Note 92 — Chapter I · CONCEPTION OF MY PLAN. CHIEFLY 1836.

In Sir R. Hill’s Pamphlet on “Post Office Reform,” (Third Edition, p. 86), is the following passage:—

“Coleridge tells a story which shows how much the Post Office is open to fraud in consequence of the option which now exists. The story is as follows. ‘One day, when I had not a shilling which I could spare, I was passing by a cottage not far from Keswick, where a letter-carrier was demanding a shilling for a letter, which the woman of the house appeared unwilling to pay, and at last declined to take. I paid the postage, and when the man was out of sight, she told me that the letter was from her son, who took that means of letting her know that he was well; the letter was not to be paid for. It was then opened and found to be blank!” (“Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. Coleridge,” Vol. II., p. 114).

In Miss Martineau’s “History of England During the Thirty Years’ Peace,” which was published thirteen years after “Post Office Reform,” this story appears in the following shape:—

“Mr. Rowland Hill, when a young man, was walking through the Lake District, when he one day saw the postman deliver a letter to a woman at a cottage door. The woman turned it over and examined it, and then returned it, saying that she could not pay the postage, which was a shilling. Hearing that the letter was from her brother, Mr. Hill paid the postage, in spite of the manifest unwillingness of the woman. As soon as the postman was out of sight, she showed Mr. Hill how his money had been wasted, as far as she was concerned. The sheet was blank. There was an agreement between her brother and herself, that as long as all went well with him, he should send a blank sheet in this way once a quarter, and she thus had tidings of him without expense of postage. Most people would have remembered this incident as a curious story to tell; but Mr. Hill’s was a mind which wakened up at once to a sense of the significance of the fact. There must be something wrong in a system which drove a brother and sister to cheating, in order to gratify their desire to hear of one another’s welfare, &c.” Vol. II., p. 425.

A few years ago Sir R. Hill drew my attention to the blunder into which Miss Martineau had fallen. The following is my note of what he said:—“He remarked on her carelessness, and the trouble it had cost him. He had sent her, on her application, his pamphlet. She read it carelessly. The story Miss Martineau tells is, in the pamphlet, told of Coleridge. He (Sir R. Hill) had been attacked in some of the papers for taking credit to himself for charity. Cornewall Lewis asked him one day whether he had seen an attack on him in ‘Notes and Queries.’ On his answering ‘No,’ he showed it him, and undertook to answer it himself. The story was so believed and amplified, that a friend of his, when travelling in the Lake District, was shown the very room in an inn where Rowland Hill had first thought of penny postage.”

I am informed that two old ladies who lived in No. 1, Orme Square, Bayswater, used to show to their friends the room in which Rowland Hill devised Penny Postage, though he only took that house in 1839, a few months before the Penny Postage Act was passed.—Ed.