3 This overlap, however, must be contextualized: in 1868, for instance, in excess of 110 million letters were delivered by the London District Post (letters posted in the capital and delivered to a metropolis address), out of a total of more than 850 million letters for the whole of the United Kingdom. Whether the choice between a letter and a telegram was a matter of preference, affordability, convenience or speed, an overlap existed between the two methods of communication in terms of purpose and function. This explains to a large extent the limited take-up of urban telegrams in London and other cities, and why the private telegraph companies did not report their numbers. As I demonstrate below, letters were in many cases faster and much cheaper than telegrams for urban communication.

Perhaps more controversially, I also argue that telegrams were only more efficient than letters over longer distances. Next, I introduce the electric telegraph, and break down the telegraph service into its main process elements to argue that the telegram followed the model of the letter post, although no evidence was found that this emulation was a deliberate strategy on the part of the ETC, or a cultural default into which they fell unwittingly. Evidence is presented showing that, by the time telegrams were introduced in the late 1840s (following Rowland Hill's postal reform), letters were a highly efficient form of interpersonal correspondence. To broaden the scope of the Victorian telegraph discourse, I begin by examining the evolution of postal communication comprehensively, placing emphasis on the first half of the nineteenth century, when the speed of delivering letters improved considerably.

2 Undeniably, the telegrams were, in some aspects, a novelty but, as this paper reveals, they also displayed many parallels with the mail service. Implicitly if not explicitly, this historiographical approach portrayed telegrams as an innovative method of communication. 1 Histories have been written as if the contemporary mail service was irrelevant. The telegraph service was initially offered to the British public by the Electric Telegraph Company (ETC) two decades or so before this nationalization.Īs the historiography of the Victorian telegraph reveals, the interplay between telegrams (or telegraphic despatches, as they were first known) and letters in the early days of telegraphy has been ignored to a large extent. The paper focuses on the early period of telegraphy, prior to nationalization of the telegraphs in 1870. The influence of one technology over another is not always obvious, as in the case presented in this paper, where I draw attention to the influence of the Post Office's mail service on the design and development of the British inland telegraph service. The operating model adopted by the Electric Telegraph Company to deliver this service is deconstructed to show the similarities with the mail service and to demonstrate that a telegram was not always faster than letter post. It was in this context that the telegram service was introduced to the public. To this end, the evolution of postal communication is first explored, with a focus on the nineteenth century, when innovations such as mail-trains and prepayment by stamp considerably accelerated the mail and increased the volume of letters from 67 million in 1839 to a staggering 741 million in 1865. Attention is drawn to the parallels between the telegram and mail services. It is argued that this service was not as innovative as the electric telegraph technology that underpinned it. The first telegram service in Britain was launched by the Electric Telegraph Company two decades before nationalization of the telegraphs in 1870. The paper examines the early development of the Victorian inland telegraph, and more precisely the telegraphic despatches, or telegrams, as they became widely known.

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