Similar, then, to calling cards, which were popular in the 1800s
A bit, though more often like "Can’t make Tuesday, how about Wednesday?’
Thinking back, it must have been a Holmes fan who wrote the “Sherlock Hemlock” sketch on Sesame Street where he has only five minutes to deliver an urgent message across town and tries flagging down a passing jogger to do the job. (Of course SH then realizes with seconds left that there was a pay phone behind him the whole time.)
A major scandal in the Jackson administration involved the wife of Jackson’s Secretary of War, who was considered unladylike. The wives of other Cabinet members would not call on her - and when she called on them, they were “not in.” Jackson (whose beloved wife had also been the victim of similar shunning) was outraged by this, leading to a major reshuffle of the Cabinet, and selection of van Buren (the one member of Cabinet who did not shun the wife of the War Secretary) as Jackson’s successor.
"James Parton, in the 1860s, would famously state that “the political history of the United States for the last thirty years dates from the moment when the soft hand of Mr. Van Buren touched Mrs. Eaton’s knocker” (her door-knocker, you!)
Pretty sure this would have been my life. It seems like the only thing for upper class women to do in those days was obsess over their social status and throw parties, which for me would have been a right nightmare.
Most commercial offices had at least one messenger on staff — usually, but not always,a boy. Jerry Cruncher, a bank messenger, is a signficant character in A Tale of Two Cities, which admittedly is set in the late 18th century, but he would be just as credible in a nineteenth century setting.
Me too.
I’m watching the “Gilded age” on HBO.
It’s the equivalent of Downton Abbey in America(in fact developed/written by Julian Fellowes).
I could never have managed that life. Their letters, cards, invitations alone would’ve done me in.
Maybe below stairs.
The Wife in Downtown Abbey, as you may recall, is an American. As was Winston Churchill’s mother. Part of the attraction for rich American women was that the structured, class ridden, life of the English Aristocracy, was so much looser and freer than the straight-jacket of upper-class NYC.
Oh they could get up to a lot of mischief. Alice Longworth Roosevelt, thirty five years old, not allowed to legally vote, still made the rounds in Washington DC and killed the US’s entry into the League of Nations
Even in wartime London, my mother had three mail deliveries a day. She could mail a letter in the morning, and it would be received that afternoon (within London). And before planes took over, you could post a letter in London in the afternoon, and it could be delivered next morning in Northern/Ireland. Irish Mail - Wikipedia
I was a summer substitute carrier in 1970. Real carriers had trucks, but they didn’t trust me with one. I used a rolling mail bag or a shoulder bag, but I picked up mail in relay boxes (those black or dark green things without slots) which I had a key for. Those were put close enough together so that I could carry what was in it in a shoulder bag.
One delivery a day, though I think businesses might have gotten more directly from the office, since they might have a lot of volume. This was in outer Queens county, NY.
I was a messenger for an accounting company in NY the summer of 1969. It would be a bicycle messenger today, but back then the subway was so cheap it paid to take it. I walked to close by offices. I mostly carried contracts and records, things that would be faxed a bit later or emailed today.
One of my school friends was a delivery boy in 1977. He walked between city locations carrying jewelry and loose diamonds, between the jewel stores and the independent contractors who did the diamond setting. He would have been about 18, so I guess they wanted a cheap ‘responsible adult’. Quit that job to become a nurse.
My father’s first “office boy” job was to walk the 10 minutes or so from the office to the bank, pick up the payroll (in cash), and walk back. Never had a problem (or course - this was in the late 1930s).
Before the telephone, almost everyone lived rurally or in villages and small towns. The world moved much more slowly. The post came once or twice a day, in England, but this was exceptional. If you were a typical citizen, you probably didn’t know anyone outside a few hours walk or ride, and rarely if ever would you need to communicate anything that wouldn’t wait until a gathering. Remember that virtually everyone went to church on Sundays. Market days, work parties like harvests and quilting bees, etc. gathered the whole community and were common.
If you had a servant or hired man, you could send him with a letter or a verbal message. Or you could go yourself, with an urgent message. It wouldn’t be something like Tuesday won’t work, it would be more like If you want to say last words to Aunt Hazel.
Time was different. Now we think everything has to happen as soon as we think of it. That’s not how it was.
The historical reenactment TV series The 1900 House from 1999 set up a family in London’s Charlton neighborhood to live for three months as a family from the year 1900 would. It’s a fun little 4-hour proto-reality-show that spends the first hour as a This Old House style program where they find the right home, source period fixtures and appliances, and restore it to the period in full working order. The rest of the time chronicle’s the family’s experiences, and I highly recommend it.
Anyway, Charlton was at the time the suburbs, though it’s pretty urban by today’s standards with attached row houses on narrow deep lots. The narrator for the US version of the program states that mail pickup and delivery was three times a day, similar to US cities. I don’t know how thoroughly researched that statistic is, but based on the previous comments that sounds reasonable for a middle class residential district where there was still a decent need for correspondence, but you were unlikely to have a servant or a street boy that could spare the time and expense to hop on the nearest trolley and take your message across town.
I think this is a vast oversimplification. The telephone began to be widely used commercially in the 1880s. By that time, Western countries had already undergone decades of rapid industrialisation and urbanisation, and communication networks in the form of railroads, telegraph lines and the mail were expanding. A system of time zones was emerging that standardised clocks to a precision of seconds. It’s not as if mid-to-late 19th century life was still the pastoral idyll that had characterised human life for millennia before.
In 1880, 72% of the US population lived on farms. Approximately .1% of households had telephones. These would have been large businesses in major cities, and perhaps the extremely wealthy.
In one of the PG Woodhouse semi-autobiograpies (Woodhouse never met a story he didn’t like) there is an anecdote about visiting another writer (Guy Bolton?) In his fifth-floor walkup in London, and seeing Guy seal and address a letter and throw it out the window. When asked why he said the honest hardworking Londoner who found it would hasten it to the nearest post box, and it was a lot faster than walking it down the stairs.
Wodehouse had Bolton test the process by sending him a note the next day, and he received it hand-delivered within an hour of defenestration. That is, the stranger who picked up the letter took it directly to the destination. Wodehouse said the man declined a tip but accepted a drink.
If you’re taking this from the 28% urbanization figure from Wikipedia, then no, this is not correct. The definition of urban population in this census was based on places with a population of more than 8000: Source. That means that the non-urban part of the population is not just those living on a farm; it included a lot of small-town residents as well.
I’m not disputing this. The point of my post you were responding to was that even before the widespread adoption of telephones, communication in the form of railroads, telegraphs and mail existed.