THE POST OFFICE OF FIFTY YEARS AGO.
Mr. Cobden stated:—
"We have fifty thousand in Manchester who are Irish, or the immediate descendants of Irish; and all the large towns in the neighbourhood contain a great many Irish, or the descendants of Irish, who are almost as much precluded as though they lived in New South Wales from all correspondence or communication with their relatives in Ireland."[1]
Mr. Henson, a working hosier of Nottingham, stated:—
"When a man goes on the tramp—i.e., when he travels in search of employment—he must either take his family with him, perhaps one child in arms, or else the wife must be left behind; and the misery I have known them to be in from not knowing what has become of the husband, because they could not hear from him, has been extreme. Perhaps the man, receiving only sixpence, has never had the means, upon the whole line, of paying tenpence for a letter, to let his wife know where he was."
The average postage on a letter in 1837, even including the penny letters which circulated by the local posts, was as high as 6¼d., a sum which in those days formed a far larger fraction of a working man's daily wages than it now does; and the difficulty the poor had in paying such a postage was well shown in the evidence of Mr. Brewin, of Cirencester, a member of the Society of Friends. "Sixpence," said he, "is a third of a poor man's daily income. If a gentleman, whose fortune is a thousand pounds a year, or three pounds a day, had to pay one-third of his daily
- ↑ Life of Sir Rowland Hill and History of Penny Postage, Vol I., pp. 306–7.
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