapers by post was practically covered by

the duty stamp. Yet “No newspaper could be posted in any provincial

town for delivery within the same, nor anywhere within the London

District (a circle of 12 miles radius from the General Post Office)

for delivery within the same circle, unless a postage of 1d., in

addition to the impressed newspaper stamp, were paid upon it—a

regulation which, however, was constantly evaded by large numbers of

newspapers intended for delivery in London being sent by newsagents

down the river to be posted at Gravesend, the Post Office then having

the trouble of bringing them back, and of delivering them without

charge.”[25]

The newspaper duty at its lowest charge was 1d., and at its highest

4d., and varied with the varying burden of taxation. Thus during the

long period of George III.'s almost incessant wars it rose from the

lower to the higher figure. Before a word could be printed on any

newspaper the blank sheet had to be taken to the Stamp Office to

receive the impress of the duty stamp, and therefore prepayment of

newspaper postage was secured. It may be that when the stamp duty

rose to 3d. and 4d., the official conscience was satisfied that

sufficient payment had been made; and thus the franking signature

became an unnecessary survival, a mere process of lily-painting and

refined gold-gilding, which at some future time might be quietly got

rid of. If so, the reason becomes evident why the forgery of franks on

newspapers was viewed with leniency, the authorities having, by means

of the stamp, secured their “pound of flesh.” But no duty stamp was

ever impressed on letters which were treated altogether differently,

prepayment in their case being, if not actually out of the question,

so rare as to be practically non-existent.

The duty on newspapers was an odious “tax on knowledge,” and rendered

a cheap Press impossible. Only the well-to-do could indulge in the

luxury of a daily paper; and recollection of childish days brings back

a vision of the sheet passing through a succession of households till

its contents had become “ancient history,” and it ended its existence

in tatters. The repeal of the stamp duty and of that other “tax

unwise,” the paper duty, changed all this, and gave rise to the penny

and halfpenny Press of modern times and the cheap and good books that

are now within the reach of all. The fact is worth recording that yet

another—perhaps more than one other—article of daily use did duty in a

plurality of households during those far-off days of general dearness.

This was tea, then so costly that it was a common practice for poor

people to call at the houses of the well-to-do, and ask for the used

leaves, though not to cleanse carpets and glassware as we do at the

present day, but to infuse afresh.

The making of exemptions is a huge mistake; and, according to the

cynic, a mistake is more reprehensible than a crime. Exemptions create

discontent, and justly so. Peel, inimical as he was to the postal

reform, was well aware of the evils of the franking system, and said

that “were each Government Department required to pay its own postage,

much would be done towards checking the abuse.”[26]

It was Rowland Hill's wish that franking should be totally abolished.

But vested interests—that worst bar to all social progress—proved

stronger than the reformer; and his plan, in that and some other

details, was not carried out in its entirety. Franking was enormously

curtailed, but it was a scotching rather than a killing process; and

after his retirement the evil thing slowly but steadily increased.

Nor does the tendency at the present day give sign of abatement.

[Illustration: _From a Photograph by the London Stereoscopic Co._

Yours very affectionately Rowland Hill]

As some of that increasingly large portion of the public which knows

nothing of the old postal system are under the erroneous impression

that others than Rowland Hill suggested the use of postage stamps for

letters, it is well to point out that the employment of such stamps

before 1840, so far from cheapening or rendering easier the payment of

postal charges, must have made them considerably dearer, and have yet

further complicated the process of letter-“taxing.”[27]

Postage stamps, like railway tickets, are mere tokens of prepayment,

and, however mentally hazy on the subject of the origin of postage

stamps some of us may be, we can all easily understand how absurd,

indeed impossible, introduction of the tickets would have been in

the dark ages before railway trains began to run. Equally impossible

would have been the employment, or even the suggestion, of stamps when

letters were posted unpaid. Under the old system the letters of the

unprivileged classes were rated, primarily, according to the distance

travelled, though not necessarily the distance actually separating

writer and recipient, because, although before 1840 railways existed,

no close network of lines covered our land, providing, as it does

to-day, direct and plentiful means of inter-communication; and

therefore the Post Office, to suit its own convenience, often obliged

some of its mail matter to perform very circuitous routes, thereby

not only retarding delivery, but rendering still greater the already

great variability of rates. “Thus, for example, letters from Loughton

to Epping (places only 2 or 3 miles apart) were carried into London

and out again, and charged a postage of 7d.—that being the rate under

the old system for letters between post towns ranging from 30 to 50

miles apart.”[28] That this circumambulatory practice was responsible

for waste of time as well as increase of cost is shown by the fact

that of two letters, the one addressed to Highgate, and the other

to Wolverhampton (120 miles further along the same coach road), and

both posted in London at the same hour, the Highgate letter would be

delivered last. As regards cost, an anomaly quite as absurd as the

two foregoing existed in the case of letters between Wolverhampton

and Brierley Hill which were carried by a cross-post passing through

Dudley. If a letter went the whole way, the postage was 1d.; but if

it stopped short at Dudley, 4d. was charged. Of the letters which

performed circuitous routes, Scott, in the fortieth chapter of “Guy

Mannering,” humorously remarks that, “There was a custom, not yet

wholly obsolete, of causing a letter from one town to another, perhaps

within the distance of 30 miles, to perform a circuit of 200 miles

before delivery; which had the combined advantage of airing the

epistle thoroughly, of adding some pence to the revenue of the Post

Office, and of exercising the patience of the correspondents.”

The question of charge was still further complicated, because,

secondarily, there existed “single,” “double,” “treble,” and yet

heavier rates of postage; as when the treble rate was passed, further

increase was reckoned by weight, the charge being quadrupled when the

letter weighed an ounce, rising afterwards by a “single” postage for

every additional quarter ounce. It was as well, perhaps, that the

people who lived before the 'forties did not lead the feverish life of

to-day. Otherwise, how would the post officials, to say nothing of the

public, have remembered these positively bewildering details?

A “single” letter had to be written on a single sheet of paper, whose

use probably gave rise to the practice of that now obsolete “cross”

writing which often made an epistle all but illegible, but to which in

those days of dear postage recourse was unavoidable when much matter

had to be crammed into the limited compass of that single sheet. If a

second sheet, or even the smallest piece of paper, were added to the

first, the postage was doubled. The effect of fastening an adhesive

stamp on to a single letter would therefore have been to subject

the missive to a double charge; while to have affixed a stamp to an

envelope containing a letter would have trebled the postage. In other

words, a man living, say, 400 miles from his correspondent, would have

to pay something like 4s. for the privilege of receiving from him a

single sheet of paper carried in a wholly unnecessary cover bearing

an equally unnecessary, because entirely useless, adornment in the

shape of an adhesive stamp. For obvious reasons, therefore neither

“the little bags called envelopes,” as in his pamphlet Rowland Hill

quaintly described these novel adjuncts, nor the stamps, were, or

could be, in use.[29]

One veracious anecdote will suffice to show what came of evasion,

wilful or unintentional, of a hard and fast postal rule. A letter was

once sent from London to Wolverhampton, containing an enclosure to

which a small piece of paper had been fastened. The process called

“candling” showed that the letter consisted of three parts; and the

single postage being 10d., a charge was made of 2s. 6d.[30]

It will thus be seen that in reckoning the postage on a letter,

distance, the number of enclosures (if any), and, finally, weight

had to be taken into consideration. Nor should it be forgotten that

of single inland letters the variations of charge amounted to over

forty. Under so complicated a system, it was, save in very exceptional

circumstances, far easier to collect the postage at the end of the

letter's journey than at its beginning; and, in the absence of

prepayment, of what possible use could stamps have been, or what man

in his senses would have proposed them?[31] Had later-day ignorance

of the actual state of things under the old postal system been less

widespread than it is, any claim to authorship of postage stamps

before reform of that system was attempted or achieved would, for

lack of the credulous element among the public, scarcely have been

hazarded.

The “candling” of letters was practised to ascertain whether single,

double, treble, or still heavier postage should be charged. The

missive was carried into a darkened room, and held up against a strong

artificial light. This process not only gave the examining official

some idea of the number of enclosures, if any, but often revealed

their character. It was to defeat temptation to dishonesty caused by

this scrutiny that the practice, not yet obsolete, was adopted of

cutting a banknote in two before posting it, and keeping back the

second half till receipt of the first had been acknowledged.

Single letter postage between London and Edinburgh or Glasgow cost

1s. 3-1/2d., between London and Aberdeen 1s. 4-1/2d., and between

London and Thurso 1s. 5-1/2d., the odd halfpenny being the duty

exacted in protectionist days to enable the epistle to cross the

Scottish border. A letter to Ireland _via_ Holyhead paid, in addition

to ordinary postage, steamer rates and toll for using the Menai and

Conway bridges. Or, if a letter took the southerly route to Ireland,

the extra charge was levied at Milford. Single letter postage to

Londonderry was 1s. 5d. To the many other more distant Irish towns it

was still heavier.

These single charges—enforced, too, at a time when the nation, wearied

out with many years of almost incessant war, was poorer far than it

is now—seem to us exorbitant. When, therefore, we think of them as

doubled, trebled, quadrupled, and so forth, it is easy to understand

why to all but the rich letter-writing became an almost lost art; and

we realise more clearly the truth of Miss Martineau's word-picture

which a superficial reader might be inclined to pronounce overdrawn.

The rates had been oppressive enough in 1801 when, in order to swell

the war-tax, a further contribution to the Exchequer of £150,000

was enforced. But in 1812 a yet further contribution of £200,000

was required; and these higher rates—the highest ever reached—were

maintained for a quarter of a century after the peace of 1815: that

is, till Rowland Hill's reform swept the old system away.

In order to increase the postal revenue, the screw had been tightened

in a variety of ways, even to the arresting of further progress in

Ralph Allen's much-needed “cross-posts” reform.[32] As Mr Joyce puts

it: “In 1695 a circuitous post would be converted into a direct one,

even though the shorter distance carried less postage; in 1813 a

direct post in place of a circuitous one was constantly being refused

on the plea that a loss of postage would result.”[33] In the latter

year all sorts of oppressive and even bewildering new regulations were

enforced whose tendency was to make of the Post Office a yet harsher

tax-raising machine. One new charge was of “an additional penny on

each letter for the privilege of the mail-coach passing through”[34]

certain towns; and other rules were equally vexatious.

The lowest single postage to Paris was 1s. 8d.; and in the case of

foreign letters partial prepayment was the rule. For instance, when

a letter travelled from London to Paris, the writer paid 10d., which

freed it as far as Calais only, its recipient paying the other 10d. on

its delivery in the French capital. Collection of postage at the end

of the entire journey would have been contrary to regulation.

The lowest single postage to Gibraltar was 2s. 10d.; and to Egypt, 3s.

2d. When a letter crossed the Atlantic to Canada or the United States

an inland rate at each end of the transit was charged in addition to

the heavy ocean postage. A packet of manuscript to either of those

countries cost £5 under the old system. But at this “reduced” (!) rate

only a 3-lb. packet could be sent. Did one weigh the merest fraction

of a pound over the permitted three, it could not go except as a

letter, the postage upon which would have been £22, 0s. 8d.[35] One

can hardly expect the public of to-day to believe that rates such as

these were ever in force. They sufficiently explain why it was that

the ill-to-do relatives of equally ill-to-do people who emigrated to

the Colonies or foreign countries often lost all trace of them.

In the _Morning Chronicle_ of 22nd August 1837, appeared an

announcement that, “Henceforth postage on letters to the Mediterranean

will be at the rate of only 10s. an ounce”—showing that even as

regards countries nearer home than America postal charges rendered

letter-writing an expensive occupation even to the well-to-do if they

had a large foreign correspondence. To-day “a letter can be sent from

London westward to San Francisco or eastward to Constantinople or

Siberia for a less amount of postage than was charged in 1836 on one

going from Charing Cross to Brompton.”[36] And in the future the cost

is likely to become less.

The old postal rates being so burdensome, it was inevitable that

tricks and evasions of many sorts should be practised, notwithstanding

the merciless penalties that were inflicted on delinquents detected in

the act.

It is probably no exaggeration to say that hundreds, if not thousands,

of newspapers were annually posted which no one particularly cared

to read. Yet it is certain that many a recipient eagerly welcomed

the paper sent him even though he might rarely unfold its pages. As

newspapers went free—or nominally did so, for after all the postage

was indirectly taken out of the pocket of the man who invested 5d.

in every copy of his “daily”—and letters, except those which passed

between members of the privileged classes, did not, the newspaper

came to be a frequent bearer of well-disguised messages from one

member of the unprivileged classes to another. The employment of

inks of different colours, of variations in modes of writing names,

callings, and addresses, and even peculiar flourishes executed by

the pen, conveyed valuable information to him who received the paper,

and enabled many tradesmen to keep up a brisk correspondence without

contributing a farthing to the revenue.

How, for example, should the uninitiated postal authorities know that

the innocent-looking superscription on a newspaper sent from London to

“Mr John Smith, Grocer, Tea-dealer, etc, No. 1 High Street Edinburgh,”

conveyed to Mr Smith the assurance that on Tuesday the price of sugar

was falling, and that the remittances he had sent in discharge of his

indebtedness had been received? Yet so it was, for however fictitious

the name and address, the case is genuine, the conspiring pair of

correspondents having come forward during the agitation for penny

postage as voluntary witnesses to the necessity for the reform, their

evidence being the revelation of their fraud made on condition that

they should be held exempt from prosecution. There were six different

modes of writing Mr Smith's name, one for each working day of the

week; and the wording of his trade varied still oftener, and served to

give him the latest news of the market. If Mr Smith's fellow-tradesman

(and fellow-conspirator) in London wrote the address immediately after

the name, omitting all mention of Mr Smith's calling, the latter knew

that the goods he had sent had reached their destination. Variations

rung upon the locality name, such as High Street (without the number),

High St., 1 High Street, 1 High St., No. 1 High Street, or No. 1

High St., related to pecuniary matters. For while we have seen how

satisfactory was the news conveyed in “No. 1 High Street,” “High

St.,” on the contrary, told Mr Smith that the bills he sent had been

dishonoured.

But Mr Smith and colleague were by no means the only correspondents

who deliberately plotted to defraud the revenue; for, under the old

system, it seemed to be each person's aim to extract the cost of

postage on his own letters out of the pocket of some other person. In

this achievement, however, there can be little doubt that, as a rule,

the well-to-do made the most successful score.

The story told by Mr Bertram in “Some Memories of Books” about the

apprentice to a printing firm is another instance of evasion. The

young man was frequently in want of clothing, and made known his need

to those at home with as little outlay as though he had been a member

of Parliament or peer of the realm. He printed small slips of paper

bearing such legends as “want trousers,” “send new coat,” etc., pasted

them into newspapers, and sent these to his parents.

At the present day indulgence in a practice of this sort would seem

contemptible, a fraud to which only the meanest of mankind would

resort. But had we too lived when postage was charged on a fourth part

only of the entire mail, and when the writers of the letters forming

that fourth part, and we among them, were taxed to make up the loss on

the franked three-quarters, perhaps even we, immaculate as we believe

ourselves to be, might have been tempted to put our scruples into our

pocket to keep company with our slender purse, and have taken to

“ways that are dark,” though, if less astute than Mr John Smith and

his London correspondent, possibly also to “tricks that are vain”—with

unpleasant consequences to ourselves.

There is an oft-quoted story about Coleridge, who, one day while

wandering through the Lake District, saw a poor woman refuse a letter

which the postman offered her. The kindly poet, in spite of the

woman's evident reluctance to accept the gift, paid the money she

could not raise; but when the letter was opened, it was seen to be a

blank sheet of paper not intended for acceptance, but sent by her son

according to preconcerted agreement as a sign that he was well.[37]

This, then, is not only yet another illustration of the frauds to

which the “have nots” were driven to resort, but, further, shows how

profitless, even costly, was the labour imposed upon the Post Office

by the system to which the authorities clung with so unaccountable

an affection. For an unaccepted sheet of paper does not travel from

London to the Lake District for nothing; and when we multiply one

unaccepted letter by many thousands, one may form some idea of the

amount of fruitless trouble as well as fruitless outlay which was

incurred by the Department.

The enforced silence between severed relations and friends was

therefore rendered yet more painful when the letters—genuine letters

too, not dummies—got as far as the post office nearest to their

intended destination, or even to the door of the poor dwellings to

which they were addressed, yet failed to cross the threshold because

their should-be recipients were too poverty-stricken to “take them

up.” In many instances mothers yearning to hear from absent children

would pawn clothing or household necessaries rather than be deprived

of the letters which, but for that sacrifice, must be carried back

to the nearest post office to await payment. One poor woman, after

striving for several weeks to make up the money to redeem a longed-for

letter from her granddaughter in London, went at last to the local

office with the shilling which a pitying lady gave her, only to find

that the letter had been returned to town. She never received it.

Another poor woman begged a local postmaster's daughter to accept

a spoon by way of pledge till the ninepence charged upon a letter

awaiting payment at the office could be raised. A labouring man

declined an eightpenny letter though it came from a far-off daughter

because the price meant one loaf the less for his other children. It

was much harder for the poorest classes to find pence enough to lavish

on postage in those yet earlier and often hungrier nineteenth century

decades than even the “Hungry Forties”; during which years a man had

sometimes to spend more than eightpence—more occasionally than double

that sum—on his children's loaf.

The refused missives, after waiting a while at the local office

for the chance of redemption, went back to the chief office, were

consigned to the “dead” department, and were there destroyed, thus

costing the Service—meaning, of course, the public—the useless double

journey and the wasted labour of not a few officials.

Sometimes a kind-hearted postmaster would advance the sum due for

a letter out of his own pocket, taking his chance of being repaid.

But not every postmaster could afford to take such risks, nor was it

desirable that they should be laid upon the wrong shoulders.

In 1837 the Finance Account showed a profitless expenditure of

£122,000 for letters “refused, mis-sent, re-directed, and so forth.”

This loss of revenue was, of course, quite distinct from that already

mentioned as caused by the use of franks fictitious and genuine.

Truly, the unprivileged paid somewhat dearly for the advantages

enjoyed by the privileged, since it lay with the former both to make

good the loss and to provide the required profit.

Under the old system the postman would often be detained, sometimes as

much as five minutes, at each house at which he called while he handed

in his letters, and received the money due upon them. In business

quarters this sort of thing had long been found intolerable, and

therefore, by private arrangement with the merchants, the postman, on

the first, and by far the heaviest, delivery of the day, did not wait

for his money. But after the second delivery he had to call at every

house where he had left letters earlier in the day and collect the

postage: a process which often made the second delivery lengthy and

wearisome. A test case showed that while it took a man an hour and a

half to deliver 67 letters for which he waited to receive payment,

half an hour sufficed for the delivery of 570 letters for which he did

not wait to be paid.[38]

Another evil of the old system was the temptation to fraud which it

put in the way of the letter-carriers. When a weak or unscrupulous man

found a supply of loose cash in his pocket at the end of his delivery,

his fingers would itch—and not always in vain—to keep it there. Again,

an honest man, on his way back to the office with the proceeds of his

round upon him, was not safe from attack if his road was lonely or the

streets ill-lighted or deserted. The old foot and horse posts were

often robbed. Murders even, Mr Joyce reminds us, were not infrequent,

and executions failed to check them.

The system of account-keeping was “an exceedingly tedious,

inconvenient, and, consequently, expensive process.”[39] The money

which the recipient of a letter paid to the postman passed to the

local postmaster, who sent it on to the head office. It went through

many hands, and peculation was rife. “The deputy postmasters could

not be held to effectual responsibility as regards the amounts due

from them to the General Office; and as many instances of deficit came

at times to light, sometimes following each other week after week in

the same office, there can be no doubt that the total annual loss must

have reached a serious amount.”[40]

On the arrival of the mails at the General Post Office, the clerks

were required to see that the charge entered upon every letter had

been correctly made, and that each deputy postmaster had debited

himself with the correct amount of postage; to stamp the letters—that

is, to impress on them the date when they were posted; to assort them

for delivery, in which work the letter-carriers assisted; to ascertain

the amount of postage to be collected by each letter-carrier, and to

charge him therewith. In addition to all this, another detail must not

be forgotten—that in the London Office alone there were daily many

thousands of letters which had to undergo the “candling” process.

For the outgoing mails the duties were somewhat similar, and quite

as complicated, and some seven hundred accounts had to be made out

against as many deputy postmasters.

Simplification of account-keeping under the old system, however much

needed, seemed hopeless of attainment.

Even in England, the most prosperous “partner” of the United Kingdom,

there were at the time of the late Queen's accession, districts larger

than Middlesex, within whose borders the postman never set foot. Of

the 2,100 Registrar's districts into which England and Wales were

divided, 400 districts, each containing on the average about 20 square

miles and some 4,000 inhabitants—making in all a population of about

a million and a half—had no post office whatever. The chief places in

these districts, containing about 1,400 inhabitants each, were on the

average some 5 miles, and in several instances as much as 16 miles,

from the nearest post office.[41]

The 50,000 Irish, or immediate descendants of Irish in Manchester,

said Cobden in his evidence before the Parliamentary Committee of

1838, were almost as completely cut off from communication with their

relatives in Ireland as though they were in New South Wales.[42] And

when he drew this comparison, it counted for much more than it would

do to-day. Great Britain and Australia were then practically much

further asunder than they are now, sailing vessels at that time taking

from four to six months to do the single, and sometimes nearly twelve

the double voyage. A good many years had yet to elapse before the

Indian Ocean was bridged by the fast steamships which have reduced

that several months' journey to one of a few weeks only.

The great free-trader's calico printing works were situated at a

little town or village, of some 1,200 inhabitants, called Sabden, 28

miles from Manchester. Although a manufacturing centre, it had no post

office, and nothing that did duty for one.

In the opening paragraph of the twenty-seventh chapter of “The Heart

of Midlothian,” Scott says that in 1737 “So slight and infrequent was

the intercourse betwixt London and Edinburgh, that upon one occasion

the mail from the former city arrived at the General Post Office in

Scotland with only one letter in it. The fact is certain. The single

epistle was addressed to the principal director of the British Linen

Company.”

In “Her Majesty's Mails” Mr Lewins says that: “About the same time the

Edinburgh mail is said to have arrived in London containing but one

letter addressed to Sir William Pulteney, the banker” (p. 85).

The old system being at once clumsy, irrational, irritating, and

unjust, little wonder need be felt that when Queen Victoria's reign

began, each inhabitant of England and Wales received on an average one

letter in three months, of Scotland one in four months, and of Ireland

one a year.[43]

Until 1748 there were but three posts a week between London and

Birmingham. In that year the number was doubled. The notice making

known this improvement contains denunciations of the people who were

in “any way concerned in the illegal collecting or delivery of Letters

or Packets of Letters.” The fines for the offence were “£5 for every

letter, and £100 for every week this practice is continued.” But fines

could not arrest the smuggling, because the practice was remunerative

to the smugglers, and popular among those who employed them, and who

thus enjoyed cheap rates of postage. Therefore the illegal traffic

went on growing, till by the time the old system came to an end it had

assumed vast proportions.

Publishers and other business men wrote letters on one large sheet of

paper for different people living in the same district. On reaching

its destination the sheet was divided into its separate parts, each

of which being then delivered by hand or local post. A similar

practice in respect of money payments prevailed.[44] One publisher and

bookseller said he was “not caught” till he had thus distributed some

20,000 letters. Several carriers made the collection and distribution

of letters their only business, and in the collecting process women

and children were employed. In one district the illegal practice was

more than fifty years old, and in at least another, as we see by the

notice quoted in the preceding paragraph, its age must have exceeded

a century. In one then small town the daily average of smuggled

letters amounted to more than 50, and on one occasion rose above

150. The Mr Brewin of Cirencester already mentioned said he knew two

carriers who conveyed four times as many letters as did the mail.[45]

One carrier confessed to having smuggled about 60 letters a day. On

another carrier's premises a bag was seized containing 1,100 letters.

Twelve walking carriers between Birmingham and Walsall were employed

exclusively in conveying letters at a charge of a penny apiece. Five

Glasgow merchants illegally transmitted letters at the rate severally

of three, eighteen, sixteen, eight, and fifteen to one that went

legally. Five-sixths of the Manchester letters contributed nothing

whatever to the postal revenue.[46] Nor does the list of delinquencies

end here.

Letters were also smuggled in warehousemen's bales and parcels; among

manufacturers' patterns and other things which coach proprietors, on

payment of a trifle for booking, carried free of charge; in weavers'

bags, in farmers' “family boxes,” and in other ways.[1]

Even the mail-coach drivers and guards engaged in the unlawful

traffic, though in many instances letters were sent in coach parcels

not so much to save postage as to facilitate transmission and ensure

early delivery.

Mr Maury, of the American Chamber of Commerce, assured the Select

Committee that when regular steam communication between Liverpool and

New York was established, the first steamer carried _five_ letters

in the large bag provided in expectation of a heavy dispatch. Ten

thousand letters were, however, placed in another bag sent to the

care of the consignee of the same vessel; and Mr Maury himself

contributed some 200 free letters to this second bag. Every ten days

a steamer left this country for America each carrying some 4,000

smuggled letters—a fact of which the postal authorities were well

aware; and almost every shipbroker hung a bag in his office for the

convenience of those who sent letters otherwise than through the post.

Letters so collected by one broker for different ships in which he

was interested were said to be sometimes “enough to load a cab.” In

111 packages containing 822 newspapers sent in the course of five

months to America, 648 letters were found concealed. The postmaster

of Margate reported that in the visitors' season the increase of

population there made no proportionate increase of postage, a fact

which he attributed to the illegal conveyance of letters by steamers.

The growing facilities for travel caused a corresponding growth of

letter-smuggling. At the same time, the more general establishment

of local penny posts tended to secure to the Post Office the

conveyance of letters between neighbouring towns and villages;[47] and

undoubtedly did much to recoup that extensively swindled Department

for its loss of revenue caused by franking, evasions like those of Mr

John Smith and others, and letter-smuggling.

As usual, the people who practised the deception were scarcely so much

to blame as those who, spite of every effort at reform, persisted

in maintaining a system which created favouritism, hampered trade,

severed family ties, and practically created the smuggling offence

which scandalised the official conscience. Had the rates been less

exorbitant, and had they fallen impartially on rich and poor, these

dishonest practices might have had little or no existence. They ceased

only when at last the old order changed, and, happily, gave place to

new.

FOOTNOTES:

[18] “The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago.” By Pearson Hill. Cassell &

Co. (1887).

[19] As the passage is slightly condensed, quotation marks are not

employed. The words generally—whole sentences sometimes—are, however,

Miss Martineau's own.

[20] Written while yet the fate of the Franklin Expedition was an

unsolved mystery.

[21] The two sorts of post were kept quite distinct, the business

of the general post and that of the local posts being carried on in

separate buildings and by different staffs. It was not till the postal

reform had been established some years that Rowland Hill was able to

persuade the authorities of the wisdom of that amalgamation of the two

which formed an important feature of his plan.

[22] “Hansard,” cxlvi. 189.

[23] Travelling as well as postage has cheapened. A fourth part of £6

is 30s.—the price of each “inside place.” To-day a first-class railway

_return_ ticket between Deal and London costs less than half 30s.

[24] Fourteen franks a day was the number each M.P. could issue.

[25] “The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago,” p. 6.

[26] “Life,” i. 135. Peel voted against the Penny Postage Bill;

and even that kindly friend to the poorer classes, the “good” Lord

Shaftesbury—then Lord Ashley—followed Sir Robert's example.

[27] That is, of calculating the amount of postage to be levied on

each letter.

[28] “The Origin of Postage Stamps,” p. 17. By Pearson Hill.

[29] A recent discussion in _Notes and Queries_ (Tenth Series, vol.

i.) has shown that envelopes are mentioned by Swift and later writers

of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They are sometimes

called “envelopes” and sometimes “covers.” Their use must have been

exceedingly limited, and still more limited, perhaps, is the number of

people who have actually seen them. They were probably square sheets

of paper used to enclose a number of missives addressed to one person

or several persons living in the same neighbourhood; and were, most

likely, better known to the race of letter smugglers (about whom see

further) than to any one else. An obituary notice in the _Liverpool

Daily Post and Mercury_ of 23rd May, 1906, on the late Mr J. D. Tyson,

“a notable Liverpool insurance broker,” shows how new the use of

envelopes as we now understand them was more than half a century ago.

The writer says: “Even the introduction of the envelope was greatly

opposed by most of the old firms; and for fear the envelope would

be thrown away and all traces of posting be lost, the juniors were

instructed to pin the envelope to the letter. This had soon to give

way when the usefulness of the envelope became so pronounced.”

[30] The neat and rapid folding of the large sheets of paper on which

single letters were written was regarded as one of the fine arts;

and lessons in it were sometimes given to boys at school. I have a

distinct recollection of seeing a number of people seated round a

table and practising letter-folding, and of my begging to be allowed

to join the circle and try my diminutive 'prentice hand at the game. A

dignified and elaborate process was the sealing of the folded letter,

impressing much the juniors of the family, who looked on admiringly,

while the head thereof performed the ceremony, the only drawback being

the odious smell of the unnecessarily large, old-fashioned “lucifer”

match employed to light the candle. When one of the seals hanging to

the broad silken strap showing below the paternal or grand-paternal

waistcoat was pressed upon the bountifully spread, hot wax till a

perfect impression was left, the letter thus completed would be held

up for all to see. What would those stately, leisurely-mannered

gentlemen of the olden time, who, perhaps, took five or more minutes

over the fastening of a letter, have said to our present style of

doing things—especially to the far from elegant mode of moistening the

gummed envelope flap which has superseded the cleanly spreading of the

scented wax and application of the handsome seal of armorial bearings

carved on a precious stone and set in a golden shield?

[31] According to an extract taken from the “New Annual Directory for

1800,” in the Guildhall Library, prepayment might be made in the case

of the local “penny” (afterwards “twopenny”) post. That this fact

should need an advertisement seems to argue that, even as regards the

local posts, prepayment was not a common practice.

[32] This was he who did “good by stealth, and blush[ed] to find it

fame.” Out of his contract with the Post Office he made the large

income, for that time, of £12,000 a year, and spent the greater part

of it in those acts of beneficence which, aided by Pope's famous

lines, have preserved for him well-deserved, lasting fame.

[33] “History of the Post Office,” p. 357.

[34] “History of the Post Office,” p. 357.

[35] “The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago,” p. 13.

[36] “The Jubilee of the Uniform Penny Postage,” p. 22. By Pearson

Hill.

[37] “Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge,”

ii. 114. In different versions of the story the absent relative is

described as father, husband, or brother; and in not a few cases the

hero's action, through a mistake made by Miss Martineau when writing

the History already alluded to, has been claimed for Rowland Hill,

who is further supposed—quite erroneously—to have been then and there

inspired with the resolve to undertake postal reformation.

[38] “Eighteenth Report of the Commissioners of Revenue Inquiry,” pp.

621, 622. Now, if 570 letters, payment for which had not to be waited

for, could be delivered in half an hour, it follows that in the hour

and half consumed in delivering those 67 other letters, three times

570, or 1710, _prepaid_ letters might have been distributed. This one

small fact alone furnishes proof of the necessity for prepayment, for

this test delivery was made in the heart of the city of London, where

prompt delivery and common-sense postal regulations are of paramount

importance to business men.

[39] “Post Office Reform,” p. 29.

[40] “Post Office Reform,” p. 29.

[41] “The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago,” p. 12.

[42] “Third Report of the Select Committee on Postage,” p. 22.

[43] “The Post Office of Fifty Years Ago,” p. 14.

[44] “Third Report of the Select Committee on Postage,” p. 12.

[45] _Ibid._ pp. 13, 14.

[46] “Third Report of the Select Committee on Postage,” pp. 13, 14.

[47] “Third Report of the Select Committee on Postage,” pp. 15-30.