The Edwardian Picture Postcard as a Communications Revolution: A Literacy Studies Perspective [1 ed.] 9781003261322, 9781032198873, 9781032198897

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The Edwardian Picture Postcard as a Communications Revolution

This monograph offers a novel investigation of the Edwardian picture postcard as an innovative form of multimodal communication, revealing much about the creativity, concerns and lives of those who used postcards as an almost instantaneous form of communication. In the early twentieth century, the picture postcard was a revolutionary way of combining short messages with an image, making use of technologies in a way impossible in the decades since, until the advent of the digital revolution. This book offers original insights into the historical and social context in which the Edwardian picture postcard emerged and became a craze. It also expands the field of Literacy Studies by illustrating the combined use of posthuman, multimodal, historic and linguistic methodologies to conduct an in-depth analysis of the communicative, sociolinguistic and relational functions of the postcard. Particular attention is paid to how study of the picture postcard can reveal details of the lives and literacy practices of often overlooked sectors of the population, such as working-class women. The Edwardian era in the United Kingdom was one of extreme inequalities and rapid social change, and picture postcards embodied the dynamism of the times. Grounded in an analysis of a unique, open-access, digitised collection of 3,000 picture postcards, this monograph will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of Literacy Studies, sociolinguistics, history of communications and UK social history. Julia Gillen is Professor of Literacy Studies at Lancaster University, UK.

Routledge Research in Literacy Edited by Julia Gillen and Uta Papen Lancaster University, UK

Literacy and Multimodality Across Global Sites Maureen Kendrick Assignments as Controversies Digital Literacy and Writing in Classroom Practice Ibrar Bhatt The Norwegian Mission’s Literacy Work in Colonial and Independent Madagascar Ellen Vea Rosnes Researching Early Childhood Literacy in the Classroom Literacy as a Social Practice Lucy Henning Researching Protest Literacies Literacy as Protest in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro Jamie D. I. Duncan The Impacts of Language and Literacy Policy on Teaching Practices in Ghana Postcolonial Perspectives on Early Literacy and Instruction Philomena Osseo-Asare The Sociocultural Functions of Edwardian Book Inscriptions Taking a Multimodal Ethnohistorical Approach Lauren Alex O’Hagan Constructions of Illiteracy in Twentieth Century Ireland Contesting the Narrative of Full Literacy Maighréad Tobin The Edwardian Picture Postcard as a Communications Revolution A Literacy Studies Perspective Julia Gillen

The Edwardian Picture Postcard as a Communications Revolution A Literacy Studies Perspective Julia Gillen

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Julia Gillen The right of Julia Gillen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-032-19887-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-19889-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-26132-2 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003261322 Typeset in Bembo by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

For Jim Gillen

Contents

Acknowledgements

ix

1 The Edwardian postcard as a revolutionary communications technology 1 The social media of the early twentieth century?  1 Ethel’s actress card and the Edwardian era  2 My approaches to investigation  6 Notes 16 References 16

2 The early postcard

19

Preparing for the picture postcard boom  19 The introduction of the postcard  20 Who was using postcards?  26 The late Victorian postcard  29 Who were postcard producers?  32 The great postcard innovation of 1902  34 The picture postcard and other communications technologies  36 Notes 37 References 38

3 Researching the Edwardian postcard Introduction 40 Literacy Studies and complementary approaches to vernacular or ordinary writing 41 Previous studies of writing on postcards  43 Collecting Edwardian postcards  45 Data organisation and initial analysis  48 Using the census and other historical records  51 A case study of transcribing a card and accessing relevant historical records: card 554  55 Notes 59 References 59

40

viii Contents

4 Materiality and multimodality

63

Introduction 63 Writers’ use of space  66 Multimodality and the undivided back subset  69 Notes 81 References 81

5 What were the Edwardians writing about?

84

Mediated discourse analysis  84 Corpus linguistics  86 Towards a wordlist  87 Keywords 89 Notes 99 References 100

6 The lives of three young women through postcards: Annie Parrish, Janet Carmichael and Ruby Ingrey

101

Women and their environments in the Edwardian era  101 Annie Parrish  104 Janet Carmichael  110 Ruby Ingrey  114 Summary 128 Notes 128 References 128

7 Conclusions

131

Introduction 131 The picture postcard in the Edwardian era  133 Comparisons with social media  137 Contribution of this book  139 Notes 140 References 140

Index

142

Acknowledgements

I owe an immense debt to Nigel Hall, formerly of Manchester Metropolitan University. We began writing a book about writing Edwardian postcards many years ago. He had first introduced me to a specific genre of old postcards, Why haven’t you written?, and we worked together to produce Hall and Gillen (2007). As this book recounts, we branched out with the idea of collecting 1,000 Edwardian postcards, developing our writing with the aid of encouragement from colleagues at Lancaster University in the Centre for Mobilities Research to write Gillen and Hall (2010). I felt very honoured that our chapter was selected as the opening chapter in that book edited by John Urry, Monika Büscher and Katian Witchger. I have also been very encouraged in this lengthy, often paused, project by members of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, including David Barton, Mary Hamilton and Karin Tusting. I am particularly grateful to Uta Papen, coeditor of this book series, for reading draft chapters of this book and making extremely helpful comments. I have benefited also from an interest in the project by members of the Department of Linguistics and English Language, including Tony McEnery, Ruth Wodak and, especially, Paul Baker, who noticed when I stopped mentioning this work. Corpus linguists at Lancaster University and beyond advised me on the work explained in Chapter 5, as I elucidate and thank them there. Besides the Centre for Mobilities Research, I have also been a member of the Centre for Technology Enhanced Learning and again am grateful for interest, and the photographic contribution of Phil Moffitt to Chapter 6. But I return to the genesis of this book, and working with Nigel. Nigel’s investigations of writing implements were very useful to my discussion of ten cards in detail published by the Journal of Sociolinguistics (Gillen, 2013) and to my discussion in Chapter 4 of this book. However, it eventually became evident that I would need to write a book alone, owing to his diminishing health. It took me some years to succeed in pivoting away from the book we had wanted to write together to one that I could write alone. It has become very different from what we might have written together but nonetheless shows many traces of that collaboration, most of which I have acknowledged in the text. However, there are many ways in which he helped that have not been explicitly detailed; I recall for example he introduced me to the activities of Henniker Heaton MP,

x Acknowledgements as discussed in Chapter 2. He carried out considerable historical and geographical investigations; in many cases, he was the first to find one of our addressees in the census, although I returned to work on each of the postcards of the main collection in the census. As I explain in the text, we developed our initial categorisation system together. Nigel was the first to become interested in Ruby Ingrey and Arthur Waddelow, even travelling to London to retrace her addresses and the site of the Metropolitan Cattle Market. I would like to mention too that the first people to help us with transcribing postcards were his wife June Hall and my mother Jeanette Riglin. I regret that I have not been able to record all the names of donors of postcards nor even all the transcribers of the 3,000 cards of the main collection. I am very grateful to all of them and also to Lancaster University Library for the tremendous work in transferring the collection to Lancaster Digital Collections, making the postcards and transcriptions available open access online (especial thanks to Phil Cheeseman, Liz Fawcett, Annette Lawrence, Thomas Shaw and their colleagues). We brought this participation to the Institute of Historical Research Our Centenary History, Past, Present and Future Festival at Senate House, University College London, in July 2022. More librarians have helped me in the research for this book than I can name but include Helen Clish, Lorna Pemberton and Paul Newman at Lancaster University, and also the British Library. I have been extremely fortunate to benefit from AHRC grants to Lancaster University. The Physical Social Network in 2016 enabled a productive collaboration with Adrian Gradinar. One of our activities was a public exhibit and event “Hands on with the Crank Machine” at Brighton Digital Festival in partnership with The Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove, part of the Brighton Digital Festival in 2017. I am grateful to Kevin Bacon in Brighton. Much longer ago, in 2010–2011 I developed an exhibit “Janet Carmichael and the Edwardian Picture Postcard” at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery and thank Martha Lawrence, then the Assistant Museum Manager. I also developed an exhibit on the Edwardian postcard for the public exhibition “Picture This: Postcards and Letters Beyond Text” supported by the AHRC at the University of Sussex in March 2011. In 2010 I also organised a postcard fair at Lancaster University, which included talks by Nigel Hall and Andrew Brookes. To return to the AHRC, in 2016 I also benefited from a grant from the AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund. I have also received internal funding from Lancaster University to support public engagement with research. I have been able to meet with postcard clubs and local history groups and give a number of talks, both physically and online. Online talks given from Lancaster City Museums and Lancaster University Public Events in 2021, as part of the AHRC Being Human Festival in 2020, and for the UK Literacy Association also in 2020, are available on YouTube. Discussions with people interested in Edwardian postcards, including as dealers or collectors, have been as enjoyable as my academic presentations, and I never cease to be amazed at the diverse sources of knowledge about Edwardian

Acknowledgements  xi postcards. I even benefited from the only initially hostile contact I have ever had about the project, when a member of the public phoned and alleged I had used taxpayers’ money to buy the postcards. Having assured him this was not the case, and having offered to share some scans of the type he was particularly interested in, I was very pleased when he gave me some useful information about one of the postcards in my collection. I have enjoyed discussions with many people in the postcard collecting world and must especially mention Brian and Mary Lund. Indeed for a time, Nigel Hall and I wrote a monthly column for Picture Postcard Monthly under the editorship of Brian Lund. I have been very fortunate in meeting many academics through research on Edwardian postcards. In 2018 I contributed to an invited talk at “Postcard Journeys: Image, Text Media” at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. I was also invited to present “The Edwardian Postcard: Breathing New Life into Early Twentieth Century Social Media” at a Sheffield Institute of Education seminar at Sheffield Hallam University in 2018. At “Valuing the Visual in Literacy Research” at the University of Sheffield in 2017, I presented “‘Above Is the Street I Walk along Daily’: Re-examining Multimodality through an Examination of the ‘Undivided Back’ Format of Early Twentieth Century postcards.” This work developed into a book chapter (Gillen, 2017), with support from that book’s marvellous editors: Becky Parry, Cathy Burnett and Guy Merchant, and the kind author of the Foreword, Donna Alvermann. Earlier, I can still recall how nervous I was at presenting to the Edwardian Culture Network’s second annual conference at Liverpool University in 2014. Fortunately, I can also remember how much I enjoyed the papers of that lively group and indeed went on to organise an event myself in Lancaster. “Edwardian Postcards: Learning from Early Twentieth Century Social Media Practices” was my plenary paper at Historicising the Digital BAAL/CUP seminar, University of Leicester, in June 2016. I have also spoken about my research on Edwardian Picture Postcards at the University of Hong Kong, for which I thank Adam Jaworski, and the City University of Hong Kong, for which I thank Rodney Jones. In that year, 2014, I also presented at “What Is a Letter? An Interdisciplinary Approach” at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. I am indebted to the organisers, M.I. Matthews-Schlinzig and Caroline Socha, who edited a book to which I contributed (Gillen, 2018). Another very memorable gathering at which I was fortunate to present was the Historical Sociolinguistics Network meeting: “Examining the Social in Historical Sociolinguistics, Methods and Theory” at New York University and City of New York Graduate Center in April 2017. I have also presented to the American Educational Research Association’s Writing and Literacies SIG, of which I am a longstanding member. Besides Nigel Hall, the most significant intellectual and indeed practical contribution to the project was by Amanda Pullan, who was a researcher on the project, funded by the AHRC for 12 months from September 2017. Amanda contributed substantially to the project in discussions, public and community engagement at events and online, and contributed to the development of a new

xii Acknowledgements citizen humanities website idea. Joanne Thistlethwaite and Jane Demmen also acted as research associates and were particularly skilled transcribers. Several undergraduate students have also assisted the project, particularly with social media dissemination; Cath Booth of MMU made useful suggestions also. I apologise to all those who have contributed but have not been mentioned here. I am grateful to the many colleagues at Routledge I have worked with, including most recently Alice Salt, Elizabeth Spicer and Shalima Begam in the production of this book. Finally, my greatest thanks go to members of my family, including my children, Daniel, Conor and Kathleen, and my husband Jim to whom this book is dedicated.

References Gillen, J. (2013). Writing Edwardian Postcards. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(4), 488–521. Gillen, J. (2017). The picture postcard at the beginning of the twentieth century: Instagram, Snapchat or Selfies of an earlier age? In B. Parry, C. Burnett, & G. Merchant (Eds.), Literacy, media, technology: past, present and future (pp. 11–24). Bloomsbury Academic. Gillen, J. (2018). “I should have wrote a letter tonight:” a Literacy Studies perspective on the Edwardian postcard. In M. I. Matthews-Schlinzig, & C. Socha (Eds.), What is a letter? an interdisciplinary approach “Was ist ein Brief? — Eine interdisziplinäre Annäherung” (pp. 123–140). Königshausen & Neumann. Gillen, J., & Hall, N. (2010). Any mermaids? Tracing early postcard mobilities. In J. Urry, M. Büscher, & K. Witchger (Eds.), Mobile methods (pp. 169–189). Routledge. Hall, N., & Gillen, J. (2007). Purchasing pre-packed words: complaint and reproach in early British postcards. In Ordinary writing, personal narratives: writing practices in the 19th and early 20th centuries (pp. 101–117). Peter Lang.

Data availability statement The main collection of 3,000 Edwardian postcards that is the basis of this book is openly available in Lancaster Digital Collections: https://digitalcollections. lancaster.ac.uk/collections/ep/1

1 The Edwardian postcard as a revolutionary communications technology

The social media of the early twentieth century? Quite half of the company who sit and sip their lager beer in the German gardens or “Tonhalle” have a packet of postcards at their side, and the despatch of mementos of the occasion is a regular part of the proceedings when friends meet …. All so easy too. Just “Love from Jack,” or “Fine place this,” and the picture does the rest. The picture postcard is simply a continuance of the “you touch the button and we do the rest” idea. It is part and parcel of the busy, rushing, time-saving age we live in. (Editor of the Process Photogram, cited by Corkett, 1906: 624) In the twenty-first century, social media are acknowledged as providing sites for presentation of identity, interaction with others and participation in society. Despite enormous and ever-growing popularity, social media are also blamed for many social ills, from the spread of dangerous misinformation to widening inequalities and deleterious impacts on mental health. Social media platforms are often blamed in media discourses for increasing pressures on young people, especially, to see and be seen, to display and have their messages shared, while still being recognised as inescapably linked to many domains of everyday life for many of us. It is one of my arguments in this book that society in Britain – probably as in many other places, but this is the location where I research – has, long ago, in an almost forgotten and misjudged era, experienced a social phenomenon with many of the same qualities as today. Relatively few people, it is true, put quite so much energy into deploring the picture postcard craze in the first decade of the twentieth century as critics of social media now, although there certainly were some strong detractors. But in terms of its functionality in society, its popularity and the creativity with which many people embraced it, the Edwardian picture postcard can fruitfully be compared to today’s social media. It should be explained immediately that the term “Edwardian” refers to the reign of Edwardian VII, 1901–1910, almost exactly aligning with the heyday of the picture postcard and the collection discussed in this book, more precisely from 1 January 1902 until the end of 1910. DOI: 10.4324/9781003261322-1

2  Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology Between that era and the dawn of the digital age of society in the 1990s, with SMS and email, there were no comparable means of exchanging rapid, cheap, accessible written messages with images. I would like to immediately introduce you to one, perfectly ordinary picture postcard from the first decade of the twentieth century. This, as are all the cards discussed in this book, unless noted otherwise, is from the Edwardian Postcard Project’s main collection and can be freely viewed online in Lancaster Digital Collections.1

Ethel’s actress card and the Edwardian era Miss Clowes 70 Corporation St Stoke-on-Trent

Dear L. received your nice leer. You must look for me when you see me, shall come as early as possible, although it might be the last train from Biddulph which should leave at 10-p.m anyway don’t give me up unitll 11-30 at latest love from Ethel (Then along the side of the card) are you still collecting p. Cds.

Figure 1.1  Postcard 1647.

Ethel’s card demonstrates a world of rapid connections, plans and communications interwoven with a shared sense of popular culture. Phyllis Dare, pictured, was an actress who owed much of her international popularity to her carefully managed presence on picture postcards (Kelly, 2004). Bartlett (2013) discovered from the archives of Foulsham and Banfield, the leading theatrical photographers of the time, that Dare signed annual contracts of £100 (over £12k in 2021)2 and would have sat for these postcard portraits monthly. The Edwardian era was the time when media representations of actors and actresses developed on the picture postcard into what Stephenson (2013: 9) termed the

Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology  3 “modernizing iconographies of celebrities – stars ….” The final reference in Miss Clowes’s card, written upside down, is to the practice of collecting postcards, an immensely popular hobby at the time (Carline, 1971). Implicitly, it acknowledges that the card, in an era before colour photography, could well have been a valued object, a gift someone might want to add to their collection. Sharing displays the affection cemented by the message. Finally, it is the speed of the communications technologies, both the card and the planned railway journey, that might impress us now. Ethel had posted the card before 10.30am in complete confidence that it will reach Miss Clowes hours later. She could well have been promising her arrival later that same evening. Admittedly, Biddulph is only just over 9 miles from Corporation Street, Stoke-on-Trent. Today, the journey could be made in approximately the same duration, but not so late at night, and by bus rather than train. The postal service and trains were more efficient in that era, than now, both instantiations of what were felt to be increasingly rapid communications technologies. The first years of the twentieth century, before the Great War – later better known as the First World War – are sometimes thought of as an idyllic, pastoral and stable era, calm before the storm. But this is the effect of retrospection, a largely fictional view of “Edwardian perfection” promulgated by authors such as L.P. Hartley (Wright, 2004). Substantial enquiries by social investigators, Charles Booth working in London in 1886–1889 and Seebohm Rowntree in York in 1899–1900, had led to the recognition that Victorian assumptions of growth, prosperity and consequent reduction in poverty, at least by working families that were not feckless, did not hold (Read, 1972). These late Victorian investigations revealed levels of poverty that had also come to the notice of society when a high proportion of men recruited to serve in the South African War of 1899–1902 were rejected as unfit. These findings were experienced as disturbing at the time, leading to understandings that factors such as low wages, especially for unskilled labourers, large families, periods of unemployment and the effects of old age had consequences experienced as unavoidable by even responsible individuals. The work of those investigations and other data from the era have been reanalysed using modern methods with a finding that 18% of working households experienced absolute poverty and that certain points in the lifecycle, including childhood and old age, were particularly vulnerable (Gazeley & Newell, 2011). In its own time, Edwardian Britain witnessed political turmoil, with a Liberal government elected in 1906 expected to tackle these conditions, while opposed by powerful and wealthy landowners (Short, 1997: 19). For people living at the time, those years in Great Britain and Ireland were experienced as a time of rapid mobilities and change. Processes of urbanisation were unparalleled (Collins, 2000: 1; Thompson, 1992: 24); one-quarter of women were employed in some four hundred different occupations (Crow, 1978: 137) and technological advances impacted all areas of life, whether urban or agricultural.

4  Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology Transport was a highly dynamic area of life. In 1896 the requirement to have someone walk in front of a motor car was abolished, and the speed limit increased to 14 miles per hour. By 1904 there were 8,500 private cars on the roads of Great Britain (Wild, 2017: 128). A wonderful compendium of articles depicting the influence of the motor car on society through the era on just one locality is provided by the “Ladies’ Chain” articles in the Accrington Observer and Times. These were written under the pseudonym of “Stella,” by Florrie Crossley (R. Crossley, 2011). She charted the thrilling exploits of the town’s motorists during the decade, such as the time in May 1906 when an intrepid group tried to reach Edinburgh. These were among the better-off inhabitants of the area who could make use of the most expensive technologies available whatever the opportunities and challenges. “Telephones were in great demand in the endeavours of motorists to trace the whereabouts of their fellow sufferers in various places along the trial route, and to inform those at home that all were well” (R. Crossley, 2011: 141). Eventually, “all agreed they had endured experiences which they had no desire to repeat” (R. Crossley, 2011: 11–12). More reliable transport technologies were watched out for; from a contemporary view, it is very surprising to see what replacements were considered. “When balloons supersede motors as some say they may, will there be a speed limit on them also I wonder?” Stella speculated (R. Crossley, 2011: 153; iii). By 1909 an engineer and pub landlord Harry Bergan had put his unreliable car up for sale and begun building an aeroplane, having become Accrington’s first member of Manchester’s Aero Club (R. Crossley, 2011: 230–231). For people with more restricted budgets, expanding railways reached their zenith in 1909 (Pooley et al., 2005), carrying people between cities, towns and even some villages. In the Victorian era, most people had generally walked wherever they had to go, but in the Edwardian era access to affordable railway travel increased, with “nearly 95 per cent of all railways passengers travelling third class” (Lawton & Pooley, 1992). In 1904 “bicycles were the fastest vehicles on the roads” (Church, 1956: 208), but the most important aspect of cycling was that it became widely accessible during the era to men, women and children (Hannavy, 2011: 22–23). Again, during the Victorian era, bicycles had been mainly restricted to the middle and upper classes. On the domestic front, there were immense developments such as the building of suburbs, made possible by the late Victorian transport revolution, including the development of networks of trains, trams and buses, and even underground railways in London (Lawton & Pooley, 1992: 239). Contemporary commentators were often concerned about the separation of social classes that ensued, from the working classes in inner city slums and those more prosperous arranged in inner or, even more desirable, outer suburbs (Read, 1972: 30). Aspirations to move to the suburbs appear highly understandable in the words of those who managed it; Church’s (1956) popular autobiography explained the ultimately successful endeavours of his father to pass mail sorter exams in the Post Office that enabled the purchase of a house in the suburbs in the Edwardian era. But his school-teaching mother had to continue working in Battersea to

Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology  5 pay the mortgage, and the extremely polluted air there eventually killed her. The growth of the suburbs was greeted by considerable snobbery in media aimed at upper-middle-class audiences; Read (1972: 30) quotes a 1905 publication that decries the evils of the suburbs as including picture postcards, alongside such apparently deplorable features as bamboo furniture and “miraculous hairrestorers.” Perhaps more objectively it can be stated that the concept of town planning was emerging (Cherry, 1988), and bold new ideas for house and furniture design were being developed (Parker & Unwin, 1901). Even the experience of night was modernised, owing to developments of electric and fluorescent gas lights (Bradley, 2016: 36). After the long Victorian era, change seemed in the air all around. This book focuses on one way in which communications were transformed, with the enormous popularity of the picture postcard. Teulié (2019) has pointed out that the picture postcard brought reproductions of landscapes and artworks, into virtually every home, whereas previously they had been the province of the rich. Anyone could buy a postcard representing a painting for half a penny without investing in a real and costly painting. This new access to art corresponded to the height of Empire. (Teulié, 2019, unpaged) In what has become known as its Golden Age, the first decade of the twentieth century, the picture postcard was the social media platform of its day. You could send a message that would arrive within hours. That message would consist of your own writing combined with a picture you chose to share – whether cute cats, a celebrity actress, a stunning landscape or perhaps your local church. You might even have commissioned a portrait of yourself, a type of “selfie,”3 or produced your own image through photography (Hannavy, 2011) or artwork.4 It is true that there were many differences between the picture postcard and any specific social media platform of the twenty-first century, but these differences were not necessarily deficiencies of a non-digital era. It is true that a single, specific postcard with its message could not “go viral” and be reproduced in exactly the same format among a wide public, unless this was via another medium such as a newspaper or magazine. But nevertheless the picture postcard – often abbreviated by its users to p.p.c. – was often far more social than might be assumed. Its purposes and functions were far more diverse than its reduced shadow: the holiday, art or novelty picture postcard that anyone alive today can only have experienced, excepting contemporary digital/physical postcard crossover apps. The physical postcard held a prominent place in society and was regarded in its time as a revolutionary communications technology. As I will explain further in subsequent chapters, nothing like the picture postcard existed between approximately the first decade of the twentieth century, until the digital revolution that began in the 1990s and is still unfolding. Furthermore, comparisons between the affordances5 – that is, the possibilities of a technology

6  Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology as perceived by its users – of postcards with specific contemporary digital platforms and tools do not always place the picture postcard at a disadvantage. Actually, early SMS, emails and even Twitter struggled to include images in their early days (Gillen, 2014).

My approaches to investigation The purpose of this book is first of all to describe and analyse literacy practices of the Edwardian era in the UK as evidenced by picture postcards. That is, I am examining the writing and reading practices of people using texts, in combination with images, while seeking various ways of putting these in context. My second purpose is to illustrate and explain various linguistic and other methods that are appropriate to this exploration. I draw chiefly on Literacy Studies, the sociolinguistics of writing, Corpus Linguistics and social history. I am influenced by current approaches to applied linguistics that can be characterised under the umbrella of posthumanism. I also seek to encourage the reader to draw comparisons with communications technologies of the twenty-first century. This is not simply to argue that Edwardian postcard writing is in some ways similar to Twitter, messaging apps, Instagram, etc., but because I believe that historical studies are potentially useful to people studying and theorising everyday literacy practices now. The heyday of the picture postcard in Britain coincided with the reign of King Edward VII from 1901 to 1910 and most especially from a change in January 1902, as I will explain. Therefore, this book and the associated project behind is called the Edwardian picture postcard, to point most clearly to the era studied and its location, Great Britain and Ireland (the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland at that time). I continue to introduce the Edwardian picture postcard through a second example I discuss in some detail. This is not because the example is in any way “typical,” as this book will show the picture postcard varied enormously as a communications genre in many dimensions. Indeed in one respect – the layout of the writing – this example is highly unusual although not unique. But I must begin somewhere and choose one that shows the joie de vivre evident in many postcard texts, illustrates the Edwardian postcard as a social practice and also demonstrates the collaborative interpretation, distributed across diverse technologies and people. This card was sent on 13 December 1909 from Swansea to Ashton (now called Ashton-on-Ribble), Preston. I present it in the style I adopt as a convention for a few cards illustrated in full in this book: within a quadrant. The top left contains the image side. The bottom left contains the writing side, or rather the side that includes the stamp and the address (since there was another format, in the earlier part of the era, as I explain in Chapters 2 and 5). At the top right is my transcription of the addressee and address and the bottom right is a transcription of the message. Transcriptions preserve original orthography and line endings.

Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology  7 Mrs. Geo. P. Hardley. “Meadowfield.” Lytham Road. Ashton Preston.

Puffin North Dock Swansea 13 12 09 My Dear Wife Laurence and I were walking up the main St this evening at 4-45 when we came face to face with George. It was a great surprise to all of us. We returned at once to the Puffin So we are now going to have tea. I shall persuade him to stay here tonight It seems like old times him being here again tonight True love to you & all at home always yours George

Figure 1.2  Postcard 112.

It is immediately obvious to the contemporary reader that the name and the address on the right hand of the postcard back are clearly written. Indeed, the writer has been careful to emphasise key features: the full name of the addressee, the name of the house – which might be familiar to the postman – and the town which would be useful to the sorting offices along the way. The communications platform being used is named “Post Card,” and there are other texts present without the direct agency of the writer. A brand “Frith’s series” is fairly prominent – the second line from the top – and so are instructions to the user about how to use the spaces. On the left side at the top is printed “This space

8  Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology may be used for communication” and on the right side “The Address only to be written here.” These reflect decisions made not by the publishers or producers of the cards alone but also by the regulatory authority: The Post Office. This was so important in its day, attracting political, media and public attention that its head, the Postmaster General, was a full member of Cabinet – the most powerful ruling body under the leadership of the Prime Minister. Well over a century later, there is much political and media interest in social media platforms and questions as to the degree and type of legislation, regulation and governance they might be subject to, at national and international levels. The Post Office of Great Britain and Ireland was also an international player as a member of the Universal Postal Union.6 The postcard has other features too that in form will be familiar to social media users. Without the writer’s direct intervention, the technologies of the platform bring in other information besides that which the writer has selected. He – as I will show it was a man – chose to write the addressee’s name and address. However, writing a postcard successfully, which may be judged in terms of it reaching its destination, at least, does not just depend on human agency. The machinery of the Post Office appends the postmark, a vital element to enable despatch onwards. It was postmarked in Swansea, meaning it passed through that major post office and was stamped at 9.15pm on December 13 09, meaning of course 1909. The timing of 9.15pm will not startle any social media user but may give pause for thought to any user of the British Post Office in the late twentieth or twenty-first century who will most probably be unaware of the extremely long hours of full functioning of the Post Office in that era. Returning back to the postcard, I turn to the handwritten element. The writing is not immediately easy to decipher, being a cross-hatching style occasionally adopted by the Edwardians. This style, writing first in one direction and then the other, becomes easier to read when one is used to it and enables more writing to fit on the card than is easily the case otherwise. It is not very common, but not highly unusual either, having been carried over from a practice used by some Victorians (Golden, 2010: 34). Its advantages are that it saves space and perhaps it also makes it a little more difficult for intermediaries, such as the postman, to decipher. It would be impossible in at least most social media platforms to directly compose a message in the cross-hatching style, if authoring through a keyboard. It is impossible now to retrace just how the process of transcribing, a collective enterprise in the case of this postcard, was achieved. I began this project with Nigel Hall, who first introduced me to a specific sub-genre of early postcards (Hall & Gillen, 2007). Over the years that we worked together, we recruited various help, some paid for research assistance, and some voluntary, during the early years of amassing, transcribing and analysing this collection in ways that will be explained later. When transcribing is challenging, I have found the best approach is to work collaboratively over time, as new eyes, or the same person looking again later, can make out more. Sometimes we have been stumped, and there are many gaps in our transcriptions and doubtless mistakes

Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology  9 as well. The delightful narrative that George wrote to his wife, as best as this collective effort can transcribe it, is a delightful example of Edwardian picture postcards as “inscribed carriers of emotional meaning” (Pollen, 2009: 87). Having transcribed the text, I could then turn to the census records of the era to find out more about the sender and addressee. The task of combing through the censuses was initially undertaken with Nigel Hall, and again it would be impossible to disentangle our contributions over time. Since I returned to them all for this book, checking and often expanding, I write in the first person. Working with the census records, I was able to work out that this is George Hardley writing to his wife back home in Runcorn. George was on one of his frequent trips away, with his son Laurence, when they bumped into oldest son, George. Father George is so delighted he immediately dashes off a card to his wife to tell her of the coincidental meeting. Why did they all meet in Swansea? The answer is that they were all mariners, with young George Hardley, like his father, a master mariner, and all were on boats travelling backwards and forwards between Swansea and Runcorn, probably delivering coal or other raw materials to the industrial complex that had grown up in Runcorn in the nineteenth century. At the time of the closest census, 1911, the family were living in another house close to this address – at Long Lane, Ashton. Internal evidence makes it certain this is the same family, including George Penketh Hardley (more about his middle name later), Mary Ellen his wife and ten children, including George and Laurence, the oldest sons. George and Mary Ellen were in their mid-forties at the time the card was written. Two years later the census records George, 23, working as a mariner, as was Lawrence aged 17 and between them Dorothy, 19, a milliner. Bessie Mary, 16, is a dressmaker’s apprentice, and then there are six other younger children. In addition, two others had been born but soon died. In 1911 the family has Hannah Penketh Hunning staying with them, a middleaged woman, presumably a relative of George, perhaps helping with the children. With or without a helpful guest, with so many children, Mary Ellen’s life cannot have been easy, living as they were in a seven-roomed house. The Hardleys had four bedrooms, a parlour, a sitting room and a kitchen (sculleries, closets and bathrooms were not counted) in 1911.7 The census records of every ten years can be investigated to look further back into the family history. Looking into Mary Ellen’s history first, I found that she had been born in Runcorn, like her husband, and one presumes that some kind of family or local connection linked them, although Mary Ellen, née Heginbotham, had grown up in Worcestershire. The earliest census entry for her, in 1871, shows the young Mary Ellen Heginbotham living in New Street, Lower Mitton, Stourport, Kidderminster, Worcestershire, with her father Joseph, an insurance agent, mother and their seven children. Mary Ellen’s two older sisters and one older brother were working as stampers and lacers, so probably in the millinery trade. Edwardian towns tended to concentrate on a single industry, so clusters of family members in the same occupation is frequent, and probably indicative of a certain lack of choice (Thompson, 1992: 29). By 1881

10  Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology the family were living at 38 New Road, Kidderminster, Old Borough. Joseph was then a “time keeper.” Older sister Hannah was then a carpet weaver, but of most interest to us is that Mary Ellen is shown as working as an assistant teacher, and her sister Selina a pupil teacher. Five years later, Mary Ellen Heginbotham married George Hardley, the master mariner in the merchant service, and, as already stated, they went on to have ten children who survived at least into childhood. George Hardley, the sender of the card, had been born in Runcorn as the second child of another George Hardley, also a master mariner and his wife Rebecca. By 1881, at about 19 years of age, later postcard writer George was already being described as a master mariner, the trade he in turn passed to at least two of his sons. I have written as if the census trail was straightforward to follow, but in actuality as usual it was problematic. Census records are rife with misspellings and transcription errors. George Penketh Hardley was once transcribed as George Penbeth Hardley. His mother Rebecca was misspelt in the 1871 census as “Rebaca.” The Heginbotham family was entered as Higginbottom in 1881. To make sure I am connecting the same people, I had to do lots of crosschecking backwards and forwards between families and addresses. In some respects looking up large families such as the Heginbothams and Hardleys makes this much easier as the sequence of first names and age relations are unique to each family. Besides the census records, online if 100 years old or more, I was also assisted in researching the cards through connections we can make using contemporary digital technologies. In considering this card, I was helped by members of the Oystermouth Historical Association, including John and Carol Powell. The Association maintains a very good website,8 which draws on historical postcard images. One of theirs is very similar to this card and helped them to advise me that the Hardley card was at least a little out of date at the time it was sent, since a fairground had been erected next to the track on the reclaimed land, further that the photograph had been taken in early Spring. Not surprisingly, most such views are taken in Summer. In seeking out the Puffin, the boat mentioned by George, the Oystermouth Historical Association put me in touch with Carl Smith. He advised that a problem with researching a ship’s name is that there are likely to be half a dozen the same at any one time but suggested that this is likely to be the 400-ton general cargo vessel SS Puffin, built on the Clyde in 1900. Carl looked at an image of this SS Puffin in the Joe McMillan collection and confirmed that she looked like a collier and that coal (usually steam coal) would have been shipped from Swansea to Preston, Runcorn, Liverpool and Manchester at that time. He added, I have seen many postcards sent in this way by masters or members of a vessels crew to tell family they were about to sail and expect them in so many days. French ships were often in Swansea for coal and their men sent

Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology  11 many PCs home. In the French style they usually stuck the stamp on the photo side! Quaint but it doesn’t help the collector who wants the image! Help from the people mentioned above, and all those who have created and maintained contemporary digitised records, assisted me to consider a number of facets of this postcard – where it was sent from, to whom, when and why. Like so many social media communications of the twenty-first century, it was through processes beyond the user’s direct control appended with information about the place and time it was sent from. Here, it is the postmark that locates the moment of posting in space and time, much as many social media communications can be marked by the time and/or place of posting today. In common with digital communications, the addressee needs to be adequately well specified by the sender for it to arrive. Many picture postcards went astray but nevertheless statistics were collected by the regulatory authority on this as well as successfully delivered cards. Contextual knowledge, encompassing topographical identification, and historically situated understandings of occupation and culture assist with comprehending the function of the card and meaning-making practices of the writer and receiver. Carl Smith’s remarks include two other pointers to the study of any picture postcard. First is his remark about the common French positioning of the stamp, a practice based on a different regulatory framework. The extent to which the picture postcard was a regulated space and the degrees to which allowable formats could be slightly subverted, or creatively modified, is a fascinating issue I return to in Chapter 4. Again, these issues bear comparison with the affordances of far later digital templates, such as the short length of original SMS, more commonly known as text messages (Jeffrey & Doron, 2013). These have developed some flexibility but originally at least were extremely constrained in numbers and constitution of characters, as well as typeface and layout. Second, Smith’s allusion to collectors is a reminder of how these ephemeral objects have come down to us through many decades. Many billions were in circulation around the world and were generally perceived as ephemeral. Postcards were preserved at the time of their use if they were valued by the addressee. This could be because of the salience of the message and the person sending it – it is not hard to imagine Mary Ellen reacting to George’s warm message concerning two of their children and his lengthy salutation: “True love to you & all at home always yours George.” For a picture postcard to last for many years and outlive its original users has to be owing to a secondary function, as an object to be collected. As confirmed from internal evidence in the main collection, many Edwardians, especially women, collected cards, often putting them into albums (Carline, 1971; Wilson, 2021). As researchers, we can now collect cards through transactions with collectors and dealers. What is distinctive about twenty-firstcentury Edwardian picture postcard collection practice is that for around 99% of collectors it is the image that matters. Then, for some of the other 1%, it is the postmark that is of interest!9 This project has been one of relatively few that was stimulated above all by an interest in the messages.

12  Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology There have been thousands of books that focus on the Edwardian picture postcard, but virtually all these are devoted to the image. Only a small number have considered the message side as equally interesting, and few have seriously focused on the writing, the writers and readers; see, for example, Atkins (2014); Becker and Malcolm (2008); Jackson (2019); Phillips (2000); Wilson (2021). In this book I focus on the picture postcard as a literacy practice. That is, I am interested in the texts and what they show us about the people who used the cards, the ways in which their communications were mediated through this technology and how they used it to express their concerns and their identities. I am interested in such questions as, who wrote and received cards? What was the relationship between messages and pictures? Why did people use picture postcards and for what purposes were they unsuitable? How did people make use of the physical space on cards, and how did they react to (changing) regulations about that space? What writing implements did they use? How did people react creatively to opportunities opened up by this new medium? Many questions can be asked about the language used: what did people write about? How did postcards fit in their communicative repertoire (Rymes, 2014; Street, 2003), that is, the full span of communicative practices they engaged in? Did people of every class, gender and occupation write picture postcards? At this point, I insert a little more background about the approaches I take to working with the cards to answer these questions and my disciplinary mix behind this. My home academic field is called Literacy Studies, or sometimes New Literacy Studies, and aims at studying literacy as social practice in everyday life. Most Literacy Studies research is contemporary, drawing on qualitative, especially ethnographic methods, although there have been significant contributions to historical studies, such as Barton and Hall’s (1999) edited collection “Letter Writing as a Social Practice.” Most historical studies of literacy practices fall under the umbrella of Historical Sociolinguistics. The sociolinguistics of writing (Lillis, 2013) is also central to this enterprise. The concept “the sociolinguistics of writing” was proposed as a branch of sociolinguistics, the study of language variation in use which had mostly tended to focus on spoken language. I am also influenced by various currents that seek to problematise the placing of the human at the centre of analysis in our highly technological age and are therefore often grouped together under the term “posthumanism.” This is a productive wave currently buffeting linguistic and education research, among other domains, and for me is an influencing sensitivity. I now turn to look at how my research enterprise can be mapped against the concerns of Literacy Studies, Historical Sociolinguistics, the sociolinguistics of writing and other salient approaches and methods in a little more detail. Literacy Studies scholars have a sociocultural orientation; that is, they seek to understand practices involved in reading and writing in diverse situations of everyday life, valuing the study of authentic texts and other forms of discourse related to human individuals as they live in particular circumstances.10 Without necessarily referring to Literacy Studies, some previous scholarship related to

Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology  13 social practices with postcards have also drawn on sociocultural foundations, for example, Östman (2004). Historical sociolinguistics is concerned with capturing variation in language use in the past; necessarily once sources are before audio recording technologies then written texts constitute data. Recent work in Historical Sociolinguistics, connecting to Eckert’s definition of third-wave variation studies,11 is pertinent to this study as it focuses above all on the relations between text-making and expressions of identity (Auer et al., 2015). So, with a sociocultural orientation, I want, as in the discussion of the Hardley postcard shown in Figure 1.2, to enrich my understanding of even a single card in as many facets of the personal, historical and cultural context as I can, through investigating census and other records. Thus, the study of postcard writing moves beyond study of the text alone into its personal, social and historical milieu. Lillis’s (2013) work on the sociolinguistics of writing is especially useful when considering any specific postcard text as material object, as I did with the Hardley card discussed above. Writing involves inscription, the making of marks that are perceived as meaningful. The materiality of these marks, the kind of instrument used and the available technologies depend on what resources are available locally. Writing is thus always multimodal. Edwardian picture postcards are multimodal not just in the sense that a picture is combined with an image but more fundamentally in that there are always visual aspects to the writing, such as George Hardley’s cross-hatching. Writing, then, as Lillis and McKinney (2013: 425) state: “…is both a technology, that is a tool for doing language and semiotic work, and a form of communication that is mediated by technologies or materials used.” The meaning-making activities, which can be thought of as writing composition, depend too on culturally shared understandings of the meanings of words, phrases and all linguistic elements that have considerable sociohistorical antecedents. As Lillis I take an understanding of linguistic communication from the school of thinkers around Mikhail Bakhtin.12 These scholars look upon language not as a system of set resources but rather as profoundly dynamic, dialogic and performative (Bauman & Briggs, 1990; Georgakopoulou, 2007). As human communicators we rely on and reshape past examples of language. It is not possible to precisely recreate any example of language use, for every reader and writer on each occasion will bring a subtly different expression and interpretation. So all communications are dialogic, designed for different circumstances of use and involving the meeting of different subjectivities. Writing is a social practice, bound up with other activities and inextricably associated with relationships. It is not difficult for later readers to imagine that Mary Ellen might bring particular understandings to the account of the meeting with young George. Corpus linguistics, which will be introduced in Chapter 5, is then applied to investigate the questions: what were the postcard writers writing about? How did their language in these texts compare to written English in other contexts? Assuming no prior knowledge of corpus linguistics from the reader, I introduce methods to analyse the whole dataset at once to identify key patterns in the texts

14  Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology at word level and also beyond. I use a larger corpus of written English to make comparisons with the writing in these postcard messages. Finally, I want to use the lens of social history to understand the picture postcard in what might be called the media ecology of its time, interests pursued by Cure (2018) and Milne (2010). How did use of the picture postcard relate to other communication technologies of the era? How was the picture postcard considered in its own time, as highly personal, dyadic, even romantic perhaps? Was it only for people who already knew one another in the world, or could it be used to reach out to new correspondents? Was it also suited for any other kinds of communications, or were other purposes perceived as appropriate to alternative channels? Were there any uses that the picture postcard was put to that were innovative, owing to its specific affordances and the creativity of its users? Bringing these disciplines and questions together, I can perhaps simplify matters in discerning two threads running through my work. One is the human and is often best expressed through a narrative approach. As with the Hardley example, I can make use of internal, that is, textual evidence and those other sources of information I can gain from contemporary records to craft something like a story of their lives. I can at times suggest connections between the lives of the Edwardians and ourselves, each living in eras self-consciously experienced as times of rapid change (Keep, 2001). In presentational terms, I am making use of the human propensity for narratives of other people (Bruner, 1986). To finish off my story of card 112, I can record that it is perhaps not surprising that after so much childbearing and, one must assume, housework in caring for such a large family, Mary Ellen did not reach a great age. She died in Preston in 1921, aged 59; George Penketh Hardley lived on another six years. The card breathes life into the public documents recording their existences and contributes to strengthening the claim by Strange (2015) that working-class fatherhood in the Edwardian era could be very far from the stereotype of the strict disciplinarian father, uninvolved with his family and lacking in affection. In such ways, this postcard demonstrates the utility of the project as a contribution to social history. My second thread is focused upon the cards as technologies, the environment in which they were located and the ways in which they came to affect the actions of people in particular moments and the culture of the time. I used to count myself very much as a sociocultural researcher, in brief putting humans as social beings at the centre of accounts and investigating their uses of “tools.” But the posthumanist movement – an umbrella term, much contested – may be seen as a collection of loosely associated theories and ways of working that all respond to the idea that the concept of tool use is simplistic and does not allow for the complexities of agency that go beyond human intentionality. As embodied humans we experience, every day, ways in which the technologies we use shape our activities. With Werner Rammert (2012: 90) I can question, “to what extent human beings can actually maintain their ascribed status as autonomous actors and to what degree technological agency actually transcends the restricted role of passive and fixed instruments.”

Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology  15 In this respect, the posthumanist current helps me at the same time to see the act of writing and posting the card as an entanglement of material technologies, the production and distribution of the card, the relatively brief moment in which it was written by George Hardley and the various ways in which the regulatory and technical framework of the Post Office were involved. We do not live as isolated beings with free choice unaffected by environmental change whether caused by the weather or changes in our own bodies. Every action we take involves other people, at the time or in its historical basis, and all are inflected by symbolic systems and artefacts. It can be useful and productive as researchers to turn away from looking at the human as the starting point and, instead, at least some of the time, to begin with technology and the environment. What changes do they bring along with them? We can make use of Rammert’s helpful complexifying of agency beyond human plus tool: “Since agency emerges from empirical interdependencies between entities, each of which may show different levels and degrees of agency, agency can only be studied in collective constellations of inter-agency” (Rammert, 2012: 100). Any specific use of the picture postcard in the era consisted of a number of processes, including its creation and distribution, involving manufacture, regulation and commercial concerns (Byatt, 1978; Dagnall, 1985; Staff, 1979). To send a card, a buyer had to buy or, far less often, commission or create one, in an environment of plentiful choice, as will be explained in the following chapter. A sender chose a card appropriate to their recipient; this was far a more complex practice than those involving the holiday postcard of the later twentieth century. Regulations, discussed further in the next chapter, stipulated what kinds of writing could appear where, and the stamp plus postmark then usually guaranteed delivery. Technologies then are interwoven with human lives in “collective constellations of inter-agency” (Rammert, 2012: 100; see also Barad, 2007). In Chapter 2 I give a historical background to the picture postcard as a communications technology in Great Britain in the Edwardian era. I describe the evolution of the postcard from its beginnings to the “divided back” of 1902, the main format of the Edwardian era and of which the postcards in Figures 1.1 and 1.2 are examples. In Chapter 3 I describe the project’s methods, including collecting, categorising and transcribing the cards and look towards analysis. In Chapter 4 I consider the postcard as a multimodal communications technology. As I have suggested above, there are multiple ways of considering multimodality: any card could be considered in this respect in terms of the image and writing taken together, or just in terms of the written side – considering layout, orthography and other features. I have decided to particularly focus on examples from an early subset of the collection: examples of the undivided back. One reason for doing this is that this format of cards offers a clear parallel to those studying today’s “new media” with the combination of image and text that acts as a “caption” or overlay.13 I also briefly consider some other factors involved in multimodality or materiality more broadly including writing technologies. In Chapter 5 I first use mediated discourse analysis to examine two individual cards with brief yet contrasting messages. Corpus Linguistics is brought into play to

16  Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology help answer the question through investigating the entire main collection: what did people write about? I investigate the prevalence of certain themes and demonstrate what is revealed by this analysis as the relationship between the postcard and the letter. In Chapter 6 I take a more narrative, biographical approach, investigating the cases of three young women and showing what can be revealed about their lives through their cards and other sources. Chapter 7 briefly revisits findings from previous chapters and examines the success of the Edwardian postcard in its own era. Comparisons with the twenty-first century’s social media are suggested. Open access to the postcards through Lancaster Digital Collections provides opportunities for further studies of this primary source of early twentieth-century vernacular writing.

Notes 1 https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/collections/ep/1 2 www.thisismoney.co.uk 3 The work of Sumin Zhao and Michele Zappavigna, for example Zhao and Zappavigna (2018), have elaborated the many different forms a selfie can take as it mutates beyond the original concept of a photo taken of oneself by oneself with a smartphone, possibly with the use of a selfie stick. 4 See card 410, in Figure 4.4. 5 A particularly fine discussion of the relationships between affordances, technologies, texts and practices in digital contexts is provided by Jones et al. (2015). 6 First convened in 1874 and known under this name since 1878. http://www.upu. int/en/the-upu/history/about-history.html (accessed 30 April 2019). 7 The 1911 census, unlike the 1901 census, included information on how many rooms there were in each individual dwelling. 8 https://sites.google.com/site/ahistoryofmumbles/ (accessed 19 November 2021). 9 I cannot prove these claims; however, they arise from length immersion in postcard collecting communities; see Gillen and Hall (2010). 10 See Gillen and Ho (2019) for a brief overview of Literacy Studies. 11 See Eckhert’s website at https://web.stanford.edu/~eckert/thirdwave.html for a succinct explanation. 12 See, for example, Bakhtin (1986); Voloshinov (1995). 13 See Gillen (2017), which uses different examples.

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Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology  17 Becker, B., & Malcolm, K. (2008). Suspended conversations that intersect in the Edwardian postcard. In N. Nørgaard (Ed.), Systemic functional linguistics in use. Odense working papers in language and communication (vol. 28, pp. 175–198). University of Southern Denmark. Bradley, S. (2016). The railways: nation, network & people. Profile Books. Bruner, J. (1986). Actual minds, possible worlds. Harvard University Press. Byatt, A. (1978). Picture postcards and their publishers. Golden Age Books. Carline, R. (1971). Pictures in the post: the story of the picture postcard. Gordon Fraser. Cherry, G. E. (1988). Cities and plans: the shaping of modern Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Edward Arnold. Church, R. (1956). Over the bridge. The Reprint Society. Collins, E. J. T. (2000). Introduction. In E. J. T. Collins (Ed.), The agrarian history of England and Wales volume VII 1850–1914 part I (pp. 1–29). Cambridge University Press. Corkett, F. T. (1906). A report of his paper: the production and collection of the pictorial postcard’ read to the Society of Arts at the Adelphi. Journal of the Society of Arts, 54 (27 April), 622–630. Crossley, R. A. (Ed.). (2011). Edwardian Accrington observed: a lady journalist’s contemporary account of day-to-day Accrington life 1901–1910. Thornham Local History Society. Crow, D. (1978). The Edwardian woman. George Allen and Unwin. Cure, M. (2018). Picturing the postcard: a new media crisis at the turn of the century. University of Minnesota Press. Dagnall, H. (1985). The evolution of British stamped postcards and letter cards: their history and documentation. H. Dagnall. Gazeley, I., & Newell, A. (2011). Poverty in Edwardian Britain. The Economic History Review, 64(1), 52–71. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0289.2009.00523.x. Georgakopoulou, A. (2007). Small stories, interaction and identities. John Benjamins. Gillen, J. (2014). Digital literacies. Routledge. Gillen, J. (2017). The picture postcard at the beginning of the twentieth century: Instagram, Snapchat or Selfies of an earlier age? In B. Parry, C. Burnett, & G. Merchant (Eds.), Literacy, media, technology: past, present and future (pp. 11–24). Bloomsbury Academic. Gillen, J., & Hall, N. (2010). Any mermaids? Tracing early postcard mobilities. In J. Urry, M. Büscher, & K. Witchger (Eds.), Mobile methods (pp. 169–189). Routledge. Gillen, J., & Ho, S. Y. (2019). Literacy studies. In K. Tusting (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic ethnography (pp. 40–53). Routledge. Golden, C. J. (2010). Posting it: the Victorian revolution in letter writing. University Press of Florida. Hall, N., & Gillen, J. (2007). Purchasing pre-packed words: complaint and reproach in early British postcards. In M. Lyons (Ed.), Ordinary writing, personal narratives: writing practices in the 19th and early 20th centuries (pp. 101–117). Peter Lang. Hannavy, J. (2011). The Victorians and Edwardians on the move. Shire Publications. Jackson, T. (2019). Postcard from the past. 4th Estate. Jeffrey, R., & Doron, A. (2013). The great Indian phone book: how cheap mobile phones change business, politics and daily life. Hurst & Company. Jones, R. H., Chik, A., & Hafner, C. A. (2015). Introduction: discourse analysis and digital practices. In R. H. Jones, A. Chik, & C. A. Hafner (Eds.), Discourse and digital practices: doing discourse analysis in the digital age (pp. 1–17). Routledge. Keep, C. (2001). Blinded by the type: gender and information technology at the turn of the century. Nineteenth Century Contexts, 23(1), 149–173. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 08905490108583536.

18  Edwardian postcard as revolutionary communications technology Kelly, V. (2004). Beauty and the market: actress postcards and their senders in early twentieth-century Australia. New Theatre Quarterly, 20(2), 99–116. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0266464X04000016. Lawton, R., & Pooley, C. G. (1992). Britain 1740–1950: an historical geography. Edward Arnold. Lillis, T. (2013). The sociolinguistics of writing. Edinburgh University Press. Milne, E. (2010). Letters, postcards, email: technologies of presence. Routledge. Östman, J.-O. (2004). The postcard as media. Text, 24, 423–442. Parker, B., & Unwin, R. (1901). The art of building a home: a collection of lectures and illustrations (2nd ed.). Mayfield Press. Phillips, T. (2000). The postcard century: 2000 cards and their messages. Thames and Hudson. Pollen, A. (2009). Sweet nothings: suggestive Brighton postcard inscriptions. Photography and Culture, 2(1), 77–88. Pooley, C. G., Turnbull, J., & Adams, M. (2005). A mobile century?: changes in everyday mobility in Britain in the twentieth century. Ashgate Publishing. Rammert, W. (2012). Distributed agency and advanced technology: or; how to analyse constellations of collective inter-agency. In J.-H. Passoth, B. Peuker, & M. Schillmeier (Eds.), Agency without actors? New approaches to collective action (pp. 89–112). Routledge. Read, D. (1972). Edwardian England 1901–1915: society and politics. Harrap & Co. Ltd. Rymes, B. (2014). Communicative repertoire. In C. Leung, & B. V. Street (Eds.), The Routledge companion to English studies (pp. 287–301). Routledge. Short, B. (1997). Land and society in Edwardian Britain. Cambridge University Press. Staff, F. (1979). The picture postcard and its origins (2nd ed.). Lutterworth Press. Stephenson, A. (2013). Introduction: Edwardian art and its legacies. Visual Culture in Britain, 14(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2013.750826. Strange, J.-M. (2015). Fatherhood and the British working class 1865–1915. Cambridge University Press. Street, B. V. (2003). What’s “new” in new literacy studies? Critical approaches to literacy in theory and practice. Current Issues in Comparative Education, 5(2), 77–91. Teulié, G. (2019). Orientalism and the British picture postcard industry: popularizing the Empire in Victorian and Edwardian homes. Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens [Online], 89(Spring). https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.5178. Thompson, P. R. (1992). The Edwardians: the remaking of British Society (2nd ed.). Routledge. Voloshinov, V. N. (1995). Language, speech, and utterance. In S. Dentith (Ed.), Bakhtinian thought: an introductory reader (pp. 106–124). Routledge. Wild, J. (2017). Literature of the 1900s: the great Edwardian emporium. Edinburgh University Press. Wilson, A. (2021). The picture postcard: a new window into Edwardian Ireland. Peter Lang. Wright, A. (2004). Hartley, Leslie Poles. In Oxford dictionary of national biography. Oxford DNB. https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/31208. Zhao, S., & Zappavigna, M. (2018). The interplay of (semiotic) technologies and genre: the case of the selfie. Social Semiotics, 28(5), 665–682.

2 The early postcard

Preparing for the picture postcard boom I claim that the Picture Postcard of the early twentieth century was a revolutionary communications technology. The term “revolutionary” appears strong. It implies a radical change, and I believe that the significance of the picture postcard to communications in many aspects of everyday life is sufficiently major to justify the word and that this book will illustrate this importance. Another connotation of revolutions is that they are sudden but that it is possible either at the time or by later historians to trace their foundations; however rapid their onset, conditions were, at least in hindsight, ripe for the emergence of picture postcards. Finally, another connotation of revolutions is that they involve struggles. Any kind of new media is often subject to controversy and the early postcard was no exception. The first proposal for the picture postcard by its inventor was rejected by his boss on the grounds that what was being proposed was an “indecent form of communication on exposed post pages” (Siegert, 1999: 148). Subsequently, late Victorian etiquette manuals frowned upon their use; Carline (1971: 55) cites one injunction: “Don’t conduct correspondence on postal cards. It is questionable whether a note on a postal card is entitled to the courtesy of a response.” Yet at the same time, evidence shows that once the postcard was introduced in one country it spread rapidly and was tremendously popular, despite, and sometimes perhaps because of, persisting strands of opposition (Cure, 2018). In this chapter, I deal with the introduction of the postcard in the nineteenth century and its use up until 1902. This is strictly speaking after the beginning of the Edwardian era, but January 1902 introduced a key change so that the picture postcard became the hugely popular, mainstream communications technology in Britain that I investigate in this book. This change has often been reported, even in its own day, as the result of a change in regulation by the Post Office in 1902; however, as I shall show, the truth is more complex. Nevertheless, it does make sense to treat January 1902 as the beginning of the picture postcard revolution. I look at the early postcard in order to describe how it emerged in British society at the time. Highly salient is the historical and technical story of DOI: 10.4324/9781003261322-2

20  The early postcard communications in the Post Office, the monopoly that regulated all written communications sent over a distance by any means other than through people’s direct personal delivery since its creation in the seventeenth century (How, 2003: 11). It is important to situate this against political interventions in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the turn into the new twentieth century. The postcard revolution depended on its users, but also on economic and technological developments that were taken up by producers and distributors, in ways that were often constrained by regulators, reactions of publishers and the public to evolving regulations. This chapter then traces the key developments in the history of the postcard as a written communications technology up to the dramatic change of 1902.

The introduction of the postcard In 1865 Dr Heinrich von Stephan, a German postal official, proposed to the German-Austrian postal conference the adoption and use of an “open postsheet” (offenes Postblatt). Von Stephan displayed a grasp of the relationships between technologies and social practice that today we might describe as affordances (Jones et al., 2015). His suggestion was based on an argument that the letter had itself evolved over the course of history and that it was time for a new form of letter appropriate to situations that require only a short communication. He said of the letter: It is not simple enough, because note-paper has to be selected and folded, envelopes obtained and closed, and stamps affixed. It is not brief enough, because if a letter be written, convention necessitates something more than the bare communication. This is irksome to both the sender and the receiver. (von Stephan cited by Staff, 1979: 44–45) His proposal was for an envelope-sized card, with a space for a stamp and the address on one side, leaving the other side for the written message. He also suggested that the postage charges should be as low as possible. His proposal was rejected for a number of reasons, including that the nature of the German postal system at that time was not sufficiently organised to administer the system and that consequently the “open post-sheet” might incur financial loss. However, as already mentioned, Stephan’s superior, the General Postal Director Philipsborn objected to the postcard as an “indecent form of communication on exposed post pages” (Siegert, 1999: 148). The proposal was not pursued immediately, since the concept that private communications could be made public was causing consternation, even though some posting of private cards was already taking place within parts of Germany and France. These were mainly business-related cards containing a brief printed notice, usually an advertisement or announcement. Such cards often had a printed view on the other side. Even in England in the 1860s, visiting cards were occasionally stamped and posted, even though

The early postcard  21 that would seem contrary to the main function of announcing one’s visit. One company, Lundy, produced envelope-sized cards with printed business illustrations and texts (Carline, 1971; Staff, 1979). In an article in Vienna’s Neue Frei Presse on 26 January 1869, the topic of the postcard was revisited. The author, Emanuel Herrmann, this time argued that the adoption of postcards would increase mail with consequent economic advantage for the Post Office (Dagnall, 1985: 2). This was persuasive and in Austria on 1 October 1869 the first official postcards were sent. During the first three months after issue, 2,926,102 cards were sold. This success was in itself a powerful argument for the postcard promulgated in other places. Meanwhile on the retirement of Philipsborn Bismarck proposed von Stephan to the King as the new director of the General Post (Siegert, 1999: 150) and so from 1 July 1870 the North German Federation officially allowed its first postcards and soon followed the South German states. Switzerland and Britain were next. According to Dagnall (1985), in Britain both the public and the government were introduced to postcards, also known as postal cards or post cards, by an article in the “Scotsman” newspaper on 17 September 1869. It was headed “Halfpenny card postage.” It began by stating, It is proposed by a card postage to attain two objects – first, postage to be reduced to a halfpenny for certain kinds of written communication; and, second, an increase of convenience in the transmission and receptions of communications which are of a brief and not confidential nature. (cited in Dagnall, 1985: 193) Again, then, the argument for the postcard links its physical form with features of content and style. The article starts by pointing out that while the effort of folding a letter, finding an envelope, getting a stamp, etc., might seem trivial to most people, “Those who conduct large businesses can tell a different tale” (Dagnall, 1985: 193). This orientation to the needs of business continues as the article explains that postcards would be easy and practical to use by individuals needing to send brief messages; every example relates to business. For instance, “The importance of saving a minute or two in this way cannot be over-estimated. Transactions involving thousands of pounds may fall through … for want of the time to make up a letter.” The author extends his argument beyond commercial dealings but still orients towards various kinds of official business carried on by at least reasonably prosperous, educated people: The advantage of such a means of communication would be enormous to the public. Circulars of meetings, formal acknowledgements, circulars of all kinds, bulletins, announcements of deaths, business cards and advertisements, notices of motions for meetings of public bodies, might be printed on these cards and circulated to those for whom they were intended in half the time, as well as half the expense. (cited in Dagnall, 1985: 193)

22  The early postcard The use of the word “public” in this quotation clearly means “public” as opposed to “private” and implies certain sociodemographic sectors of a society. This article, while making a very powerful case for the introduction of postcards, clearly has a major implicit claim, that the postcard would be primarily a tool for business and industry, and for educated people who belong to societies and clubs. Such suppositions were echoed elsewhere. The Nottinghamshire Guardian suggested to its readers that the chief users of “this novel means of obtaining publicity” were insurance companies and advertising firms.1 Such assumptions were to resound decades and even centuries later in the introduction of other new communications technologies. Fischer (1992) has demonstrated that early marketing of the telephone and the personal computer envisaged such business‑related uses, even when these technologies were to be situated in the home! The question of who used postcards and who they were for is an interesting and important one; after all, in the same year as the postcard was introduced the nineteenth century’s major educational act was passed. Attendance at school was about to become compulsory, and all children were going to be taught to read and write, something that was sufficiently successful for a major historian of literacy to claim for the Edwardian era that “by 1914 England, together with a handful of advanced Western countries, had for the first time achieved a literate society” (Vincent, 1989: 1). The foundation of sufficient reading and writing skills was in place. To return back to the lengthy and powerful piece in The Scotsman, it was subsequently reproduced as a pamphlet and distributed to Members of Parliament and other influential people. It aroused considerable interest, but not from one very significant party– the Post Office. John Tilley, Secretary to the Post Office, wrote on 22 October 1869 that “revenue would suffer very seriously and that there was no general demand at the present time for such an extension” (Dagnall, 1985: 4). However, with the clear success of postcards in Austria pressure was growing, in particular as a result of a petition showing a large number of powerful people supporting the introduction of postcards. So on 26 May 1870, the British Treasury authorised the House of Lords to put a clause into a forthcoming Act of Parliament that would legalise the sale of postcards by the Post Office. Public discourses occupied diverse positions on the introduction of postcards. In 1870 the Manchester Weekly Times predicted that the introduction of the postcard would have an enormous impact on writing practices: It will be an appreciable advantage to send a message to any part of the country for a halfpenny instead of a penny, but for most people who use the post the really attractive part of the arrangement is the saving of time and trouble. The number of little operations involved in sending off a letter is wholly out of proportion to the importance of the missive itself … The work of correspondence will be reduced to a minimum when one has only to carry a pack of postcards in one’s pocket, write one’s thought in pencil as soon as it occurs, and dispatch it through the first messenger or the first

The early postcard  23 receiving box one comes across. People will soon take it as a matter of course that what they receive should be in the briefest terms. For ceremonious observances, or strictly private messages, they will look only to the closed letter.2 This appreciative paean enables many parallels to be made with the digital revolution that began approximately a hundred years later. One point is the ease of dispatch: postboxes were far more ubiquitous than today. There were many postboxes in villages, towns and cities and even on trains; postmen made several deliveries a day.3 The anonymous writer was prescient also in realising the connection that ease of communication has with linguistic forms and routines. Just as relatively few short texts on social media platforms begin with a salutation or formal ending so with postcards writing could become spontaneous and be likely to be less formal than letter writing. The Manchester Evening News article also mentions, as indicating more formal genres, “ceremonious observances” and links those with issue of privacy. It may at first sight seem surprising that the postcard rather than viewed as a dyadic private communication should be considered public. But it was a public communication in a number of ways. First, it was open to the postman and potentially other postal workers to read; I have already suggested that crosshatching could be thought of as one way of confounding this and will show other such tactics later in the book. Second, internal evidence from the postcard texts shows that they were often authored collectively, sometimes with different people inscribing. Third, external evidence such as the article just quoted and indeed the legal framework confirms that it was thought of as a public communication from the outset. In 1897 the Daily Mail reported a case brought to Mr Justice Darling and a jury, whereby a composer and music teacher Gerald Buhl alleged that his landlady, Louisa Chope, had sent him 18 abusive postcards suggesting he was behind in his rent. The case was found in favour of Ms Chope, since he indeed owed the rent.4 Others accused were not so fortunate: Isidore Sigismund was committed for trial in 1900 after writing sentences on a postcard that the prosecuting counsel characterised as unimaginable “unless he was lost to every feeling of a man.”5 At least the penalty Sigismund risked was less than it might have been in Serbia, owing to disputes involving the members of the Serbian Royal family – both as recipients and senders of abusive postcards – such a crime was equated to high treason.6 To return to the Manchester Evening News article of 1869, it was indeed generally enthusiastic but also introduced a note of caution, that might ring true for some social media users today: To this, as to all other advantages of this earth, there is a corresponding drawback. We are brought within hail of distant friends, but it is alarming to think how accessible we shall become to strangers, and to those who are worse than strangers – acquaintances who are also bores.7

24  The early postcard There were many criticisms of the introduction of the postcard, often associated in some way with the lack of privacy. The Derby Mercury thundered: The postal cards ought to be summarily abolished. They are perfectly untrustworthy so long as any postmaster has power to suppress them altogether, or to delay them in transitu, and the amount of mischief which they are capable of doing can be easily estimated. A well-devised postcard might be the means of sowing domestic dissension in any peaceful family, and it is not going to far to say that specimens which have been shown to us are calculated to do serious commercial injury to the recipients.8 The Pall Mall Gazette was also cautious: Will one be able to write whatever one likes on the new postcards? Fancy a grave country squire finding the following on his breakfast table: “Dear Dick – Hope you had not a headache after all that bad champagne at Epsom. Thanks for the tenner I won of you on Kingcraft”… Altogether, we think that something ought to be explained about the responsibility of indiscreet and economical correspondents.9 It is interesting to see that this last article makes the assumption that writers of postcards would be of a privileged social class. In his Postmaster General’s report of August 1870, the Marquess of Hartington announced that from 1 October that year, “post cards, bearing an impressed halfpenny stamp, will be sold at all post offices, at the rate of one halfpenny each.”10 Despite The Times commenting: “The ‘post card’ is a novelty; time will show what can be made of it,”11 it was an instant success. According to the 1871 report of the Postmaster General (p. 3) “The average daily number [of postcards], as ascertained during one week in September, is about 96,000,” and in the first year and four months of their introduction 76 million cards were sold (and presumably posted). No wonder that only five days after the post card was introduced The Times reported that, “The enormous addition to the work of the Post-office letter-carriers entailed by the circulation of the new post cards has, it is alleged, already created a large amount of dissatisfaction among them.”12 By 8 October The Times was speculating that, the thin end of the wedge has been introduced by the halfpenny stamp, and it is obvious to conjecture that it may be allowed before long to do more and more the work of its prototype, until it becomes the essential stamp or unit of the system. Then that instinct of economy which animates every Briton in dealing with a revenue question will suggest countless expedients for making open Post Cards available beyond the limits on which the Department has reckoned.13 In other words, the cost of runaway success owing to the postcard being so accessible and popular began to be feared.

The early postcard  25 Meanwhile, the postcard spread quickly across Europe: Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Russia, France, Serbia, Romania, Spain and Italy had all introduced the postcard by the end of 1873. The postcard soon spread worldwide, with Australia, Argentina and India issuing their first postcards before the end of the decade. As I have explained, the initial reaction of the Post Office to the idea of the postcard had been quite negative, and it is, therefore, not surprising that the Post Office sought to exert considerable control over the postcards as objects and their use, making firm stipulations on size, weight and accessibility. Two kinds of cards were issued on 1 October 1870. The larger of the two was 4¾ by 3½ inches (about 15 × 89mm) and the smaller was 4¾ by 2⅞ inches (about 15 × 73mm) and came to be known as the “small inland” size. Each had a border around it, just inside the edge, and had a printed halfpenny stamp in the righthand corner of the border. About one-third down from the top was printed, “THE ADDRESS ONLY TO BE WRITTEN ON THIS SIDE.” The other side was left blank for the message. This was a very plain card and a long way from the picture postcard of the Edwardian period. These cards could be bought singly for half a penny or a packet of 24 for 1 shilling. To buy a card, a purchaser had to go to a post office. The Post Office stipulated: They will be available for transmission between places in the United Kingdom only. The front (or stamped) side is intended for the address only. There must be no other writing or printing on it, nor must there be any writing or printing across the stamp. On the reverse side any communication, whether of the nature of a letter or otherwise, may be written or printed. Nothing may be attached to the card, nor may it be folded, cut, or otherwise altered. If any of these rules be infringed, the card will be charged with postage on delivery as an insufficiently paid letter.14 The post card was initially perceived as an innately inferior object in comparison with the letter, which had priority. Postcards could be detained in the post office until a later dispatch or delivery, as the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent warned readers who might want to take advantage of the cheaper option.15 The Post Office was still very wary that the postcards might reduce letter revenues, but The Times reported on 16 March 1871: Last October the original principle of penny postage was relaxed in favour of halfpenny Post Cards, and the success of the experiment, as we now learn on official authority, has been completely established. The cards circulate by millions, to the manifest convenience of the public; while, on the other hand, the receipts of the Post Office from the ordinary letter traffic have been in no degree curtailed.16 So postcards were being used additionally, rather than replacing letters, enhancing the claim that their introduction was revolutionary.

26  The early postcard

Who was using postcards? This is an important question for this study and has been little investigated previously.17 This chapter concerns the early years of the postcard, before the Edwardian era, and it does seem useful to look at early usage and to consider the assumptions made about it that prevailed in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Earlier I referred to support for the introduction of the postcard. Given its cheaper price, one might expect that reference to usage by the poor or the ordinary working man or woman might have been more common. But as has been discussed, early assumptions concerned business use and middle- or even upper-class uses (see Figure 2.1 for such an example). This assumption that the principal users would be literate and middle-toupper-class people was not without some justification. The nineteenth century saw a gradual increase in the opportunities of education for poorer children, but it was only in the 1870s that elementary education became compulsory, and even after this time vast numbers of children failed to attend schools. The extent to which poorer and less educated people were using postcards was of some interest to the Post Office. In 1871 the Secretary to the Post Office, John Tilley, sent a circular to all Postmasters. It stated, “It is desired to ascertain whether Post Cards are bought in large proportion by the poorer classes, and whether single Post Cards, or two or any number less than six are often applied for” (Dagnall, 1985: 16). The Postmasters were given guidance in how to recognise cards posted by the poorer classes. How was one to recognise such a card? Apparently by the handwriting, address, etc., so certainly by a biased procedure. On 10 May 1871, the Secretary to the Post Office said in a memorandum, When Post Cards were first introduced, it was expected that they would be used in large numbers by the poorer classes, and, with the view of facilitating their employment by the poor, it was deemed expedient to fix the price at a halfpenny each only – charging nothing for the card itself.

Figure 2.1  A postcard sent from Belgium to Manchester in 1888 for business purposes. Collection of Julia Gillen

The early postcard  27 He then went on to say, “It turns out, however, as you will see from the enclosed reports, that only a very small proportion of the cards are purchased by the poor, and that single cards are rarely bought” (Dagnall, 1985: 16). However, this claim, of the supposed expectation that they would be used “by the poor” seems to me doubtful. Despite extensive searching of later nineteenth-century newspapers and journals, I have so far failed to find any reference to the use of postcards by the poor prior to Tilley’s comments. He had strongly opposed the introduction of the postcard in 1869 (Dagnall, 1985: 4). And it does not seem that the halfpenny price was determined by the intention to facilitate their use by the poor. Given the absence of such evidence, it is worth questioning Tilley’s purpose. His intention seems to have been to seek an opportunity to raise the price of postcards and increase revenue for the Post Office, “picking the pocket” according to the Derby Mercury.18 In 1871 a post card cost a halfpenny, and this price included both the card and the cost of postage. The monopoly stationer permitted to produce the cards, De La Rue, was paid by the Post Office, a cost estimated by Tilley to be about £13,000 a year. Tilly was prepared to investigate the possibility of raising revenues for the Post Office by disturbing this relationship. He proposed to shift the cost of the card itself to the stationers, by allowing private stationers to produce their own postcards. The Post Office would then receive the full cost of collecting and delivering the card from the impressing of the stamp, while stationers bore the cost of producing the cards and the rewards of selling them. Incidentally, it is useful to use the contemporary term “stationer” at this point; later, the functions of publishers and printers generally became disaggregated. On 1 April 1872 a charge was added to the halfpenny cost of the card, but as this charge was very small per card, customers now had to purchase a packet of postcards, the minimum in a packet being six cards costing 6½ pence (or multiples thereof). Very soon people made their opinions clear such as this writer to the editor of The Times, who signed off the letter as “Post-Card”: The Post Office have recently issued an order prohibiting the sale of singlepostcards, or of any number less than a dozen, for which they charge 6½d. This is a very tyrannical and unnecessary regulation, and it is difficult to see who benefits by it. If we may buy a single postage-stamp, why should we not buy a single post-card. One of the principal conveniences of the post-card system was that if you wished to send a message, you only had to go to the nearest post-office and buy a postcard. …If the only object is to make the public pay something for the pasteboard, this might be done by charging an extra halfpenny for any number under a dozen, and so on in proportion. The public would not object to this if the privilege of buying a single card were restored.19 Initially, the pack of cards had to be purchased at a Post Office, but from 17 June 1872, private cards could be purchased elsewhere, if virtually identical to the official cards, but then had to be taken to a Post Office to have a half pence

28  The early postcard stamp impressed upon the card! This only slightly diminished the Post Office’s control of postcards, for it now received the full halfpenny for the postage; the stationers paid for the card production and the public had the inconvenience of having to visit the post office to have their card impressed. Quite clearly, if poorer people were buying relatively few postcards before this date, they were now unlikely to be buying any. In 1874 The Times in a review of postal communications since the dawn of the penny post suggested that use of postcards had been static in the last few years.20 In the same year, 1874, Mr T. Boucher, of the Post Office Circulation Department, undertook a two-week survey to find out the uses for which postcards were being sent. Private correspondence accounted for 31% of cards. A higher proportion, 34%, were used for trade advertisements and orders for and advices for goods. The other 35% were mostly pre-printed cards relating to travellers’ notices, receipts and acknowledgements, consignment notes, statements of accounts, charity and canvassing notices, School Board and hospital notices, notices of meetings and invitations.21 No specific attempt was made to identify cards by the poor. The next significant discussion was in 1877 when there were proposals for a new size of postcard, what was to be called the “Stout” postcard. It had been claimed that a disadvantage of the original postcard was a lack of space for the address and that this might be a disadvantage for the poor. The reasoning seemed to be that “A man of obscure condition requires at least four, generally five and sometimes six lines of direction to find him.”22 In the first four months after they were introduced almost 200,000 arrived at the Returned Letter Office, presumably for failures to put proper addresses on the card. It seems that the higher condition of some enabled their cards to be addressed with very few details, for example, Mr H. Hignall, Esq. “Moreton” Camberwell. The Post Office evaded this issue by arguing, “As a matter of experience, it is not found that post-cards are largely used by the poor,”23 although, as discussed above, evidence on this point is unclear. Just a month later John Tilley was contradicting this in a letter to the Inland Revenue making two arguments about the postcard and its potential for greater take-up: It has been represented more than once to the Postmaster General that the usefulness of the Post Card is a good deal impaired by the inadequacy of the space allowed for the address, it being often necessary, especially in the case of poor persons, to insert the names of several streets in the address. Lord John Manners24 is disposed to attach some importance to this consideration; and there can at any rate be no doubt from enquiries which have been made that the poorer classes are prevented from using the Post cards to any large extent by the circumstance that they cannot be purchase single card or any number less than six. (Dagnall, 1985: 32) Some alterations in available postcard formats were made, but it was not until 1887 that once again single postcards could be bought, but at an increased price

The early postcard  29 of three farthings (and a dozen cards then cost seven pence). By 1894 the monopoly of a single stationer was at an end (Dagnall, 1985: 74).

The late Victorian postcard So the story of the early British postcard is a complex one. The Post Office introduced the postcard but also displayed some resistance to changes that would enhance its usability, especially to the poor. Nevertheless, the most important point to be made about the early history of the postcard is that despite all the controversies, misgivings and obstacles put in its way, the postcard was a success, with steady growth from 72 million in 1873 to 419 million in 1901. The number of letters also increased during this time from 870 million to 2,323 million and the average annual percentage increase in letter postage was about 3.5% a year over this period, while the average annual increase in postcard traffic was 5.9%. However, it should be noted that the figures contained in the Post Master General’s reports are not the result of a massive counting task by hundreds of letter carriers but estimates based on samples in a number of cities. The statistics also showed that each year an astonishingly high number of both cards and letters were returned to the Post Office undelivered, in 1901 over a million postal items.25 It is difficult to be sure about why so many cards were returned each year. It is probably the case that most of these could have been wrongly addressed, or were incompletely addressed, or were addressed but the writing was illegible. However, there are two other possibilities for all these returns. The first was identified as early as October 1870 (Oct 8, p. 9) when a writer for The Times pointed out that “nothing can facilitate delivery so much as Letter-Boxes in every door.” What does a letter carrier do when there is no letter-box and nobody about? Perhaps many of these ended up as non-deliverable. The second reason derives from the very strict regulations that surrounded the use of postcards. If addresses were written in the wrong place, if anything of any nature was stuck on a postcard,26 if anything other than the address was written on the front, then the recipient of the card would have to pay a surcharge. There are quite a few letters to newspapers from people who had been surcharged complaining bitterly about it, especially as the surcharge was a penny, twice the cost of the card. No doubt many people simply refused to accept a card that contravened regulations. The most exciting change in the late Victorian age was the broad allowance by the Post Office of picture postcards in 1894, following evidence of great popularity in other countries where it had been allowed, especially France. Carline (1971) explains that it is impossible to trace the beginning of the picture postcard and that even in Britain some had previously been allowed in very specific circumstances. Stationery could be decorated long before the advent of the postcard so publishers were more than ready when picture postcards were allowed in 1894. However, when picture postcards were allowed, at this time the whole of one side was still used for the address, and therefore the presence

30  The early postcard of a picture left less space, at least for the message. These cards of the undivided back format are discussed further in Chapter 4. Despite some changes to the materiality of the card, the British Post Office was still deliberately lagging behind innovations in parts of Europe. The MP Henniker Heaton campaigned tirelessly on this issue. The major reform he urged was to permit the public to use adhesive stamps, which would make postcard use more flexible and thus enhance their popularity. This would stimulate more sales, encouraging publishers to be more adventurous with their illustrations. In a letter to The Times in 1894 he was able to announce success: After seven years of struggle with the Post Office I have pleasure in announcing a substantial success for the public. Henceforth a person may take any plain card of the proper size, write a letter upon it, affix a halfpenny stamp, and have it transmitted through the post… It is now the stationers’ turn. We may hope to see postcards sold by them in all our cities as on the continent, bearing tiny and attractive pictures of interesting buildings, monuments and scenes of natural beauty.27 Given that in 1840 the British Post Office introduced to the world the idea of sticking a postage stamp on an envelope, it is astonishing that it took them so long to allow people to stick a stamp on a postcard. Further, the small size of the postcard greatly limited the possibilities for illustrations. The British Post Office’s reluctance had caused picture postcards to lag behind their popularity in some other European countries, and some bemoaned the lost economic opportunities, such as Norman Allison, who wrote in 1899: “The illustrated post card is bound to become immensely popular in England, if only our apathetic designers, printers, and retail shopkeepers awake to the fact that profits will follow commercial exploitation.”28 So even when pictorial cards in Britain were becoming common, there were still complaints about the restricted size of British postcards as well as the cost. Again it was Henniker Heaton who fought the Post Office. With respect to the size, he wrote: I pointed out … that our stationers in the great towns of the United Kingdom were anxious to adorn their post-cards with engravings, photographs and ‘Chromos’ of local scenes of interest and beauty; famous buildings, foaming waves dashing on to the beach, peaceful vales, cloudwreathed mountains, still blue lakes, and ruined keeps that are doubled in the glassy water below. How can all this be shown in a space of 4½in. by 215/16 ins?29 One further major hurdle remained before the postcard craze could truly be unleashed in Britain. In 1870 it had been stipulated that the address side of the card could only contain the message, and this was still the case in 1899 (although a minor concession had allowed people to add their own address on this side).

The early postcard  31 This left the other side of the card to contain both the illustration and any written message, and this limited the size of both the illustration and message. Nevertheless, in 1896, in a letter to The Times, Henniker Heaton made a sweeping claim: “Now the postcard is the letter of the poor.”30 The idea that the postcard was a social benefit appeared to prevail in much of the media: in the following year, 1897, when the man regarded as the inventor of the postcard, Heinrich von Stephan, died, the Daily Mail’s news story reported that he was regarded as a “benefactor of humanity” through his two great contributions: the postcard and the Postal Union.31 See Figure 2.2 for a 1900 European postcard. The benefits of the postcard as a means of communication were widely agreed and connections made with developing technologies. A “Daily Mail Special” report of 1898 had the headline: “Pictorial Postcards: Beginning of a Craze Made in Germany.”32 The popular newspaper explained that the postcard craze in Germany had reached a great height and was beginning to spread to England. The newspaper expressed concern that Germany could benefit economically since they were very much ahead in postcard manufacture, making better quality, more appealing cards. A Daily Mail reporter had been sent to quiz the three British manufacturers believed to be now publishing postcards; they noted with particular approval that at least one was designed and printed in England. (Many postcards were printed in Germany even if designed in other countries.) The Daily Mail also noted that besides postcards being sold in shops, there was a rise in “postcard automatic machines,” that is, vending machines, in stations, hotels and bus stops.33 Another article of the same year made reference to another technology associated with postcards: the postcard album.34 It was being recognised that attractive postcards could be collected; this fed very much into the ambit of the late Victorian hobby. Postcards were becoming even more accessible, and the improvements in their appearance led to their being considered collectable. At the end of the century, The Times summed up the place of the post card in society, with a generally approving review of its history on 1 November 1899. It took some account of what appeared to be a minority view of disapproval: “Some people, too, urged that the use of a post-card was little short of an insult

Figure 2.2  A postcard of 1900 sent from Paris to Belgrade. Collection of Julia Gillen

32  The early postcard to the recipient, inasmuch as if the communication were not worth a penny it was not worth sending at all.”35 The overall conclusion however was positive: “The fact that post-cards have become a most useful adjunct of social and commercial intercourse must far outweigh any disadvantage which the old-world letter-writer ascribes to its use.”

Who were postcard producers? Anthony Byatt (1978) authored a definitive account of “Picture Postcards and Their Publishers” with the subtitle “An Illustrated Account Identifying Britain’s Major Postcard Publishers 1894 to 1939 and the Great Variety of Cards They Issued.” What can be distilled from his impressive inventory is that the routes to being in the right place at the right time to pioneer or rapidly join in the opportunity to publish postcards at the beginning of the twentieth century were quite diverse. Here, I describe a few of such routes to the production of postcards. Much of the information in this section comes from Byatt’s excellent (and out-of-print) book. Raphael Tuck and Sons was the notable pioneering firm to publish postcards in Great Britain. The firm had been founded by Raphael Tuch, a Jewish refugee from Breslau, now Wroclaw, who came to London in 1865 with his wife and seven children and later adopted the spelling “Tuck.” It seems he began dealing in furniture and picture framing operating with a handcart out of a small base office. With his three sons the picture-framing side of the business developed into importing and publishing, always looking for the latest innovations in visual technologies. So they entered early photography, oleographs (a method of colour reproduction), Christmas cards from 1871, and so on. The company, especially as represented by Adolph Tuck, perceived their activities as being part of the Fine Arts world, in making artistic products accessible. This position, contested by some holding more elitist views, was seen to have won out in 1893 when a Royal Warrant of Appointment to Her Majesty Queen Victoria was awarded. In 1899 the company built a five-floor building in Moorfields, London. It was corresponding with the Post Office, making the economic arguments about the potential of larger size postcards put forward by Henniker Heaton as explained above, and was absolutely ready to drive the subsequent picture postcard boom forwards. Other photographers were also early at moving into the postcard business, perhaps most notably Valentine & Sons of Dundee. James Valentine, son of the original founder, an engraver, produced pictorial envelopes, campaigned for cheap international postage and became an accomplished landscape photographer. His firm produced postcards from 1865 and again was quick to move with new technologies, designs and geographical spread by 1900, proudly emphasising that their cards were printed in Great Britain. This combination of early expertise in photography and a willingness to innovate with printing technologies was shared by other photographic pioneers such as Arthur Frederick Sergeant of Halifax who took up photography at the

The early postcard  33 age of 12 in 1894 and while still in his teens invented “Chlorobrom,” an emulsion used to coat paper, which went into production in Belgium. Thomas Annan in Glasgow meanwhile had been photographing private works of art in grand homes in Scotland and the North of England for much of the latter half of the nineteenth century, ingeniously using his carriage as a darkroom. In 1883 he travelled with his son to Vienna to secure sole rights in Britain for a heliogravure process, a photochemical process employing a copper plate for the reproduction of photographs, which put his firm in a good position to demonstrate its early pictorial postcards at the Glasgow International Exhibition in 1901. It has already been mentioned that Germany was in the forefront of postcard publishing globally by 1900. Stengel & Co. was an extremely successful German company, with bases in Dresden and Berlin, which by 1902 offered “10,000 different topographical cards covering most of Europe, the Middle East, Russia, Japan and Australia. Their principal works in Dresden employed 250 people and produced 30 million postcards each year” (Byatt, 1978: 255). Therefore, it was relatively easy for them to move into the British market with cards produced in Germany, many of which used the latest technology in machine and hand colouring techniques, distributed through their agent O. Flammger from 1901. It made sense to him to locate himself near to rival Raphael Tuck, and the area of their offices later became known as the “Postcard Mile”; Byatt (1978) has located 60 postcard publishers that eventually operated out of a square mile of London, between Ludgate Hill and Old Street, during the Edwardian era. Others took inspiration from German postcard publishers such as Stengel & Co. Evelyn Wrench, the son of a Deputy Lieutenant in Ireland and an aristocratic mother, went to Eton College. At the age of 17, he was allowed to travel extensively in Europe with the idea of improving his command of languages prior to entering the Diplomatic Service. However, as he later recounted, what came to grab his attention was German postcards: Why was it that the Germans were ahead of us in so many things – taximeters on the cabs, better cake-shops, lovely out-of-door restaurants, cleaner towns, excellent print, and then, of course, postcards? The German postcards were very well produced. I wondered how many picture postcards I had sent in the last eight months, certainly a couple of hundred…. The German postcards publishers must make a very good thing of it – how unenterprising English firms were, you hardly ever saw really good postcards in England. (Wrench, 1934: 80) He immediately decided to become a postcard publisher himself and, with the benefit of family capital, upper-class connections and his own considerable initiative, negotiated with German printers. On returning to England, he obtained contracts to sell postcards at royal palaces and was in a position to sell his first cards, which arrived from Germany on 29 November 1900. His first major

34  The early postcard success was with Queen Victoria “In memoriam” cards (commissioned before she died), and so he was in a position to expand rapidly with the picture postcard revolution following 1902. Everything then was in place for the next innovation, which seriously set off the “Picture Post-card Craze,” as it was termed in its own age. The postcard combined illustration and space for a message and had been enthusiastically taken up. Enterprising publishers formed a competitive market, often using German printworks. Media discourses generally reflected popular approval although undoubtedly for some in elite society, postcards were connected with either business, or informality, possibly tipping over into vulgarity. Postcard regulations had loosened somewhat, enabling people from a wider range of social classes to make use of the convenient form. This broadening of access was a more general feature of social trends as the twentieth century dawned, with examples such as birth control, cycling and opening up of more jobs for women that characterised the sense of accelerating speed of the new era (Lawton & Pooley, 1992).

The great postcard innovation of 1902 The key innovation of 1902 was that it became widely publicised that it was permitted to divide the address side so that it could also include the message. The whole of the other side could be used for an illustration. This made the cards far more attractive for personal use than they had been before. People could buy cards with larger illustrations and yet also include a message that, while shorter than that likely of a letter, had substantial flexibility, from a few words to a hundred or so. It is interesting that although this change was publicised in January 1902, and publishers, led by Messrs F. Hartmann, began to produce postcards with divided backs,36 the Post Office itself claimed it had actually permitted the change since 1897. The Postmaster General’s report explained: On the 1st February 1897, I was able to rescind certain regulations which were sometimes found to be vexatious to the public. The absolute prohibition of writing or printing on the front of a postcard, and the rule which required that the right-hand half of the address side of all other postal packets should be kept clear for the address, were replaced by a comprehensive regulation, applicable to post cards and to all other postal packets, that nothing should be written or printed on the address side, which, by inconvenient proximity to the postage stamp, by obscuring the address, or in any other way, would be likely to embarrass my officers in their duty.37 However, the widescale adoption of taking advantage of this possibility, which became known as the divided back, did not begin until 1902. Why? There would appear to be two factors. One is that this regulation only applied to

The early postcard  35 inland cards, not cards sent abroad. This potentially made the situation confusing to postcard publishers, who therefore kept matters simple and held onto the old format. They continued to publish cards with the instruction “The address only to be written on this side” until around 1899 and so the public complied (Carline, 1971: 53). When, after this, the word “only” was dropped, few people seemed to notice. Second, the new regulation was, arguably, not tremendously clear either to postal officers or to members of the public: just how close to the address might you be allowed to go before being judged to “obscure” it? In January 1902 all this changed. First, a letter in The Times contained the information: There seems to be considerable misapprehension in the mind of the public, and even of postmasters themselves, as to the space on postcards (of the United Kingdom) which is now available for writing. The word ‘only’ has for some time been omitted from the injunction ‘The address only to be written on this side’. But there appears to be a general impression that the writing must still be necessarily restricted to the reverse side of the postcards. That this, however, is not the case is clear from a communication which I recently received from the secretary of the General Post Office. His words are; - ‘Any writing or printing on the address side of a postal packet should be confined to the left-hand side, the right-hand side being reserved exclusively for the address and postage stamps.’ Perhaps it might remove a good deal of doubt and uncertainty, if you would allow this authoritative intimation to be more widely known.38 And in The Picture Postcard Magazine for January 1902, the editor published a statement on behalf of the Postmaster General. This statement said, …postcards may bear on the front, i.e. the address side, a continuation of the message, or the name and address of the sender, or even an advertisement, so long as this matter does not interfere in any way with the legibility of the address. (Richardson, cited by Wingham, 2018: 29) Third, publishers began to produce cards with an invitation to write on half of the same side as the address, that is, bringing in what became known as the divided back. The effects of these changes were enormous. If the message could be contained on the same side as the address then the whole of the other side could be used for illustration, meaning that the illustration need not be in conflict with the message. It was with this change that the postcard truly became a userfriendly object. It was no wonder that in the year ended 31 March 1903 almost five hundred million cards were sent through the post, and the picture postcard revolution was fully underway.

36  The early postcard In a startling reversal, the British Post Office was now ahead of its continental rivals; one postcard magazine had to remind its readers that the valuable concession made by the British Post Office enabling them to use one half of the front of a postcard with a written communication, is not recognized outside the country. Therefore when writing to friends in the Colonies and in foreign countries they should be careful not to write on the front of the card.39 People did by and large manage to cope with the idea that the divided back applied only to cards inland; in the United States for example the new format was not permitted until 1907.40 The postcard business became open to thousands of entrepreneurs. One part­ icularly impressive and unusual example was a woman, Cristina Broom. “Mrs Albert Broom,” to use the appropriate nomenclature of the time, was the wife of a London stationer who became disabled after a cricket injury. Christina Broom was a self-taught photographer of unusual skill, determination and hard work (Dunn, 2015). Her hobby of photography became known, and she was invited to take photographs of the Regiment of Guards at Chelsea Barracks, the images to be used in a recruitment campaign. Her photographs were regarded as so effective that Field Marshal Frederick Roberts, one of the most famous generals of the Victorian era, visited her and this led to her gaining access to the Royal Mews (Byatt, 1978: 51). From 1903 onwards she turned these photographs into postcards, building upon what she had learnt about printing in the stationery business and assisted by her daughter.41

The picture postcard and other communications technologies Before leaving this history of the postcard, it is vital to recapitulate its place in the communications technologies of the time. The postcard was not the only way people could send messages to each other. People had been writing letters to each other for centuries, but the sender needed to have an envelope and the stamp cost a penny. The letter was at the heart of epistolary culture and practice, and the postcard now offered an alternative. The telegraph had been developed early in the nineteenth century and by the 1840s messages were being sent but only within countries. It was not until 1858 that Britain was linked to the United States. The telegraph soon spanned the world, but its use was mostly by commerce and industry. It was expensive and out of reach for most people, especially as the messages had to be delivered by hand to the receiver (a custom which did not fall out of practice until 1982 in the UK). Another way of communicating began to develop towards the end of the nineteenth century when the telephone was developed, but during the Edwardian period it was unavailable to all but a few and very expensive. When the first Post Office telephone exchange was opened on 1 March 1902 its

The early postcard  37 capacity was 14,000 subscribers. The population of inner London in 1902 was 4,536,267. According to the Postmaster General’s report for 1902, a trunk line conversation cost an average of 5.7 pence. Vast numbers of families in the years leading up to the First World War were living on about one pound (240 pence) a week (Pember Reeves, 1913). For the majority of the British population, a postcard was the easiest, cheapest, fastest and most efficient means of communicating across distances. In 1897 the government had promised that every house in the UK would get regular deliveries and each Postmaster General’s subsequent report in the era boasts of all the means taken to reach every home and multiply deliveries in cities and towns. Contracts with steam companies and connections across the remotest Scottish islands are reported on, as are new overnight routes, connections between London and other centres and experiments with means of transport other than rail and the horsedrawn cart.42 The postcard could be used locally or more globally: in 1900 the Daily Mail reported how a Mr Woollett had managed to send a postcard around the world: it took 81 days and 91 hours to return to him.43 By 1902 the postcard was an attractive object, and people began to send more and more cards. Understanding how people used their cards, the light that can be shed on their lives as involved with this popular medium, and the interplay of materialities form the basis for most of the rest of this book. Next, however, I turn to the project’s research methods.

Notes 1 Nottinghamshire Guardian, 14 October 1870, p. 7. 2 The Manchester Weekly Times, Saturday, 4 June 1870. 3 See for example Staff (1979: 64). 4 Daily Mail, 23 November 1897, p. 6. 5 Daily Mail, 7 November 1900, p. 6. 6 Daily Mail, 12 September 1900, p. 5. 7 The Manchester Weekly Times, op. cit. 8 The Derby Mercury, 9 November 1870, p. 5. 9 Pall Mall Gazette, 17 June 1870. 10 Sixteenth report of the Postmaster General, 1870, p. 5. Incidentally, readers may notice that “post card,” “postcard,” “post-card” and other variants were present; indeed, the section in which this announcement was made was headed “card post.” 11 The Times, 29 September 1870, p. 8, Col. A. 12 The Times, 5 October 1870, p. 12, Col. E. 13 The Times, 8 October, p. 9, Col. D. 14 Sixteenth report of the Postmaster General, 1870, p. 5. 15 The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 1 October 1870, p. 3. 16 The Times, 16 March 1871, p. 9, Col. D. 17 Gilderdale (2015) discusses the work of Daniel Gifford, who used a sample of 2,000 holiday cards to trace locations and make inferences about users. 18 The Derby Mercury, 9 November 1870, p. 5. 19 The Times, 27 April 1872, p. 7. 20 The Times, 15 August 1874, p. 9. 21 p. 24 in Dagnall, op. cit. 22 p. 32 in Dagnall, op. cit.

38  The early postcard 23 p. 31 in Dagnall, op. cit. 24 Postmaster General, 1885–1886. 25 Forty-seventh report of the Postmaster General on the Post Office, 1901, p. 56. 26 Tiny pieces of tinsel were popular. 27 The Times, 9 August 1894, p. 12. 28 Chamber’s Journal, 21 October 1899. 29 The Times, 19 August 1899. 30 The Times, 14 March 1896, p. 5. 31 Daily Mail, 9 April 1897, p. 5. 32 Daily Mail, 25 August 1898, p. 3. 33 Daily Mail, 25 August 1898, p. 3. 34 Daily Mail, 29 August 1898, p. 6. 35 The Times, 1 November 1899, p. 13. 36 p. 54 in Carline (1971). 37 Forty-third report of the Postmaster General on the Post Office, 1897, p. 5. 38 The Times, 30 January 1902. 39 The Postcard Collector, December 1903, p. 233. 40 Smithsonian National Postal Museum, Washington DC; display consulted April 2016. 41 Cristina Broom’s work featured in a 1994 exhibition, “Edwardian Women Photographers” at the National Portrait Gallery, London (Dunn, 2015). 42 In 1902, for example, 237 towns received four daily mails from London and 15 towns eight daily mails. Forty-ninth report of the Postmaster General on the Post Office, 1903, p. 56. 43 Daily Mail, 15 May 1900, p. 3.

References Byatt, A. (1978). Picture postcards and their publishers. Golden Age Books. Carline, R. (1971). Pictures in the post: the story of the picture postcard. Gordon Fraser. Cure, M. (2018). Picturing the postcard: a new media crisis at the turn of the century. University of Minnesota Press. Dagnall, H. (1985). The evolution of British stamped postcards and letter cards: their history and documentation. H. Dagnall. Dunn, J. (2015). Cristina: an exciting new “broom” in what was a man’s world. Picture Postcard Monthly, October, 14–15. Fischer, C. (1992). America calling: a social history of the telephone to 1940. University of California Press. Gilderdale, P. (2015). American holiday postcards, 1905–1915: imagery and context. Early Popular Visual Culture, 13(3), 246–248. How, J. (2003). Epistolary spaces: English letter writing from the foundation of the Post Office to Richardson’s Clarissa. Ashgate Publishing. Jones, R., Chik, A., & Hafner, C. A. (2015). Introduction: discourse analysis and digital practices. In R. Jones, A. Chik & C. A. Hafner (Eds.), Discourse and digital practices: doing discourse analysis in the digital age (pp. 1–17). Routledge. Lawton, R., & Pooley, C. G. (1992). Britain 1740–1950: an historical geography. Edward Arnold. Pember Reeves, M. (1913). Round about a pound a week. G. Bell and Sons. Siegert, B. (1999). Relays: literature as an epoch of the postal system. Stanford University Press.

The early postcard  39 Staff, F. (1979). The picture postcard and its origins (2nd ed.). Lutterworth Press. Vincent, D. (1989). Literacy and popular culture: England 1750–1914. Cambridge University Press. Wingham, M. (2018). EW Richardson - the editor of Britain’s first major postcard magazine. Picture Postcard Monthly, 468, 28–33. Wrench, J. E. (1934). Uphill: the first stage in a strenuous life. Ivor Nicholson & Watson, Ltd.

3 Researching the Edwardian postcard

Introduction This book explores writing practices using the Edwardian postcard, that is during the period 1901–1910. In this chapter, I outline why it is worthwhile studying writing on the Edwardian postcard, including through an overview of the contribution of previous studies of postcard writing. I explain the Literacy Studies approach to understanding and researching literacy that I find particularly appropriate in its preference for contextualised studies, often ethnographic and longitudinal. As I have demonstrated in Chapter 1, there are various gains to be made through taking a contextualised approach, as opposed to a text-oriented study alone. The project required a longitudinal approach. The nature of the data entailed a particularly long stretch of time in collection and preparation. Beginning with a couple of hundred cards, I initially set out with Nigel Hall to collect, transcribe and analyse a thousand. Since the project moved along slowly but steadily over a long period, we eventually settled for aiming towards a dataset of three thousand cards. This took us about eight years to collect, transcribe and apply an initial categorisation scheme. In case this sounds like a very long time, which indeed it is, I can doff my hat to the 40 years of collection and research spent by Andrew Brooks (2014) before producing his book discussed below. I highlight two aspects I bring with this project to Literacy Studies. The first is a concern with the materiality of texts, including “writtenness” (Lillis, 2013), that connects with the contemporary focus on affordances particularly invoked with reference to digital texts (see Jones et al., 2015, drawing on the work of Gibson). The second is an application of a historical approach, working with the census and other kinds of records, including contemporary digital technologies. Literacy Studies as an approach focuses on everyday writing and reading practices and seeks to understand the choices that people make as they write, including selecting materials, composing their texts and how they take their addressee into consideration. Contemporary norms and values influence their decisions although people also bring in their own specific concerns and often creative ideas. Literacy Studies involves consideration of the cultural contexts DOI: 10.4324/9781003261322-3

Researching the Edwardian postcard  41 around these choices, so I now turn to explicate this approach in a little more detail, explaining its appropriacy for this study but also the ways in which I am seeking to develop the methodology.

Literacy Studies and complementary approaches to vernacular or ordinary writing Most scholarship on historical writing has concentrated on the elite, both because prominent, rich and powerful people were more likely to be at the centre of what might be regarded as the most significant historical events and because their records are most likely to survive. Since the turn of the twentieth century, there has been an increased focus on what might be called “vernacular” or “ordinary” writing. The concept of “vernacular literacies” stresses the impetus for particular writing practices beyond school, work and other institutionalised environments: Barton and Hamilton (1998: 247) describe them as “essentially ones which are not regulated by the formal rules and procedures of dominant social institutions and which have their origins in everyday life.” Barton (2007: 52) also emphasises that vernacular literacies “outside the domains of power and influence are often hidden.” Clearly complementary to this concept, “ordinary” is also used to refer to the commonplace, everyday writings of everybody, as Sinor (2002: 5) suggests: “writing that is typically unseen or ignored, and is primarily defined by its status as discardable.” The social anthropologist Fabre (1993), who studies “ordinary writings,” defines this by its functions as nonliterary: such as domestic or work writing. “Ordinary” can also be used of the people studied; Lyons’s (2013) landmark study ranging through France, Italy and Spain in the early twentieth century discusses writing practices of ordinary people to whom literacy was new. He examines the writing of people who were compelled often through migration or war to draw on limited educational experiences to engage in literacy practices in order to maintain communications with their families. Here, “ordinary” is used in contrast with privileged access to an extensive education for the middle and elite classes in a specific European historical era. What Lyons terms “the new history from below” (which itself draws on a long tradition of working-class history) is an extensive area in which historical contributions to Literacy Studies make a complementary, indeed overlapping contribution.1 Literacy studies is an interdisciplinary field of study that examines reading and writing practices in everyday life. It is sometimes known as New Literacy Studies, from a wellspring of inspiration created by some key works in the 1980s, each themselves the product of lengthy engagement in the field. Shirley Brice Heath’s renowned work of this period is her book: Ways with Words, a study of people’s uses of reading and writing at home and in schools in three communities in the United States (Heath, 1983). Fascinating also is a complementary contribution she made to methodology, originally to a Pennsylvania Colloquium on Ethnography and Education (Heath, 1982). Designed indeed for ethnographers in educational settings, nevertheless, two of her tenets are

42  Researching the Edwardian postcard of great value for this study. First, she stresses the importance of what she terms “ethnohistorical research” (Heath, 1982: 36–37), seeking out documents and evidence of varying kinds that shed light on the background of the practices being studied. Second, that the meanings of words and terms vary across time and across cultural groups and that the researcher must be alive to local meanings. That work by Heath was published by a Center of Applied Linguistics, concerned with education and grounded in ethnography, with a powerful social anthropology grounding. Literacy Studies itself continues to manifest these interests and motivations. The chapter was in a book entitled Children in and out of school; the contributors shared with Heath, as the title suggests, an interest in learning wherever it is located and an awareness that literacy, as other elements of learning, is not confined to formal surroundings. Heath’s major contribution to the New Literacy Studies of the early 1980s was the argument that ethnographic methods have a place in countering very individualised, or decontextualised, understandings of literacy practices, common in education and psychology. Such approaches conceptualise literacy in terms of reading and writing skills that can be abstracted away from the contexts in which they are used, in which measurements are taken as absolute proxies for abilities to deploy skills in any situation and can then be used to disempower people (Papen, 2016). Literacy becomes not the reading and writing practices that people employ for their own purposes, in ways that make sense to them and the people they are communicating with, but rather becomes considered and measured as performance in tests set by others in relatively powerful social positions. Street (1983) calls this the “autonomous” view of literacy, privileging one particular way of doing things in a society and disguising ideological assumptions beneath it. A significant insight in key Literacy Studies’ foundational works such as that by Street is recognition of the limitation of equating literacy to school-based practices. Historically, literacy itself did not begin in schools as Collins and Blot (2003: 83) argue: “schooled literacy emerged out of and in response to a complex, multifaceted commonplace literacy – of workplace, church, family and politics.” Furthermore, as key Literacy Studies concerned with history, such as works by Cook-Gumperz (2006) and Graff (2007, 2010), have recognised, schooled and other instantiations of formal literacy have always attempted to maintain a hegemony over definitions of literacy and indeed this continues to this day (Hamilton, 2012; Moss, 2021). As Heath uncovered in her influential 1980s study, this severely disadvantages those whose home-based cultures do not comfortably align with school expectations of literacy practices. This remains a key concern for many educators today, with much valuable ethnographic work continuing to illuminate these sources of inequity.2 To return to historical inquiry in literacy education, Green and Cormack (2015: 189) agree that a particular benefit of bringing in a historical perspective is that it moves definitions and understandings of literacy beyond the bounds of formal education into other realms of everyday life. Theirs is the only chapter in the Handbook of Literacy Studies (Rowsell & Pahl, 2015) focused on historical

Researching the Edwardian postcard  43 inquiry, although an interest in involving some consideration of historicised backgrounds to current fields of inquiry appears in some other chapters. That perspective, as Heath’s (1982) conception of ethnohistorical research, is chiefly concerned with using historical investigations to illuminate current ethnographical work As yet relatively few works that locate themselves centrally in Literacy Studies concentrate on historical topics and methods; although without trying to mention all those that do I must mention O’Hagan’s (2021) work in this book series, The Sociocultural Functions of Edwardian Book Inscriptions. In summary, then, Literacy Studies approaches combine study of reading and writing with methods that are often described as ethnographic. A range of tools and methods are employed, geared towards gaining better understandings of people’s own understandings of their meaning-making practices and the social and cultural context around these (Rowsell & Pahl, 2015). In relation to the discipline of linguistics or applied linguistics, where it is often situated, Literacy Studies is characterised by its focus on studying context, with great attention paid to social, cultural and indeed historical factors that shape and are shaped by interactions around the text. Thus, sociolinguistics, and particularly the sociolinguistics of writing (Lillis, 2013), are strong areas of alignment.

Previous studies of writing on postcards Studies of writings on postcards are not extensive; nevertheless, I cannot offer a complete overview here. One reason for this is that there are immense areas of scholarship on picture postcards stemming from an interest in the picture side, whether from popular culture, art history, design and production, tourism, local history or other disciplinary wellsprings. It was the image of the picture postcard that was overwhelmingly likely to be the reason for any preservation of these potentially ephemeral communications. Usually initially preserved in albums, some collections have been preserved for historical reasons (Lauder, 2012; Prochaska & Mendelson, 2010) or in the course of the hobby of deltiology (Gillen & Hall, 2010; Siegert, 1999). Academic attention has been leveraged to the possibilities of using them as visual resources to assist cultural studies in specific topics such as tourism (Thurlow et al., 2010) and the history of gender politics (Palczewski, 2005; Wollaeger, 2001) or indeed stressed the diversity of such applications (Stevens, 1995). Dwarfing those sources of interest in postcards is the huge amount of less academic interest in postcard images connected with the hobby of collecting postcards, sometimes called deltiology. Thousands of books are published which are based on collections of postcards around a theme, very often a particular locality. Although all these studies, as the vast majority of collections, are focused on the image side, occasionally some writing on the back is noticed and written about; necessarily, it is impossible to review such a vast area. Here then, I can briefly review some of the existing scholarship focused on writing postcards, especially with a historical lens, asking what they reveal about people’s literacy practices with postcards.

44  Researching the Edwardian postcard Illuminating studies of the postcard include the work of Rogan (2005), who explored the postcard in its Golden Age, defined here as approximately 1895–1920. Basing his analysis on a study of his own collection and secondary sources, he identified four main factors to account for their popularity: aesthetics of the picture, function as souvenir, collectible, and means of communication. Jaworski (2010) examined linguistic landscapes as mediated for tourism and so is particularly interested in writing on cards, but as they were produced for sale rather than as added by a sender, so the focus is on the publishers’ texts. Östman (2004) also discussed the postcard as semiotic space and focused on the semi-public characteristic of postcards, and, drawing on empirical analyses collected by Laakso and Östman (1999), suggests that this causes some indirectness in linguistic strategies. Two outstanding coffee-table-style books feature historical postcard messages and their images. The artist Tom Phillips published The Postcard Century: 2000 Cards and Their Messages to coincide with the millennium (Phillips, 2000). It was tremendously popular upon publication and attracted considerable attention as a way of exploring day-to-day life in the twentieth century through the medium of postcards. Anecdotally, it appeared also to give deltiology a great boost. As yet a contrasting fate has met the also beautifully produced Postcard Messages from the Great War, by Andrew Brooks, which has been self-published (Brooks, 2014). The author discusses messages from over 300 cards sent either to or from soldiers on active service or training. He utilises a vast range of hist­ orical records appertaining to the war, such as archives, books, diaries and so on. Brooks also demonstrates mastery in exploiting clues offered by postmarks, censor marks, deletions, unlabelled images and many other features of cards and reconstructs contextual information that soldiers were not allowed to write about. Often painfully, he is frequently able to detail the fate of those involved, right down to their final resting place or memorial. Another feature of this wonderful book is the great diversity of genres for the picture side, apart from the plain official services cards. There are topographical scenes, real photographs of army groups that include the sender (so “selfies”), comic cards, highly decorated illustrative greeting cards and many other kinds of images. As with Edwardian cards, as shall become apparent, great interest often lies in how the messages relate to these images. Brooks, who has published articles for Picture Postcard Monthly, also collaborated in a book associated with that publication entitled What the Postman Saw, which reproduced interesting or amusing mess­ ages (Brooks et al., 1982). Some studies published in academic journals or books have focused on the interplay between postcard image and message, in specific contexts of use (Atkins, 2022; Becker & Malcolm, 2008; Hall & Gillen, 2007; Hook, 2005; Laakso & Östman, 2001; Laurier & Whyte, 2001). Kress (2004), responding to Östman (2004), suggested that when selecting a postcard from a finite suggestion, the writer chooses an image assuming “that it will say something about me to the person to whom I send the card” (Kress, 2004: 444). He then asserts that the image will be read in the context of the message and vice versa,

Researching the Edwardian postcard  45 not necessarily relating the two in the ways the sender would wish. He suggests that the discipline of linguistics has very little to say about these textual relationships between the two and that a theoretical framework is needed that integrates the two. This book is not an adequate response to this interesting proposal in that I do not seek to give equal weight to considering both sides. Like Kress, I do want to consider the postcards as they were used in practice, with a keen eye to the minutiae of material detail, rather than considering them as decontextualised texts. I am interested in the pictures but not as centrally as the written sides, and particularly in reading them in the light of messages, rather than just for themselves. I return to these issues in the next chapter. Finally, two further works must be singled out, however inadequate the space here to delineate their contributions. One is a PhD thesis: Peter Gilderdale’s (2013) magnificent three-volume Hands across the Sea: Situating an Edwardian Greetings Cart Practice. This is a superb study of design and cultural history that goes beyond being a definitive study of a specific postcard practice and genre, to revisiting and illuminating the history of the early postcard. As Gilderdale (2013: x) wrote, “This thesis’s richly contextualised account of the trajectory of this entangled phenomenon aims to provide an improved historical underpinning for future postcard studies.” It must indeed be highly recommended as having succeeded in its aim. When this book was almost finished, I’m delighted to say that a book I knew about through the Edwardian Culture Network3 came out: Ann Wilson’s (2021) The Picture Postcard: A New Window into Edwardian Ireland. Wilson specialises in visual and material culture in Ireland in the period and has investigated picture postcard culture through primary collections and media discourses of the age. So some of her aims were similar to this book’s; notably, she also illuminates topics I have not treated in depth such as antecedent visual technologies and collecting practices. Some of her most fascinating material springs from her foci on specific collections and her rich consideration of Irish identity as refracted through postcard use, including through travel and tourism. I could not recommend this book more highly.

Collecting Edwardian postcards My original collaborator in the Edwardian Postcard Project, Nigel Hall, began collecting a specific genre of early twentieth-century postcards: “Why haven’t you written?” in the UK and the United States. This sprang from an interest in writing technologies and representations of them. Cards in this genre frequently displayed, as the publisher’s illustration for which the card was (presumably) selected, the text: “Why haven’t you written?” or a close variant, plus images of related technologies such as a pen and postbox, or even a representation of the card itself. We engaged in multimodal analysis examining the relationship of the designed combination of printed words and images on the picture side with the messages handwritten by senders on the other (Hall & Gillen, 2007).

46  Researching the Edwardian postcard We then progressed to collecting postcards and moved towards settling on Edwardian postcards as written and posted between 1901 and 1910. These are readily easily identifiable through the use of the Edward VII stamp, although actually a little expertise is involved since the stamp which replaced it on the accession of George V is not very different at first glance. There are today three main ways of collecting postcards. The hobby of coll­ ecting postcards, deltiology, is overwhelmingly concerned with postcard images, as I have already mentioned, although a few collectors are interested in postmarks. Auction sites on the internet are a prime site for buying and selling cards. However, I have not been involved in buying on the internet principally because it is the picture side that is displayed and the source of value. My remit is to begin with the written side and so purchasing online would be impossible without extensive time-consuming searching and perhaps correspondence with the seller. Many cards offered online are in mint collection and have not been through the post. When we began collecting cards for this project, in 2007, the main setting for buying cards was postcard fairs, which remain a key location for deltiologists, although interrupted by the coronavirus pandemic.4 Advantages for collectors include being able to physically examine a large number of cards in a short period of time. A further advantage is that sellers categorise their cards into sections, making specialist subjects easy to inquire into. Almost all collectors search for postcards according to pictorial themes. These are often topographic, and sellers respond by organising such cards within their boxes with regional, local, even village-based labelling systems. Other interests can be pursued through interaction with the seller. Indeed, earlier we investigated how the cards circulated in the early twenty-first century, through participant-observation of such exchanges (Gillen & Hall, 2010). “Any mermaids?” was one enquiry I overheard at a Postcard Fair in Nottingham on 1 November 2008. “Not just at the moment,” responded the stallholder, accustomed to mentally reviewing his stock of probably a few thousand old postcards. Such expertise, often based on decades of dealing, remains common. Picture Postcard Monthly featured an interview with Nigel Oram, who had been dealing in postcards for 30 years. He recalled being momentarily surprised by an enquirer collecting on the gas industry, to whom he was able to sell a postcard of Paddington station that featured a gas holder.5 Dealers are often collectors themselves; they have to possess more than any single collector’s expertise as otherwise organising and selling their collections would be impossible. The trajectory of moving from collecting to dealing is remarked on by many, such as in this interview of a dealer I recorded: I’ve been collecting over twenty years – it’s a hobby gone mad. People start collecting and progress to dealing and eventually to this shambles! I sell postcards to everyone, you try to satisfy every wish, most are topographic, others collect cooking, football, cinema and so on. I’m interested in glamour and children rather than our own little village; our cards reflect our

Researching the Edwardian postcard  47 interests. Some collect by publisher, or, if you’re a military person, you collect your own regiment or the Boer war – whatever interests you. There’s no end … you think you’ve heard everything and then someone comes up to you and asks for pawnbrokers…it’s a lovely hobby and has given me a great deal of pleasure; I’ve met a lot of people over the years. Edwardian postcards can also be found in other places, such as physical auctions, junk or antique shops, or market stalls. Most people involved in those trading places are involved in passing them on essentially because they come across cards and understand that they have some value to others. The fairs and internet sites are a more concentrated focus of activity where collectors and dealers meet, either physically or online. So although I am now mainly buying cards in antique shops and markets, it was postcard fairs that were central to our activities as collectors and researchers of the main collection of 3,000 cards, which this book is based on, as well as gratefully received donations. At fairs, I tend to search by looking for boxes of miscellaneous cards typically priced at 50p each and turn the boxes of cards around to examine the message sides, quickly flicking through to locate the appropriate stamp and postmark, and check that the card has a message and address. The occasionally startled seller enquires what I am looking for, and is often able to direct me to boxes where Edwardian postcards, sometimes not in the best condition and without highly sought-after images, might lie. I put chosen cards aside, sometimes being able to negotiate a discount for a bulk purchase, say ten cards plus. Occasionally at regular fairs, dealers used to get to know Nigel or myself and look out for some cards prior to our visits. Only after buying cards, getting them home and putting them into protective covers if they were not bought that way, did we turn them over and notice the image side. It is worth paying some attention at this stage to why, although these cards are bought individually, we have many connected examples, to the same addressee and sometimes even from the same sender. Given that six billion cards were sent in the period, and our main collection is a mere three thousand, this would at first glance appear incredible. However, the explanation lies in the way that most cards have been preserved, in their own time and in the intervening years up until they landed in the hands of a dealer or secondary trader. At the beginning of the twentieth century, collecting cards was an extremely popular pastime; most valued examples were often placed in albums. These included mint cards, that is, those that had not been through the post, or cards that had, according to the preference of a collector. Albums may then lie in houses, perhaps being passed through generations, until they land in the hands of a seller or trader, possibly through a house clearance. An album will generally be gutted by a dealer, who, as I have explained, will sort cards for resale according to the subject of the image. According to many articles and editorials in Picture Postcard Monthly, often the best way to get an optimum price for a valued card is to sell it through an internet auction house. Cards that reach high prices are usually through their image, such as being of the Titanic or a famous

48  Researching the Edwardian postcard cricketer, or may be because the artist or publisher is prized or indeed some method of production such as the incorporation of silk. However, if a dealer is separating cards out into the boxes (typically shoe boxes) they will then be selling from, it might well be that cards from the same album end up in the same box, especially if such a box is the kind of miscellany I might be likely to look in first. Thus, although it cannot be proved, it is very likely that two or more cards to the same person in our collection originally resided in an album together. In any event, whether they were in an album or for some other reason end up in our collection, such linked cards can be extremely valuable in extending our knowledge of a correspondence and writing practices beyond the examination of single cards. In the subsequent sections on transcription and categorisation, decisions that were made jointly by Nigel Hall and myself are indicated by use of the firstperson plural.

Data organisation and initial analysis Transcription We transcribed the cards, preserving orthography and line endings. Reading the handwriting has often proved quite challenging, in part as handwriting is not used as much as it was several decades ago; in addition styles of handwriting have changed somewhat. Challenges do arise; in some cases this is because we find the handwriting difficult to decipher. But it can be often for another reason, that the addressee and sender are referring to themselves or someone or something else very well known to them and so they can make use of abbreviations or less than neat writing and still convey their meaning perfectly well to their addressee. Even transcribing addresses can be very difficult; sometimes, an immediate reaction is to sympathise with the postmen, and as mentioned in Chapter 2 many cards did not reach their destinations. But it is virtually certain that all of ours did; otherwise, they would not have been preserved, so it is likely that in many cases senders were confident of the postmen’s familiarity with the locality in order to interpret an incomplete or less-than-clear address. Another particular challenge to transcription arises when forms of writing are deliberately used that are unconventional, such as cross-hatching, mirror writing or codes. Further, there are elements of other languages such as Welsh or French on some of the cards. These are interesting in themselves as part of the practices of writing cards and so are discussed in Chapter 4. Our longitudinal approach has often helped us in transcription. We transcribed many of the cards initially ourselves, occasionally working with assistants. Sometimes research assistants initiated transcriptions. All cards have been returned to at a later stage, for various reasons as described below, and so very often an element of retranscription has been done later. We have frequently spent a long time puzzling over part of a card, often having to leave it aside, and then, on coming back to it perhaps months or years later, been able to make a

Researching the Edwardian postcard  49 breakthrough. One such is described in the historical case study at the end of this chapter. Categorisation and initial analyses From the beginning, we decided to begin with some categorisation of features of cards that would give us at least partial answers to some questions we were developing at a very early stage of handling the cards. Viewed retrospectively, these have a relationship with the framework for describing writing by Lillis and McKinney (2013). As each postcard was transcribed, its characteristics were entered on a spreadsheet. The first task was to give the number of the card and ascribe the picture side to one category. It may seem a little surprising, given the discussion above, that we start with the picture side, but the reason was to begin with the relatively easy categories here and then spend more time on the writing side. Each postcard was placed into one of the categories shown in Table 3.1. This system was piloted by ourselves and tested with assistants to ensure it was workable. We also decided to categorise the cards according to whether the image was a “real photographic” (very likely amended in some way, such as the application of colour by hand): 52%; professionally illustrated: 47%; or something other, such as a home-made illustration: 1%. Turning to the written side, we counted how many writers explicitly mentioned the pictures, and found that 16% did so. On reflection, this seems to be quite a high number; rarely in my life when sending greeting cards, even more clearly a gift, have I referred to the picture on the front. Many cards will have been sent with a consciousness that the picture side might carry particular meaning for the recipient and often this understanding could surely have been left implicit. We then recorded the year, taken from the postmark. Part of the reason for this was curiosity as to whether the latter period or the early years of the Edwardian era would dominate and whether our collection would appear in its distribution to be reasonably representative of the cards’ popularity, as revealed in the Postmaster General’s statistics. Results were as shown in Table 3.2.

Table 3.1  Image categories Principle category

Percentage

views building/s celebrity ordinary person or people comic child art words

48 26 3 2 2 2 15 2

50  Researching the Edwardian postcard Table 3.2  Year of postcard use Year by postmark

Percentage

1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910

0 1 4 11 16 15 16 16 13 10

The percentages shown in Table 3.2 do not add up to 100 owing to rounding. There are three cards in the main collection dated from 1901; I believe that we were not trying to collect cards from that year at least some of the time. Otherwise, the spread across the years does not give rise to any concerns. One issue of interest to us, as introduced in Chapter 1, was the relationship of the card to the letter, and we decided to investigate this in two aspects. Reading even the first few cards we collected, including for our study of the “Why haven’t you written?” genre (Hall & Gillen, 2007), made very clear to us that postcards often mentioned reciprocity, in promising or mentioning a recently received postcard and also that they had a very strong relationship with letter writing. Therefore, we categorised the cards according to whether or not the writer mentioned postcards or letters as demonstrated in Table 3.3. Since a writer can do more than one of these mentions in the same card, it cannot be concluded that a specific proportion of the cards feature mentions of postcards and/or letters. It does indicate that some writers were referring to other elements of their mutual correspondence. This issue is investigated further in Chapter 5. We wondered to what extent people were drawing on letter-writing practices in composing their postcards, where supposedly letter-writing conventions were not needed. One aspect of the conventional letter would be for a writer to put the date of sending and their own address. Nineteen per cent of the cards featured the writer entering a date; this is arguably a high figure, given that the postmark can usually be relied upon to carry this information (occasionally a postmark can be blurred) and so is persuasive of carrying over a letter-writing Table 3.3  Explicit mentions of postcards and letters by writers Mentions

Percentages

received or sent a postcard received or sent a letter promises to send a postcard promises to send a letter

22 12 2 7

Researching the Edwardian postcard  51 Table 3.4  Gender of writers and addressees (female, male, unknown) Gender of sender to addressee

Percentage

F to F F to M F to U M to F M to M M to U U to F U to M U to U

35 5 0 11 4 0 37 7 1

convention. Twenty per cent of cards feature the writer’s address. This might sometimes have been unnecessary, and perhaps carrying over a letter-writing convention. However, the speed of the post in the era meant that many people received letters when away from home, as is attested to by a large number of cards being marked “c/o” (care of) and then an address, so often it must have been needed to mention one’s address if temporary or for another reason not necessarily to hand to the correspondent. We also looked to see if people included salutations, again potentially droppable in this brief form of writing but at the same time a frequent feature of informal communications, such as oral telephone dialogues (Hopper, 1992). So it is perhaps unsurprising that 63% of the cards featured a salutation, then 63% were signed by name, 25% by an initial. The remainder presumably relied on identification of the sender through handwriting and other cues. We looked for internal evidence as to who was sending the cards. We checked to see if family relationship was indicated by the sender and found that 19% of them did. This further cements the notion that many of the cards were preserved, probably in albums, and were valued in part because of the strength of personal relationships. We know that much contemporary literature refers to women as collectors of postcards although Laski (1964: 203) claimed that coll­ ecting them in the Edwardian era was the province of children. Nonetheless, while acknowledging that collecting postcards was likely to be the province of the feminine domestic sphere, it is of great interest the extent to which men and women were involved in writing and receiving postcards. Gender is often impossible to determine, for example, when initials only are used. However, bringing in the category “unknown” gave us nine possible permutations, and so each card was characterised as shown in Table 3.4. So females are certainly more dominant, as both senders and addressees, but males are not absent.

Using the census and other historical records As already indicated, one of our main principles for acquiring the postcards was that they had to have a mostly legible address, giving the possibility to make use

52  Researching the Edwardian postcard of census information in some cases. When we started assembling our collection, the 1901 census of England and Wales had become available online, with 32 million entries (Brennand, 2002), and by the time we had finished so had the 1911 census. Scottish censuses were taken on the same dates as those in England and Wales and are also available. The 1901 Irish census is available online and for free; also available is the 1911 census. While writing this book, the 1921 census is now available but has not been consulted. Census records have been crucial for the project. They contain so much information about households that significantly increases understanding of the people sending and receiving cards. It is, however, immediately obvious that most information available is about the person receiving the card, for every card provides their address and most of them provide a name, and it is this information that potentially allows us to locate people in the censuses. While this meant we had mostly had very limited information about the senders, occasionally the nature of the relationship between sender and receiver if made explicit, perhaps over two or more related cards, has also enabled the identification of the sender. The Hardley card in Figure 1.2 is a good example. From 1841 (and to a very limited extent a little earlier) a national census has been taken every ten years in Britain. Censuses prior to 1901 in Ireland were destroyed. The amount of information collected was quite limited at first, but in each succeeding decade that information increased. The 1901 and 1911 censuses are the most important for us, but the previous censuses often provided additional knowledge as I have traced families back in time such as the Hardleys. Both the 1901 and 1911 censuses provide the name and age (and birth year) of the head of the household, of other family members and anyone else living in that household, and most importantly for us they provide the household’s address. They also provide, where appropriate, people’s occupations, their relationship to the head of the household and where they were born. In addition, there are crude categories for disability; for example, in the 1901 census one for “totally deaf or deaf and dumb.” In the 1901 census there was a column requiring the number of rooms in the household if less than five, while in the 1911 census the head of household had to: Write below the number of rooms in this dwelling (house, tenement apartment). Count the kitchen as a room, but do not count scullery, landing, lobby, closet, bathroom, nor warehouse, office, shop. Finally, the 1911 census required the number of years a couple had been married, details of the number of children living or having died, and whether working people were “employer, worker, own account.” Thus, the amount of information provided by the census is considerable, and offers, in particular, a lot of socio-economic information about the size, wealth and occupational status of each household. In some respects it is a gold mine for researchers, providing information that would not be easily accessible in other records. As both the 1901 and 1911 censuses have been transcribed and put

Researching the Edwardian postcard  53 online (as have all the others preceding them), it would seem quite straightforward to put the names into the search page and wait for the information to come up on the screen. If only life were that simple! In reality, a significant number of factors inhibit access to the information I wanted and meant that there are many cards for which there is no census data. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, and I have clustered these into three groups. Issues relating to people’s circumstances Dramatic life changes can happen between the time of a postcard being written and the nearest census. Babies are born and people die. People marry and usually women during this era changed their names. The births, death and marriage indexes can be very helpful, but only if there is good evidence on the card to provide the relevant information. Many people change addresses during this time, and some may change their addresses many times, such as Ruby Ingrey discussed in Chapter 6. In general, the chances of finding someone in either census tend to be greater if the date on the card is close to the census date. However, if they have a very unusual name, or we have corroborating evidence such as all the names of family members, I can sometimes still locate them. Issues deriving from the cards themselves Many cards are written with a degree of illegibility in that it is difficult to read personal or address names, or in some cases both. Sometimes, this difficulty can be alleviated where more than one card has been sent to an address, thus allowing some cross-referencing between cards. Many addresses and even names are incompletely written. Cards that have a house or apartment number and street names are much easier to find than those that have house names and no street names. Although they were adequate for the post office workers at the time, cards presenting such difficulties are often too difficult to trace now. Some people were recorded by the census while at a temporary residence; obviously, this could often mean that they were absent from their usual address, perhaps one to which one of our cards was addressed and therefore become untraceable. Issues relating to the censuses: original collection and subsequent handling of the data No census is complete. There are always people missing from a census. In some cases, it might be accidental and in others it could be quite deliberate. The census collects data for a specified day and night: 31 March 1901 and 2 April 1911. If someone is absent, the expectation is that they will be on the census return of the household in which they were staying that night. However, some people intentionally “disappeared.” There was a concerted campaign led by

54  Researching the Edwardian postcard several women’s suffrage groups and Emmeline Pankhurst to boycott the 1911 census (MacDonald, 2020). Emily Wilding Davison, who was to throw herself under a horse in the Epsom Derby in 1913, succeeded in hiding away in the Houses of Parliament on the census night of 1911 in order to record it as her residence (White, 2010). It was the duty of the head of household to provide the census information, either by telling the enumerator this information in 1901 or by filling in the form themselves in 1911. Either method might be fraught with error, particularly when undertaken at speed. Many English names exist in variant spellings, and many family names may be quite unusual and not previously known to an enumerator. It is quite common to find the spelling of family names varying across censuses. Sometimes, this is quite deliberate; people changed their preference for which first and second names they want to use, for example. People occasionally report their place of birth differently in subsequent censuses. Another problem is that handwriting is sometimes almost illegible, and in some cases the data sheets have faded so badly that rescuing the information is virtually impossible, and this is certainly as well a problem with the Birth, Deaths and Marriages Indexes. Dates of birth are frequently inaccurate; it appears that ages were inquired into and then assumptions made as to the date of birth.6 The interpretation of handwriting also caused difficulties. Chapter 6 features a case study of Ruby Ingrey; for the 1911 census, where the head of the household wrote in the names, this was transcribed later as “Inkrey.”7 Rather oddly, there also seem to be instances where streets to which cards were sent, successfully, but which do not appear on the census. Finally, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints organises and shares many transcriptions, digitises data and shares a Family Tree, but these are not necessarily error-free.8 Positive features of the censuses and historical records Having above pointed out some inadequacies of the censuses, I must now acknowledge strengths, as accessed through Findmypast or Ancestry, subscription-based platforms. The digitisation of the censuses offers multiple ways of searching. Thus, missing data does not necessarily inhibit identification of someone. Thus, one can search by address, parish, town, road and so on. Sometimes, these still generate a lot of work as when an address contains the road but no number. In these circumstances, there may be no substitute for the time-consuming searching of all the households in the road or street. Nevertheless, the fact that it can be done improves searching for people and families. It can be possible to create an extensive history, often going back several generations. The census and other such records can then be enhanced through the investigation of other information as I will demonstrate with an example at the end of this chapter. Nigel Hall and I initially searched census records for each and every card wherever it appeared possible. Later, I went through each one again, sometimes confirming our earlier findings, occasionally extending or amending and

Researching the Edwardian postcard  55 sometimes succeeding in finding details where I had not before.9 I have succeeded in finding census information relating to approximately half the postcards in the main collection.10 Limitations It is important to tackle issues of selection and representativeness before presenting my findings. I cannot and do not seek to make claims for the entire body of Edwardian postcard writing through this study. If there were about six billion cards and we have three thousand, it is obvious that any such endeavour would be inadequate. It is important to state from the outset that the issue of representativeness is always going to be a thorny question and one that we cannot ever hope to resolve, but neither can anyone else. One vital issue is that for some reason, probably very rarely if at all accidental, these cards were deemed by their receivers worthy of retention, at least for some period. As I have already mentioned, this often happened when they were placed in albums. It is certain that many cards were discarded immediately upon receipt. Many cards sent for commercial reasons, as junk mail in the late twentieth century, would be quickly discarded. I know also from the postcard-related media, such as contemporary magazines for postcard collectors, that there were specific reasons for sending postcards that would often lead to their rapid disposal, for example, for the purpose of entering competitions. The fact of a card’s retention might lead one to assume that the more costly, high-value cards would be more likely to be retained, and then perhaps to make a connection with spending power and thus to wonder if it would be the cards of the better-off rather than the poor that would be more likely to come into our collection. But there are three mitigating factors against making such an assumption. First is that the census searches reveal that many of the addressees were living in straitened circumstances. Second, many cards were kept because of (presumably affectionate) associations with the person concerned and the card’s image quality in respect of production values and cost is seemingly often irrelevant. Third, our collecting strategy and buying power lead towards a bias towards cards that are cheaper now, rather than expensive. Some cards will have shifted in their value, for example, if relating to the Titanic or cricket, and command very high prices in the twenty-first century. But others, such as those with very high production values, will have been relatively expensive also in their own day. So it seems to me that overall there is no overwhelming reason that our collection can be unrepresentative in any way that need cause concern. Ultimately, however, this collection is illustrative of cards that were thought worthy of retention in their time.

A case study of transcribing a card and accessing relevant historical records: card 554 I include this case study as an example of how one single card can through our research methods lead to an extraordinary amount of information, almost a mini

56  Researching the Edwardian postcard biography. The first attempt to transcribe the card occurred before 2010, and a subsequent attempt to find the addressee in the census was unsuccessful. This is because we (Nigel Hall or myself) had transcribed the name and address as: J. Drummond Hughes(?) Esq. 24 Cul???? Ealing In July 2011 the linguist Kathrin Kaufhold helped us by retranscribing a number of cards, which included 554. She proposed the following name and address and made some slight alterations to the transcription of the message so that it became: 554/1902 J. Drummond Inglis Esq 24. Culmington Road Ealing – (on small space at front of card) July 22nd 1902 I am sending you this view of Hastings Castle- as I am [?] [?] [?] who landed here, & won the battle of HastingsWith much love. [?] yours M.W(31 words) Armed with this new transcription, including the informative address, I was now able to find the addressee. The notes I then made from the census and other historical records are as follows: John D. Inglis lives at the address on the card with his mother Katherine S. Inglis in 1901. She is described as married, b. 1867 in Bowden, Cheshire, but there is no recorded husband here in the census. Also in the household are two servants, Sara Baverstock, a nurse (domestic) and Sarah Lamb, a

Researching the Edwardian postcard  57 cook (domestic). John was born in 1896, in Devonport, Devon so was just 5 years’ old at the time of the census so only about 6 when he received this. It might be presumed that he was in a relatively privileged household so although I can’t definitively be certain, it seems likely this is the John Drummond Inglis who progressed from being a Second Lieutenant, to Lieutenant and then Major in the Royal Engineers in the First World War. The next record for John Drummond Inglis is as an “Exec” recorded as a shareholder in the Great Western Railway in 1932. Later I was able to add the following: Further evidence that these John Drummond Inglis entries are likely to be one and the same are supported by the 1911 census in which I have found Katherine Sarah Inglis (b. 1867, Bowden) now living in St Marys Church Street, North Colchester. Now she is with her husband, Thomas Drummond Inglis, described as a Retired Major Royal Artillery Training. At this point they have 3 servants, none the same as 1901. Their son John Drummond Inglis is not with him and I cannot find him in the 1911 census. However, at this point I was wondering if John Drummond Inglis had been a relatively well-known person, perhaps with some records accessible through a search engine. On searching for John Drummond Inglis with google I found a portrait of “Sir (John) Drummond Inglis” by Janet Jevons, dated 1944 in the National Portrait Gallery online collection.11 Apparently, according to the collection, there is also another 1944 portrait of him by Walter Stoneman. At that stage there was no information about John Drummond Inglis on the site but an appeal to submit information. The really valuable information included on the site however was simply his birth and death: 1895–1985. Armed with the new information that he was born in 1895 rather than 1896, much more information became accessible, including his birth and baptism records and his whereabouts in 1911. I could also find out more about his military ranks, including that he was granted the honorary rank of Major-General in 1945 but that also he did something else very interesting on retirement: depositing an archive of “correspondence, papers and photographs” with the Royal Engineers Museum (reference HMC NRA 36645). The Royal Engineers Museum very kindly gave me by email some indication of this collection, enabling further information to be added to his profile here. The current version of the historical data entry therefore reads as follows: Census and historical data card 554 John D. Inglis lives at the address on the card with his mother Katherine S. Inglis in 1901. She is described as married, b. 1867 in Bowden, Cheshire, but there is no recorded husband here in the census. Also in the household are two servants, Sara Baverstock, a nurse (domestic) and Sarah Lamb, a

58  Researching the Edwardian postcard cook (domestic). John was shown here as having been born in 1896, in Devonport, Devon so was just 5 years’ old at the time of the census so only about 6 when he received this. In the 1911 census Katherine Sarah Inglis (b. 1867, Bowden) now lives in St Marys Church Street, North Colchester. She is with her husband, Thomas Drummond Inglis, described as a Retired Major Royal Artillery Training. At this point they have 3 servants, none the same as 1901. John Drummond Inglis was actually born in 1895 in Devon, as revealed in both births and baptism records. In the 1911 census he was a student at Wellington College, Crowthorne, Berkshire. The school had opened in 1856; the Wikipedia entry tells us that 707 of its former students lost their lives in the First World War. Other records, including a particularly informative obituary of his second wife, who died in 1987, flesh out his military career. Between the wars he was particularly involved in technical developments in the army working in elements such as the “School of Electric Lighting” (19922–26) and acting as the Vice President of the Mechanical Board between 1934 and 1937. He was Chief Engineer, 21 Army Group between 1943 and 1945 with the rank of Temporary Major-General. On retirement in 1945 he was granted the honorary rank of Major-General. On retirement he deposited an archive with the Royal Engineers Museum (reference HMC NRA 36645). This contains letters to Inglis congratulating him on the award of his KBE, including one from Field Marshal B L Montgomery. It also contains the paperwork for various awards he received including the OBE, Order of the Bath, the French Legion of Honour and several others. There are two portraits of him in the National Portrait Gallery: including a portrait of “Sir (John) Drummond Inglis” by Janet Jevons, dated 1944 in the National Portrait Gallery online collection. http://www.npg.org. uk/collections/search/person.php?LinkID=mp90021#jff405c89f Apparently, there is also another 1944 portrait of him by Walter Stoneman. (The National Portrait Gallery published my submitted information in August 2015.) John Drummond Inglis died in Eastbourne in 1985, so aged 90. Armed with all these biographical facts I can wonder if the “Battle of Hastings” card was sent by a relative or friend of the family to a young child and retained, perhaps for many decades, as the inspiration for a military career. This might be fanciful, but certainly some meaning must have been attached to the card to account for its preservation. This example is unusual although not unique, in terms both of the historical data retrievable and postcard users in our collection, in that the recipient of this ordinary card turned out to become a prominent person in society with a place in valued archives. Nevertheless, as I will show in Chapter 6, I have been also able to find out a great deal about postcard recipients and senders who led very different lives and might be presumed less likely to be traceable.

Researching the Edwardian postcard  59 In this chapter then I have moved from outlining Literacy Studies, through a brief review of some salient studies of literacy practices with postcards to an account of methods. I explained how working with Nigel Hall we collected and categorised 3,000 cards. I then discussed the importance of the historical censuses to this project, demonstrating their use. Finally, I traced how a vast amount of biographical information can be opened up, not without difficulty, to illuminate one specific card.

Notes 1 See, for example, Artières (2000, 2010); Béroujon (2009, 2010); Cabrita (2010); Chartier (1992); Durston (2008); Fabre (1993). 2 See, for example, Brandt (2001); Dyson (2016); González et al. (2005); K. Hall et al. (2013); Janks (2009). 3 https://edwardianculture.com/ (last accessed 8 January 2022). 4 Unfortunately, the ageing demographic profile of dealers is probably a factor too. 5 Picture Postcard Monthly, no. 435, July 2015, p. 9. 6 It is worth using the facility to search by plus or minus two years if the date of birth is a factor in a search. 7 I contribute to opportunities to correct errors in databases, as Nigel Hall used to do. 8 https://www.familysearch.org/en/ (last accessed 20 August 2022). 9 I almost entirely used Findmypast.com, which at the time of most of the searches was superior to Ancestry.com as enabling an address search. Were I to go through the entire main collection again, using Ancestry.com and Findmypast.com together, I might find some more card writers. 10 This estimate is based on counting information from the first 500 cards, for which I have census information relating to 238. 11 http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person.php?LinkID=mp90021#jff405c 89f

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4 Materiality and multimodality

Introduction Literacy Studies and Sociolinguistics as (applied) linguistics more generally are increasingly concerned with multimodality, multilingualism and materiality. An influential innovation was to recognise the implications of a more holistic understanding of the human individual, as a member of a communicating dyad or larger group. It was recognised that communication is multimodal, involving other elements besides language. Gesture, gaze and other elements of communication play a part. Systemic functional linguistics, especially as associated with the work of M.A.K. Halliday, is often credited with playing a particularly important role in developing such approaches and their application, leading towards the highly influential work by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) that brought multimodality firmly into the purview of language and communication. Also very significant to me among works of the early twenty-first century has been the role of mediated discourse analysis, for example Norris and Jones (2005), Scollon and Scollon (2003), and Wohlwend (2008). These scholars developed the sociocultural understandings of language as social action as opposed to conceptualising language as code, a bounded set of linguistic resources best understood abstracted away from individual users. When studying language as social action, the roles of temporal, spatial and embodied aspects of communication are impossible to ignore. The concept of language as code is now held by many scholars as inadequate to account for the diversity of language practices in action. Notions such as translanguaging emphasise dynamic processes of meaning making, drawing on diverse resources (García, 2014; Wei, 2017). Learning a little about sign languages in use, in a project in India, Uganda and Ghana (Gillen et al., 2016; Zeshan et al., 2023) has been extremely useful to me in appreciating, with Pennycook (2018: 68), that attention to the practices of sign language users “can help us understand language in spatiotemporal and embodied terms.” Sign languages in practice may be used in combination with spoken and written languages and/or other named sign languages. With this insight Kusters et al. (2017) argue that attention to multilingualism, now often shifting to the concept of translanguaging, has too often been considered DOI: 10.4324/9781003261322-4

64  Materiality and multimodality separately from the study of multimodality, and propose that “the lens of semiotic repertoires enables synergies to be identified and provides a holistic focus on actions that is both multilingual and multimodal” (Kusters et al., 2017: 219). With the advent of digital communication, understandings of multimodality have undoubtedly increased (Jewitt, 2014). Combinations of language with other modes, whether images, sounds, video, etc., are increasingly studied, although as van Leeuwen (2011: 668–669) points out, some of this attention was prefigured by the work of the Prague School in the 1930s and 1940s. Approaches to linguistic landscapes, the study of language in public spaces, have also been invaluable in enhancing our understandings of the multiple ways in which semiotic repertoires are drawn upon to construct social identities in material forms inscribed in environments (Blackwood et al., 2016; Lou, 2016). The approach to multimodality I take then is founded upon understanding of linguistic communication as always material, always multimodal and drawing upon diverse semiotic repertoires. I intended to show by the discussion of George Hardley’s card in Chapter 1 the wealth of elements that can be examined in a single card in terms of multimodality; the ingenuity of his approach to inscription, and at the same time how his literacy practices with the postcard must have been understood within his family and more broadly culturally recognisable. Taking such a broad view of multimodality, multilingualism and materiality means that every card is unique and in its own way potentially worthy of discussion. Yet at the same time since the collection can never be representative it demands the selection of particular lenses. So the way I have decided to investigate is to work with a small number of topics: • Writers’ use of space: orientation, and writing implements; • Writing systems: languages other than English, and other writing systems; • Working with a small subset of the cards, to study relationships of writers’ texts and images; and contemporary texts and marks both by publishers and the Post Office’s postmarks. Before justifying the selection of these topics, I introduce an overall orientation. The discussion in this chapter is different from that of the George Hardley card in Chapter 1 in that it is consciously inflected by a posthumanist or relational materialist perspective. Although I do not completely like the label “posthumanism” as to me it seems to imply that we are in some ways temporally beyond the human, I appreciate the influence it is having in Literacy Studies and elsewhere in applied linguistics (Pennycook, 2018). Essentially, the idea is to move beyond a privileging of the human in analysis, of always assuming the centrality of the human actor. Rather, a starting point can be to try to find new ways of envisaging relationships between “human,” “technologies” and “environment.” These can never act in separation but are always involved together in what Barad (2007) calls “entanglements of matter and meaning.” The notion of entanglements may be conceived as a rethinking of what Rammert (2012: 89) argued as

Materiality and multimodality  65 “two grand illusions that have accompanied Western societies since the Enlightenment and the rise of modernity: the idea of autonomous human action and the project of autonomous technology.” On the contrary, he claims, any interaction involves a number of interdependencies and so he argues for a “multiple reality of distributed agency” (Rammert, 2012: 90). Although Rammert expands his argument with persuasive contemporary examples such as driving cars and using internet search engines, his overall purpose is to explain that humans have always acted in relation to natural forces, other human beings and artefacts, and that the notion of humans as autonomous and objects as passive has always masked interdependence. This is the entanglement of matter so characterised by Barad (2007), who persuasively argues that human perception is always, necessarily, involved in this entanglement; we cannot stand outside our contexts of being. Interestingly, even without the move towards posthumanism, it could be argued that the influence of ethnography in some areas of applied linguistics has led to similar impetuses; van Leeuwen (2011: 679), for example, looked to a rise in self-reflexivity as a needed corollary to developments in applied linguistics aligning with multimodal analyses. In this chapter, I keep ideas of entanglement between matter and meaning to the forefront, putting into the background for the time being the ways in which the cards, through the censuses, can be linked to sketchy biographies, and rather focus on the cards as interactions involving people and objects, postcards, that are material and constrained, not least owing to Post Office regulation as explored particularly in Chapter 2. All the postcards in the collection could potentially be involved, and I will make some observations that involve categorisations of them all before moving to focus on a subset. One purpose of this chapter is to examine how space is used in writers’ inscriptions, and in the collection overall. I investigate orientation and also writing implements, applying the concern by Literacy Studies scholars for examining materiality in epistolary texts, as manifested in the 1999 edited volume by Barton and Hall (1999) and particularly Hall’s (1999) chapter there. Pursuing these aims also instantiates elements of Lillis’s (2013) sociolinguistics of writing, as discussed in Chapter 1. I also investigate the use of other repertoires through the use of writing that is not in the English language and the use of codes. This is absolutely not to suggest of course that the English language postcards in the collection are less multimodal but rather to take an opportunity to take these lenses on orthography and writing practices. Second, I choose to examine a subset of the cards, and as a manageable way of determining a subset, I hit upon the idea of examining the undivided back format, as introduced in Chapter 2. This is a way of examining various ways in which cards themselves, their images and different kinds of inscriptions are entwined in different ways and point to other phenomena beyond. I have written briefly before about a few of these examples; at that time my particular concern was to draw parallels with social media platforms (Gillen, 2017). Here, I use the whole subset, which also responds to the question of how the undivided back format fared after 1902, when regulation allowed for a more

66  Materiality and multimodality convenient and freer format. We know from very many different historical examples that communications technologies do not neatly succeed one another, instantly making obsolete and obliterating their predecessors; rather they jostle in the same space. But first I turn to some features studied across the whole collection.

Writers’ use of space Orientation One simple way of contrasting the postcards in the sample is to consider the writing orientation, an immediately apparent affordance of the use of analogue materials. One immediate point to make is that the writer had a measure of freedom in this respect, so long as they adhered to the framework of the Post Office. So, in most of the cards, the writers are reasonably careful to leave the space for the name and address either completely or fairly free of the text that constitutes their message. However, so long as that was adhered to satisfactorily then it was possible to write in any direction and indeed not to necessarily restrict oneself to a particular direction. In this respect, postcard writing was considerably freer than the binaries that underlie digital media and constrain all sorts of qualities of the writing. Without generalising across all social media, and recognising that platforms change constantly and develop new features, I can mention that as a fairly standard user of Twitter I do not in my everyday practice at the time of writing in 2022 have recourse to non-standard fonts, different colours of text, the capacity to write in different directions, etc. Postcard writers had these affordances. During the early process of categorising the cards across a spreadsheet, we marked the main orientation that the writer had applied. (The word “we” here applies to Nigel Hall and myself, and then research assistants as well as volunteers who helped us with the main collection in this process.) After some pilot trialling of systems, we decided on the system shown in Table 4.1. The first category, OrTop, was undoubtedly the most “natural” orientation for most postcard writers, since it captures the orientation of most writing texts they would otherwise have written or read. So it does show considerable adaptation that more than half the cards can be characterised by an alternative Table 4.1  Writing orientation (approximate results) Category

Percentage (approx)

OrTop (starts from top) OrLeft (starts on left-hand side and writes at 90° to the centre) OrRight (starts on right-hand side and writes at 90° away from the centre Upside (upside down) Diagonal

45 14 28 7 4

Materiality and multimodality  67 orientation. One reason for this on early cards in particular is the particular affordances of the undivided back format, as discussed further below. But even if this accounts for a small proportion of cards, it is clear that many other writers adopted an orientation other than the most obvious, the default as it were. Since postcards were in many ways public texts, one reason could be to make it a little more difficult for any intermediary, such as a postman or other post office worker to read. We also investigated how many cards had messages on the picture side, around the picture, and which had writing on both sides. We found that 63 cards had messages only on the picture side and that 74 cards had writing on both sides (so only a little above 2% for each). Writing implements The choice of writing instruments may reflect the prosperity and projection of the identity of the writer. It will affect the appearance of the writing and may, intentionally or otherwise, contribute to the impression the writer wishes to make on the receiver. At the beginning of the twentieth century, there were two types of ink commonly used that are difficult although not impossible to distinguish: dip pens and fountain-type pens. Dip pens are, as the name suggests, implements that are dipped in ink periodically. When using a dip pen, the ink gradually fades as the amount of ink taken up decreases and then goes dark again once it has been redipped. Sometimes, as the nib dries the writer uses a slightly stronger pressure and then one can often see that the end of the nib has slightly separated and the line splits a little. The fountain-type pen gives a continuous flow so the density of the writing stays constant. However, some people were skilled at redipping the dip pen before it faded and some card messages are short enough to be written with one dip of the pen. Dip pen writing was much more likely to contain small (or large) blots as the loaded pen was placed on the page, but a reasonably competent adult would probably avoid them. Pens with their own ink supply, which came to be known as fountain pens, were invented in Egypt in the tenth century, but although the seventeenthcentury diarist Pepys had one they remained rare until the eighteenth century (Finlay, 1990). During the nineteenth century, many types of such pens were patented and by the last quarter became fairly common. A particularly leakproof and reliable type of fountain was designed and produced by Lewis Waterman in 1884, who went on to patent cartridge pens in 1890 (Finlay, 1990). Fountain pens had various devices to contain the ink, the most common being an inside rubber pouch. They were filled by lifting a lever on the side of the pen and dipping it into a bottle of ink. This caused a slight vacuum in the pouch which sucked up the ink. In the Edwardian period, people who were relatively well-off may well have used fountain pens, but many people would have used dip pens as they were very cheap and boxes of nibs would last a very long time. A few people in the Edwardian age used quill pens, made from birds’ feathers, a type of writing

68  Materiality and multimodality implement which had been used continuously since the sixth century. These were dying out in the twentieth century, but in 1910 there were still four “Quill Pen Merchants and Manufacturers” in London alone (Finlay, 1990: 6). Fading has generally occurred during the decades since the card was written. Although it is possible with great attention to look at cards in the “ink” category and make a well-informed guess as to the type of pen used, as Nigel Hall helped me with an intensive study of ten cards (Gillen, 2013), we did not feel it was feasible within the scope of this project and therefore grouped ink as one category. Inks, available in multiple colours, but almost always in black or blue, accounted for 86% of the cards. Graphite pencils, referred to as “lead pencils,” have been common in England since the sixteenth century and developed colours with the use of dyes. In 1866 “indelible pencils” also sometimes called “ink pencils” were patented; indeed, they continued to be much used until the advent of the ballpoint pen in the 1940s (Nickell, 1990). Indelible pencils appear purplish on Edwardian postcards and must have been very useful as cheap yet a little more resistant to rain and other damages than ordinary pencils. We categorised the cards in terms of writing implements placed into four categories we found readily easy to discern (see Table 4.2). With regard to handwriting, cursive handwriting was extremely common, and accounted for 99% of the cards, but very occasionally the writing of single letters, not joined, appeared. One card was typewritten. Writing systems other than English language Writing systems other than the English language appear on the cards for two reasons. First, there are a few cards that make use of other languages. Second, there are cards where writers use codes for reasons of privacy, or perhaps playfulness. There are few uses of other languages: just one postcard is written in Welsh in the entirety of its message although it is sent from Liverpool and addressed in English to a Mr Evans temporarily staying in Scotland. Nine cards include some Welsh words and phrases; three of these were written by a David Evans writing to his sister in Camberwell, London. Only one card is written in French, with one other featuring a French phrase. Occasionally, postcards do have printed texts in other languages; two cards sent to Mlle Swanzy, from a Table 4.2  Writing implements Writing implement

Percentage

ink plain lead pencil coloured pencil indelible pencil

86 10 >1 3

Materiality and multimodality  69 relative, R.G. Swanzy, are French cards, depicting cute children with French slogans; one of these is the only typed message in the collection. Of course, the absence of languages other than English is chiefly owing to the collection strategy. It may be recalled from Chapter 2 that concerns for privacy were raised since even before the introduction of the postcard. Siegert (1999) advised that in Germany attempts to alleviate such concerns were made from the earliest days. He mentioned a policeman who wrote an article in an illustrated family magazine in 1875 urging people to learn his idea for a simple cypher. In Great Britain and Ireland, there was considerable interest in postcard codes, whether selfinvented or drawn from other systems, such as that of Captain Bernard (c. 1908). Bernard’s book is interesting in its reflection of contemporary popular culture: “rinking” or ice skating has an entire section, and courting couples is another assumed preoccupation. The code “35a” stands for “My own dearest darling. It seems ages since I last saw you, and I am counting even the minutes until we meet again.” A number of ways of slightly or completely disguising a message were used; unsurprising in an era when the postman was such a familiar figure at the door. Our cards include examples of codes (13 postcards), mirror writing (7) and shorthand (6), all of which would have been likely to have discouraged the casual reader. Rebus, the use of a picture to stand for a word, featured in nine cards and may be regarded as a kind of code, although its function is more likely to be playful than to discourage easy decipherment of the message. We also categorised the postcards according to how easy they were to read. It might be remembered that a criterion for collection was the clarity of the addressee and address. However, we found that 92% of the postcard messages were easy to read. The mean length of message, that is, not including the name and address the postcard is sent to, but all other text added by the sender(s), was 50.7 words. More analysis of the length of postcard messages might be useful; so would a thorough investigation of the distances postcards travel, using techniques from digital humanities. We tried out various sampling methods, but this is definitely a direction the project might explore in future, as it would further understandings of the Edwardians’ social networks. In the meantime, the case studies in Chapter 6 provide interesting examples.

Multimodality and the undivided back subset There are many potential ways of examining multimodality in the dataset. As I explained above, I decided to create a subset of the collection in order to create a small number I could look at in some detail. I decided to look at those cards in the undivided back format. I manually identified these cards, finding 56 in the collection. I had a few difficult decisions to make with regard to a few cards, finding that the distinction between undivided back and divided back was not as absolute as I had imagined. In the case of four cards, it seems to me that the card had been originally published as an undivided back, that is with an image

70  Materiality and multimodality with a small space adjacent for a message. However, these cards have been converted to a divided back by the publisher, but although in this form, the writer has treated it as if it were an undivided back card. My decision may seem somewhat questionable; it was made when I thought of these cards as a “turn of the century format,” (Gillen, 2017) so privileging cultural understandings and uses of the card design over the presence of a divided back inserted by the publisher in these dubious cases. To put this decision in other terms, I was drawn more to the notion of affordances than using a strictly functional approach. I used two main approaches to analysis for the cards. First, I decided to use this subset to examine closely the card content other than that inscribed by the individual user, that is, all verbal texts on the cards not authored by the writer, and consider their placement, content and relation to image. These texts were placed by printers and the Post Office through technologies, including design, printing and the application of postmarks by postal workers. If one were to make this distinction in analysing social media today, one might separate out all the texts applied by the platform, so as originally designed but then algorithmically applied, such as any formatting and date stamp, from the user-generated texts, that is, those authored on singular occasions by a human individual. This distinction of Web 2.0 technologies then, of pre-formatted texts and those authored by the user albeit highly constrained in their materiality, is also characteristic, albeit in different ways as shall be seen, of the Edwardian picture postcard. As I might select a particular social media platform with its affordances at a particular period, for example, when studying Twitter (e.g. Gillen & Merchant, 2013) so here I chose to study a specific phase of the Edwardian postcard. In this approach, as explained further below, I aimed for a systematic method, one that could be potentially replicable and used a database, Microsoft Access. My second approach discussed here was to investigate connections within the texts themselves to phenomena within and beyond the card. This investigation is necessarily subjective and stems from what I perceive in the card messages, acknowledging that assemblings I perceive would undoubtedly differ from somebody else’s. For this approach I started again as it were, using the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) Atlas-ti. On reflection, I am now less sure that I needed to have separated out these investigations in this way, through different software, but somehow this helped me to inhabit the exercises differently. Card content – images I begin with a basic overview of the postcards’ images. Most of them are topographic, closely linked with well-known touristic locations: for example, there are 12 of London “sights,” including two of Buckingham Palace; six of Oxford and two of Windsor Castle. Four are more generic country scenes, even if these are identified in some way such as 790 captioned “Ferry Boat, Windermere.” Nonetheless, I distinguish these from “sights” as these appear to be designed to

Materiality and multimodality  71 appeal through general aesthetics rather than a very evident link to a specific, known location, and may not be based on any photograph. In a similar fashion, one card is a generic seaside scene and another an ordinary street (discussed below see p. 80). Three cards are reproductions of artworks and five have the cute child theme. One card, 21, is a photograph of an actress, Connie Ediss (discussed in detail in Gillen, 2017), and finally one card, 2051, is an almost miniaturised photograph of an interior, “Casino de Monte Carlo – La Salle.” While aware that these descriptions are minimal, I am aware that most historical postcard scholarship has focused on images and issues of representation, and I want to turn my attention here to more overlooked elements of multimodal assemblings. Contemporary texts and marks by publishers and the Post Office I used my Microsoft Access database of all texts on these cards that were not created by postcard writers, to investigate texts created by publishers and the Post Office, what marks were applied and where they were situated. The database fields were spatially organised, according to the different areas of the postcards on which marks appeared and their orientation, vertical or horizontal. These options were determined by the publisher, operating under the regulations specified by the Post Office. Finally, there was the postmark, always on the top right-hand corner of the address side of the card, applied by post office/s. In the database I created records and then queries and reports to order information in different ways. Examining the 56 cards, I found it possible to categorise eight places for publishers’ texts and marks, that is eight possible positions and orientations where marks could be placed. 1. address side left-hand side, horizontal Just 11 cards have textual material here. Card 2215 has made considerable use of the space: “The Wrench Series, No. 273 [trademark] TM Wrench Printed in Saxony” and a further three cards have placed a trademark here. This was also the area where three cards in this set, and of course many then in circulation, reversioned undivided back cards by later adding “This space, as well as the Back, may now be used for Communication (Post Office regulation).” 2. address side middle, horizontal In every case a card has a text here, and this is the strongest evidence of Post Office regulation with such printed texts as “POST CARD THE ADDRESS ONLY TO BE WRITTEN ON THIS SIDE.” But what I find fascinating is that actually this formula, which one could easily imagine to be a precise regulation, is evidently not. There are many slight variants, for example, not using upper case throughout, or by interspersing the name of the publisher, for example, “Peacock Brand” followed by the company trademark in between the words “CARD” and “THE ADDRESS.”

72  Materiality and multimodality This appears on five of these cards and was evidently a policy of The Pictorial Stationery Company, a pioneer in the field which had declared in an 1898 agreement between its two principals its determination to examine every detail of the postcard publishing business, expending “time, labour and expense in devising and elaborating the details….” (Byatt, 1978: 205). Accordingly, the Peacock Brand was trademarked in 1900. Other cards dispense with the instructional/regulatory text. Some Frith cards follow Pictorial Stationery Company’s lead in including their company name in the text but others have simply “POST CARD. FRITH’S SERIES.” Three cards in this subset are French, in this position stating: “CARTE POSTALE Ce Cote est exclusivement reserve l’adresse.” Three cards have simply “POST CARD” varying as to the inclusion of a full stop, and two, apparently published by the same entity although without declaring the name, reflect a societal uncertainty over whether or not “post-card” should be hyphenated. 3. address side right, horizontal Unsurprisingly, this space is rarely printed on by a publisher since care had to be taken not to compete with the postmark, which might obliterate it. Nevertheless, four cards include information (worded slightly differently) that the card was printed in Saxony. The Pictorial Stationery Company was particularly keen to emphasise its use of prestigious German printers, sometimes in this position on the card. Two cards place their instructions about the placement of the address here, and another records the place of printing, but this text is now not legible. 4 . verso: left-hand side, vertical Vertical text on the left-hand side of the picture was a relatively unobtrusive position and so quite rarely used (just 15 in this sample). Davis’s of 2 Cornmarket, Oxford, used this position to identify the publisher and warn that the product was copyrighted. Occasionally other printers used this space to identify themselves by text and/or trademark, including Valentine Ltd of Dundee and three by Raphael Tuck. Other companies occasionally identified the picture by a serial number placed here (or elsewhere). Such serial numbers were probably useful for ordering purposes, and many companies wanted to encourage collections of series, made easier through the provision of serial numbers. 5. verso: left-hand side, horizontal Twenty-eight cards have text in this space, although their exact positioning and text functions vary considerably, including topographical or other caption, publisher’s name and serial number. One card, 2785, precedes the publisher’s name: “J. HELIER & CO.” with the word “TYPOGRAVURE.” This is a highly coloured card, albeit with a limited palette, and is one of many such terms used or even invented by publishers to name their specific (perhaps, in actuality far from unique) methods of photomechanical engraving and printing. In this case, the Oxford English Dictionary suggests the term was brought over from the United States of America, where it first appeared

Materiality and multimodality  73 in 1885 and was explained in 1894 as a “method of obtaining half-tone pictures from copper relief plates.”1 6. verso: centre, horizontal This position is similarly used to the above category, and again 28 cards (not the same cards) feature text here. I did not distinguish in this category between text above, in the middle or below the illustration, possibly a failure of discrimination although it would have not have been easy to distinguish owing to the considerable fluctuation and relation to spaces left available for messages. Texts are topographical captions, which vary in their specificity, and/or information about the publisher and claims to copyright. The most expansive text here is: “COPYRIGHT. S HILDESHEIMER & CO. LTD. LONDON” above a reproduction of a painting and “ON THE HEATH” below it (card 259, see Figure 4.1). 7 . verso: right-hand side horizontal To continue immediately with card 259: “ON THE HEATH” is followed, aligned to the right-hand margin, by “CHRISTIAN MALL.” This text immediately repeats, although imperfectly, a handwritten “Christian Mali” within the frame of the picture itself. The Deutsche National Bibliotek (German National Library) website2 confirms that Christian Mali (1832–1906) was a painter born in the Netherlands who worked in Germany. It is interesting that Hildesheimer (a well-established company in London) spelt his name wrong. The company became a specialist in reproductions of “water-colour paintings….covering every part of the British Isles” (Byatt, 1978: 131). They were generally cavalier about whether or not to caption the names of the artists, so perhaps Mali was fortunate in a sense, even if misspelt.

Figure 4.1  Postcard 259.

74  Materiality and multimodality 8. verso: right-hand side vertical This is the least inhabited area; just three publishers have used it, one for their name, one for a serial number and one for both combined: A.-G. POSTKARTENVERLAG. KUNZLI ZURICH DEP. No. 6720. This card, 2162, is revelatory of the entwined economies of the European postcard scene. It was published by Pascalis, Moss & Co., who by 1900 was operating in London, selling cards imported from France, Italy and Austria. These included London street scenes of which this one, a highly coloured street scene of Leicester Square, is an example which exemplifies the relatively high standards of postcards produced on the continent at the beginning of the decade. The company was one of the first London postcard publishers to disappear, as it did so in 1902, although this appears to be because of a split between Pascalis and Moss, rather than commercial failure (Byatt, 1978: 197). This detailed consideration of texts reveals the interplay of many different kinds of agency and influence. The governance of the Post Office is visible, influencing each and every postcard. Economic interests spanning several different European countries play out across the cards, filtered through a marketing orientation that might lead to a highlighting of the publisher, printer, place of printing, information as to the image, and attempts to appeal to copyright law in various combinations. Printing technologies vary considerably, occasionally drawn explicit attention to, again through a marketing orientation. Companies attempted to instil brand loyalty through creating a recognisable interplay of style between image genre and these additional texts, cf. Olsen and Hadjicharalambous (2011). Postmarks Postmarks, official marks stamped on letters to facilitate their carriage, have existed in Great Britain for the privileged and wealthy, since the seventeenth century. When the Victorian postal service was famously reformed in 1840 with the introduction of the Penny Post, it made the system accessible to everyone (Golden, 2010: 4). A postmark is essentially a receipt for prepayment towards delivery and a marker of when and where the mail item was received by the Post Office. An item for the post could be on prepaid stationery, but by the time of the Edwardian postcard, a halfpenny postage stamp is usual. This is affixed to the card and then guarantees the user the service of the Post Office in an attempt to deliver it, should the address be legitimately and clearly marked. The postage stamp is then overprinted by a mechanically applied ink mark, which records the place and approximate time that postmark is applied. Occasionally the postcards show two stamps, when its journey is for some reason marked through two of its intermediary stops. Postmarks have since the nineteenth century occasionally been subject to specific design processes and often in the twentieth century used in celebration of public events or to disseminate messages from the Post

Materiality and multimodality  75 Office. In this collection they generally display the nature of their instruments as round-bottomed ink stampers, applied to the top right. Postmarks can be more elaborate. I have already mentioned that our postcard collection was assembled from cheap cards, little valued by collectors. Therefore, it contains neither highly valued images, whether by topic or material, since these attract the attention of 99% of collectors but it can be added that the collection was therefore unlikely to contain particularly unusual or interesting postmarks, since these attract the attention of approximately 1% of postcard collectors who focus on postmarks, a segment of the market known to dealers. (My percentage estimates are based on discussions with dealers and fair organisers [Gillen & Hall, 2010].) Temporal analysis It must be remembered that our main collection is not evenly spread over the Edwardian era, and in particular we did not try to collect many cards from 1901. Nevertheless, the distribution of this subset of the cards over the years of the decade is somewhat interesting: see Figure 4.2. It should be remembered that the divided back format was understood to be allowed from January 1902. It is known, and indeed is visible from this sample, that publishers rushed to offer the new, more desirable format and indeed converted some of their existing cards as best they could. Although the impact of the new divided back format had a huge impact and for the most part took over the market, this sample demonstrates that there were still some of the older format sent in subsequent years. This may have been because people still possessed some and did not want to waste them; possibly they still chose to select this format from sellers who had the old stock on their hands. Perhaps the very constraint of the particularly small space was still appealing in itself to a few, Cards organised by year of sending 25 20 15 10 5 0

1901

1902

1903

1904

1905

1906

1907

1908

1909

1910

Figure 4.2  Undivided back cards in the main collection organised by year of sending.

76  Materiality and multimodality rather as part of Twitter’s popularity was the very constraint of its brevity (Gillen & Merchant, 2013). Perhaps people were sending the old format because it was one they had got accustomed to. In today’s era, we do not all switch the moment that a new operating system comes in, for example, and may display some resistance to change. However, eventually supplies of an old format because scarce and particularly recognisably old fashioned; Figure 4.2 demonstrates that the old format seems to have tailed off after 1904. Places and links with other features The postmarks in this set include the information as to the place of the post office, which affixes the mark together with time and date. Occasionally, some of this information is too faint or partially obliterated; especially in several cases, it is hard to make out the placename accurately. This subset of the whole collection contains at least four cards from Scotland, one from Wales and the rest, where legible, bear English postmarks, including several from London, Liverpool and Oxford. There are few ready links to be made between postmarks and other features already examined. Occasionally, cards are plainly similar in some respect to one another; two of the French cards are sent from Grimsby to the same person by an identical sender; two of the actually divided back cards treated as if they were undivided back are from the same, unsigned sender, to Miss Oliver in Belfast. One link between postmark, postcard and sender is evidenced by three of the four postcards postmarked from Oxford in that they are all sent to Miss M.E. Evans in Camberwell by her brother. Another of the cards sent to Miss M.E. Evans is discussed further on p. 80. Relationship of writers’ texts and images I used the CAQDAS tool Atlas-ti to aid my work with these cards. An advantage of CAQDAS is that it enables the generation of codes that can then be applied through the data and the exploration of links between them. Having identified a factor or characteristic of even one card and then passed through the sample to see if it occurs elsewhere, then it becomes very easy to resort to the examples and access those at once. CAQDAS can be used in far more complex ways; I have worked with varying kinds of data in a large project with a team of several of us together. But I also find it useful in small projects where I am less concerned for the moment at least in linguistic analysis and more engaged in thinking in terms of themes. In this case, I first created this mini project some years ago when working towards a chapter in an edited book I mentioned previously (Gillen, 2017). But I had it in mind that although I concentrated on a few examples then, creating this Atlas-ti project would make it easier for me to return to this subset when reviewing it all in a new light for this book. CAQDAS makes it easy to expand a project through creating new codes and to reconsider findings. The essential benefit of using CAQDAS in Literacy Studies is that of facilitating organisation

Materiality and multimodality  77 of data, codes and memos (notes of various kinds such as reflective logs and comments on codes). Naturally, the systematicity or what many might prefer to call rigour depends on the procedures of the investigator, or members of the team involved. Coding systems may derive from research questions, be derived inductively, or be a mixture of the two. It is common for codes to be added or amended as one works through the data, but it is then vital to go back to previously coded data and recode in the light of this new activity. It is quite common, reading qualitative studies that use CAQDAS, to read of codes “emerging from the data” – I expect I’ve done this – or, my particular bugbear, to read a possibly unjustified claim to be using “grounded theory.” In the latter case, I find the writers generally point to an inductive approach, rather than a true attempt to embrace grounded theory, which in any case is anything but an evasion of subjectivity (Gillen, 1998: 19–23). I can appreciate the urge to claim that codes “emerge from the data” but posthumanism exposes this as perhaps a lack of reflection on a researcher’s own positionality. The use of CAQDAS is actually a wonderful example of sociotechnical assemblages in itself. Rather than report on the data analysis by going through the codes, as I reported on the spatial analyses of the non-user-generated texts in a systematic fashion above, it seems more appropriate to discuss the entanglements of messages, users, materiality of the cards and phenomena beyond them in a loosely thematic way. I begin by returning to the images, considering now how they are related to other features of the card, the users and even phenomena beyond. Thirteen of the card messages make explicit reference to the image. Some of these relate the image to the sender’s activities, such as “This is a very pretty place. We are all staying on the opposite side,” sent from the Royal Dart Hotel, Devon, to Miss Oliver in Belfast on card 2122. Such use of postcards is typical of the holiday postcard that persisted although in relative decline, into the twenty-first century. More quotidian and linkable to social media practice is one of David Evans’s cards to his sister: a street scene of Oxford is effectively captioned by him “Above is the street I walk along daily” (card 370). In many such cards, the link of the image to the addressee is implicit, in that the act of sending the card has presumably meant some thought of them and the selection of an appropriate message. Occasionally, however, the image is as it was disavowed. Cecil sent Dora Wain a card (381) in 1903 of “St James’ Park, London.” Many would be likely to consider it a fine real photographic card, depicting fashionable people looking into the lake, alongside one finely dressed gentleman strutting towards the photographer. “My funny cards are all used up at present. I can’t find you another until I renew my stocks,” Cecil declares, very likely for humorous effect – he was careful to treat the image with great respect, not allowing any encroachment even into the sky with his 146 words carefully crammed around the image. Other card messages link the image, the sender and the receiver explicitly, sometimes very simply for example through the appeal “how do you like this?” (of Aber Bridge, card 2874). Such a general enquiry might refer to either the postcard itself or perhaps the recipient, Maggie, learning that the sender is at Aber Bridge. This potential ambiguity is sometimes

78  Materiality and multimodality made more specific, for example, “Do you like my card?” (card 903) or “Of what does this remind you?” (card 259). Postcards are often explicitly framed as gifts, sometimes in performance of gift exchange, as when a postcard message refers to a previous card sent by the addressee, “thanks for P.c. is was a very pretty view indeed” (card 2995). Occasionally, the receiver’s collection is referred to; here the sender is effectively demonstrating that they know not only that the addressee collects postcards but it is highly likely they know the theme that is being collected; in view of the huge volume of postcards it was unlikely that picture postcards were often sent without any regard to the image. So postcard 2177 of “The Marble Arch, London” with a message including “I hope you have not got this p.c. in your collection” to Miss Oliver in Belfast makes it quite likely she collected postcards either of London or of major tourist sights. The practice of recognising picture postcards as collectable gifts, to be exchanged, with the best retained in albums, is demonstrated in Figure 4.2. This was sent to Miss Morgan, The Mount, Westbourne Park, Scarborough in 1902.

Figure 4.3  Card 1212.

In the original, which I remind the reader of as all other cards can be seen online in Lancaster Digital Collections,3 the postcard is beautifully coloured. As can be seen, the writer is careful to frame the illustrated parts of the postcard and place her three different message elements onto different parts of the card surface. The following card, 410, shown in Figure 4.4, is included in the undivided back subset as it appears to have been sold as a blank undivided back postcard. The writer has created a division on the back to create a boundary, giving them a writing space for the message to the left.

Materiality and multimodality  79 Posting the Postcards. what do you think of my Painting. I shall make a good I will try and write a leer next time Gertyartist, eh: what

Miss Nicholls 16 Fransfield Grove High Street Sydenham Kent. _______ Dear Flo I am sorry I have not wrien before to thank you for your the prey postcard, you sent me. perhaps you have heard I am at home from Willy. I am sorry you believe Edie and have sent the news to Miss Nicholls of Groton Fox, and at home they got my postcard and read it so I hear nothing else but (“How is Willy”) With love Gerty

Figure 4.4  Card 410.

Card 410 is a gift of the most painstaking kind: the image has been painted and annotated by the sender. To read the text and image together, it becomes apparent that the painting “Posting the Postcards” includes a self-portrait of the artist, Gerty, her name written on her collar and hem. Labels on the suitcases refer to the place of posting in Suffolk and the destination. The depicted person with Gerty is labelled Willie; both are sending cards with “Love to Will.” The census is helpful here. There is a whole family of Nichols living at the destination address, including Florence Nichols, b. 1884, who is a dressmaker, living with her family including father Joshua, a gentleman’s coachman, and mother Louisa. They have five children other than Florence, including William, a railway porter – another clear link to the topic of the painting. This card then is replete with connections between the families, their postcard writing practices and the mobilities involved in postcard transportation, in the most delightfully creative way. A different kind of link can be made between the image and the message that entailed an expectation that the receiver would understand the connection.

80  Materiality and multimodality Dear Sister I have left O. I am now in Reading Station. Love. David

Miss M. E. Evans 17 Brunswick Sp Camberwell London S.E.

Figure 4.5  Card 2033.

Under an image of Buckingham Palace “Lady Jane” writes, “good news: King getting better.” (card 207) linking the building to its resident. The day that the card was sent was the day Edward VII’s coronation was originally scheduled but postponed owing to an operation, so it is likely that the addressee, Miss Goldsmith in Liverpool, knew that “Lady Jane” had gone ahead with a planned visit to London to witness the procession. Almost half the postcards in this subset make explicit reference to the physical movements of the sender. Card 2033 exemplifies, in Figure 4.5, factors of the ubiquity in time and space of the Post Office in the era; the postmark is timed 10.45pm. indicative of an employee working at that time. The message: “Dear Sister I have left O. and am now in Reading station. Love David” in its brevity, immediacy and content evokes clear connections to twenty-first-century messaging apps (Tagg & Lyons, 2022). Explanations of the sender’s movements may be in reports of past activities such as “Went for a lovely drive yesterday through the Park to Kingston and

Materiality and multimodality  81 came back by the river” (card 1539). Accounts of current movements impart a vivid quality to the despatch; the postcard is one element of a network of dynamic communications technologies: “Writing in Tram (12 Midnight)” writes Bert on card 343 and then adds below a photographic image of a very busy street scene at Piccadilly Circus “writing in Car” (this may have referred to a tram). Future travel plans are communicated, including references plain, implied or metaphorical: We are quite looking forward to coming to you tomorrow, & will take the train from Willesden 11.5 (card 2991). Expect me “home again” tomorrow evening. I will be in Padd, D.V. Either at 737 or 845. (card 370, from David Evans). I will make Titanic efforts to come to the lunch that day (card 757, written in 1904, so a few years before the doomed ship of that name was designed and 8 before its sinking). Other communications technologies are mentioned; no fewer than 11 cards in this subset mention letters, as further discussed in Chapter 5, and there are mentions of cameras, photos, magazines, parcels, patterns, keys – the equipment of everyday life as evident in the collections as a whole. In studying the Edwardian postcard through developing new Literacy Studies approaches, materiality is shown to be worth investigating, including with regard to the impact of regulatory authorities, the affordances of the platform and economic battles between providers that leave their mark in a competitive environment. Multimodality is material; a constant and inescapable entanglement of matter and meaning in which the researcher’s choices and research instruments are ultimately inseparable from what we may call “the data.”

Notes 1 Oxford English Dictionary (n.d.) Typogravure. Retrieved 2 November 2022 from www.oed.com 2 Deutsche National Bibliotek “Catalog of the German National Library”. https:// portal.dnb.de/opac.htm?method=simpleSearch&cqlMode=true&query= nid%3D118576720 3 https://digitalcollections.lancaster.ac.uk/collections/ep/1

References Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke University Press. Barton, D., & Hall, N. (Eds.). (1999). Letter writing as a social practice. John Benjamins. Bernard, C. (c.1908). The postcard code: a novel and private method of communicating by postcard. British Library: 012331.de2301233. Blackwood, R., Lanza, E., & Woldemariam, H. (Eds.). (2016). Negotiating and contesting identities in linguistic landscapes. Bloomsbury Academic.

82  Materiality and multimodality Byatt, A. (1978). Picture postcards and their publishers. Golden Age Books. Finlay, M. (1990). Western writing implements in the age of the quill pen. Plains Books. García, O. (2014). Countering the dual: transglossia, dynamic bilingualism and translanguaging in education. In R. Rubdy, & L. Alsagoff (Eds.), The global-local interface and hybridity (pp. 100–118). Multilingual Matters. Gillen, J. (1998). An investigation into young children’s telephone discourse. Manchester Metropolitan University. Gillen, J. (2013). Writing Edwardian postcards. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 17(4), 488–521. Gillen, J. (2017). The picture postcard at the beginning of the twentieth century: Instagram, Snapchat or Selfies of an earlier age? In B. Parry, C. Burnett, & G. Merchant (Eds.), Literacy, media, technology: past, present and future (pp. 11–24). Bloomsbury Academic. Gillen, J., & Hall, N. (2010). Any mermaids? Tracing early postcard mobilities. In J. Urry, M. Büscher, & K. Witchger (Eds.), Mobile methods (pp. 169–189). Routledge. Gillen, J., & Merchant, G. (2013). Contact calls: Twitter as a dialogic social and linguistic practice. Language Sciences, 35, 47–58. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/ pii/S0388000112000642 Gillen, J., Panda, S., Papen, U., & Zeshan, U. (2016). Peer to peer deaf literacy: working with young deaf people and peer tutors in India. Language and Language Teaching, 5(2), 1–7. http://azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/SitePages/pdf/Language-and-LanguageTeaching-July-2016.pdf Golden, C. J. (2010). Posting it: The Victorian revolution in letter writing. University Press of Florida. Hall, N. (1999). The materiality of letter writing: a nineteenth century perspective. In D. Barton, & N. Hall (Eds.), Letter writing as a social practice (pp. 83–108). John Benjamins Publishing Co. Jewitt, C. (Ed.). (2014). The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis (2nd ed.). Routledge. Kress, G., & van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: the modes and media of contemporary communication. Edward Arnold. Kusters, A., Spotti, M., Swanwick, R., & Tapio, E. (2017). Beyond languages, beyond modalities: transforming the study of semiotic repertoires. International Journal of Multilingualism, 14(3), 219–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/14790718.2017.1321651 Lillis, T. (2013). The sociolinguistics of writing. Edinburgh University Press. Lou, J. J. (2016). The linguistic landscape of Chinatown. Multilingual Matters. Nickell, J. (1990). Pen, ink, and evidence. University of Kentucky Press. Norris, S., & Jones, R. H. (Eds.). (2005). Discourse in action: introducing mediated discourse analysis. Routledge. Olsen, B., & Hadjicharalambous, C. (2011). The periodization of marketing: myth or reality? Evidence from the Scott Paper Company. Academy of Marketing Studies Journal, Suppl., 15(Special Issue 2), 33–45. Pennycook, A. (2018). Posthumanist applied linguistics. Routledge. Rammert, W. (2012). Distributed agency and advanced technology: or; how to analyse constellations of collective inter-agency. In J.-H. Passoth, B. Peuker, & M. Schillmeier (Eds.), Agency without actors? New approaches to collective action (pp. 89–112). Routledge. Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in place: language in the material world. Routledge. Siegert, B. (1999). Relays: literature as an epoch of the postal system. Stanford University Press.

Materiality and multimodality  83 Tagg, C., & Lyons, A. (2022). Mobile messaging and resourcefulness: a post-digital ethnography. Routledge. van Leeuwen, T. (2011). Multimodality. In J. Simpson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 668–682). Routledge. Wei, L. (2017). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Applied Linguistics, 39(1), 9–30. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amx039. Wohlwend, K. E. (2008). Kindergarten as nexus of practice: a mediated discourse analysis of reading, writing, play, and design in an early literacy apprenticeship. Reading Research Quarterly, 43(4), 332–334. Zeshan, U., Panda, S., Papen, U., & Gillen, J. (2023). Peer to peer deaf multiliteracies: a new concept of accessibility. In D. Griffiths, K. Pahl, S. Ainsworth, & G. Macrory (Eds.), Multilingualism and multimodality: working at the intersection (pp. 206–222). Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI).

5 What were the Edwardians writing about?

Mediated discourse analysis In this chapter, I demonstrate two methodological approaches to studying the postcard texts, one relating to postcards taken singly and the other to the whole collection. I begin by working with two contrasting single postcards, each with quite brief messages, and then use Corpus Linguistics to investigate all 3,000 postcards; this method could be scaled up to any number in the future. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the concept of mediated discourse analysis is particularly appropriate to my understanding of this project since it emphasises language as social action (Norris & Jones, 2005; Scollon, 1998). I will take here this approach to two examples of postcards considered as multimodal ensembles (Jaworski, 2020), one as an example of extremely short and Miss Phyllis Terry 2 Gay Street Bath

With best wishes for a very happy Birthday M.G.

Figure 5.1  Postcard 2593.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261322-5

What were the Edwardians writing about?  85 formulaic texts and the other as a more unusual text, likely to be a one-off in the users’ experience. Even the shortest and most formulaic texts can be approached with mediated discourse analysis. For example: card 2593, shown in Figure 5.1, can be understood as part of a social practice, greeting people in writing on the occasion of their birthdays. As Jones and Norris (2005: 4) write: “…the ‘meaning’ does not so much reside in the discourse itself, but rather in the actions that people take with it.” The details of this social practice vary as shaped by factors, including geographic, technological, cultural, temporal and personal factors. In the twenty-first century, social media enabled an extremely rapid multimodal way of communicating a postcard greeting; as (Georgalou, 2017: 82) observes, posting on a Facebook “Wall” (a term in use at the time of her data collection) displays date and time. The sender can be held responsible for the appropriate delivery date and time in the twenty-first century as in the Edwardian era; the relative vagaries of the UK postal system in the intervening period did not afford such precision. I can approach an understanding of the text that M.G. wrote to Phyllis Terry better if I understand something of the functions that postcards played in early twentieth-century Great Britain. I know that the card would have travelled quickly and that it might have been assumed by its sender and receiver as a gift, an instantiation of a popular and valued, still quite new, genre of postal communications. The card image is of Wells Cathedral, from the South East. The image is hand coloured, of good quality, one of Frith’s series of views, “one of the most extensive collections of scenes covering the British Isles”(Byatt, 1978: 96). It seems possible that Phyllis might have already known the building, as about 20 miles from her home. The card had been posted in her hometown of Bath, never a large city, so it’s very possible that the postcard came from somebody close enough to meet Phyllis in person, sometimes, if not on her birthday. From the censuses, I learnt that Phyllis was born in 1894, so this was her 11th birthday. She was living in an upper-middle-class, wealthy setting, with a surgeon father, mother and just one other sibling, a brother, in the family, thus instantiating the tendency of well-off families to become smaller in size during the late Victorian age (Thompson, 1992). Card 2609, in Figure 5.2, concerns not a celebration of a birthday but news of a death. One cannot know if it was feasible for Miss Saunders to hasten to Manchester in time for the burial of her grandfather, but I imagine this is unlikely since no logistical suggestions are included. Rather, this card is to convey an out-of-the-ordinary message. It may well be that the choice of an image of Manchester Town Hall conveyed a portentous message; in this era it was appreciated as an embodiment of “civic patriotism, while at the same time also expressive of a wider sense of national identity” (Readman, 2018: 305). Perhaps this, linked to the first “surprise,” might have been intended as something of a preparation before the harsher news. The sender has made a great effort to ensure the card reached the correct address, writing as thickly as possible with her indelible pencil. Further, the thoughtful parallelism between the sentence

86  What were the Edwardians writing about? Miss Saunders Newlands The Park Nongham

Dear S. You will be surprised to see that I am in Manchester. You will surprised to hear that your grandfather died & they bury him tomorrow (Saturday) Mother

Figure 5.2  Postcard 2609.

openers creates cohesion between the diverse topics (Flowerdew, 2013: 52). In all I suggest that this is an example of what Mavers (2007) describes as semiotic resourcefulness: Semiotic resourcefulness is making the most of the resources that are available for making meaning according to the immediate representational/ communicational purpose. This involves agency, initiative, analysis of alternatives and judgements about aptness for purpose. Available design possibilities are framed by mode and medium, the literacy practices in which they are located and the social context. (Mavers, 2007: 171) I was unable to find the Saunders family in historical records, only that in 1900–1901 the address on the card was the home of a sculptor, Gertrude Wadsworth.

Corpus linguistics I decided to investigate the texts using corpus analysis tools. I fully agree with the claim put forward by McEnery and Hardie (2012: xiv) that corpus linguistics need no longer be thought of as the domain of a narrow body of specialists but rather that its computerised methods to investigate texts are useful to studies of authentic language, whatever (sub) discipline these may originate in. Corpus

What were the Edwardians writing about?  87 linguistics is particularly useful for the investigation of substantial numbers of connected texts or very long texts. These may consist of spoken language that is then transcribed, or of written language. Samples are collected and annotated with metadata about the circumstances of their collection. The data is made ready for analysis with the assistance of tools, geared to searching the data and revealing particular patterns. In this chapter, I want not only to demonstrate my findings using corpus linguistics but also to show as explicitly as possible the trajectory of my investigation. Relatively few works in Literacy Studies have made use of corpus linguistics (e.g. Gillen, 2009, 2014; Lillis et al., 2020; Sebba et al., 2012). In this way, apart from shedding a light on the texts in the main collection, I hope to enable readers to think of ways they might be able to apply similar corpus linguistics methods when working on other topics. Lancaster University is a world-class centre for corpus linguistics and although I am a relative novice compared to many of my colleagues, I hope to show some of the tools and methods usually freely available. I wanted to use corpus linguistics to investigate what people wrote about and to exclude for this purpose the details of the addressee and addresses. My preliminary step then in creating the corpus was to make a plain text file in which all the names of addressees and addresses were eliminated.1 I preserved the number of each card in order to be able to refer back to an individual card, and coded that as metadata, that is, information about the text rather than the text itself. I present my investigations in two stages. First, I present the results of an analysis using CL tools that have been developed over many years.2 I then briefly explore some of the possibilities of using a relatively new CL tool developed at Lancaster University that is particularly suitable for a beginner, #LancsBox v.6 as available in 2022 (Brezina et al., 2021). Preliminary investigation Here I used the free software AntConc, created by Laurence Anthony (2014) of Waseda University. The specific version I used was 3.4.1w (for Windows) downloaded in March 2014.3 As a reference corpus, I used the Lancaster-Olso/ Bergen Corpus of British English compiled in the 1970s. I will explain what a reference corpus is and what this one is in particular, below.

Towards a wordlist Corpus linguists’ first and most simple step in looking for patterns in a specific corpus is to create a wordlist. This counts the words and arranges them in corpus in order of frequency. The wordlist tool told me that the corpus consisted of 155,906 word tokens, that is, words as they appeared on the postcards and 8,335 word types, that is, distinctly different words. Table 5.1 shows the wordlist for the top 50 words, ranked by frequency for the different tokens.

88  What were the Edwardians writing about? Table 5.1  Wordlist of the top 50 words Rank

Frequency

Word

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

5,762 5,550 5,329 3,276 3,227 2,038 1,964 1,954 1,935 1,860 1,849 1,785 1,724 1,718 1,687 1,640 1,563 1,427 1,402 1,343 1,313 1,253 1,251 1,233 1,222 1,169 1,116 1,102 1,069 978 944 942 885 820 816 811 805 795 742 730 726 718 674 671 660 646 635 607 604 593

you i to a the are love have dear will for all is x we it from hope on of with not very your this am and in be at well so but me my had time as was see here much come p shall home c if just been

What were the Edwardians writing about?  89 There are a few interesting points about the list above. Note that it has not been sorted at all by case, so that I appears as i. So what appears in the list as dear might have been written as dear or Dear. The aim at this point is to indicate the frequency of words used, regardless of their position in the sentence or any other factor that might affect capitalisation. Words like from, dear, love, and x (abbreviation for a kiss as a sign-off, still popular today) appearing in the top 20 might indicate that this is an epistolary genre. People have perhaps brought over salutations and closings from the letter genre, even if we cannot know from this evidence if they are using exactly the same salutations and closings as they did in letters. Other explanations are poss­ ible; perhaps postcards were particularly used for romantic communications? So I return later to considering this question about possible salutations and closings. But first, what can be indicated by the most popular words? At first sight, it does appear interesting that rank no. 1 is you and rank no. 2 is i (most probably I ). Might this mean that this corpus is particularly dialogic, that it makes use of these personal pronouns because it is a particularly intimate, perhaps conversational genre? It would be dangerous to assume this immediately, since something else is immediately noticeable from the table. It is dominated by little words, sometimes called “grammatical” or “function” words, like to, a, and the (ranked 3, 4 and 5). Indeed, with such words as relatively common, it is easy to reach the opinion that the above list of the top 50 words does not look particularly interesting. Although on noticing time (37) and home (46), I might wonder why postcard writers particularly use those more intrinsically meaningful “lexical” words and think that might be worth looking into. On the whole, however, with a background knowledge of English as an everyday user it might seem likely, to me and perhaps other readers of this table, that it could be probable that almost all if not all words in the top 50 may feasibly be very prominent in this corpus just because they are so common in the language overall. So perhaps a raw (the usual term for “simple” in this context) frequency list is of limited use. I needed to find out more about the usual distribution of common words in English and whether any of the words in this corpus stand out, as “keywords,” that is of relatively unusual prominence.

Keywords So the next step was to try to work out whether the high-frequency words are particularly characteristic of this corpus, or to express the idea in a more interesting way, which words appear in this corpus that are not there just because they are typical of English as a whole. This process means comparing highfrequency words in this corpus with another, preferably much larger corpus, which, in the terminology of corpus linguistics I call a “reference corpus.” I can then see which words in the Edwardian postcard corpus stand out in terms of frequency for comparison as keywords.

90  What were the Edwardians writing about? I did this by using the Corpus Query Processor CQPweb at Lancaster University maintained by Andrew Hardie (Hardie, 2012). I selected as a reference corpus the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus of British English, compiled by Leech, (Lancaster University), Johansson (Oslo) Hofland (Bergen) and colleagues. This is a million-word reference corpus compiled in the 1970s from data originating from the 1960s, of British English, designed to sample data across genres. It was the second major corpus of written English to be constructed, designed as a parallel to the earlier, pioneering Brown corpus compiled by Kucera and Francis for American English.4 The LOB corpus appears to be a reasonably suitable choice at least at first sight, since it consists of written English collected in the middle of the twentieth century. It cannot be affected by new words of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. So I used it to identify the words in the Edwardian postcard corpus that are relatively key, in comparison to LOB.5 Table 5.2 shows the results.

Table 5.2  Keyword list: Edwardian postcard corpus cf London-Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus of British English Rank

Frequency

Keyness

Word

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

5,762 1,935 5,550 1,964 1,718 1,427 1,169 1,860 1,233 1,251 537 1,785 555 466 544 671 461 1,687 660 2,038 944 368 1,954 374 635 726 646 349 730 674

11083.881 7246.556 6533.681 6196.720 5975.940 4580.777 3294.341 2474.125 2399.439 1965.762 1842.770 1750.150 1708.406 1578.157 1545.240 1485.939 1484.453 1470.975 1463.683 1368.423 1248.084 1228.404 1196.260 1144.593 1143.306 1119.147 1082.341 1052.400 1039.199 1038.363

you dear i love x hope am will your very thanks all write yours letter p weather we shall are well card have sorry c here home send see come

What were the Edwardians writing about?  91 Table 5.2  (Continued) Rank 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Frequency 405 366 277 322 275 290 485 718 262 431 383 423 604 266 245 230 820 160 195 453

Keyness

Word

1031.883 1017.573 944.995 941.047 879.272 878.349 834.822 789.972 766.346 756.810 746.668 745.823 718.666 708.155 707.841 700.666 678.591 646.694 643.586 624.972

hear nice hoping glad pleased lovely better much tomorrow week soon mother just sunday don monday me alright regards going

 ooking through the keyword list, one word which might seem surprising is “don” (45). The reason L for this is that the software breaks up contracted words into its elements. So what we are really seeing here is “don’t.” English offers this particular challenge to corpus linguistics, and this is the most common way of addressing it.

Again, it is important to note that this list is ordered by rank of keyness, not of frequency, although frequency is also shown in column 2. Frequency is still an important factor; the lowest figure shown here in the top 50 is 160, which shows that I am dealing with relatively commonly used words in the corpus. One point I wondered about above seems to be borne out. You (1) and i (3) are extremely prominent, so certainly demonstrating that this corpus is extremely, self-consciously, dialogic in that people are, more than usually in written English, referring to themselves in the first person and addressing the addressee as you. This suggests a conversational style and appears to be a noteworthy finding relating to this corpus. However, this finding could be placed into some doubt. It seems possible that this finding, of relative dialogicality, that is, a conversational style, might be accounted for facts relating to the nature of the reference corpus. The LOB corpus consists of printed, written English. This includes examples from different domains of written English, the genres chosen to match the earlier Brown corpus of American English as closely as possible (Johansson et al., 1978). Genres include press (newspapers etc.); learned and scientific writings; skills trades and hobbies; belles lettres, biography and essays; general fiction and so on. There is a genre called miscellaneous, which includes government documents and reports. Any corpus must necessarily be selective and, as is well documented by Johansson et al. (1978) and many others

92  What were the Edwardians writing about? since, corpus linguistics has to involve difficult sampling decisions. Nevertheless, drawing on a background in Literacy Studies, I would contend that sampling from printed texts entails a strong bias away from vernacular writing, such as everyday letters, lists and notes. It means that the LOB corpus, as indeed so many corpora of written texts at least until computer-mediated communication, is likely to be strongly biased towards relatively formal texts, many of which indeed have been through editing processes at various levels. This will highlight the productions of professional writers. And even if I think about vernacular voices that might have been captured, such as a letter to a newspaper editor, this is likely to have been edited and formalised in some way. The corpus linguist Biber (1988) found that rather than relating to a presumed dichotomy between speech and writing, the use of you and I is characteristic of informal speech and written genres in which interpersonal involvement is characteristic. In the meantime, keyness does nevertheless point up issues of potential interest that can be worth looking into more deeply. For example, dear is indeed showing up very highly, ranked third. I can use more functions of AntConc to investigate further. Is dear being used as a salutation or is it used to indicate value, whether in a financial or affective way? An especially useful function of corpus linguistic tools such as AntConc is to check the positioning of words and which words they co-occur with. “Concordances” are detections of patterns of co-occurrences. AntConc can search for all instances of a word and display all results of a query with some co-text before and co-text after each example. Looking into dear, the simplest thing to check first, in wondering if it is mainly used as a salutation, was to see whether it comes as the first word in a text; that is, if it was the first word written and indeed this is almost always the case. Exceptions include where material such as a date or placename precedes the dear – clearly preserving it as a salutation and if anything demonstrating the relationship to the letter genre even more clearly. Some salutations are a little more elaborate, beginning My dear then almost always followed by a first name or indication of relationship, for example, My dear Sister. The exception to this is My dear little snowdrop. There are very few other exceptions to the salutation use of dear, and these are still somewhat related as mid-sentence terms of endearment thanks for your letter, Auntie dear, we miss you all Do not be late dear, for we shall have as you would a letter dear. I received your P.C. never mind dear, yes I am looking forward So my dear you were not forgotten hope you are better now dear Occasionally dear comes close to the end, for example: Thanking you all the same, dear, with best love, to see you again soon dear. With heaps of love & kisses

What were the Edwardians writing about?  93 The word dear then is generally part of a formulaic beginning, although this can be varied and indeed the word, if moved elsewhere, seems to strengthen in its connotation of endearment, as well as containing an element of directly addressing the other, as a salutation does. Is love used in a similar way? Might it be used as a term of address, as it is in informal spoken language in some areas of North West England at the time of writing? I am sometimes addressed as love during service encounters, a salutation which is occasionally extended to lovey or lovely. (If I move 40 miles or so South, this changes to duck, ducky or meduck [my duck].) Might it be part of a closing routine? I would generally close informal letters or cards to relatives with a formula, including love. Or were postcards the preferred means of expressing positive affect between friends, lovers and relatives? So this time I used AntConc to search for the word love. There were 1964 instances of love and Table 5.3 shows the first five results. This is a “key word in context” or KWIC display, showing the word in question roughly in the middle in order to indicate some surrounding words. Note that where a number appears between angled brackets shortly after the instance of love, this means that the KWIC screen has moved on to the next card. I actually looked at the first 30 results, but as they were all so similar to the first five I show only these in Table 5.3. The sample indicates that there may be a considerable number of uses of love as part of a closing formula, but perhaps it is inadequate to jump to this conclusion from a perusal of five or even 30 results, when there are 1,964 instances. So to search for love as a salutation I used the cluster tool. This finds common co-occurrences of a word. In the first step with love as part of a cluster, I decided to define a cluster as minimum two words and maximum five and to

Table 5.3  Keyword in context display for love: first five results 1 2 3 4 5

upset like Uncle. & I did is not very well Best , and then will write. Much sent me it was pretty you are all well much

Love Love love Love love.

to. Grandma. Granfa. & yourself. from Nellie Dear Nora. Mrs. Fletcher from both. yours M.D. from Carrie Camberwell House St I have returned here safe,

Table 5.4  Clusters of love which occur at least 50 times, where the minimum length of a cluster is 2 and maximum 5 and where love is to the left Rank

Frequency

Cluster

1 2 3 4 5 6

623 574 335 96 82 81

love to love from love to all love to you love from all love to all from

94  What were the Edwardians writing about? position love on the left (see Table 5.4). This picked up from my initial impression from Table 5.3 that clusters such as love from and love to appear to be common. The enormous number of uses of love with from and to bears out the idea that here is a common formula. It must be borne in mind that since I have looked for clusters of various lengths, the instances of, for example, love to you in the above appear also included in the results for love to. But this actually strengthens the understanding of love as part of a formula: love from X or love to X are very productive and can be extended in various ways. Running the search again, for clusters of love but this time with love to the right, also reveals uses of love in formulae. The most common two-word cluster is with love, at 460 uses still considerably less than love to and love from. My love (4) might be thought of potentially usable in a whole number of ways, yet the next ranking entry shows that by far the most common use of my love is in the phrase give my love (see Table 5.5). Are other lexical words in the corpus equally likely to be used in formulaic ways? The next candidate of possible interest from Table 5.2 is hope. Without reproducing all results in detail, hope made a strong showing in enquiries about health such as hope you are well (frequency: 67) or variants such as hope you are all well (f59) or hope you are quite well (f30). Hope was also used with regard to meetings to plans such as hope to see you (f41). People used cards not just to convey greetings and good wishes across a distance but also to further plans to connect, often through meetings. People also used hope to convey their support for others’ states of health, plans and intentions. However, a distinctly different use of hope also emerged: hope you will like this (f53). This referred to the card itself, often with more specific extension referring to the picture side, such as one, view or actress. This provides internal evidence for the claim, first advanced in Chapter 1, that people often sent cards as embodying gifts, not merely as transparent vehicles for a message. Often people collected cards, perhaps owing to their connection with their sender (see Chapters 1 and 6) or because they collected according to a specific topic. Some, such as actresses, were a hugely popular theme for several years in the Edwardian era, later to be overtaken by view cards, especially of rough seas (Gilderdale, 2013). Looking for the word thanks might at first thought appear unlikely to yield many regular patterns in terms of topic, even if we might find a grammatical sequence such as thanks for the X. Presumably people thank each other for any

Table 5.5  Clusters of love which occur at least 50 times, where the minimum length of a cluster is 2 and maximum 5 and where love is to the right 1 2 3 4 5 6

460 188 171 91 67 60

with love best love much love my love give my love with best love

What were the Edwardians writing about?  95 number of things, since the diversity of items, thoughts or whatever people convey to each other, must vary enormously? I decided to look into this. As a preliminary step, in order to capture thank, thank you as well as thanks etc., I searched the corpus with the search term thank*. The asterisk (wildcard) means that thank will be searched for as part of a word, whether or not there is an extension. This revealed 770 hits or instances of this. I then sorted the concordance, to find out what words followed thank*. Scrolling down the 770 instances, it is immediately apparent that almost all of the things people are thanking them for are letters and postcards. Letter is generally spelt in a regular fashion, but postcards are referred to in a huge number of ways such as card, postcard, PPC, PC, P.P.C and so on. To sort these out more precisely I made use of the collocates tool. This identifies and ranks which word is associated closely with another word. In order to use the tool, one has to decide how large the window is, or the range of associated words. For example, people wrote things like thanks very much for the card, so the word card is appearing in the sixth position to the right. However, I can decide I do not want to search to the left. It would seem possible people might write “I received your X for which many thanks,” which would locate thank* to the right of the item received, but I was unable to find an instance of this pattern easily. (It’s quite possible my search was not comprehensive enough, but certainly such a pattern did not turn out to be easily discoverable.) Table 5.6 shows the top 20 results.

Table 5.6  The top 20 ranked frequency collocates of thank*, arranged to the right up to 7 places Rank

Frequency

Word

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

718 321 211 209 208 193 165 156 146 145 92 91 91 54 50 49 49 49 48 47

for you i p much very letter c your the card to so am it will hope are pretty we

96  What were the Edwardians writing about? The results show many words not helpful in distinguishing things or ideas people were thanking one another for, since there are many results for words like for and much. Nevertheless, a very, very strong pattern emerges. Ranked 4 is p with a frequency of 209. This alphabetic letter is always used in this corpus as part of an abbreviation for postcards, such as ppc or pc. It is therefore unsurprising that c also appears highly (r8 f156) as does card (r11 f 92). Very notable however is the appearance of the only other common noun on this list: letter (r7 f165).6 If people were thanking others for cards and letters, this means that they were in a chain of correspondence, rather than sending one-off postcards. In the era many cards were sent in one direction only, for example, as means of advertising from businesses to people, or from people to various institutions, including postcard competitions organised by publishers themselves to promote postcard sending! But what this finding shows is that apart from using salutations, closings and exchanging greetings, the main topic of correspondence is a reference to that very correspondence, which did not just include postcards but also letters. People were in relationships where they exchanged cards and commented on that, but also made use of letters, as is revealed here through studying what they were thanking one another for. I have also learnt that the most common adjective used in thanking somebody for something was pretty (r 19 f 48). Perusal through the results shows that this was almost always applied to a description of a card, for example, the pretty view. It is surely worth turning to consider letter as an individual item. Were people doing anything else with their references to letters apart from thanking people for them? This time I decided not to impose any pattern on a cluster in terms of left or right ordering but to look for clusters of at least three words as otherwise the results are dominated by clusters such as a letter, your letter and so on. The top result then was thanks for letter (yes, omitting an article). Increasing the minimum length of the cluster to four words brought out the results shown in Table 5.7. This demonstrates that apart from people thanking others for a letter, they are also writing about other matters concerning letters. The top phrase write you a letter (r 1 f20) consists almost wholly of promised to write a letter, often within a particular time frame such as this week, very soon or tomorrow. Even where such a promise is not made, there is an acknowledgement of a sense one could be due such as “I really ought to write you a letter, but…” Most of the writing about letters then contains either thanks for letters or promises to write them and further cements the finding that these cards are links in a chain of communications that included letters. Apart from this dominant kind of reference to letter, there are also some instances where letters from or to others are noteworthy enough to mention – see had a letter from (r 2 f 19) in Table 5.7. Indeed, this includes a variety of references to other people such as I had a letter from Florrie we had a letter from G I had a letter from my puss

What were the Edwardians writing about?  97 Table 5.7  20 Top-ranked clusters of at least 4 words, including letter Rank

Frequency

Cluster

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

20 19 18 14 14 13 11 11 10 10 9 8 7 7 7 7 7 7 7 6

write you a letter had a letter from thanks for your letter will write a letter will write you a letter many thanks for letter much for your letter to write a letter many thanks for your letter you a long letter time to write a letter to get your letter a letter from you for your kind letter i had a letter i will write you a letter will write you a long letter write a letter soon write you a long letter i received your letter

One is a reference to the correspondent: she’d had a letter from you Working with #LancsBox #LancsBox is a very accessible set of free CL tools, relatively recently developed at Lancaster University (Brezina et al., 2021). It is accompanied by videos to explain how to upload one’s own corpus, access other corpora and carry out a number of analysis tools, including those that have been explored above using other software. Some of these tools are more appropriate to larger corpora. For example, if one wants to search a large corpus with various subcorpora, such as the “Brown Family Extended” that includes LOB referred to above, one can examine the distribution of a specific term across the subcorpora. The Words tool looks for absolute and relative frequencies and dispersion of items across subcorpora. More linguistic analysis is enabled very easily, for example, I can instantly access a frequency list of word types and then arrange a list of lemmas. Lemmas are the most basic form of a word, for example, the lemma be will include is, being and many other types as well as be. The display of lemmas includes the part of speech. So the most frequent lemma in my corpus is be_v, second you_pron and third i_pronoun. It’s then possible to filter according to part of speech, so I can investigate the most frequent nouns, as shown in Table 5.8:

98  What were the Edwardians writing about? Table 5.8  Nouns that occur at least 200 times Lemma

Frequency

dear love time letter day hope thank home weather week card mother night morning mrs today Sunday p.c. tomorrow kind Monday Saturday yesterday holiday line

1,721 1,680 821 573 551 548 527 486 451 450 421 411 313 311 304 266 266 265 252 240 229 229 223 212 202

Of course, this automaticity means that results are not perfect. Card appears high but arguably functionally postcard p.c. and other variants should be included in the lemma.7 Dear is not necessarily a noun, as has been seen. Nonetheless, the list is extremely interesting in pointing out the salience of mother and also of time and frequency of temporal terms; one gets a flavour of postcard writing being used to make plans and give accounts. Page (2012: 191) notes this focus in much of contemporary social media, suggesting that “prioritizing recency is also an apt strategy for constructing a sense of co-presence and social connection….” This same Word tool identifies keywords, as explored above, very readily and then the GraphColl tool identifies a collocational network of a word or phrase and offers visualisations as well as tables. Figure 5.3 shows in detail the collocates of mother in a span of five words to the left and five to the right; investigated by frequency, her occurring at least 20 times. The closer a word is the more prominent it is, so the most frequent collocate is to. In addition, the words are arranged according to whether they are more likely to occur to the right or left of mother. Clicking on any of the words brings up a KWIC display, that is, displaying all instances of the collocation. One can also investigate clusters and manipulate any of the tools with various statistical measures. Finally, a Wizard uses all these tools and more to produce a draft report on any corpus.

What were the Edwardians writing about?  99 on

are and

with

better for

all a

very

from to

just

dear

mother

your

is

my i

love

will

father hope

have

&

you

well the

Figure 5.3  Visualisation of collocates of mother occurring at least 20 times.

I hope I have indicated some of the potential of Corpus Linguistics to enable studying almost any substantial text or collection of texts as well as having given a flavour of my journey with the tools made readily available in a generous academic community.8

Notes 1 With #LancsBox, as explained later, this step is unnecessary. 2 My investigations with this project began with the freely available MOOC on Corpus Linguistics: Method, analysis, interpretation. Lancaster University, via FutureLearn, January–March 2014. This course has been further developed and presented and in 2022 is still freely available with some limitations on access in 2022. 3 AntConc is still free, and later versions are available: see https://www.laurenceanthony. net/software/AntConc/ 4 LOB is in CQP web freely accessible at Lancaster University and available as part of “Brown Family extended” https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/familyx/. It is also archived in Oxford Text Archive: University of Oxford, Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen corpus of modern English (LOB): [tagged, horizontal format] / Stig Johansson, Oxford Text Archive, http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12024/0167. It is also now available through #LancsBox. 5 I used the log likelihood measure. 6 Those who have experience with corpus linguistics may wonder at this point why I do not rank according to a statistical measure, rather than raw frequency. The reason for this is that a statistically ordered sort brings out on top a huge number of single words that occur once in the corpus and just happen to be within the window, without any direct relationship to thank*.

100  What were the Edwardians writing about? 7 This could be achieved with little effort. 8 While this book was in production, a new even more accessible version of #LancsBox has come out: #LancsBox X. This makes it extremely easy to upload one’s own corpus, and investigate a range of large corpora, accompanied by simple instructional videos.

References Anthony, L. (2014). AntConc [Computer Software] (3.4.1w). Wasada University. http:// www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/ Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press. Brezina, V., Weill-Tessier, P., & McEnery, A. (2021). #LancsBox v.6.x. [software]. http:// corpora.lancs.ac.uk/lancsbox/ Byatt, A. (1978). Picture postcards and their publishers. Golden Age Books. Flowerdew, J. (2013). Discourse in English language education. Routledge. Georgalou, M. (2017). Discourse and identity on Facebook. Bloomsbury. Gilderdale, P. (2013). Hands across the sea: situating an Edwardian greetings postcard practice. Auckland University of Technology. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/56364268.pdf Gillen, J. (2009). Literacy practices in Schome Park: a virtual literacy ethnography. Journal of Research in Reading, 32(1), 57–74. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9817. 2008.01381.x Gillen, J. (2014). Digital literacies. Routledge. Hardie, A. (2012). CQPweb - combining power, flexibility and usability in a corpus analysis tool. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 17(3), 380–409. Jaworski, A. (2020). Multimodal writing: the avant-garde assemblage and other minimal texts. International Journal of Multilingualism, 17(3), 336–360. Johansson, S., Leech, G., & Goodluck, H. (1978). Manual of information to accompany the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English, for use with digital computers. http:// korpus.uib.no/icame/manuals/LOB/INDEX.HTM Jones, R. H., & Norris, S. (2005). Discourse as action/discourse in action. In S. Norris & R. H. Jones (Eds.), Discourse in action: Introducing mediated discourse analysis (pp. 3–14). Routledge. Lillis, T., Leedham, M., & Twiner, A. (2020). Time, the written record, and professional practice: the case of contemporary social work. Written Communication, 37(4), 431– 486. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088320938804 Mavers, D. (2007). Semiotic resourcefulness: a young child’s email as design. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 7(2), 155–176. McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Norris, S., & Jones, R. H. (Eds.). (2005). Discourse in action: introducing mediated discourse analysis. Routledge. Page, R. (2012). Stories and social media: identities and interaction. Routledge. Readman, P. (2018). Storied ground: landscape and the shaping of English national identity. Cambridge University Press. Scollon, R. (1998). Mediated discourse as social interaction. Longman. Sebba, M., Mahootian, S., & Jonsson, C. (Eds.). (2012). Language mixing and code-switching in writing: approaches to mixed-language written discourse. Routledge. Thompson, P. R. (1992). The Edwardians: the remaking of British Society (2nd ed.). Routledge.

6 The lives of three young women through postcards Annie Parrish, Janet Carmichael and Ruby Ingrey

Women and their environments in the Edwardian era I have three reasons for concentrating in this chapter on three collections of cards each kept by a young woman. The first is to explore everyday lives of women through their postcards and glimpse something of the experiences of the gender which has traditionally received less attention in history. The second takes regard of the underlying contrasting contexts of these three women’s lives: one in a deeply rural community, another in a town and the third in the largest city of the Edwardian era, London. The third is essentially chance; these collections are among the largest samples of connected cards in the main collection, and it is good fortune that their lives contrasted in these ways. Occasionally, I can take opportunity of women commentators on the era, sometimes to provide an alternative slant to accepted discourses. The Edwardian era is known as a time when women were trying to break away from many of the stifling constraints of the Victorian era. Women themselves were raising questions about the place of women in society, including their inferior legal status, inability to vote and unequal wages. In 1908 Mary Reid MacArthur challenged the claim of Sidney Webb, generally considered as one of the more progressive public figures of the era, that there were few direct instances of competition between men and women, writing: The position of women in industry is one of the most vital problems with which the labour world is confronted to-day. With the introduction of machinery, men wage-earners have witnessed the influx of women into branches of almost every trade and industry, and have viewed with growing concern the lowering of wages involved by their unregulated competition. (Reid MacArthur, 1908: 63) She went on to argue that the route to a better situation for women and men was through participation in trade unions. Besides the potential to attain better financial deals, Reid MacArthur (1908: 83) extolled the specific benefits for

DOI: 10.4324/9781003261322-6

102  The lives of three young women through postcards women “as schools of social and economic education – education in its widest and truest sense.” As so many Edwardian women, she combined radical beliefs with a wish to reassure society that the perceived essential attributes of the female sex would not be lost but rather enhanced and so ends her chapter: Living a fuller life they [women] need no longer look to marriage as a way to escape from the monotony and drudgery of existence, but are enabled to undertake its responsibilities more fitted physically and mentally to be the mothers of the coming race. (Reid MacArthur, 1908: 83) In the era, struggles such as for the vote, which erupted more dramatically after 1910, were not necessarily felt to be the concerns of all women. Nevertheless, questions around the position of women in society are seen by many historians as one of the characterisations of the period (Read, 1972; Sutherland, 2015; Thompson, 1992). Recent works by museums, archives and historians have done much to highlight contributions by Edwardian women often previously overlooked. I mention, highly selectively, three examples that have made a great impression on me while writing this book. The first is the Pre-Raphaelite artist, Evelyn De Morgan (1885–1919), exhibited at Burnley’s Towneley Hall in 2021–2022.1 Technically superb, she expressed hope for an imagined feminist future during the Edwardian era, turning later to express horror at warfare. Second, the garden historian Advolly Richmond introduced me to the work of the pioneering traveller Ella Christie, who commissioned a woman, Taki Handa, to design a Japanese garden at Cowden, Clackmannanshire in 1908.2 Finally, and in a very different sphere, while encountering countless references to the surveying work of Rowntree and Booth, discussed in Chapter 1, I have not encountered any recent reference to the 1909 survey of a rural parish in Wiltshire by a woman, Maud Davies, who made house-to-house enquiries and surveys in a three-month period in the winter of 1905–1906. With very little resource, she emulated some of the methods of those Victorian investigators of cities (Davies, 1909). In 1910 her achievement was recognised in The Economic Journal as a “new departure in sociological investigation” (Dearle, 1910: 609). In this chapter, I use a narrative approach to tell the story of three young women in the era through their postcards and other historical records. Issues such as women’s suffrage, unequal rates of pay, legal rights and many more do not appear directly discussed in this collection of postcards. Nevertheless, this exploration at least brings out some facets of everyday life as experienced by three young women, living in different areas of England. More significant differences are to be expected in that they were situated in three different types of environment: rural Lincolnshire; a town, Buxton; and finally, London, the major metropolis which had undergone so much expansion in the Victorian era so that it was the world’s largest city (Heller, 2016).

The lives of three young women through postcards  103 Decades preceding the Edwardian era had seen a great change in where people lived, summarised as a flight from country to town. In the mid-nineteenth century the majority either lived in the countryside or had been born and raised there; by 1910 four-fifths of the population were living in towns and cities (Collins, 2000: 1). Rural England, which had been central to English life for centuries, had been so significantly depopulated and indeed impoverished by the beginning of the Edwardian era, that it too was characterised by a great sense of change even described as abandonment. Disastrous for rural populations was the period economic historians have labelled “The Great Depression of English Agriculture 1875–1896” (Collins, 2000: 138–207). By the turn of the century, a partial recovery was underway in some areas with products that service the cities and towns – dairy products, chicken and market garden produce of fruit and vegetables – doing well if they had good transport links (Collins, 2000: 208–223). But the agricultural depression had entirely shifted demographics and the economy. Thompson (1992: 26) reflects contemporary accounts in his claim that English agricultural labourers: “…worked in an English countryside which was never more beautiful or quiet, the great uncut hedges, abundant with flowers and small animals, arching over the empty lanes: the beauty of decay.” This is borne out in calculations about productivity: in 1850 agriculture had accounted for one-fifth of national income and employment whereas in 1910 only onesixteenth (Collins, 2000: 1). In the mid-Victorian age, towns had been virtually synonymous with markets, acting as a central hub for a number of villages; remarkably there was a kind of uniformity to this pattern with the 1851 census claiming an average of 21 villages around each town (Howkins, 2000: 1297). Industrialisation and urbanisation had rapid effects and whereas some towns continued to be significant market towns, others grew while concentrating on a single industry, such as cotton or mining (Thompson, 1992: 29). Half the population indeed lived in towns, but the opportunities for women’s employment varied greatly depending on the type of town it was. So women could earn relatively well in textile towns such as Burnley or Midlands towns that focused on making clothes or shoes but less so in expanding mining towns in South Wales and South Yorkshire (Thompson, 1992: 29–30). Probably the worst conditions were experienced by the urban poor, in the slums of the cities with precarious workforces. Cherry (1988) discusses claims that the largest cities had the poorest conditions. For example, Checkland (1981, cited by Cherry, 1988: 53) describes the “wee bauchle” of Glasgow, a typical man, small from malnutrition and disabled with rickets, as the “underweight, undersized inhabitant of the grimmest slums in Western Europe.” Thompson (1992: 20) agrees that Glasgow had the worst urban conditions. Aalen (1987, cited by Cherry, 1988: 53) claimed Dublin as the worst housed and unhealthiest city of the UK, with particularly high death rates. Similar findings have been described of Manchester and Salford and Tyneside; also of substantial towns such as Middlesbrough, Northampton and Warrington (Cherry, 1988: 53; Gourvish, 1979: 13). Contemporary surveys of poverty abound, such as that

104  The lives of three young women through postcards published by Tree in 1901 (discussed by Cherry (1988: 53), which found that 27.8% of the population of York were living in poverty. Tree’s work was inspired by the well-known work of Charles Booth in London, who published his detailed investigations of London over a 17-year period (originally working with Beatrice Potter, later Webb). His work was both quantitative and qualitative; he came to the conclusion that 30.7% of the population of London lived in poverty in the first few years of the twentieth century. One example, of Shelton Street in East London, is indicative: “…few of the 200 families who lived here occupied more than one room. In little rooms no more than eight ft square [approx. 0.73 sq meter; my addition], would be found living father, mother and several children” (Booth cited by Cherry, 1988: 52). Contemporary accounts of the inequalities in urban life are perhaps the most shocking. One of the best known is the “People of the Abyss” by the American journalist Jack London, communicating the impossible and almost always inescapable conditions very people struggled with even when served by charitable assistance (London, 1903). Cities featured great diversity in living and social conditions, with new phenomena such as suburbs expanding rapidly in the early twentieth century. It is fortunate that these three contrasting types of environments: countryside, towns and cities, featured in the lives of three women for whom I have several related cards. At the same time, it is not a remarkable coincidence that in a collection of only three thousand cards among the six billion or so of the era that I have several relating to one person and that this occurs at least three times. It is likely that in order to be retained in the first place, these were the collections of the young women concerned; otherwise, they would not have survived in such a way that I was able to acquire them. They must have been preserved in albums for some time, and then, as I have discussed in Chapter 3, eventually passed to dealers. The cards would have been fixed in the album showing the picture side as no one ever displayed the written side of cards. Perhaps the album was passed on from the original owners without the cards ever having been read since that era until today. Although the postcards are necessarily limited in number and timescale, I craft narratives around the women’s lives, making use of further investigations especially aided by censuses. As I developed my historical investigations, originally working with Nigel Hall, I came to richer understandings of the card texts and the young women’s lives. Rather than frame this chapter according to the chronology of the investigation and findings, I present biographies, organised according to the events of the young women’s lives, placed in the wider social and historical context and of course, given an intense flavouring of certain periods through the evidence of the postcards.

Annie Parrish I have 17 cards sent to members of the Parrish family, most of which were addressed to Annie. It is remarkably affecting as evidence of a little-documented social class of the day, at least in their own words: agricultural labourers. As the

The lives of three young women through postcards  105 cards show, men and women often had to show a willingness to move according to work opportunities and to take a variety of roles. In the 1901 census Annie Parrish, aged 20, had been a domestic servant in Merrikins Farm, in the parish of Louth, and in the 1911 census at Manor Farm, still in the Louth area, was then described as a “housekeeper.” The family had always been associated with farming: her grandfather and father were agricultural labourers, and her mother was a servant on a farm at the age of 17. In geological and economic history Louth occupies an interesting position. The market town of Louth is situated on the very edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds – where Cretaceous chalks give way to the coastal marsh. This favourable space for a settlement had been occupied in prehistory, was named in the 1086 Domesday book and its medieval growth was marked by a church spire still impressive today. The prosperity of the Tudor era was interrupted by the Reformation and local participation in the Lincolnshire Rising and Pilgrimage of Grace, ultimately doomed but brave attempts to stand up against injustices, including enclosure of common land. (A plaque in the town commemorates the arrest of the vicar in 1536, who was then hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn.3) Nevertheless, the building of a canal to connect Louth to the sea in the eighteenth century and railway connections in the nineteenth indicate a continuing trajectory of prosperity until the Great Depression already mentioned. Lincolnshire “stood out as the most important grainproducing country in the Midlands… as a group the [large grain] farms of the Lincoln Wolds & Heath felt the effects of depression more severely than any others in the Midlands region” (Walton, 2000: 394). Traditional products of wool were often replaced by grains and pulses by Parrish’s time. Contemporary accounts constantly deplore the flight of young people, men and women, towards the towns. One of the most fascinating contemporary accounts of rural England in the Edwardian era that I have found was a two-volume account of agriculture written by H. Rider Haggard. He was a celebrity in his day, and his fame persisted as a novelist and, very much later, as an influence on Hollywood. His books including Allen Quartermain, She and King Solomon’s Mines gave rise to numerous film adaptations. It has been suggested that they influenced the character of Indiana Jones and even Star Wars, the most successful Hollywood franchise of all time. I will not discuss the academic arguments for these claims, as I am more interested in his other occupations, particularly in his attempts to influence agricultural reforms in South Africa and England. In 1901 he spent eight months travelling through 27 counties of rural England, to inquire into the current state of agriculture, aware of its crisis. Indeed for various reasons the year of 1901 had so many difficulties that it was feared that the country could sink back into the Great Depression, rather than continue the limited recovery into new products, as briefly described above. Rider Haggard’s methodology was multi-faceted. He resolved to base his investigation on “a new system – that of the interview.” Haggard (1902: xi) argued that if he collected enough data, in the form of interview transcripts together with documents informants chose to supply, the

106  The lives of three young women through postcards resulting interpretations would be richer than if he subjected all observational data through the prism of his own assumptions. He travelled with a friend, Arthur Cochrane, to whom he entrusted another multimodal methodological feature: the production of beautifully annotated maps. They worked with George Philip & Son Ltd., for the London Geographic Institute, to produce maps for each county with notable settlements, railways, rivers, etc., overlaid with colour-coded notes of geological characterisations and principal agricultural activities of the area. Since Rider Haggard’s motivation was to draw attention to problems of the countryside and disseminate successful innovations and ideas, with ultimately an intention to affect government policies, he gained a contract with the Daily Express to publish early findings. Further substantiated with more data, descriptions and maps, his work was published in two volumes in 1902 by Longmans, Green & Co. They are wonderful books to own, although, perhaps sadly, it is rather more difficult to trace what we would nowadays call “research impact” on society in terms of policy and practice from this research than it is to perceive his influence in the realm of popular culture. To return to Annie Parrish in rural Lincolnshire, Rider Haggard indeed offers considerable illumination of her world. He was, first, very impressed by the diversity of scenery, soil and agricultural activities in the county, calling it “perhaps the most deeply interesting county in all England” (Haggard, 1902: 144). Cochrane’s map puts Louth at the centre of a variety of activities: I cannot be sure how precisely the annotations are intended to point to compass directions but in any event can record that immediately the north and north-west he has written, “shire horses,” to the west “1/4 pasture,” across the south (from southwest to south-east) “Red Lincoln shorthorns” [cattle] and to the north-east “summer grazing.” At first sight, this might indicate a fruitful diversification from dependence on wool for which East Anglia and neighbouring areas were famous for. Collins’s (2000) enormous edited compendium of the agrarian history of England and Wales can be drawn upon for further elucidation of these findings. Paul Brassley indicated that shire horses were on a particular cusp of influence in 1901; although trends towards agricultural machinery had very much worked against them, depressed prices at the turn of the century gave a perhaps brief impetus to heavy horse breeding; many were sent to work in towns (Brassley, 2000b: 562). Over the next ten years, however, the rise of the internal combustion engine led to the end of the road, except of course for minor show and specialist use. The note “1/4 pasture” probably meant that the land was on rotation, with one-quarter at any time being suitable for grazing (by cows or sheep), with interspersed periods perhaps with oats, wheat and fallow (Brassley, 2000c: 465). Regarding the cattle as next mentioned, Brassley advises that Shorthorns were mixed, that is used for dairy and beef and that the local variant, Lincoln Red Shorthorn, had been distinguished since 1822. Shorthorns, described as “mild” in character by Charles Dickens (1857: 452), also appear prominently on the map towards the coast in the Theddlethorpe area, where Annie Parrish was

The lives of three young women through postcards  107 living at the time of receiving the postcards described below. Rider Haggard (1902: 159) described a herd he encountered in Lincolnshire as “square-built animals, of good substance” and discussed differences of opinion as to which use to prioritise and what this meant for sales prices. This versatile breed had been very popular in the mid-Victorian era as it matured early and could be fed on spare arable products to enhance its beef. However, in the Edwardian era, it was to be superseded by Friesians, imported from Holland (Brassley, 2000b: 556). Rider Haggard encountered those cows in a farm belonging to two brothers called Fieldsend, about 11 miles from Louth, which also featured top-quality turnips; a rarity that year in Lincolnshire where generally the turnip harvest had failed (e.g. Haggard, 1902: 166). Turnips were important as fodder for sheep, cows or pigs in a rotation system, in an era when farmers still sought to provide for themselves (Brassley, 2000a: 576, 577, 586). However, although the Fieldsends’ farm was relatively close to Louth it may have been quite different to the farms the Parrish family worked on since it was on a favoured, relatively high stretch of land called the Wolds. Nevertheless, one Mr Fieldsend characterised farming as “a failing industry. I would like to take a better view, but I can’t” (Haggard, 1902: 160). He complained that young skilled labourers were practically unobtainable. A nearby schoolmaster, also interviewed, explained that all the capable young people, whether boys or girls, moved to towns since prospects were so much better, for example, through apprenticeships. The Fieldsends’ foreman cast an interesting light on this: “The young women go and the young men go after them” (Haggard, 1902: 163). If farms on the best land were struggling, the environment must have been challenging for the ones Annie Parrish lived on. Annie Parrish was not one who ever moved to London, and her postcards do not prove any movements beyond Lincolnshire. Historical records suggest that Annie and most of her siblings, as her parents and grandparents before, were settled entirely in Lincolnshire. Nevertheless, as I shall show they do indicate many ways in which postcards connected her to wider spheres of influence. Annie Maria Parrish was born on 6 March 1880. She was the eldest child of James Parrish and his wife Betsy, who had one son and four daughters. By the time of the 1901 census Annie, then aged 21, lived on Merrikins Farm in Gayton le Marsh some miles to the east of Louth. Although she was living with her parents, the next two siblings, brother James and sister Sarah were making a living elsewhere – although James seems always to have stayed in Lincolnshire. The youngest girls, Margaret and Fanny, were living with them; shortly afterwards Margaret (Maggie or Mag) married and moved a short distance. Also on Merrikins Farm were three siblings aged between 73 and 81 “living on their own means” and two unrelated workers. Then, evidently at some point between 1901 and receiving the first card I have, Anne Parrish had moved to Eve’s Farm (named after its owner) close to the coast in Theddlethorpe St Helens. She had probably continued to be a “general servant” as she was described in 1901. This does not necessarily evoke the sense of waiting on rich people; indeed interestingly the word “domestic” was first inserted in 1901 in her

108  The lives of three young women through postcards occupation description and then crossed out in favour of “general servant.” Women were not described as “labourers” and indeed might have spent more of their energies inside than out, but would have been expected to turn their hand to a range of duties. The first card in the collection was posted from Harrogate on 13 May 1905, addressed to “Dear Nanny,” and written in a childish handwriting. This suggests that she was looking after the farmer’s child or children. One of the other cards mentions “the boys” in a similar context, but none of the cards mention Annie’s work with any precision, apart from regrets that it was hard for her to get away for a day, even if an excursion had been planned. One postcard presages the arrival of a basket of plums, from a tree that needed “thinning out,” ending, “let us have the basket back soon.” Annie’s mother was in ill health, often referred to in the cards, so it is likely that as the oldest daughter who had stayed at home Annie took care of the household. Female domestic labourers found it relatively difficult to find marriageable partners – although of course I don’t wish to characterise this as necessarily an aim, – and when they did marry, tended to marry relatively late (Short, 2000: 1243). The card collection is interesting in terms of the images and indeed the postcard sources. Judging from this collection, Annie Parrish was interested in topographical images from a wide range of places. An attractive cottage near Plymouth features in one and the Dublin Law Courts in another. These cards were sent from family members living in Lincolnshire and so are a clear illustration of the diversity of postcards available, probably in the town of Louth, where the cards are postmarked. The range of postcard publishers in this small sample of cards is considerable too. One, sent in 1905 (573), is a colourful portrayal of a rural idyll called “Break of day.” It is an artistic production credited to A.H. Cole and marked “copyright” to try to prevent piracy. This card is published by Gottschalk, Dreyfus and Davis, a truly international company at this time with offices in New York and Munich. Later, they opened a London office and became known for portrait photographs of celebrities as well as reproductions of artistic works. Sent by sister Maggie to Annie, it implores her to come away for a short jaunt to Mablethorpe, while sounding almost resigned to a likely refusal. Maggie, now living in Saltfleet, Louth, a nearby coastal village also enquires after mother Betsy’s health: she was to die in 1908. The fact that this card is being shared by two rural Lincolnshire young women is testament to the huge popularity of postcards and the international networks involved in their production and distribution. Postcard 543, in Figure 6.1, is even more explicitly revelatory of the Parrish’s connections to London. Another Annie mentioned is in London, and while the postcard is sent from Louth, is a lively image of the capital, with extravagant colour effects. Again the message is chiefly concerned with trying to carve out leisure time, perhaps for travel. What kind of correspondent was Annie? Information is limited as I only have cards sent to her, rather than in her own hand, but there are some things that can be inferred. There is a warm and friendly tone in all the postcards. Most of the cards are from family members, coming from sisters and probably a cousin

The lives of three young women through postcards  109 Miss Parrish Eve’s farm Theddlethorpe St Helen Louth

Louth Friday Dear Annie are you dead or alive down against the sea we do not any of us seem to hear from you we did not write. last week Tom said you would perhaps send a parcel on Wed but as it did not come I thought I might send a card hope you are all well I shall see the others to night Annie is in London coming back to night I hope it is lonely all by my self. I shall get a extra day when I have my holidays as annie has got one Love May [?Mary]. (on side upside down:) hope you will be able to make this out. Fran has got to (reckinging?) of the fair already she seems to have. enjoyed her holiday

Figure 6.1  Postcard 543.

Mary. One is a birthday card addressed to James Parrish from sister Sarah, who seems to be the only sibling to move a considerable distance away, to Lancashire. Many of the cards refer to letters, sent by or to Annie, so there is a strong sense of regular correspondence interspersed with postcards, many of them attractive

110  The lives of three young women through postcards as to have a gift element; indeed one is a cute cat, a meme as popular then as now. It is evident that the family’s literacy skills are strong, counter to the suggestions by some historians as discussed by Rose (2010: 146) that schooling for rural agricultural labourers was so extremely restricted as to be nearly useless for many. This supposed lack of literacy has been ascribed to farmers’ opposition to their labourers’ children being educated, poorly trained teachers and families keeping children out of school to help with work (Digby, 2000: 1491). Rose’s (2010: 146–186) own investigations paint a more positive picture of workingclass education, including in rural areas. In the 1891 census Annie Parrish was shown as being at school, as three of her younger siblings, including a four-yearold. So it is likely she did receive at least seven years of education and could write competently, like these relatives. They write easily and confidently, and the writing is very legible. How did the family fare after 1907? Annie’s father died aged 76 in 1927. The 1939 historical register shows Annie Maria and her brother James living together in Theddlethorpe, with James now described as a smallholder and Annie as housekeeper, plus two older people whom Annie presumably supported in addition. James died in 1942, but Annie survived to the very great age of 86. Judging perhaps a little unfairly from my considerable explorations around my family tree, I would put this longevity down very largely to not being married and burdened with vast numbers of pregnancies and births. Annie and her family stand as quite a rare voice from two or more generations that had, like the plums, been “thinned out” from the countryside. Short (2000) characterises the flight from the countryside of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras as a “chain migration,” explaining The experience of previous emigrants, as revealed personally by those who returned, or in their letters home, was active in stimulating interest among their relatives and friends. (Short, 2000: 1296) Surely postcards, with their capacity to bring images as well as words from the cities, must also have had considerable influence.

Janet Carmichael The cards collected by Janet Carmichael are indicative of a life spent chiefly in the town of Buxton in Derbyshire. There are 19 cards in the collection almost all to Janet but also sometimes including or to her mother. The facts of her life show that although initially born into seemingly a fairly favourable position, the early death of her father sent her into a different trajectory, away from city into town life. Janet Stewart Carmichael was born in 1887 in Manchester. Janet Carmichael’s Scottish surgeon father, William, died in Manchester Royal Infirmary when he was 44 and Janet was only three; a fact possibly all the more tragic in that he had

The lives of three young women through postcards  111 seemingly qualified only shortly before his marriage in 1885. Janet’s mother, Rose, neé Inglett, immediately moved her baby and herself in with her mother, but by the time of the 1901 census the mother and daughter pair had moved to Buxton, where Janet lived for the rest of her life. Rose told the census enumerator that she was “living on her own means,” but a commercial directory showed that she was letting out rooms. Janet’s card collection is fascinating for the way it illuminates her life and captures many phenomena that can be found across the collection more generally, so epitomising postcard practices. Here, I will consider three aspects of her cards: first, her geographic networks; second, the window cast upon culture and, third, the performance of identity. Janet’s geographic network is significantly dispersed as displayed in Figure 6.2. Some of Janet Carmichael’s postcard connections can be explained through the facts of her biography. Her correspondents in Manchester appear to be around her own age so may be connections from her early childhood. Mrs Carmichael appears to have been a gregarious soul; several cards suggest connections made with lodgers that outlast their stay, such as the cards from May Reid in Bath. Two cards are sent to Janet Carmichael while staying in Lockerbie with a Mrs Laidlaw; one to Mrs Carmichael while staying in distant Lochgilpead – reassuring her that her cat was being looked after in her absence. In many ways card 2607 is emblematic of the possibilities of the Edwardian picture postcard at its simplest and most effective. In the card shown in Figure 6.3, Nessie has used the undivided back format card. She was able to send it within the town of Lockerbie with perfect confidence that it would arrive within hours, so that the message “Hope to see you this evening” was sufficiently timely. She was able to get the card to Janet although Janet was at a temporary address; many Edwardian cards were sent to people while away from their homes. Finally, I cannot know what the image meant between the pair. Caerlaverock Castle is a tourist attraction about 17 miles from Lockerbie, so it might be that the two had been there together, that they had plans to go or simply that Nessie chose it as an attractive image that might interest her friend. Several of Janet’s cards are tied in various ways to geographic locations in ways beyond their routes. “Louise” sent a card of Manchester Cathedral, considered an attractive destination, although, as now in my opinion, a little manipulation of the image is required to make it dramatic. Reference to the “lovely walk you took us last Saturday” serves to link appealing experiences. B.M.M. sent Janet a card in 1907 of Little Moreton Hall, near Congleton, and wrote, “This is the place we went that Saturday, isn’t it pretty?” After referring to further plans, there’s a fascinating reference to the increasing motor traffic on roads: “Dear one, we shall both be prematurely grey, with trying to protect our precious bowwows from Motors…” This is incidentally the only reference I found regarding motor vehicles impacting on road safety outside cities in the collection. Various cultural references appear in cards connected with Janet, as is the case with so many across the collection. Shared experiences bond friendships and so

112  The lives of three young women through postcards

Figure 6.2  Postcards from and to Janet Carmichael of Buxton.

The lives of three young women through postcards  113

Figure 6.3  Postcard 2607.

also does the sharing of manifestations and opinions on culture, often propelled by postcard sending. Two postcards from Dora Moor suggest that she enjoyed a prolonged correspondence, including letters with Janet about the works of Dumas. Alexandre Dumas was a popular writer in the era, perceived as a writer of stirring adventures yet still considered to have literary merit (Rose, 2010: 52, 104, 245). Although Dora states that she prefers letters, presumably for their length, sending postcards enables her to share depictions of Dumas’s heroes and comment on their alignment with how she visualises them. For example in card 60: “do you see any resemblance to our friends? I think it is not bad but it is not noble enough for Athos, dare-devil enough for D’artagnan, effeminate for Aramis, it might do for Porthos….” Just two days later, she follows this up with another card from the same series of reproductions of paintings by J.L.E. Meissonier, a French artist of the late nineteenth century whose fascination with adventurous knights suited being matched with Dumas (and by 1900 conveniently dead so unable to object to postcard publishers using his work in this way had he wanted to). This time Dora is incandescent at the publisher’s labelling of “A musketeer” misunderstanding the term and fulminating, “Just try to imagine Athos dressed like that, it is impossible, & it never mentioned their having guns, did it?” Sharing cultural interests is one way of performing identity, and postcards often assisted this in the way that we are used to social media facilitating today (e.g. Marwick & Boyd, 2010; Zappavigna, 2014). Pets have already been mentioned and besides being written about provide appealing illustrations; Janet’s include combinations of cute puppies, children and cats. However, there are other interesting ways of communicating one’s identity and the case of her Bath correspondent, May Reid, is an interesting example. May does not always sign her cards, but they can be recognised by the handwriting, the linked topics and the black-and-white images of Bath, in a certain style. This might seem unremarkable, were it not for the inclusion of one card (66) that was sent to Janet while she was away in Scotland, by May Reid, when she was in Buxton for a stay of a few weeks. Given the ubiquity of postcard sellers and the background of the rest of the main collection, it is simply extraordinary that in this circumstance May has still chosen to send one of her black-and-white Bath cards.

114  The lives of three young women through postcards This means she must have been particularly fond of them and carried them around while travelling; as if an essential element of her communication of self. Inferring much about Janet’s personality is not easy. It seems that friends, pets and travelling both locally and in Scotland were important to her. There are references to schools, although she is an adult, and to illnesses. One prevents her from taking an exam; although no census records indicate an occupation. Nevertheless, it is interesting that an unmarried young woman living in a town in the era still had a fairly extensive social network. Janet Carmichael died aged 23; at the beginning of the century over 50% of all deaths were of people aged under 45, mostly through infectious disease (Hatchett, 2012: 3) although the Edwardian era did see the beginning of advances in public health (Hatchett et al., 2012). She was buried in Pendlebury, Lancashire, so nearer to her birthplace than where she had lived. A Buxton newspaper remembered her as a popular Sunday school teacher, solving the references to school. Her mother, Rose, survived to the age of 99; all records available show her with either a female servant, boarder or companion. She too was buried in St John’s Pendlebury. I surmise this might then be the site of the grave of William Carmichael but have been unable to confirm this.

Ruby Ingrey The third story integrates the lives of Ruby Ingrey, Arthur Waddelow and their friends and relations. The main collection includes 34 cards sent to the Ingrey family, and I also possess a couple of others from after 1910. Ruby M.G. Ingrey was born in 1890 in Islington, London, and baptised on 11 May 1892 at St Luke’s in West Holloway. She spent her life, until at least the age of 20 and probably until the age of 26, in the Islington district known as Barnsbury. Ruby’s father was Robert Ingrey, born in 1848 in Newnham, Hertfordshire. By 1871 at the age of 23, he was supporting a family of elderly father Charles, termed by the census enumerator as “pauper, formerly agricultural labourer,” mother Sarah aged 67, his wife Emma and a two-month-old baby, on what were probably meagre wages as a gardener. By 1891 the usual migration into cities had taken him into London, where he was working in the Metropolitan Cattle Market in Islington. Robert and Emma (born 1852 in Ashwell, Hertfordshire) had seven children, who all survived to adulthood: the last was Ruby, born in Islington. So the Metropolitan Cattle Market and area of the Caledonian Road were the settings of Ruby’s childhood and youth, and it is worth describing them in turn. The Metropolitan Cattle Market was where George Ingrey worked; at no time from 1899–1911 did Ruby and her parents live more than a few hundred metres from it, so it was a pivot around which the family’s life circulated. The market site, opened in 1855, had been chosen for being close to the goods yards of the Great North Eastern railway, and North London Railway, north of Kings Cross Station. It was visited, soon after opening, by Charles Dickens, who described it as “the greatest meat-market in the world” (Dickens, 1857: 452).

The lives of three young women through postcards  115 It was enormous and even in 1895, “On Mondays and Thursdays, it presents a very animated scene, it being estimated that upwards of four millions of animals are sold here regularly.”4 The whole area must have been noisy, smelly and filthy, and the pubs on each corner of the market would have been extremely full on market days. It was also potentially a dangerous place; even in 1979 a quarter of the soil samples collected from the site of the former market contained Clostridium botulinum, the cause of botulism, a serious illness. The researchers attributed this to faecal contamination from some of the many millions of farm animals brought to the market (Smith & Milligan, 1979). Further, close to the Metropolitan Cattle Market were slaughterhouses, the Pentonville Prison and the Caledonian Asylum orphanage. It was amongst these surroundings that Ruby grew up. The second focal point was the Caledonian Road, locally known as “The Cally.” This road was featured in a BBC series, The Secret History of Our Streets, broadcast in June 2012. The cattle market was adjacent to the Caledonian Road, which was the artery of Barnsbury, running vertically, for about 2 miles, right through the middle of the district from Pentonville Road, near Kings Cross, to the Holloway Road, just north of Holloway Underground Station. Young Ruby never lived far from the Cally. A postcard outside the main collection, in Figure 6.4, is a postcard of the Cally produced by a printer advertising his business. In the 1891 census, the family were living at 88 Goodinge Road, the south end of which was just across the road from the cattle market and about 150m from the Cally. In the 1901 census, the family are shown as living at 14 Corporation Street, Islington (the end of which was just across the road to the cattle market and about 200m to the Cally). Only the three girls were still at

Figure 6.4  A postcard of the Caledonian Road prior to World War I. Collection of Julia Gillen

116  The lives of three young women through postcards home. Amy, the eldest, was a tailoress, while Amelia and Ruby were at school. By 1911, her parents and Ruby were living at 32 Market Street, Islington, a road butting up against the south wall of Pentonville prison and ending at the Cally, across the road from the market. In addition to the 1901 and 1911 addresses, there are four other addresses for Ruby on the cards that were sent to her from 1901–1910; all of them very close to the Cally. They are in 1906, 19 Stanmore St. Caledonian Road, Barnsbury, a short road about 500 yards south of the market; in 1907, 28 Lesley Street, Westbourne Road, Barnsbury, about 500 yards east of the market, just behind the asylum; and in 1909, Chapel House, 60 Bride Street, Westbourne Road, Barnsbury, which ran from the back of Pentonville Prison to Liverpool Road; and in 1908 No. 6 Crown Mansions, Liverpool Road. Thus, there are at least six addresses for the family in the first decade of the twentieth century. The family clearly did not spend long anywhere, and this might suggest difficulties with rent requiring regular moving on to new addresses, but they were never far from either the market or the Cally. It must have been the family’s main shopping resource, probably crossed daily for schooling, church and employment and to meet friends and neighbours. They presumably did not know that a barber’s shop on the Caledonian Road was the centre of a German spy ring. In 1910 Edward VII’s funeral was attended by his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II. A member of the Special Branch surreptitiously followed a member of the Kaiser’s entourage. This officer led him to the barber’s shop that turned out to be the communications hub of the spy network. Britain’s nascent counter-espionage force successfully began the surveillance, identification and monitoring of 22 German spies investigating Britain’s naval and military activities. On the outbreak of war in 1914, recalled one of the British Special Branch men involved, “We pounced on them…like a leaping tiger,” and 21 were rounded up (Porter, 1989: 128). Ruby was the last child and remained at home longer than the others. Indeed by 1911 Ruby was the only child living at home while working as a typist. This indicates that she had taken a step up in the world, for a member of her class, in that this was regarded as a relatively superior upper working-class occupation. It indicates that Ruby had received a good general education and that she, seemingly as her siblings, was in good general health. Gertrude Tuckwell writing in 1908 acknowledges that such jobs required general education and specific skills but counsels that this did not necessarily mean good working conditions: Take, for example, such a profession as that of a clerk into which numbers of women are constantly entering. The girl clerk working for 10s. a week in a crowded basement office, late into the night, is an instance of the sweated worker, yet this profession never figures in the popular imagination as an instance of sweating – the gentility of the occupation appears to lift it out of the category and to form its reward. (Tuckwell, 1908: 4)

The lives of three young women through postcards  117 Further, a woman could not marry without losing such a job (Heller, 2016: 113). The main story of the cards connected with Ruby Ingrey is a relationship between Ruby Ingrey and Arthur Waddelow; his family also moved to the city towards the end of the nineteenth century. Arthur’s father, John, worked on the GNR Railways, as a lampman in 1881 and a railway shunter in 1891. Between these censuses, Arthur was born, in 1886, in Peterborough. By 1901 Arthur and his family were living at 130 Wellington Road, Islington. John was now a foreman railway porter; Arthur had already left school and was working as a messenger on the railway. Arthur was not present in 1911 as he was serving in the Royal Navy, although when on leave he would have come back to the family home. At some time in this decade, John advanced further, becoming an inspector in a “goods department.” This was probably the cattle and goods depot of the Great North Eastern Railway, on the other side of the Cally, and slightly north of the market. Wellington Road ran along the southern edge of this depot. Quite a lot of railway employees lived in this area. Fourteen cards in the main collection were sent to Ruby by Arthur Waddelow. Both families grew up in what was a fairly poor area of London, although Arthur’s family may have been a little better off than Ruby’s. The area of Barnsbury featured in a major inquiry headed by Charles Booth and published as ‘Life and labour of the people in London (Booth, 1892–1897). Alongside the inquiry a series of maps were published, which used different colours to indicate the levels of poverty and wealth in streets and areas. Revised versions were published in 1898–99, while both the Ingreys and the Waddelows were living there. Each of the seven colours used in the maps specified a level of wealth or poverty: these ranged from from black, representing the lowest class, labelled as ‘vicious, semi criminal’; to yellow representing ‘Upper–middle and Upper classes. Wealthy’. It seems likely that Ruby’s father would fit into categories C or D. Category D has “families with small regular earnings, poor: Factory, dock and warehouse labourers, car men, messengers and porters.” The rubric for category D also states that as a general rule they “have a hard struggle to make ends meet, but they are, as a body, decent steady men, paying their way and bringing up their children respectfully.” Thus, these maps give a powerful picture of the area in which Ruby Ingrey and Arthur Waddelow were growing up. Most of the roads in which the Ingreys lived were coloured a solid pink, which indicated a mixed road: “Some comfortable, others poor,” and this was the same for the Waddelow family. In general, the Ingrey children appear to have thrived. One card in the collection, shown in Figure 6.5, was sent to Ruby’s parents in 1909 and has a photograph of their house. The address is 27 Dupree Road, East Greenwich. The house is where Ruby’s older brother Gussie (properly Robert Augustus) lived with his wife Louise and two children, Robert and Lilian. They do not occupy the whole house, and the census document of 1911 reveals that they have a three-roomed flat (other than any kitchen/bathroom/scullery, etc; so either the upstairs or downstairs). It is clear from the photograph that it is a fairly

118  The lives of three young women through postcards Mrs R. Ingrey 60 Bride Street Westbourne Rd Barnsbury. N.

Dear Mother and Father Just a few lines to you hoping you are quite well, if it is suitable to yourself will come and see you Whitsuntide Monday but of you have made arrangements to go out don’t put it off for us as we can come another time to see you I think this is all this time with love to you all from your loving son and Daughter Guss and Louie

Figure 6.5 Postcard 2038, with photograph of 27 Dupree Road, East Greenwich, home of Louise and Gussie.

small, neat house that looks clean and well-maintained. Given that there are three children in the photograph, it is likely that the postcard was the product of a house-to-house photographer, calling and offering to have postcards made. The men of the households were likely to have been at work and perhaps the photograph is of two mothers and their children. This is speculation, but the fact that the message does not explain the image, and that the setting is certainly the family home, must mean that the photographic subjects were known to the recipient. Gussie worked in the mixing department of a linoleum manufacturer, and so appears to have had secure employment. It was probably a better property than the ones in which Ruby and her parents were living. The house is still

The lives of three young women through postcards  119 standing, visible via Google Earth, and the twenty-first century has made the road a popular one in which to live. Ruby and Arthur in postcards The 14 postcards in the collection sent to Ruby from Arthur Waddelow during a year’s duration from August 1908 are unlikely to be the only ones sent to Ruby by Arthur. There is much textual evidence to suggest that they exchanged postcards and letters regularly over this time. Arthur Waddelow was 22 when the first card was posted, and a clue to his occupation is in the postmark, which shows it was posted in Chatham. Arthur was in the Royal Navy, although his primary role was as a stoker rather than a fighting sailor. The postcards are now discussed in chronological order of sending. Postcard 1810 - 13th August 1908 Miss R. Ingrey No 6 Crown Mansions Liverpool Road London Dear R. Just a line to let you know I shall be home on Saturday I will come round to meet you about the usual time with the bike if the weather is fine but it does not look very promising down here at present it has been raining hard I hope you have not been doing any more damage to yourself this week Arthur The 65 words of this card do not read as if this is the first card from Arthur to Ruby and, on the contrary, they seem to know one another fairly well. Judging from the overall collection, it is quite unusual for an unrelated young man to abandon the propriety and formality of “Dear Miss _____” when writing to a young woman. The use of the initial “R” is quite informal and suggests a high level of familiarity and friendship, and it is always used in his cards to Ruby. This sense of easy familiarity is reinforced by the mention of meeting her at the usual time and the intimacy of “I hope you have not been doing any more damage to yourself.”

120  The lives of three young women through postcards When Arthur writes about coming home, he is coming from the naval base at Chatham, and the reference to the “usual time” suggests that his coming home is a regular event when his ship is based there. Getting from Chatham to Islington was probably fairly easy for Arthur. Chatham was not a huge distance from London (about 35 miles) and transport links were good. Once arriving in London Arthur could link with the City and South Railway Underground Railway to Kings Cross or the Angel Islington or changing at Kings Cross could take him to the Caledonian Road/Holloway Underground Station. The next two cards were also posted in Chatham and have very similar messages. It is as if Arthur has found a routine genre and then mostly sticks to it. They all start with the news that he will be coming home but then move to a degree of uncertainty and end with an intent to call round or meet up. He mostly mentions the weather as a problem, but it is also the case that people in the Royal Navy might never be in full control of their movements and absences. Apart from the occasional final full stop, there is a complete absence of punctuation in these cards (and this is pretty much true for all his cards), but his handwriting is strong, clear, legible and fluent. He gets his points across clearly and it would be fair to say that he is an effective writer. These postcards were fairly poor-quality black-and-white photographs from the Chatham/Rochester area, although subsequently his selections went on to become of somewhat higher quality. The postcards suggest that meeting up with Ruby as soon as possible is always his priority. This does suggest both keenness on his part and possibly a fairly close relationship, and part of the interest in this set of cards is trying to work out exactly what is the relationship between them. Postcard 1815 - 15th October 1908 Miss Ingrey No.6 North Terrace Hermitage Rd Finsbury Park London Dear R. I shall be home tomorrow night all being well. I have not received a letter from you yet, but I expect there is one coming. Expect you will ride bike to school if the weather is fine so I will come to meet you on mine. Arthur

The lives of three young women through postcards  121 The following three cards still all deal with uncertainty as to whether he can come back to London from Chatham. The sixth card in the sequence, transcribed above, refers to Ruby riding to school. This would probably have been a typing school, as by 1911 she was a typist. This card has the reference to this being a two-sided correspondence and also mentions letters, as do so many of the postcards in the collection, as previously explored in Chapter 5. On the whole, the cards from Arthur are not otherwise very informative. The only news relates to whether he is going to be able to get home. There is nothing about anything he is doing, although it is possible that sharing information about his work may have been discouraged. There is then quite a long break, almost six months, until the next card between them. This is most likely either because cards were not in the collection that ended up with the dealer from whom these cards were purchased, or we missed finding them among the thousands of cards we perused. However, it is also possible that Arthur was away at sea during this period, and postcards and letters were less frequent. It is a bit surprising that he seems able to get home so regularly from Chatham, and his ship must have been based there for quite lengthy periods. Chatham dockyard was primarily a place where ships were built, but they almost certainly also carried out repairs and refittings, so his ship may have been there for that reason. The Chatham Dockyard is now a UNESCO World Heritage site. See Figure 6.6.

Figure 6.6 Chatham Dockyard entrance and close-up of original postbox. Images by Philip Moffitt photographed in 2019.

One card in the collection is to Ruby from her father. This is a rare card overall in that it includes some misspellings but is nonetheless perfectly comprehensible and displays command of written postcard conventions. It appears that Ruby is living away from her parents, in Finsbury Park (very likely staying with a sister). The mention of Arthur suggests that he is still very familiar to the family. The Florrie mentioned might be Arthur’s sister, a friend of Ruby’s, with whom she also exchanged cards. Postcard 1775 14 November 1908 Miss R Ingrey No 5 North Terrace

122  The lives of three young women through postcards Hermatage Road Finsbury Park N 120 Wellington Rd N 13/11/08 Dear R just a line as promised but – very late have not been very well and wether bad, Mother has been to see Florrey & we have lost our brother at Peterboro I shall not be at home Saturday but Mother will so you can give a call if you would like have not herd from Arthur With love from Dad The next card from Arthur gives no suggestion that there has been a long gap in the exchange. His words continue to be written in the same style and have a similar content. Postcard 1911 - 8th April 1909 Miss Ingrey No. 60 Bride Street Westbourne Road Barnsbury London Dear R. I received your letter alright pleased to hear you had a good ride shall be home tomorrow about seven hope to see you round home Arthur I also have a card posted to Arthur, the only one sent to him and almost certainly at some stage passed to Ruby. It is from his sister Florrie and was posted on 5 July 1909 from Parson Drove in Cambridgeshire.

The lives of three young women through postcards  123 Postcard 1891 A Waddelow H.M.S Sunfish GPO London. Dear Arthur Just a line to let you know we are enjoying ourselves, and having love-ly weather We had a fine ride to Hunstanton on Saturday it is 37 miles each way Lena went as well so don’t you think we did well. We have been to Crowland and Peterborough and we are going to Peterborough again thursday, I expect have not room for any more news Love from all Florrie. The first information this card offers us is that at this point Arthur was at this point based on H.M.S. Sunfish. This was an A Class destroyer which was launched on 23 May 1896 and broken up in 1920. The second interesting information is that the card is postmarked “Parson Drove.” Parson Drove is a small Domesday-Book village in Cambridgeshire, which still has many sixteenthcentury buildings, and is where Arthur’s mother, Sarah, was born. The village is 19 miles from Peterborough where Arthur and his sister Florrie were born. The overall movement of the family reflects that of so many others in the late nineteenth century, captured by a contemporary Liberal politician as “the largest secular change of a thousand years: from the life of the field to the life of the city” (Masterman, 1909: 77). The postcard also extends our understanding of cycling and its popularity in Ruby’s circle. The “ride” referred to is certain to be by bicycle; rural areas were characterised by “the gradual diffusion of the bicycle, and of roads fit for its use, in the two decades before 1914” (Chartres, 2000: 1192). Both the younger Waddelows and Ruby Ingrey must have been physically fit. In the above card Florrie writes of 74 miles in a day, hence the note of achievement “don’t you think we did well.” Arthur frequently refers to Ruby cycling. Some historians of cycling have labelled the 1890s as the “great cycling craze” but that pertained to the upper and middle classes for bicycles at that time were very expensive. It was

124  The lives of three young women through postcards not until the Edwardian period that bicycles were accessible to the working classes and taken up by many, including women, despite the difficulty of managing skirts (Sutherland, 2015). Nine days after the card from Florrie is a much more significant one, which offers the strongest indication of Ruby and Arthur having a close relationship. It was sent to Ruby’s parents on 14 July 1909 and was written by Ruby (see Figure 6.7). As Florrie’s it was posted from Parson Drove. The first point to be made is that Ruby’s writing is very clear, legible and grammatical, and unlike Arthur, she does use punctuation. The reference to Arthur having damaged his tyre while on the way to Kings Cross suggests that they got the train there as it then, as now, serves Cambridgeshire. More important is the destination. If Arthur was taking Ruby to meet his relatives still living in Cambridgeshire and they were sending a joint postcard, does this suggest that the relationship had become a very close one? Among the cards sent to Ruby by people other than Arthur, there are several that mention him. On 24 October Mrs Ingrey, Chapel House, No. 60 Bride Street, Westbourne Rd, Holloway N. London

Dearest mother, & Dad Just a card to let you know that we arrived at Parson Drove quite safely. Weather is simply lovely, it has been very hot today here. Arthur had a mishap. this morning going down to Kings X. He must have gone over something very sharp as he had (Then at the top of the card) Jubilee Colt a split in one of the tyres. Love from A & R.

Figure 6.7  Postcard 1890.

The lives of three young women through postcards  125 1908, Arthur’s sister Florrie sends Ruby a postcard saying she “had a letter from Arthur, and he said they are having the gate made larger, so I shall be able to walk in comfortably.” On 28 October 1908, Emmie writes, “I hope A is keeping well & saucy as ever.”. On 10 July 1909, another postcard from Emmie includes: “Am glad to say Dad is keeping very well hope Arthur is keeping well.” On 19 September 1909, Emmie again writes to Ruby saying, “I hope all are well at home also Arthur ….” Ruby did have a sister, Emmie, but I cannot know for certain if this is her. It does seem, at the very least, that Arthur’s sister and Ruby’s sister or friend Emmie consider them a pair. It is also the case that the cards from Arthur span 13 months, and they clearly started before the first card we have, so the relationship was an important one. It may also be significant that Arthur’s cards had been saved and were part of the collection that ended up in a dealer’s hands before being purchased by Nigel Hall and myself. The next card from Arthur to Ruby, shown in Figure 6.8, contains some real news. Miss Ingrey 60 Bride Street Chapel House Westbourne Rd. Barnsbury London

Dear R. I am writing this card from shore. I hope you will like it its not one of the set. I have come ashore to get a few things for the mess ?? I should have wrote a leer tonight I am sorry to say we are leaving Chatham tomorrow for Scotland but hope it will not be for long but we are expecting to be away for about a month ??? between two weeks of a month. I hope you take a change of walking down to the Thames before Thursday Arthur

Figure 6.8  Postcard 1812.

126  The lives of three young women through postcards Arthur’s ship is leaving Chatham for a while. It is possible to wonder how much notice the crew had of the ship’s departure because this card makes it seem as if there was very little. The day the card was sent, 20 July 1909, was a Tuesday and Arthur is hoping Ruby will be able to make rapid arrangements to come to Chatham. The next two cards were posted in Cromarty, Scotland, and had Scottish views; indeed, Arthur must have bought a bundle of cards because several subsequent cards, although posted from Chatham, were from this purchase. Postcard 1824 - 3rd August 1909 Miss Ingrey Chapel House No. 60 Bridge Street Westbourne Road Barnsbury London Dear R. Still staying at Cromerty. Have not received your letter but expect you sent one. Have had a letter from Fred said you were going for a ride on Saturday, I hope you enjoyed your selves. I only wish I had been with you. Will write letter later on. Arthur. We can only wonder who Fred was and how much Arthur might have wished he could have joined this bicycle ride. This and the following card include promises to write letters. On 13 August 1909, Arthur wrote to Ruby with some bad news with respect to a planned visit. Evidently, he had been grounded, following a late arrival back at his ship. Postcard 1826 - 13th August 1909 Miss Ingrey Chapel House No. 60 Bride Street Westbourne Road Barnsbury London Dear R. I am sorry to have to tell you I

The lives of three young women through postcards  127 shall not be home to go for a ride with you on Saturday as I was late getting on board on Wednesday morning ran into a fog just this side of ??anstead so I have got to remain on board for three days but expect to be home on Sunday morning will come round home to see you as soon as I can, have no time to write a letter. From Arthur. The final two cards, sent on 27 and 31 August, are right back to the usual tone. Arthur is confirming visits, looking forward to seeing her and indeed thanking her for a “nice letter.” So the big question is, what happened to the relationship between Arthur and Ruby? I have a couple of postcards from 1911 relating to Ruby: one on which she has added a short message to a Miss Field, and another to her, but not from Arthur. There is no straightforward romantic finale to the correspondence. Ruby’s father died in 1915 and Ruby moved to Finsbury Park, possibly to stay with her sister. From there she married Percival Joseph Barham (b. 1890) at St Thomas’s, Finsbury Park. He was a clerk living in Islington and a familiar figure in the family since Ruby’s sister, Amelia Rose Lilian, had married Percival’s brother Frederick back in 1907. In 1919 Ruby and Percival had a son who died in infancy, but, in 1926 they had a daughter, Patricia Enid who long survived them. Percival died in 1957 and Ruby in 1961 in Middlesex. Arthur Waddelow joined the Post Office as an assistant postman in 1912. He served in the Machine Gun Corps of the Suffolk Regiment in the Great War, fortunately surviving the conflict. On 21 April 1919, he and his brother Walter had a double wedding at Bircham Tofts in Norfolk. Arthur married Emma Easter and Walter her sister Alice. Emma died in 1928, followed five years later by their only daughter Joan. Arthur married Winifred Dawes, again in Norfolk, in 1935; the couple lived in Ruislip, Middlesex, where Arthur worked as a postman. After the Second World War, Arthur retired and they moved to Norfolk where both Arthur and his brother Walter died in 1947. This sequence of cards gives us a wonderful glimpse into the correspondence, pastimes and concerns of Ruby Ingrey, Arthur Waddelow and their connecting families and friends. It is plain that the cards, to have been preserved so long together, must have been kept in an album and that this must have belonged to Ruby, as she is undoubtedly at the centre of the web. There are some unanswered questions then about the relationship and what happened to it, but we

128  The lives of three young women through postcards do know that it is probable that among the cards she retained from what was almost certainly a vast correspondence, a considerable proportion were from Arthur.

Summary Looking across the three collections, I have gained an impression that young women, whether living in the city, town or countryside, must have felt connections to other locales and ways of living. In their family histories, trajectories of rural-to-urban migration were familiar to them, and sometimes even young women of fairly limited means were able to travel themselves. Picture postcards were also a means through which other worlds and ways of being were communicated to them, through messages, images and their combinations. Finally, even with little to read in their very own voices, those of their correspondents tell tales not of a sense of entrapment but of lives lived with a sense of agency. Just as histories of the British Post Office have always tended to neglect postcards, despite their undoubted social and economic importance,5 social histories of women’s lives in the early twentieth century have been relatively slow to mine this extraordinary source of information.

Notes 1 https://towneley.org.uk/events/artist-of-hope/ (accessed 4 November 2022). 2 Feature on BBC TV’s Gardeners World, 7 October 2021. 3 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lincolnshire_Rising_plaque_-_ geograph.org.uk_-_860306.jpg. 4 Reynolds (1895) Reynold’s Shilling Coloured Map of London. 5 For early examples, see Dendy Marshall (1926); Hemmeon (1912). Later histories are no better in this respect.

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The lives of three young women through postcards  129 Collins, E. J. T. (Ed.). (2000). The agrarian history of England and Wales. Cambridge University Press. Davies, M. F. (1909). Life in an English village: an economic and historical survey of the parish of Corsley in Wiltshire. T.F. Unwin. Dearle, N. B. (1910). Life in an English Village: an economic and historical survey of the parish of Corsley, in Wiltshire (review). The Economic Journal, 20(8), 609–612. Dendy Marshall, C. F. (1926). The British Post Office: from its beginnings to the end of 1925. Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press. Dickens, C. (1857). The Metropolitan Cattle Market. Household Words, 15(372) (9 May), 452–456. Digby, A. (2000). Social institutions. In E. J. T. Collins (Ed.), The agrarian history of England and Wales volume VII 1850–1914 part II (pp. 1465–1500). Cambridge University Press. Gourvish, T. R. (1979). The standard of living, 1890–1914. In A. O’Day (Ed.), The Edwardian age: conflict and stability 1900–1914 (pp. 13–34). The Macmillan Press Limited. Haggard, H. R. (1902). Rural England being an account of agricultural and social researches carried out in the years 1901 & 1902 (vol. I). Longmans, Green, and Co. Hatchett, W. (2012). Introduction. In W. Hatchett, J. Spear, J. Stewart, J. Stewart, A. Greenwell, & D. Clapham (Eds.), The stuff of life: public health in Edwardian Britain (pp. 1–4). Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, Association of Port Health Authorities, University of Greenwich. Hatchett, W., Spear, S., Stewart, J., Stewart, J., Greenwell, A., & Clapham, D. (Eds.). (2012). The stuff of life: public health in Edwardian Britain. Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, Association of Port Health Authorities, University of Greenwich. Heller, M. (2016). London clerical workers, 1880–1914: development of the labour market. Routledge. Hemmeon, J. C. (1912). The history of the British Post Office. Harvard University. Howkins, A. (2000). Types of rural communities. In E. J. T. Collins (Ed.), The agrarian history of England and Wales volume VII 1850–1914 part II (pp. 1297–1353). Cambridge University Press. London, J. (1903). People of the abyss. Isbister and Co. Ltd. Marwick, A. E., & Boyd, D. (2010). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313. Masterman, C. F. G. (1909). The condition of England. Methuen & Co. Ltd. Porter, B. (1989). Plots and paranoia: a history of political espionage in Britain, 1790–1988. Unwin Hyman. Read, D. (1972). Edwardian England 1901–1915: society and politics. Harrap & Co. Ltd. Reid MacArthur, M. (1908). Trade unions. In G. Tuckwell, C. Smith, M. Reid MacArthur, M. Tennant, N. Adler, A. Anderson, & C. Black (Eds.), Woman in industry from seven points of view (pp. 63–83). Duckworth and Co. Rose, J. (2010). The intellectual life of the British working classes (2nd ed.). Yale University Press. Short, B. (2000). Rural demography, 1850–1914. In E. J. T. Collins (Ed.), The agrarian history of England and Wales volume VII 1850–1914 part II (pp. 1232–1296). Cambridge University Press.

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7 Conclusions

Introduction I briefly summarise the findings of previous chapters before turning to three areas of final discussion: the position of the Edwardian postcard in its era, comparisons with today’s social media, and the contribution of this book to Literacy Studies. Chapter 1 included vivid instantiations of the Edwardian picture postcard as the social media platform of its day through a variety of contemporary media discourses. I was able to show how the picture postcard chimed with a society that, highly unequal and variously troubled, was also stirring with awareness of the potential of new technologies and mobilities. Investigating two examples demonstrated that the picture postcards were entwined with social and cultural trends. The materiality of the postcards offered certain affordances, including strict constraints that nonetheless could be navigated with some creativity. Postcards’ regulated content also offered certain parallels for analysis with contemporary social media, such as evidence of spatial and temporal trajectories. Chapter 2 examined the birth and rapid development of the postcard in the nineteenth century, finding its introduction the site of considerable contestation. Some of this emanated from the Post Office, which displayed some reluctance to permit an instantiation of the postcard that would most suit relatively poor people, preferring to focus on its potential to aid business and other mainly middle-class activities. The Post Office indeed set up a number of barriers to accessibility of use, despite recognition of the postcard’s potential utility in some mass media and sections of society. A source of difficulty around the postcard in society was its legal status as a public communication, unlike the letter. Eventually, postcards were put on sale singly, with adhesive stamps available separately, and in 1894 pictures were allowed on one side. A boom in production of picture postcards ensued, and the divided back format, which allowed more writing, was introduced in 1902, beginning the Picture Postcard Craze. Chapter 3 was mainly concerned with delineating the potential contribution of Literacy Studies, considering other approaches to vernacular writing and describing methods of data collection, organisation and approaches to analysis. A particular focus was the use of historical census records, including the DOI: 10.4324/9781003261322-7

132 Conclusions opportunities and challenges they present. In terms of findings, however, initial data analysis demonstrated that women and men were involved in writing postcards in the collection, especially women, and that the collection contains a reasonable spread of postcards across the era. A notable proportion of postcard messages mentioned sending or receiving other postcards or letters, setting up an avenue for further investigation. In Chapter 4, I took a number of different approaches to investigating facets of the postcards’ materiality and multimodality. I first examined writers’ use of space in terms of orientation and use of writing implements, two aspects of crafting one’s communication that can be difficult or close to impossible to manipulate in similar ways in digital communications such as use of social media or messaging apps. Fewer than half the postcards had the default written English orientation, that is writing from the top. The great majority of postcards were written in ink. Very few postcards in the collection contained languages other than English, but this was of course principally a consequence of the collection policy. A small proportion of cards included writing systems which might have been motivated to conceal the message from intermediaries such as the postman, or for entertainment or other reasons; these included codes, mirror writing and shorthand. A systematic study was made of a subset of 56 postcards, featuring the undivided back format. In terms of images, the overwhelming majority were topographic, but other kinds of images were present, including reproductions of artworks. However, my main focus was on more overlooked elements of multimodal assemblings. I found a variety of places and functions for publishers to impose printed text and demonstrate how analysis reveals interplay of commercial and regulatory pressures. Postmarks were used for temporal and limited spatial analysis. A thematic approach to the relationship of postcard users’ own messages and images demonstrated considerable variation into whether the image is explicitly oriented to in the user-generated text or not. Postcards were often framed as gifts, sometimes in awareness of exchange and occasionally with reference to the recipient’s collection. Occasionally, gifting is also implied through the quality of the writer’s artistic writing or drawing. The writers’ mobilities are a frequent theme, relayed as past, current or future. Mediated discourse analysis, applied in Chapter 5, as initially demonstrated in Chapter 1, revealed how semiotic resourcefulness on the part of the sender could be directed towards the addressee, presuming an understanding of social norms and cultural conventions. Aligning to or disrupting these can signal recognition of shared values and possibly dramatic breaks from the mundane. However, the majority of the chapter was focused upon Corpus Linguistics. Findings indicated that these postcards tended to be highly dialogic. Investigations of keywords such as dear and love demonstrated links with letter-writing practices, such as in salutations. Nonetheless, there are variations rather than strict formulae. Furthermore, relations to letter writing are evident not just in lexis and style but also in content in that many of the postcards in referring to letters or indeed other postcards. A high proportion of postcards were shown to be an

Conclusions  133 element in a link in what was perceptibly an almost constant chain of postal communications (and so very unlike the holiday postcards prevalent much later in the twentieth century). Chapter 6 explored the lives of three young women living in different environments in the Edwardian era. European networks of postcard production, distribution and consumption were shown to penetrate even remote rural lives as well as towns and cities.

The picture postcard in the Edwardian era There are many ways of observing the success of the postcard in the Edwardian era and its place in a changing society. Lord Stanley, in 1904, reflected on the tremendous growth of the picture postcard and its place in the overall postal landscape: The increase in the number of letters is slight; and the letters delivered in London show an actual decrease (1.52 per cent). This falling off is doubtless partly due to the stagnation in trade, and partly to the increased use of the telephone, but is also largely the result of the enormous increase in the use of pictorial postcards, which show a tendency to displace letters as well as official postcards. It will be seen that the number of postcards shows an increase of no less than 25.5 per cent …. Private postcards are now estimated to be about 77 per cent of the whole number passing through the post.1 The Postmaster General reports offer statistics on various matters, although not all of these were retained during the era; for example, they stopped recording the number of undeliverable postcards. However, what is consistently made available are the estimates as to the number of postcards successfully sent through the post, based on extrapolation from samples and the rates of increase from the previous year. A figure for the number of postcards per household is calculated, as is the presence of postcards as a proportion of postal items, so against letters, parcels, etc. See Table 7.1. So, postcard use continued to grow well after the era known as the Picture Postcard Craze and indeed after the Edwardian era. The rate of increase varied overall and different regions displayed different patterns. A substantial decrease began in the depths of the Great War, with its commensurate threats to lives of postmen, challenges to transportation, the cost of paper, and many other difficulties. In 1918 the government doubled the price for sending an inland postcard (Murray, 1927). The question of who used postcards was one of my main motivations for starting the project. Obviously, the considerable proportion of the population living in abject poverty were unable to use them, but otherwise their use straddled social class and gender. At the top of the social hierarchy, Edward VII was reported as sending them to his grandchildren, signed “Grandpapa” in 1901. Both parties were away from home at the time.2

134 Conclusions Table 7.1  Summary of postcard statistics Year

Total no. of pcs in thousands

Rate of increase

No. per home

% of postal items

1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912

400,300 419,000 444,900 488,900 613,470 734,500 800,300 831,400 858,300 860,000 866,800 871,400 905,500

4.7 4.7 6.2 9.9 25.5 19.7 9.0 3.9 3.2 0.2 0.8 0.5 3.9

9.8 10.2 10.7 11.6 14.5 17.1 18.5 19.0 19.4 19.3 19.2 19.4 20.0

10.9 11.0 11.1 11.6 14.0 16.1 16.7 16.8 16.9 17.5 17.4 16.9 16.9

Miss Mair Lloyd George 179 Trinity Road. Upper Tooting. S. W. immediate

Dear Mair Please could you let me have Mr. Merlin Morgan’s address. My auntie has wants to write to him at once. Hoping you got home safely Sunday night. With love, I remain yours etc. Enid.

Figure 7.1  Postcard 149.

I recall that Nigel Hall and I were startled, having bought Card 149, shown in Figure 7.1, as a cheap card, to discover who the addressee was. This Mair Lloyd George, a 13-year-old girl, was the daughter of David Lloyd George who was to become Prime Minister in 1916. Mair, his second child,

Conclusions  135 had been born in Criccieth but died in 1907 from peritonitis. Merlin Morgan, mentioned in the message by the impatient sender, was an arranger of songs and stage music. Postcard 2610, in Figure 7.2, was explicitly sent to be added to a collection, to a contemporary of Mair’s, Evelyn Annie Friggens, also born in 1890 and a second child of Frederick (misspelt as Fedrick in the 1901 census). Both cards speak to the friendships and values of the era, connecting to popular culture through the postcard medium itself. Yet the circumstances of the girls’ environments must have been very different: Frederick was a tin miner living with his growing family in the environs of Bojewyan, a Cornish hamlet. Evelyn died in 1909; presumably, both these postcards were in collections retained by their families in their memory. The main collection of 3,000 postcards cannot answer the question as to whether postcards were more used by women or men. It is highly likely that

Miss E. F. Higgins The Slennack Boyewyan Pendden R.S.C. Cornwall

Dear Evelyn Hope you will like this P.C. for your collection. Am having a nice time but the weather is not altogether too grand. I hope you had a jolly time at Plymouth. With love from S.A.

Figure 7.2  Postcard 2610.

136 Conclusions more postcards for business purposes were sent by men than women and that such postcards were extremely unlikely to be kept, once they had fulfilled their purpose. Given women’s dominance in the domestic sphere, it seems certain that postcard collecting was a hobby more for women than men and particularly that postcard albums were more often kept by women. Hughes (2021) wrote an excellent undergraduate dissertation on the postcard album of an ancestor, Dorothy Smedley, who was gifted a postcard album at the age of one year, in 1904. The album was filled by Dorothy over the following ten years by 283 postcards sent by and to relatives, almost half concerning holiday travel. For this book, Chapter 6 could not have been written about young men, since no such collection of cards emerged in the way that it did for the three women. Contemporary media discourses frequently displayed strong attitudes in favour or against the use of picture postcards. Probably the most forward-­looking paean to the postcard was written by a London journalist in 1907; it has since been repeated many times since its quotation by the postcard historian Staff (1979) but certainly still reads as a remarkable testimony: When the archaeologists of the thirtieth century begin to excavate the ruins of London, they will fasten upon the Picture Postcards as the best guide to the spirit of the Edwardian era. They will collect and collate thousands of these pieces of pasteboard, and they will reconstruct our age from the strange hieroglyphics and pictures that time has spared. For the Picture Postcard is a candid revelation of our pursuits and pastimes, our customs and costumes, our morals and manners…. Like all great inventions, the Picture Postcard has wrought a silent revolution in our habits. It has secretly delivered us from the toil of letter-writing. (Douglas, 1909: 377) There are many sources of evidence that the postcard continued to be regarded as a boon by many circles of society, even towards the end of the Golden Age. “The Minister’s Social Helper” was a regular feature in the Ladies’ Home Journal to suggest resources of developing “social church work.” (Interestingly, the anonymous writer, although given the silhouette of a woman, takes care to direct recommendations towards men as well as women.) In March 1909 under the heading “plans evening entertainment with the ubiquitous postcard,” the writer suggests many ways of using postcards in events simultaneously educative and entertaining. She proposes that postcards are widespread and vary in type, such as postcards from Palestine, of fine art reproduction, of zoo animals and of battlefields. Sharing postcards among a mass audience is now possible through the use of a specialised projector, a new technology she advocates. Finally, after her proposal to use postcards for social events, she suggests that clergymen could issue their own postcards tied to a particular forthcoming service, that includes its details and a specific hymn. “Five hundred people see, read and talk about this card and on Sunday evening many of them are there to take part in the singing of that hymn and to listen to the sermon of the evening” (Anonymous, 1909).

Conclusions  137 So, although Douglas as quoted above claimed that picture postcards constituted a revolutionary cultural change, he also admitted that revolutions are never universally approved. He acknowledged, “There are still some ancient purists who regarded postcards as vulgar, fit only for tradesmen….The picture postcard carries rudeness to the fullest extremity” (Douglas, 1909: 379). Interestingly, his argument suggests that he originally created his argument before the advent of the divided back, for he suggests that rudeness is created owing to the constraint of little space: “Now and then one can write on a blue sky or a white road, but, as a rule, there is no space for more than a gasp” (Douglas, 1909: 379). It was common in the Edwardian era for social commentators to deplore the effect of postcard use on standards of social behaviour. For example, “Stella,” the penname of Florrie Crossley, the journalist from the Accrington Observer who featured in Chapter 1, articulated a vivid complaint in her column, on 10 February 1906: The circulation of scurrilous and anonymous postcards has become a positive nuisance in Great Harwood. Having arrived at the conclusion that the senders are residents of the place the public officials will probably succeed in bringing the offender, or offenders, to justice. To be ducked in a pond, as one indignant lady suggested the discovered author should be, seems an altogether inadequate punishment for the abusive literacy genius who has written these objectionable missives to district councillors, doctors, and even ladies of the place. A lunatic asylum would seem the most suitable rendezvous. (R. Crossley, 2011: 131)

Comparisons with social media Similarly, the digital revolution has led to many claims of breakdowns in societal norms, of aggressive acts taken under the cover of anonymity and other apparent signs of revolutionary change. It is also feasible to make more functional comparisons between the Edwardian picture postcard and social media platforms that emerged in the twenty-first century, which themselves are frequently characterised as revolutionary. Instagram, for example, enabled the creation of a picture with a short message that could be instantly shared, and without additional costs if the baseline technology, usually a smartphone, could be accessed. Twitter is another comparator, especially since in its early days it was a textbased platform; with the option of a link through to another platform that hosted images (Gillen & Merchant, 2013). So digitisation is not necessarily the most vital characteristic of distinction between Edwardian postcards and contemporary digital technologies. Each can be approached from multiple perspectives. Bateman (2021) emphasises that the digital/non-digital dichotomy does not always lead in itself to identifying methods for comparisons; it might be useful, for example, to employ approaches to the study of film production to TikTok creations and there must be more scope for finding ways to analyse Edwardian postcards.

138 Conclusions Tagg and Lyons (2022) study mobile messaging: smartphones being used with apps such as WhatsApp and WeChat in dyadic or small group communications. This field is arguably closer in some ways to Edwardian postcard use than are social media platforms. Their theoretical constructs and methodologies touch my approaches in some ways and suggest further directions for working. For example, they too have made use of Mavers’s (2007) conception of semiotic resourcefulness as I did in Chapter 5. They have moved this onwards in a useful way to develop a notion of “mobile resourcefulness” described initially as “the ways in which people draw on available semiotic and technological resources in response to communicative demands and real-world goals” (Tagg & Lyons, 2022: 12). However, they continue by making it clear that by “mobile” here they are meaning to instantiate the smartphone specifically (Tagg & Lyons, 2022: 33, 42–43). While this is useful for their purposes, I believe that taking their above introductory description of mobile resourcefulness to deploy the mobilities lens more broadly, as I did when writing with Nigel Hall (Gillen & Hall, 2010), could be fruitful in further research comparing practices with Edwardian postcards and later digital platforms. In the intervening decades between the Edwardian picture postcard and what the digital revolution made possible, there was no equivalent way of sharing such cheap, fast, attractive short texts written in combination with an image. Communicative practices do not develop in linear trajectories. Grazia Sindoni and Moschini (2021) write, While it is true that the advent of digitality has multiplied the range and affordances of modes and resources that come into play in meaning making, it is nonetheless also true that, put in perspective, fractures in communicative practices and tools have always characterised the history of human communication as influenced – or even determined – by dynamic interactions between semiotic resources, modes available for meaning making, and technologies…. (Grazia Sindoni & Moschini, 2021: 1) So a sociomaterial approach can be used to study engagement with technologies and platforms whatever the era. Studying the picture postcard should serve to promote the dissolution of a dichotomy between “old” and “new” media, as argued by such authors as Chadwick (2017). Contemporary media forms, as those of much earlier eras, are complexities of “technologies, genres, norms, behaviors, and organizational forms – in the reflexively connected fields of media and politics” (Chadwick, 2017: 5). In Chapter 2 I mentioned the novel legal status of postcards which as a new public communication gave rise to countless court cases. I demonstrated the extent of political control over even minor characteristics of postcards, in an era when they were part of a system of communications technologies under monopoly control of an entity whose head was important enough to sit in the Cabinet, at the seat of government. In an era when social inequalities in Britain have widened again to an extent not seen since the Edwardian era (Thane, 2018),

Conclusions  139 issues of where profits on technologies go, as well as public fears and legal constraints on communications, are again major political concerns, even tied to conceptions of what a democratic society is or should be (Barrett et al., 2021).

Contribution of this book Published in 2011, that consistent innovator in bringing multimodal perspectives into linguistics, Theo van Leeuwen, was asked to summarise what he saw as likely future developments in multimodality for an applied linguistics handbook. He foresaw a continuation of his own interest in new technological platforms, arguing for example that popular software such as Microsoft Word and Powerpoint contribute strongly in their affordances to the shaping of communications. He concluded: A multimodal approach to studying technologically mediated communication, combining close attention to their built-in resources and structuring devices, as well as to the way these are used in different settings, would have much to contribute to our understanding of contemporary mediated communications. (van Leeuwen, 2011: 680) This book has demonstrated that such sociomaterial lenses can equally be applied to technologies of the past. It has helped move me in this enterprise to take a posthumanist lens to Literacy Studies in examining Edwardian picture postcards. Contemporary social media can be approached through methods taken in this book, and indeed others are available with the possibilities of, for example, interviewing writers. See for example Caroline Tagg’s (2021–2022) project, “Mobile Conversations in Context” studying practices with WhatsApp.3 A further contribution of this study is the provision of the main collection as an open-access resource in Lancaster Digital Collections, adding to primary sources for early twentieth-century history and thus the potential to further nuance understandings. Strange (2015) discusses the different kinds of sources we have for understanding the lives of non-elite Edwardians and the effects of these. Many studies have stemmed from oral history, which as she claims is inevitably a dialogue between the interviewer and interviewee (Strange, 2015: 12). Her work is based on analyses of working-class autobiographies, tending to emanate from high-achieving people who look back on the Edwardian period and their youth from a much later time point, and so she recognises the strengths but also limitation of this. Every type of source has its own particular qualities. It seems to me that postcard writing is a particular sort of performance of identity, probably most often intended to be ephemeral; knowledge that many addressees kept albums might have inflected this, although albums tended to show off the picture side and hide the message. A few cards demonstrate the pouring of a huge amount of effort into their crafting, such as card 410, reproduced in Chapter 4.

140 Conclusions I have often referred to the main collection of 3,000 cards in Lancaster Digital Collections on which this book is based. This number 3,000 is self-evidently a limitation and indeed I am, with much support, continuing to collect Edwardian picture postcards, partly through purchases and donations and also through crowdsourcing scans of postcards. Nevertheless, I hope that the main collection will be useful to others, whether interested in Literacy Studies, historical sociolinguistics, social history of the twentieth century or for other reasons. I expect that like the postcard dealer met by a request for “the gas industry” mentioned in Chapter 3, I will continue to be surprised.

Notes 1 Fiftieth report of the Postmaster General on the Post Office, 1904, p. 1. 2 Charles T. King, “Tabloid missives” Daily Mail, 28 February 1903, p. 4. 3 https://wels.open.ac.uk/research/moco (accessed 4 November 2022).

References Anonymous. (1909). The Minister’s Social Helper: plans evening entertainment with the ubiquitous post-card. Ladies’ Home Journal, 26(4), 51. Barrett, B., Dommett, K., & Kreiss, D. (2021). The capricious relationship between technology and democracy: analyzing public policy discussions in the UK and US. Policy & Internet, 13(4), 522–543. Bateman, J. A. (2021). What are digital media? Discourse, Context & Media, 41, 100502. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.DCM.2021.100502 Chadwick, A. (2017). The hybrid media system: politics and power (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. Crossley, R. A. (Ed.). (2011). Edwardian Accrington observed: a lady journalist’s contemporary account of day-to-day Accrington life 1901–1910. Thornham Local History Society. Douglas, J. (1909). Adventures in London. Cassell and Company Ltd. Gillen, J., & Hall, N. (2010). Any mermaids? Tracing early postcard mobilities. In J. Urry, M. Büscher, & K. Witchger (Eds.), Mobile methods (pp. 169–189). Routledge. Gillen, J., & Merchant, G. (2013). Contact calls: Twitter as a dialogic social and linguistic practice. Language Sciences, 35, 47–58. Grazia Sindoni, M., & Moschini, I. (2021). Discourses on discourse, shifting contexts and digital media. Discourse, Context & Media, 43, 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/J. DCM.2021.100534 Hughes, E. (2021). ‘The Letter of the Poor’: an exploration of the role of the postcard in revealing a working-class family’s identity in the early twentieth century. Lancaster University. Mavers, D. (2007). Semiotic resourcefulness: a young child’s email as design. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, 7(2), 155–176. Murray, E. (1927). The post office. G. P. Putnam’s Sons Ltd. Staff, F. (1979). The picture postcard and its origins (2nd ed.). Lutterworth Press. Strange, J.-M. (2015). Fatherhood and the British Working Class 1865-1915. Cambridge University Press.

Conclusions  141 Tagg, C., & Lyons, A. (2022). Mobile messaging and resourcefulness: a post-digital ethnography. Routledge. Thane, P. (2018). Poverty in the divided kingdom. https://www.historyandpolicy.org/ policy-papers/papers/poverty-in-the-divided-kingdom van Leeuwen, T. (2011). Multimodality. In J. Simpson (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 668–682) Routledge.

Index

Accrington 4, 137 actresses 5, 94; Dare, P. 2; Ediss, C. 71 Adams, M. 18 agriculture 3, 106, 110, 114; Great Depression 103–105 Amanti, C. 60 animals: cattle 106–107, 114–115, 117; cats 5, 110, 111, 113; dogs 113; horses 54, 106; pigs 107; sheep 106–107 Annan, T. 33 Anthony, L. 87, 100 applied linguistics 6, 42, 43, 63, 64, 65, 139 Artières, P. 59 Atkins, G. 12, 16, 44, 59 Auer, A. 13, 16 Australia 25, 33 Austria 21, 22, 74 Bakhtin, M. M. 13, 16 Barad, K. 15, 16, 64, 65, 81 Barrett, B. 139, 140 Bartlett, R. 2, 16 Barton, D. 12, 16, 41, 59, 65, 81 Bath 85, 111, 113 Bauman, R. 13, 16 Becker, B. 12, 17, 44, 59 Belfast 76, 77, 78 Bernard, Capt. 69, 81 Béroujon, A. 59, 60 Biber, D. 92, 100 bicycles 4, 34, 123, 124, 126 Blackwood, R. 64, 81 Blot, R. K. 42, 60 Booth, C. 3, 102, 104, 117, 128 Boyd, D. 113, 129 Bradley, S. 5, 17 Brandt, D. 59, 60 Brassley, P. 106–107, 128 Brennand, M. 52, 60

Brezina, V. 87, 97, 100 Briggs, C. 13, 16 British Government 3, 21, 37, 106, 133, 138 Brooks, A. 40, 44, 60 Broom, C. 36 Bruner, J. 14, 17 Burnley 102, 103 Buxton 102, 110–114 Byatt, A. 15, 17, 32–33, 36, 38, 72, 73, 74, 82, 85, 100 Cabrita, J. 59, 60 Cambridgeshire 122–124 CAQDAS (computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software) 70, 76–77 Carline, R. 3, 11, 17, 19, 21, 29, 35, 38 censuses 9–10, 13, 16, 40, 51–59, 79, 103, 105, 107, 110, 111, 114, 115, 117, 131, 135 Chartier, R. 59, 60 Chartres, J. A. 123, 128 Chatham 119–121, 126 Cherry, G. E. 5, 17, 103–104, 128 Chik, A. 17, 38, 61 Christie, E. 102 Church, R. 4, 17 churches 5, 42, 85, 105, 111, 116, 136 Clapham, D. 129 Collins, E. J. T. 3, 17, 103, 129 Collins, J. 42, 60 Comber, B. 60 Cook-Gumperz, J. 42, 60 Corkett, F. T. 1, 17 Cormack, P. 42, 60 Corpus Linguistics 6, 13–15, 84, 86–99, 132 Cowden 102 Cremin, T. 60

Index  143 Crossley, F. 4, 137 Crossley, R. A. 4, 17, 137, 140 Crow, D. 3, 17 Cure, M. 14, 17, 19, 38 cycling see bicycles databases 70–71 Dagnall, H. 15, 17, 21–22, 26–29, 37–38 Davies, M. F. 102, 129 Dearle, N. B. 102, 129 De Morgan, E. 102 Dendy Marshall, C. F. 128, 129 Dickens, C. 106, 114, 129 Digby, A. 110, 129 digital technologies 2, 5–6, 10, 11, 16, 23, 40, 64, 66, 69, 132, 137–138; see also social media Dommett, K. 140 Doron, A. 11, 17 Douglas, J. 136–137, 140 Dunn, J. 36, 38 Durston, A. 59, 60 Dyson, A. H. 59, 60 economics 20, 21, 30, 32, 52, 74, 81, 102–103, 105, 128 education 10, 12, 22, 26, 41–42, 102, 110, 114, 116 Edward VII (King) 6, 46, 80, 116, 133 Edwardian Culture Network 45 England 20, 22, 30–31, 33, 52, 68, 93, 102–128; see also Accrington; Bath; Burnley; Buxton; Cambridgeshire; Chatham; Kidderminster; Lincolnshire; Liverpool; London; Louth; Manchester; Norfolk; Oxford; Stoke on Trent ethnography 12, 40–43, 65 Fabre, D. 41, 59, 60 fine art reproductions 5, 30, 32, 33, 73, 132, 136 Finlay, M. 67–68, 82 Fischer, C. 22, 38 Fletcher, F. 60 Flowerdew, J. 86, 100 France/French 10, 11, 20, 25, 29, 41, 48, 58, 68–69, 72, 74, 76, 113 Friggens, F. 135 Frith 7, 72, 85 García, O. 63, 82 Gazeley, I. 15, 17

Georgakopoulou, A. 13, 17 Georgalou, M. 85, 100 Germany/German 1, 20–21, 33–34, 72, 73, 116 Gilderdale, P. 37, 38, 45, 60, 94, 100 Gillen, J. 6, 8, 16, 17, 26, 31, 43, 44, 45, 46, 50, 60, 63, 65, 68, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 82, 83, 87, 100, 115, 137, 138, 140 Glasgow 33, 103 Golden, C. J. 8, 17, 74, 82 González, N. 59, 60 Goodluck, H. 100 Gottschalk, Dreyfus and Davis 108 Gourvish, T. R. 103, 129 Graff, H. J. 42, 60 Grazia Sindoni, M. 138, 140 Great Britain 1, 3, 4, 6, 19, 21, 29–30, 32, 33, 36, 52, 69, 74, 85, 138 Green, B. 42, 60 Greenwell, A. 129 greetings 44, 45, 49, 85, 94, 96 Hadjicharalambous, C. 74, 82 Hafner, C. A. 17, 38, 61 Hall, K. 59, 60 Hall, N. 8, 9, 16, 17, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 48, 50, 54, 56, 59, 60, 65, 66, 68, 75, 81, 82, 104, 125, 134, 138, 140 Halliday, M.A.K. 63 Hamilton, M. 41, 54, 59, 60 Handa, T. 102 Hardie, A. 86, 90, 100 Hannavy, J. 4, 5, 17 Hartley, L.P. 3, 18 Hatchett, W. 114, 129 health 1, 94, 103, 108, 114, 115, 116 Heath, S. B. 41–42, 60 Helier, J. 72 Heller, M. 102, 117, 129 Hemmeon, J. C. 128, 129 Henniker Heaton, J. 30–32 Herrmann, E. 21 Hildesheimer, S. 73 Hook, S. 44, 60 Hopper, R. 51, 60 How, J. 20, 38 Howkins, A. 103, 129 Hughes, E. 136, 140 humour 44, 77 identity 1, 13, 45, 67, 85, 111, 113, 139 industries, industrialisation 9, 22, 36, 46, 101, 103, 107, 117, 140

144 Index India 25, 63 Ireland 3, 6, 8, 33, 45, 52, 69, 76, 77, 78, 103, 120 Italy 25, 41, 74 Jackson, T. 12, 17 Janks, H. 59, 60 Japan 33, 102 Jaworski, A. 44, 61, 62, 84, 100 Jeffrey, R. 11, 17 Jewitt, C. 64, 82 Johansson, S. 90, 91, 99, 100 Jones, R.H. 16, 17, 20, 38, 40, 61, 63, 82, 84, 85, 100 Jonsson, C. 100 Kaufhold, K. 56 Keep, C. 14, 17 Kelly, V. 2, 18 Kidderminster 9–10 Kreiss, D. 140 Kress, G. 44, 45, 61, 63, 82 Kusters, A. 63, 64, 82 Laakso, V. 44, 61 Lancaster Digital Collections 2, 16, 78, 139, 140 Lanza, E. 81 Laski, M. 51, 61 Lauder, L. A. 43, 61 Laurier, E. 44, 61 Lawton, R. 4, 18, 34, 38 Leech, G. 90, 100 Leedham, M. 100 letters 12, 16, 20–25, 27, 28, 29–32, 34, 35, 36, 50–51, 89, 92–98, 125, 127, 131, 132 Lillis, T. 12, 13, 18, 40, 43, 49, 61, 82 linguistic landscapes 44, 61, 64, 81, 87, 100 Literacy Studies (also New Literacy Studies) 6, 12, 16, 40, 41–43, 59, 63, 64, 65, 76, 81, 87, 92, 131, 139, 140 Liverpool 10, 68, 76, 80 Lloyd George, D. 134 Lockerbie 111 London 3, 4, 32, 33, 36, 37, 68, 70, 73, 74, 76, 77, 78, 80, 101, 102, 104, 107, 108, 114–117, 120, 121, 128, 133, 136 London, J. 104, 129 Lou, J. J. 64, 82 Louth 105–108 Lund, B. 60

Lyons, A. 80, 83, 138, 141 Lyons, M. 41, 61 MacDonald, S. 54, 61 McEnery, A.(T). 86, 100 Mahootian, S. 100 Malcolm, K. 12, 17, 44, 59 Manchester 10, 26, 85, 103, 110, 111 Marwick, A. E. 113, 129 Masterman, C. F. G. 123, 129 materiality 13, 15, 30, 40, 63–65, 70, 77, 81, 131, 132 Mavers, D. 86, 100, 138, 140 mediated discourse analysis 15, 63, 84–85, 132 Mendelson, J. 43, 61 Merchant, G. 70, 76, 82, 137, 140 merchant navy 10 Milligan, R. A. 115, 130 Milne, E. 14, 18 mobilities 3, 79, 131, 132, 138 Moll, L. 60 Moschini, I. 138, 140 Moss, G. 42, 61 multilingualism 63–64 multimodality 13, 15, 45, 63–65, 69–81, 84–85, 106, 132, 139 Murray, E. 133, 140 music 23, 135, 136 Newell, A. 15, 17 Nickell, J. 68, 82 Norfolk 127 Norris, S. 63, 82, 84, 85, 100 O’Hagan, L. A. 43, 61 Olsen, B. 74, 82 Östman, J.-O. 44, 61 Oxford 70, 72, 76, 77 Page, R. 98, 100 Pahl, K. 42, 43, 60, 61, 83 Palczewski, C. 43, 61 Panda, S. 82, 83 Papen, U. 42, 59, 60, 61, 82, 83 Parker, B. 5, 18 Pascalis, Moss & Co. 74 Pember Reeves, M. 37, 38 pencils 22, 68, 85 Pennycook, A. 63, 64, 82 pens 45, 67–68 Philipsborn 20, 21 Phillips, T. 12, 18, 44, 61

Index  145 photography 3, 5, 10, 30, 32–33, 36, 44, 49, 57, 71, 77, 81, 108, 117–118, 120 Pictorial Stationery Company 72 Pollen, A. 9, 18 Pooley, C. G. 4, 18, 34, 38 popular culture 2, 43, 69, 106, 135; see also actresses Porter, B. 116, 129 postcards: albums 11, 31, 43, 47–48, 51, 55, 78, 104, 127, 136, 139; collectors 3, 11, 40, 44, 46–47, 51, 55, 75; dealers 46–48, 75, 104, 121, 140; divided back 15, 34–36, 69–70, 75, 76, 131, 137; legal status 23, 131, 138; undivided back 15, 65, 67, 69–81, 111, 132; see also entries for individual publishers posthumanism 6, 12, 64–65, 77 postmarks 8, 11, 15, 44, 46, 47, 49–50, 64, 70, 71, 72, 74–76, 80, 119, 132 Postmaster General 8, 24, 28, 34, 35, 37, 49, 133 postmen 7, 8, 23, 48, 67, 69, 127, 132, 133 printers 27, 30, 33, 70, 72, 74, 115 Post Office (British) 4, 8, 15, 19–36, 65, 66, 70, 71–75, 80, 127, 128, 131 poverty 3, 103–104, 117, 133 Preston 6, 10, 14 Prochaska, D. 43, 61 Rammert, W. 14, 15, 18, 64, 65, 82 Read, D. 3, 4, 5, 18, 102, 129 Readman, P. 85, 100 Reid MacArthur, M. 101, 102, 129, 130 repertoires: communicative/semiotic 12, 64, 65 Richmond, A. 102 Rider Haggard, H. 105–107 Rogan, B. 44, 61 Rose, J. 110, 113, 129 Rowntree, S. 3, 102 Rowsell, J. 42, 43, 61 Royal Navy 117, 119, 120 Russia 25, 33 Rymes, B. 12, 18 salutations 11, 23, 51, 89, 92–93, 96, 132 Scollon, R. 63, 82, 84, 100 Scollon, S.W. 63, 82 schools see education Scotland 33, 68, 76, 113, 114, 126; see also Cowden; Dundee; Glasgow; Lockerbie

Sebba, M. 87, 100 Sergeant, A.F. 32 Short, B. 3, 18 Siegert, B. 19, 20, 21, 38, 43, 61 sign languages 63 Sinor, J. 41, 61 Smith, C. 10 Smith, G. R. 115, 130 social media 1–2, 5, 6, 8, 11, 16, 23, 65, 66, 70, 77, 85, 98, 113, 131–132, 137–139 sociolinguistics 12, 43, 63; historical sociolinguistics 12, 13, 140; sociolinguistics of writing 6, 12, 13, 43, 65 sociomaterialism 138, 139 Spain 25, 41 Spear, S. 129 Spotti, M. 82 Staff, F. 15, 18, 20, 21, 39, 136, 140 stamps 6, 11, 15, 20, 21, 24–30, 34–36, 46, 47, 74, 131 Stengel & Co. 33 Stephenson, A. 2, 18 Stevens, N. D. 43, 61 Stewart, J. 129 Stoke-on-Trent 3 Strange, J.-M. 14, 18, 139, 140 Street, B. V. 12, 18, 42, 62 suburbs 4–5, 104 Sutherland, G. 102, 124, 130 Swansea 6–10 Swanwick, R. 82 Switzerland 21 Tagg, C. 80, 83, 138, 141 Tapio, E. 82 telegraph 36 telephones 4, 22, 36, 51, 133 Teulié, G. 5, 18 Thane, P. 138, 141 Thompson, P. R. 3, 9, 18, 85, 100, 102, 103, 130 Thurlow, C. 43, 62 Tilley, J. 22, 26, 27, 28 transcription 6, 8–10, 40, 48–49, 52, 54, 56, 87, 121 transport 4, 37, 103, 120; aeroplanes 4; balloons 4; buses 3, 4, 31; horsedrawn vehicles 37, 106; motor vehicles 4, 81, 111; trams 4, 81; see also bicycles; merchant navy; railways; Royal Navy Tuck, R. 32–33, 72 Tuckwell, G. M. 116, 130

146 Index Turnbull, J. 18 Twiner, A. 100 United Kingdom 6, 25, 30, 35; see also Great Britain; Ireland Unwin, R. 5, 18 United States of America/American English 72, 90, 91 Universal Postal Union 8, 31 urbanisation 3, 103 Valentine, J. 32, 72 van Leeuwen, T. 63, 64, 65, 82, 83, 139, 141 Victoria (Queen) 32, 34 Victorian era 3, 4, 5, 19, 21–32, 36, 74, 85, 101–103, 107, 110 Vincent, D. 22, 39 Voloshinov, V. N. 18 von Stephan, H. 20–21, 31 Wales/Welsh 48, 52, 68, 76, 103, 106; see also Swansea Walton, J. R. 105, 130 Wars 41; Great/First World 3, 37, 44, 57, 58, 116, 127, 133; Second World 127; South African 3, 47 Watts, R. J. 16

Wei, L. 63, 83 Weill-Tessier, P. 100 White, I. 54, 62 Whyte, A. 44, 61 Wild, J. 4, 18 Wilhelm II, (Kaiser) 116 Wilson, A. 11, 12, 18, 45, 62 Wingham, M. 35, 39 Wohlwend, K. E. 63, 83 Woldemariam, H. 81 Wollaeger, M. 43, 62 women’s suffrage movement 53–54, 101–102 Wrench, J. E. 33–34, 39, 71 Wright, A. 3, 18 writing: handwriting 26, 29, 48, 51, 54, 68, 69, 85, 108, 113, 120; implements 45, 64, 65, 67–68; orientation 36, 66–67, 78; practices 22, 23, 36, 40–42, 48–51, 79, 137; skills 22, 42, 48; systems 64, 68–69, 132 Ylänne-McEwe, V. 62 Zappavigna, M. 16, 18, 113, 130 Zeshan, U. 63, 82, 83 Zhao, S. 16, 18