The Birth of Cheap Communication (and Junk Mail)

As any English major could tell you, the literary output of eminent Victorians was prodigious. Anthony Trollope, for example, wrote dozens of novels while working for the British post office, using the Victorian equivalent of a laptop computer: a portable writing desk. For his books, he didn’t stint on words: a modern reprint of “He Knew He Was Right,” with small type, runs 930 pages. But Ms. Golden said his letters tended to be brief and businesslike.

David M. Henkin, a history professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says that there has been “a distorted impression of how articulate or thoughtful 19th-century letter writers were — both American and British.”

“The historical letters we encounter were often written by famous, articulate people,” he added, “preserved by their recipients and selected for publication.”

When researching letters written by not-so-famous Americans, Mr. Henkin was struck by writing that was “prosaic, not poetic.”

In the early 1800s, before the postal reforms, Americans often sent letters that weren’t letters at all, but newspapers they had received in the mail and then resent to distant friends and family. Postal rates favored the practice, as newspapers could be remailed in their entirety for about what a single-sheet letter would cost — and the sender was spared the obligation of writing an actual letter.

In 1840, The New Orleans Picayune tried to persuade its subscribers to buy gift subscriptions instead of remailing their own copies of the paper, gently scolding that when “you send your friend all the news in a printed journal you have a very fair excuse for being lazy with your pen.” (Online readers should feel perfectly free to send this column to friends.)

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Postal service was democratized in Britain in 1839, with legislation that set a flat rate effective the next year and introduced the adhesive postage stamp, shifting the payment burden to the sender. For a penny, a letter of up to half an ounce could reach any destination in Britain. (Recipients could still do the paying, but that would cost 2 pence.)

The United States, like other countries, soon followed. In 1845 and 1851, Congress substantially reduced the cost of sending a letter and offered a steep discount for prepayment. But inexpensive postage didn’t spur people to send long, handwritten letters, so much as it enabled advertisers to spew out unsolicited junk mail on a mass scale. In 1855, according to Mr. Henkin, 30 or 40 mailbags filled with nothing but printed “circulars” for lotteries and patent medicines arrived daily at some post offices.

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The same postal reforms that allowed family members and legitimate businesses to get in touch inexpensively also made it possible for cheats to do so, too. In the United States after the Civil War, a guide to New York City estimated that more than 2,000 “swindling establishments” were using the postal system, Mr. Henkin writes in “The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in 19th-Century America” (2006).

These operators sent out “tens of thousands of solicitations and at minimal expense,” he writes. “Even a small percentage of replies from eager victims remitting a dollar or just a postage stamp could translate into a major windfall.” (Unused stamps could be resold or used in the next mailing and sometimes functioned as currency, he says.)

THE Victorians mailed all sorts of things besides words: tree cuttings, leeches, mosses and even manure, Ms. Golden writes. We could say that the only thing left for the modern correspondent to invent was the completely empty envelope — the Facebook “poke,” the sending of a greeting without saying so much as “hi.”

When one Facebook member clicks to “poke” another, of course, the receiver can poke back, returning the wordless greeting. Compared with a poke, even a brief e-mail message seems impressively articulate.