The private letters exchanged between Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett provide a dramatic contrast to the open letters discussed in Part I, the tone of which tends to reflect the robust nature of the political debates associated with three public scandals. The confidential letters exchanged between two highly gifted and sensitive poets explore themes, such as liminality, and contain symbols, such as those of sight and blindness, of a kind that also features in their poetry. These letters are intimate, focused and exclusive, gradually relaxing in style as mutual trust grows between the lovers and a long series of nuanced exchanges establishes a private set of shared associations and references. All this is made possible through the security of the uniform penny post that was so fiercely defended during the Mazzini scandal. References to the mechanics of letter writing, descriptions of the rooms in which the writers sit and references to delays in the delivery of letters ground the correspondence in the material culture of the day, enhancing a sense of immediacy and sometimes of synchrony.

At the beginning of 1845 members of parliament and newspaper leader writers celebrated the inventiveness and prosperity of Britain while also acknowledging that the ‘Condition of England Question’ cast a long shadow: ‘The people deteriorate.’ Leading writers such as Carlyle and Disraeli explored this question in their writings, often drawing upon documentary evidence in open letters to the newspapers or pamphlets framed as ‘letters’. Private letters also proliferated. Although leading figures in public life had secretaries who either wrote their employers’ letters to dictation or transcribed them in letter or copy books, senior professionals such as judges, generals, bishops and ministers of state, including prime ministers, generally wrote several letters each day, using a dip pen and inkstand while resting their paper – often a quarto sheet folded once – on a desk or table, or on a portable writing ‘slope’ or ‘desk’ when travelling. The letters of Augustus Welby Pugin and Edward FitzGerald provide examples of correspondence binding together communities of friends and colleagues through the universal penny post.

At the start of the Victorian period, the General Post Office began to reinvent itself: from a revenue-raising state department to a public service, an institution vital to the nation’s material, intellectual, and moral development. This chapter argues that the 1830s campaign for postal reform, and the changes to the postal service it prompted in the following decades, ought to be understood in reciprocal relation to the operations and ideologies of other literary institutions – and to the institution of literature more broadly conceived.

The essay pursues two lines of enquiry: first, it seeks to demonstrate how changing Post Office regulations and policies – especially the reduction of postage in 1840 and introduction of the book post in 1858 – shaped literary production, consumption, and circulation, contributing to an apparent democratisation of the literary public sphere. Second, it examines the significance of literary idea(l)s to the Post Office’s institutional culture. Drawing on a range of materials, including postal reform propaganda, Post Office records, and (largely non-canonical) poetry about the penny post, the chapter argues that early Victorian writers worked to create the impression that the Post Office, by facilitating affective, economic, and cultural connection, performed a cultural work analogous to that of literature.