The earliest overseas mail arrangements depended on common carriers with little uniformity or coordination.  Such enterprises were the main method of carrying and delivering the mail until the establishment of a a royal monopoly in England and postal system in colonial America. Benjamin Franklin who was the deputy postmaster general for the American colonies in 1753 and then the first postmaster general of the United States in 1775.     He expanded the service not only in USA but also to and from England.

In both countries the speed and frequency of the mails were improved in large part by extensive road building and improved designs to a series stage coaches running between establishing coaching inns. (In England in 1830s, they were even able to push the speed of stage coaches up to 10 mph!)

Another useful perspective to bear in mind when thinking about the influences impacting mail services was the reality that there were far fewer literate people as a percentage of populations and that relatively few organizations had interests outside their own neighborhoods in those far off days.

Before the days of postage stamps (May 6,1840 in England; July 1 1847 in America) letters had to be taken to a post Office where the post master would note the postage by hand on the top right hand corner. The sender could either pay for the service in advance, allow the recipient to pay on delivery, or pay for part in advance and allow for the remainder to be paid on delivery.

The postage rates were based on the number of sheets, the weight of the letter and distance it had to travel. Pricing this became ever more complicated with overseas mails and the accounting systems required to administer this multi-variable system became the biggest cost of running the mail services in the early days.

However, the high cost of postage had a large impact on many of the letters in our collection. This lead to a series of strategies that the many of the authors (but not Thomas Jackson himself) used to keep the rates down.

The first approach was to use onion thin sheets of flimsy paper to keep the weight down. We have many such letters that would be blown off a table by the slightest breath of wind and which now seem risky to even pick up by one edge.

Additionally and strikingly, it was common to write on one page of the letter in the normal way but then to turn the paper by 90º and reuse the same page by writing across the first side. 

This style of cross writing was the norm for many of the correspondents in this collection (eg William Slater when he was in America) but was viewed with stern disapproval by some of the recipients (eg his father). The students who have helped organize and transcribe many of the family letters from this trove started off by being relatively unfamiliar with reading manuscript in two directions now the universality of digital communications is the norm in their lives. However, with effort and dedication, they were finally able to “get their eye in” and do good job of extracting meaning out of these crossed letters.

(Literary historians may be interested to learn that Jane Austen, Henry James and Charles Darwin also wrote “crossed”, sometimes called “cross hatched”, letters similar to those we have have been dealing with here.)

Huge improvements in postal efficiency came from unifying the postage for half-ounce letters wherever they were to be delivered in each country (or major sections of it). The very earliest stamps had no perforations to separate them one from another. Instead they were printed on pregummed, non perforated sheets and the post office clerk used scissors to cut out each stamp.

The Thomas Jackson trove has a wide variety of envelopes and stampless covers that will repay study by those interested in mailing styles from 1800 – 1900 in America and England.