Letter Writing in the Victorian Age (original) (raw)

Introductory materials

• The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing
• Examples of Individual Letters

Political, social, and economic contexts

• Sir Rowland Hill (1795-1879)
• Punch on invasions of privacy: Post Office officials open personal letters
• Gender Matters
• Economic contexts

Literary relations

• The genres of letter writing
• Letter writing in Victorian literature
• Victorian Christmas Cards: an Everyday Work of Art
• Valentine’s Day cards (sitemap)

Visual arts

• As subject in painting, illustration, and sculpture

Related Technologies

• The Portable Writing Desk — the Victorian Laptop
• Envelope-folding machine
• The Perkins D cylinder Printing Press on which the first stamps were produced
• Post Boxes
• The Mail Coach vs. the Mail Train (from the 1849 Illustrated London News
• Communcations Networks: Postal Service, Telegraph, LAN, and Internet

Mail Ships That United Great Britain and the Colonies

• Launch of the Demerara Royal Mail Steam-Ship, at Bristol (1865)
• R.M.S. Port Royal. Imperial Direct West India Mail Service, Ltd.

Related resources

• Bibliography
• Letters before the Victorian era

Works about Letters and Victorian Literature [Suggested by Maria Damkjær]

Henkin, David. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. (social history about pre-civil-war America, but full of important ideas)

Koehler, Karin. Thomas Hardy and Victorian Communication: Letters, Telegrams and Postal Systems. [Review by Sara Malton.]

Rotunno, Laura. Postal Plots in British Fiction, 1840-1898: Readdressing Correspondence in Victorian Culture. Palgrave, 2013.

Siegert,Bernhard. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System.

Last modified 21 March 2024