B efore the introduction of stamps, the recipient of a letter was required to pay for post in cash on the doorstep. “There was only one type of prepaid mail and that was if you were a Member of Parliament,” explains Bob Scott, Sotheby’s stamps consultant. “Or even a friend of a Member of Parliament, because [the privilege] was abused so badly.”
Following a campaign by a coalition of merchants and politicians, Parliament passed the Postage Reform Act of 1839 and – at the suggestion of a Birmingham school teacher and social reformer named Rowland Hill – the introduction the following year of a pre-paid postal system. Pasted on the back with gum arabic, the lick-and-stick Penny Black – featuring the profile of a young Queen Victoria – was a revolution in popular and affordable communication, as profound as the first electrical telegraph or the first email.
The May 2 Penny Black was mailed by an unknown hand from London, stuck to the reversed inside of another innovation, a pre-paid sheet designed by the Irish painter William Mulready – illustrated with winged messengers being despatched by Britannia – that could act as a ready-to-send envelope. Both the Penny Black and the ‘Penny Mulready’ were only officially valid from May 6 1840, meaning that the May 2 Penny Black unaccountably entered the postal system four days early. It should not officially exist.
The recipient of this premature double curiosity was William Blenkinsop, the manager of an iron works in Bedlington in the North of England. On receipt, William read the letter inside and promptly turned the prepaid envelope sheet inside out and sent it on to his father in Carlisle. The motivation for the entire enterprise is lost to time. But clues have emerged. “When I started working on this, most of the information that was known was about the cover. But nothing was known about the family, so I dug up the Blenkinsops and I found out who they were. Because there was a story going round that it was sent to a guy who’d been dead for nine years and that’s why it was forwarded. Rubbish.”
"There was a story going round that it was sent to a guy who’d been dead for nine years and that’s why it was forwarded. Rubbish."
Scott believes the initial sender was William’s brother, John, who lived in Southern England. “I have a sneaking suspicion that they might have known a clerk in the post office because they weren’t supposed to accept the stamps until the 6 May,” says Scott. The mischievous combination of stamp and envelope hints at the whimsical character of the Blenkinsop family. “One imagines what was in the letter: ‘Here’s one of the new stamps and one of the illustrated envelopes, what I want you to do is turn it inside out and send it across to dad’.”
The Blenkinsops could be viewed as the Victorian predecessors of today’s technophiles who stand outside Apple stores at dawn waiting to pounce on the latest iPhone. “It’s exactly that,” Scott agrees. “It’s queuing up for the January sales.”
Potential buyers for this unique piece of postal history might include prominent philatelists or collectors of momentous items from the timeline of human correspondence, notes Ella Hall, Sotheby’s specialist in charge of the sale. “We feel strongly that it has an important position in this chronology of the modernisation of communication and how exponentially easier it has gotten over time to connect with family, friends, business associates and loved ones.”
The arrival of postage stamps coincided with other social changes which, collectively, altered the way the public connected with one another. “The enormous rise in the volume of mail could not be put down to simply an increase in commerce,” says Scott. “Better wages and higher literacy rates certainly provided the means for greater personal correspondence. It was, however, the establishment of the working week and the creation of ‘leisure’ time that provided the general population with the opportunity to read and write.”
Today, in the era of digital communication, the future of stamps is uncertain. We are more likely to stick one on an Etsy parcel than a love letter. And at the time of writing, Britain is wrestling with the prospect of its postal service permanently cutting deliveries to just three days a week. So, is it feasible then that Sotheby’s might one day be selling the last stamp ever sent? “With time, I think yes, probably,” says Ella Hall. Or, she adds, perhaps stamps will retain the tactile vintage appeal of vinyl records and be used by a few dedicated hipster philatelists.
“For the first time in history an entire nation of over eight million people, more than half of whom were literate, could now correspond – for the price of a penny.”
Scott is pragmatic. “We’re probably no more than a couple of decades away from the phasing out of stamps in some countries. You can pre-pay everything with your phone now if you want to. So why would you bother with funny little labels?” Of course, he reflects, the Blenkinsops’ “funny little label” celebrates a decisive moment when “for the first time in history an entire nation of over eight million people, more than half of whom were literate, could now correspond, exchange ideas, forward news, and ask questions – for the price of a penny.”
