Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication by John Durham Peters (©1999 by the University of Chicago).

Strangely enough, little research in media history has been done on correspondence by letter. Media historians are beginning to take the post office seriously as a key site for understanding the development of communications. The cultural history of the mails is a remarkably rich source for philosophical visions of the varieties of communicative experience.

The notion that the mails involve delivery of a private, specifically addressed message was late in evolving. The current division of genres between personal and public correspondence did not exactly exist in the eighteen-century newsletter in England and the colonies. The "familiar" letter was distinct from the newsletter, the forerunner of the modern newspaper, but both could be edited for and by the public. Newsletters had very high pass-along rates; they were meant quite literally to circulate among readers who would handwrite additional notices in blank spaces left for that purpose. In a similar way, personal letters in the United States could be raided for publication in the newspaper or at least for postmaster-led discussion. Some postmasters in the colonial period apparently freely quoted in their newspapers from love letters and personal correspondence. Not only was content open to stray eyes, but the receipt of mail was itself public because local post offices in the United States routinely kept logbooks on who purchased postage for what mail, since payment was typically made by the recipient rather than the sender before the 1850s. Hence not only were local postmasters well informed on local reading habits, they were privy to much of the news locally in circulation and often monitors, even censors, of what newspapers local postal patrons would read and what mail they would receive. The post was not a secure channel. Letters than were more like postcards today—both privately addressed and publicly accessible.

Since the mid-nineteenth, postal practices in North America and Western Europe quite explicitly sought to contain the potential for straying missives by giving senders private control over their letters and making the address circuitry much more focused. The key innovations that took place in the two middle decades of the century made the modern private letter possible. The first postage stamp appeared in 1840 in Great Britain, bearing a portrait of Queen Victoria. No longer did one need to see a postmaster to pay for carriage, marking a key step toward impersonality in access. In the 1840s adhesive postage stamps appeared in the United States, first as local, private issues, and in 1847 the first national stamps was authorized by the United States, first as local, private issues, and in 1847 the first national stamps was authorized by the United States Congress. The first United States patent for envelopes was issued in 1849. By sealing off contents against inspection envelops gave letters an entirely new aura of privacy, in 1851 Congress, perhaps motivated to secure linkage with the Pacific Coast in the wake of the 1849 gold rush, passed a flat rate for all letters, not graded for distance as some early rates were. In 1856 all mail in the United States had to be prepaid (as opposed to COD, or cash on delivery), and a registered mail service was founded to help prevent the loss of valuables, though it was rarely used. In 1858 street drop boxes, introduced in London in 1855, were first used in the United States. By the late 1850s, then, it was possible to mail a letter sealed in an envelope, paid for with a prepurchased stamp, and dropped into a public box. "No longer did the sender have to come under the scrutiny of the receiving postal employees" (Mathew J. Bowyer). No sentinels guarded the gates to the system. Confidentiality was now possible.

Here, then, we have a system of public communication, connected to every address in the nation, that allows for the conveyance of private messages in sealed packages. Mail, the circulation system of writing and other lightweight cargo, was no longer locally inspected to the same degree. Stamps, envelopes, and drop boxes made the individual sender in principle sovereign over the letter. The post office had thus made an inherently public and plural signifying system into one governed by the private will of the sender. The post office, by accommodating sender-imposed restrictions on receivers, had transformed letters from creatures of dissemination into creatures of apparent dialogue.