Let’s say it’s London, 1850, and I need to speak to Mr. Farthingsteadshaw forthwith. If I’ve learned anything from TV and movies, it behooves me to “send for” him. But what does that mean? Do I just find a street urchin, hope he knows his way around London well enough to find my quarry’s address, and tip him a shilling? Were there companies that offered this as a service?
I would recommend posting a letter and hoping that the postmaster was familiar with the recipient. You might also post a classified ad in one of the newspapers addressed to the person.
One so directs one’s servant, who then does whatever it may require to fulfill this duty, upon pain of immediate firing and disgrace.
There were several post deliveries per day in Victorian London. There was also the telegram option, which could be sent within London and would be delivered immediately by a telegram boy.
(Based on my extensive reading of Holmes. In one, Watson even comments that Holmes would send telegrams when it was quicker just to walk to the individual’s residence.)
In those days, mail was collected/delivered up to 12 times a day, so sending
him a letter would be fairly quick.
eta. ninjad. bloody typical.
By 1850, a city like London would be covered by a directory. Those were printed books, compiled and marketed commercially, with the postal addresses of upper-class and otherwise notable residents. To this day, they’re a valuable source for genealogists.
I assume then the telegraph office was closer.
Thank you for confirming my long-ago memory!
Remember, London was the commercial capital of the Empire. Businesses always want the quickest possible communication, so multiple post deliveries per day was the cutting edge of communications technology. That government service was very valuable to the commercial world.
Were there couriers back then (bike messengers are probably the common version today) if you wanted something to go even faster?
E.G. Hand the letter to some person whose sole goal was to arrow as fast as possible to the recipient? I’d think the government and well off would want that.
Inclusive of murder? 
Sounds likely, but no idea.
One doesn’t interfere with how the help performs their tasks.
Holmes had a page named Billy. Mentioned in a few stories at least.
ETA. Well, I looked it up. Billy wasn’t in the original series. Just plays and movies. He embodied some of the characteristics of the Baker Street Irregulars.
"Mayhew, in his discussion of errand runners, actually provided an underestimate of their number, suggesting that England and Wales as a whole contained a total of 24,205 male porters, messengers and errand boys and that about a fifth ‘were lads under 20 years of age.’ In fact, the 1851 census disclosed a total of 88,950 of which 59 per cent were aged below 20.
I suspect all you had to do was open a window and yell, “Hey boy!”
Correct- mail was very fast, a telegraph was even faster and there were messenger services.
Yes. In fact if you were well off you’d have many servants, and one of them would have the job of delivering messages, or at least trotting one over to a messenger service or the Post or the telegraph office.
Likely if the message was important, you’d have a better job of getting someone’s attention than you would now. (I know people who dont answer their telephone).
To be precise, Billy appeared in The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone. Although that is unusual, as Doyle originally wrote it as a one-act play before adapting it in text. He’s part of the canon, though.
If you were a person of consequence you had servants, and one of them, possibly the boy who ran messages and did odd-jobs, would be ushered off with a note.
If you wanted to signal that this was urgent and important, you would send a senior (male) servant. You could dismiss a runner / boy / lackey, but someone at butler level was as good as the man himself standing in the doorway.
Huh. Ignorance fought.
I wonder if that would have been the case in, say, New York or Boston in those days.
I’m reminded of the old saying: in America, the Post Office delivers the mail, and in the UK, the Royal Mail delivers the post.
Although “the city” (offices) had multiple post deliveries, I’ve never read anything suggesting that the “suburbs” (for example, the real address of the fictional Sherlock) had anything other than daily deliveries (although collections from the “post boxes” would be more frequent.)
You might wonder what the point of collecting from the post boxes would be, but remember that it was all collected and sorted by hand, plus of course the city delivery would be 3 or 4 times a day.
By the way, in Paris, if you were sending a note to a home in the inner suburbs, you would send a “small blue” – a petit bleu, a card sent by the pneumatic post system and delivered by a postal boy. It was a torn-up bleu that eventually implicated Esterhazy in the Dreyfus affair. There was eventually around 300 miles of pneumatic tube, and it avoided the process of encoding/decoding for telegraph transmission.
When i was a child, in a random US suburb, the mail was collected 3-4 times each day from mail boxes. It was printed on each box when mail would be picked up.
And the mail boat came twice daily to the island where i vacationed.