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The official QI Twitter account (@qikipedia) today said the following:

If you sent a letter in 19th century London you could expect a reply within 2 hours

Is there any merit to this claim?

unor
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Nzall
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3 Answers3

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I interpret the claim to not be about how responsive a particular recipient could be, but to be about how long it took to deliver a letter, and how often this service ran. i.e. if the recipient was attentive, and quick to respond, how long would it take for a response to be delivered?

The Dictionary of Victorian London includes a number of quotes from contemporary sources about the London Postal service.

One source from 1844 shows that there are seven deliveries daily "in town", and they were collected every two hours:

Morning by eight o'clock, for the second delivery. Morning by ten o'clock, for the third delivery. Morning by twelve o'clock, for the fourth delivery. Afternoon by two o'clock, for the fifth delivery. Afternoon by four o'clock, for the sixth delivery. Afternoon by six o'clock, for the seventh delivery.

A source from 1879 shows it varied by postal district:

London is divided into 8 postal districts, in which the number of deliveries varies from 12 to 6 daily, between 7.30 a.m. and 7.45 p.m.

Again, collections occurred every couple of hours:

Take care to post before ¼ to 8, 10, 12, and 2, 4, 6, 8, in one of the Iron Pillar Boxes (first erected 1855) on the kerb stones of the leading thoroughfares.

This doesn't show that the letters would be delivered quickly, just that they were collected and delivered frequently. There may still be a large "lag".

A source from 1879 shows:

the third delivery in [Eastern Central District] [...] is made at about 10 a.m., and includes the letters collected in London generally at 8.45 a.m [...]

This shows that a lag of a little over an hour is expected. It seemed to get better later in the day (as they got over the backlog of the overnight deliveries):

The next nine deliveries are made in every district hourly, and include all letters reaching the General Post Office or the district offices in time for each despatch.

In summary, while it depended on the year and the region, once could expect to receive mail every hour or two, with a lag of around an hour or so. This doesn't support the idea that a response might be typically expected within two hours, but it does suggest that such response times would be sometimes possible on a good day.

Oddthinking
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    I should try reading Twitter this way – Avery May 23 '17 at 14:58
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    Terry Pratchett obviously borrowed heavily from the Victorian Post Office's regulations when writing Going Postal; as all of the quotes in your answer seemed eerily familiar. – GeoffAtkins May 23 '17 at 15:22
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    That mail system was actually better than some current-day email services. – T. Sar May 23 '17 at 18:00
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    This data actually suggests that a 2 hour turnaround time is not possible. It appears that mail is collected/delivered approximately every 2 hours. If I hand my letter to the mail carrier as he arrives, it will take about 2 hours to arrive at the recipient. Unless he writes a response on the spot, he'll have wait another 2 hours to mail the reply, which will take another 2 hours to deliver. So, the minimum expected time to receive a reply is closer to 6 hours, not 2. Including the time needed to write a reply, one requires three cycles of dropoff/pickup, however long they may be. – Nuclear Hoagie May 23 '17 at 19:28
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    @NuclearWang you don't hand mail to the mail carrier and note the comment in the answer after A source from 1879 giving an example of under 2 hours – mmmmmm May 23 '17 at 19:53
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    @Mark - I only mention handing the letter to the mail carrier because it minimizes the wait time. You could of course leave it in the mailbox, but would then have to wait additional time between "mailing" the letter and actually having it go somewhere. And unless mail is delivered every 40 minutes, you're still not hitting the 2 hour mark stated by the OP. – Nuclear Hoagie May 23 '17 at 20:07
  • @NuclearWang: I largely agree. I think the claim is essentially wrong because - based on these figures - you couldn't *expect* to get a response in two hours. But if someone is responding to a pre-addressed RSVP - e.g. zero turn-around - it is feasible it *might* happen when the timings lined up perfectly. – Oddthinking May 24 '17 at 02:08
  • I would point out that this falsifies the claim, at least for any of the districts you were able to site. Since all your quotes suggest more then an hour from letter completion to delivery time, and even an instantaneous reply would have to be relayed back again. Two relay trips (to and from) of each more then an hour means that a response within two hours isn't possible no matter how responsive the receiver was. – dsollen May 24 '17 at 16:10
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    @dsollen: Again, I largely agree. "This doesn't support the idea that a response might be expected within two hours" However, if the winds were aligned, you might be one of the earlier people in delivery, and get a letter in less than an hour, it might sometimes happen. Further, even if it fails to be technically true, it validates the surprising idea that in an era before the motor car, postal delivery times were much faster than today. – Oddthinking May 24 '17 at 17:11
  • The original comment says "you *could* expect", meaning it was possible, depending on the recipient and the culture of the time. That shouldn't be misread as *should* expect. – Django Reinhardt May 25 '17 at 14:43
  • @DjangoReinhardt: I have to admit I didn't quite follow that. I don't *think* I have misinterpreted it, but if I have, I need further explanation, sorry. – Oddthinking May 26 '17 at 06:00
  • Quote: "This doesn't support the idea that a response might be *expected* within two hours, but it does suggest that such response times would be feasible on a good day." It seems to imply that you read the original statement as someone should *expect* a response in that time, and so therefore there is something incorrect about it, when really it's only suggesting the second half of your statement. Does that make any more sense? In short: It seems your research supports the possibility of the statement being true. – Django Reinhardt May 26 '17 at 10:57
  • @DjangoReinhardt I *could* expect it in five minutes. I would be wrong every time, but I could still keep on doing it... taking the op's quote literally to the letter even feasibility is irrelevant. – Rick May 26 '17 at 16:14
  • @DjangoReinhardt No, "You can expect X" means exactly the same thing as "you expect X". You seem to think it means "You expect possibly X", which is a contradiction in terms. – David Richerby May 28 '17 at 17:03
  • @NuclearWang Even your six hours seems optimistic, as you've not allowed any time for the mail to be sorted. – David Richerby May 28 '17 at 17:04
  • @DavidRicherby: The answer tries to address that - it appears local mail can be collected, sorted, and delivered in under 1hr 15m. – Oddthinking May 28 '17 at 17:10
  • @DavidRicherby Your point makes little sense in relation to mine. Consider: "When travelling through a major British city in the 1980s, you could expect to see young people dressed as 'punks'" vs "When travelling through a major British city in the 1980s, it was guaranteed you would see young people dressed as 'punks'". – Django Reinhardt May 30 '17 at 09:50
  • @DjangoReinhardt There is no difference in meaning between "you could expect to see punks" and "you expected to see punks". "You could expect" doesn't mean "maybe you'd expect; maybe you wouldn't." – David Richerby May 30 '17 at 09:59
  • @DavidRicherby We're not talking about tense. Also, if you think "possibly expect" is an oxymoron, you might be confused about the definition of "expect". – Django Reinhardt May 30 '17 at 10:00
  • @DjangoReinhardt I haven't said anything that suggests we're talking about tense. In particular, I've drifted between "could expect" and "can expect", precisely _because_ the tense is irrelevant. – David Richerby May 30 '17 at 10:06
  • Things to have gotten lost here. My point is that the sentence is contradictory: *"This doesn't support the idea that a response might be expected within two hours, but it does suggest that such response times would be feasible on a good day"*. An expectation is nothing more than a belief. So, given that "such response times would be feasible on a good day", a person might well believe they could get a reply within two hours. – Django Reinhardt May 30 '17 at 10:19
  • @DjangoReinhardt: I think we are agreeing on the facts, but disagreeing on definitions of terms. Obviously, an unrealistic person *could* expect to get an answer within 5 seconds, but that makes the claim almost tautological. I am reading "could expect" to mean within a typical or common range of outcomes. I am interpreting the evidence to suggest a 2 hour response time wouldn't be common, but might be an occasional outlier. – Oddthinking May 30 '17 at 11:29
  • @Oddthinking I think this is what's confusing me about what you've written. You say it's "feasible", which means "possible and practical to do easily or conveniently" -- which is precisely how I read the original claim. I read it like I would this: "In the 20th century a sender of an electronic mail could expect a response within minutes." It emphasises what's important about the claim without making it unrealistic. Even though 99.9% of emails I send do not get a reply so quickly, it's not unreasonable to say this as a way of explaining the speed of the technology to someone from another era. – Django Reinhardt May 30 '17 at 13:12
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    @Django: Interesting. You also interpret the (also fuzzy) term "feasible" differently to me. The dictionary I checked agrees with you. I have made some subtle changes to the language to hopefully make it less unclear. What do you think? (Happy to see a counter-edit if you are unhappy.) – Oddthinking May 30 '17 at 14:14
  • @Oddthinking I think the addition of the word "typically" is what has made it clearer for me. Cheers. – Django Reinhardt May 30 '17 at 16:47
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In the 1850s, the postal system was reformed. From that time until WWI, there were twelve deliveries per day in London:

In order to improve the London system, the separate corps of letter-carriers who delivered the General and District mail were consolidated, there were twelve hourly deliveries per day, and ten separate postal districts were created (Daunton, Royal Mail, 46).
Letters in London: Communication and correspondence in the nineteenth-century city

People did expect fast replies, but it often took longer than two hours:

Victorians expected that a letter might arrive two to three hours after posting, although to the dismay of many patrons, it often took eight to nine hours (still far speedier than mail service today).
Posting it: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing

Laurel
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    Do you know if the Post Office discouraged or forbade any sort of gratuities? If it didn't, I would think it plausible that some people could get extremely good mail service. If a postman delivers one side of all the roads in his route in one direction, and then does the other side going in the reverse direction, and Y was "downstream" of X in the forward direction, X might send a letter to Y and have it delivered in the same cycle. Y might then offer an incentive for the postman to cross the street to receive a reply while delivering the opposite side's mail. – supercat May 23 '17 at 16:46
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    If you were coresponding with someone on the same street, in the days before telephone, you would send a private runner, not use the post. – JDługosz May 23 '17 at 20:51
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    @JDługosz why not walk there personally in that case? – John Dvorak May 24 '17 at 09:53
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    @JanDvorak Most people using the post back then would have had servants to carry out menial tasks like that. And post carried an element of formality. Walking round implies that you are sufficiently close as to expect to be allowed an audience without notice. In Victorian times, that's a *very* close friend. – Graham May 24 '17 at 12:45
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    @JanDvorak because you’re going through a pile of business, not dropping everything do deliver one note. – JDługosz May 24 '17 at 18:11
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From the Oxford English Dictionary, the origin of the expression "by return of post":

By return of post (F. par retour du courrier): orig. by return of the 'post' or courier who brought the dispatch (obs.); now, by the next mail in the opposite direction.

This certainly suggests that if an urgent reply was requested, one would mark the envelope as such and the messenger would wait for you to write the response immediately. In such cases, a 2 hour delay would depend on the distance (London was about 5 miles across in 1850, based on this map). As other answers explained, conventional mail deliveries happened all day long - obviously the point there was that one would want to minimize the delay for getting letters delivered from when they were written. That doesn't prove that everyone would respond immediately to every letter that came in - again, unless it was marked to indicate that an immediate response was required.

Urgent letters would be marked with "haste, post, haste" - this is the origin of the expression "post haste":

1590s, from a noun (1530s) meaning "great speed," usually said to be from "post haste" instruction formerly written on letters (attested from 1530s), from post (adv.) + haste (n.). The verb post "to ride or travel with great speed" is recorded from 1550s.

Such marking would usually invite a rapid delivery, and quick reply.

Floris
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    This is wrong and completely unrelated. The **normal, ordinary** post service ("dropping letters in to your box" - no connection whatsoever to courier delivery, individual messenger service, etc) was (surprisingly) incredibly better in that era than today. – Fattie May 27 '17 at 15:24
  • @Fattie except that the mail man came to your house several times a day and would "by return of post" come back to pick up letters as well. Yes you could drop them into a box - no you didn't have to. Just as even today the mail in the US is picked up from the mail box (while you can take the mail to a dedicated letter box you don't have to). This continued past the time of dedicated (point to point) couriers. – Floris May 27 '17 at 15:42
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    "one would mark the envelope as such and the ***messenger*** would..." this QA has nothing to do with messengers, it is about the Royal Mail. – Fattie May 27 '17 at 15:48
  • @Floris But the definition you quote is about a courier coming to your house, giving you a letter and waiting there while you wrote your reply. Sure, the postman would pick up any letters you'd written, but wouldn't stand there waiting for you to reply to a letter that he'd just given you: his job was to provide service to your whole district, not just to you. – David Richerby May 28 '17 at 16:59