The preceding year Sir Rowland Hill introduced a uniform system of
cheap postage. The rate had been as high as a shilling for a single
letter.[1] Such a charge was practically prohibitive, and, as a rule,
no one wrote in those days if he could possibly avoid it. Sir Rowland
reduced it to a penny (paid by stamp) to any part of the United
Kingdom.[2] Since then the government has taken over all the telegraph
lines, and cheap telegrams and the cheap transportation of parcels by
mail (a kind of government express known as "parcels post") have
followed. They are all improvements of immense practical benefit.
[1] An illustration of the effects of such high charges for postage is
related by Coleridge. He says that he met a poor woman at Keswick
just as she was returning a letter from her son to the postman, saying
she could not afford to pay for it. Coleridge gave the postman the
shilling, and the woman told the poet that the letter was really
nothing more than a blank sheet which her son had agreed to send her
every three months to let her know he was well; as she always declined
to take this dummy letter, it of course cost her nothing. See
G.B. Hill's "Life of Sir Rowland Hill," I, 239, note.
[2] The London papers made no end of fun of the first envelopes and
the first postage stamps (1840). See the facsimile of the ridiculous
"Mulready Envelope" in Hill's "Life of Sir Rowland Hill," I, 393.