Letter-Writing Etiquette

The revolution came in 1840, when Rowland Hill's Uniform Penny Postage made sending a letter cost a single penny, prepaid by the sender. Before that, postage was charged by distance and by the number of sheets, the recipient paid, and a letter could cost more than a day's wage. Writers economized ruthlessly: they cross-wrote, turning the finished page ninety degrees and writing a second layer of text at right angles across it, and they folded letters and sealed them with wax, because using an envelope attracted double postage.

A thicket of etiquette grew around the new cheap post. Manuals dictated the paper, the margins, the handwriting, and the promptness of reply; black-bordered mourning stationery announced a bereavement before a single word was read. The Post Office's own first attempt at ready-made stationery flopped: William Mulready's elaborately illustrated prepaid letter sheets, launched in May 1840, were so mocked that they were replaced by the plain 'Penny Pink' within a year. Lewis Carroll, writing a guide to letter-writing in 1894, begged readers never to cross-write: 'Cross-writing makes cross reading.'

And lovers found a code hidden in plain sight. Because the stamp could be stuck anywhere on the envelope, its position and tilt carried secret messages — the so-called language of stamps, in which a stamp pasted upside down meant 'I love you.' The trick was a hangover from the old receiver-pays era, when a sender could encode 'yes' or 'no' in the stamp and the recipient could read the envelope and refuse to pay for the letter. The post office eventually confined stamps to the top right corner, but the instinct — to smuggle feeling past the censors — never left.