The Victorian art of correspondence - by guest author Alison D Stegert with resources

 

Mobile phones, FaceTime, WhatsApp, social media… It’s hard to imagine the world without instant communications, but if you ask any older person, they will tell you that staying in touch has not always been as easy as it is today.

The Dawn of Modern Communication

Let’s go back 150 years to the middle of the reign of Queen Victoria. The 1800s was a century of change and innovation. Industry, transportation, commerce, and medicine all saw rapid advances, and so did communications. How did people stay in touch in the late 1800s?

A new communication system was Samuel Morse’s telegraph, a system of electrical pulses sent along a wire. The pulses – dots and dashes – formed an alphabet called Morse code. A specially trained telegraphist tapped the message onto the wire and, at the other end of the wire seconds later, another telegraphist transcribed the message. The number of words determined the price of the telegram, so they were often abruptly short. Delivery of the message cost an additional fee. People found telegrams expensive and inconvenient, so they didn’t take off as a common means of staying in touch in the 1800s.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s freshly patented telephone entered the communications scene. This new-fangled device allowed for instant, real-time, person-to-person communication across a distance, but it took another fifty years for telephones to become common in homes, changing forever how people communicated.

 

Sample of Copperplate By George Bickham - The Universal Penman,
published by Dover Publications, Inc., New York, Public Domain

The Heyday of Handwritten Letters

So how did nineteenth century people stay connected? They sent handwritten letters through the post. What we call “snail mail” today was then surprisingly quick – more like “hare mail.” Mid-century reforms enhanced the British postal system, making it cheap, fast, and very convenient.

Up until the late 1830s, a letter was paid for by the person it was addressed to, and the pricing wasn’t easy to calculate. In 1840, a teacher named Rowland Hill suggested big changes to the postal system: the pricing should be simplified, and the sender of the letter should pay. He invented prepaid, adhesive postal stamps called Penny Blacks, which cost one penny for a letter under half an ounce sent anywhere in the United Kingdom. Pillar boxes were introduced, making letter sending very convenient, and trains shortened delivery time across distances. From 1897, mail was delivered to houses, not just to local post offices.

 

Penny Black sheet of six (wikipedia public domain image) 

These reforms started a correspondence craze. By the turn of the twentieth century, the General Post Office handled an estimated 2,740 million pieces of mail – a ginormous increase from the 76 million pieces of mail sent back when Penny Blacks were first introduced.

The mail was delivered between six and twelve times a day in big cities like London. That’s a lot of postie visits! It meant someone could post a letter to someone across town, and they could receive it about two hours a later. There was enough time for them to post a reply, and have it delivered in the same day. It’s not instant messaging, but it’s pretty good!

International mail was a different story back then. For example, letters sent to India or Australia in the early 1800s could take months. Imagine getting important news from home – like a job offer, a birth or a death – late by a few months!

This Victorian love of letter-writing spawned things like illustrated greeting cards, post cards, and Christmas cards. Beautiful handwriting was prized, and a lovely, loopy script called Copperplate was popular. Victorian pens were fitted with metal nibs that were dipped in bottled ink.

Queen of the Handwritten Word

Queen among the letter writers of the Victorian Era is Queen Victoria herself. No one knows exactly how many letters she wrote in her lifetime, but some of her surviving correspondence has been bound into over sixty volumes (books). Between her mountain of mail and her daily journaling, it is estimated that she wrote an average of 2,500 words a day – or approximately 60 million words in her time as queen. That’s a lot of letter paper and ink!

 

Queen Victoria Writing with Abdul Arim (Wikipedia. Public domain)

Queen Victoria is the HM in Her Majesty’s League of Remarkable Young Ladies, a book set in 1889 London and starring Winifred Weatherby, a 14-year-old wannabe inventor. The story includes lots of different forms of correspondence: calling cards, letters, telegrams, Morse code, news articles, and something called a telautogram.

 

Telautograph (National Museum of American History;
Smithsonian Institution, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The Telautograph was an extraordinary but forgotten Victorian invention that reproduced and transmitted copies of handwriting and line drawings across telegraph wires. Invented in 1889, Elisha Gray’s Telautograph was an early forerunner of the 1980s fax machine. Read the book to discover if this amazing invention helped or hindered Winifred in her role as gadget maker for Queen Victoria’s league of young lady spies.

Writing Challenge 1: Snail Mail

Snail mail is super fun! The best way to increase your chances of GETTING a letter is SENDING a letter.

Your challenge is to write a real letter to post to someone you know. It’s a good idea to pick someone who is likely to reply. (Hint: Grandparents and older people are usually thrilled to receive a letter and to write back.)

The only rules are:

Write your letter by hand. It doesn’t have to be long!

Use traditional letter writing conventions:

A traditional salutation: Dear _____, / My dearest ____, / etc.

A message (Ideas: something about you, questions about them, something you’re proud of, etc.)

A traditional closing: Yours truly, / Your loving (grandchild), / Warm regards, / etc.

Your signature: Can you do a Copperplate style signature with lots of lovely loops? Have a go!

Address the envelope and affix a stamp. You might have to ask for help if you don’t know the address. And you might need to ask for a stamp from your parent or carer. Don’t forget to write your return address on the envelope!

Post it in a Royal Mail pillar box and smile because your letter will brighten someone’s day!

Challenge Two 2: Code Cracking

(International Morse Code alphabet (Wikipedia: Public domain)

Can you decode this Morse code message?

.. - / .. ... / ..-. ..- -. / - --- / .-- .-. .. - . / .-.. . - - . .-. ...

I  T    /    I  S   /

[It is fun to write letters]

Try writing your name in Morse code.

Alison D. Stegert has worked as an innovative school counsellor, a bumbling waitress, and an intrepid English (EFL) teacher, but writing kids’ books is her dream-come-true job.

Her latest book, Her Majesty’s League of Remarkable Young Ladies, was published in the UK in July 2023 and released in Australia by Scholastic in 2024. The book is the result of Alison’s 2021 win of the international competition The Times | Chicken House | IET 150 Prize.

Aussimerican Alison is a long-term resident of Queensland, where she serves as state director of the Queensland branch of  SCBWI Australia East and the chief scribe at the Sunny Coast Writers’ Roundtable.

Instagram & Threads: @alison_stegert_kidlit

X: @Alison Stegert

website: ali-stegert.com

Writing Historical Heists with Laura Noakes

A heist story follows the planning, completion and aftermath of a theft of an item or items from a place. It often involves a group of heisters, who each have a specific skillset that will help them to pull off the caper. 

The Italian Job is a classic heist film

When I sat down to write my heist, I was inspired a lot by the films I watched as a kid. I think my introduction to heists was the classic film The Italian Job, which stars Michael Caine and is set in Italy in the 1960s. I was blown away by the clever ways the characters sought to outwit the security measures to get their hands on some valuable gold, as well as the literal cliffhanger ending! I fell in love with heists watching the Oceans Eleven series, which is far more modern. I loved the cool gadgets and tech the gang used as they closed in on the vault.

So quite a lot of my ‘research’ into the different types of heists was actually just rewatching a lot of my favourite heist films, which was a lot of fun! From these rewatches, I noticed that there are a few elements common in many heists, and I turned these elements into questions to help plot my heist story:

1)      Who is the mastermind behind the heist?

2)     Who makes up the heist team?

3)     What are the team trying to steal?

4)     Why are they trying to steal it?

5)     What’s the plan?

6)     What’s the twist?

Having answers to these questions meant that whenever I got writer’s block, I was able to unstick myself pretty quickly.

Laura's archival research on life in Victorian London

As I wrote my own heist, which is set in 1899 in London, I had to be really aware of the time period and how the historical setting would impact on my heist. In 1899, Queen Victoria was on the throne, women didn’t have the vote and much of the technology we take for granted today didn’t exist yet! I really wanted readers to feel as though they were in late-Victorian London, so I did a lot of research on what living during that time would have been like.

This research came in many forms. I read a lot of non-fiction books about the Victorian era and Victorian London—one my favourites is How to be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman, which told me a lot about everyday life. I also read fiction books set during the Victorian era, and books written by Victorians, like Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.

Websites were also a huge research tool. My main character, Cosima, lives in a group home for disabled children run by a matron. These homes really did exist during the Victorian era, and thinking about these institutions served as the spark which inspired my story. A brilliant website created by Peter Higginbotham formed the core component of my research into these homes: http://www.childrenshomes.org.uk/. Peter is also the author of several excellent books which I wholeheartedly recommend.

I have the same disability as Cos—Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder—so I thought a lot about how different my life would have been if I’d have been brought up in a Home and being disabled during the Victorian era. There isn’t a tonne of information on how disabled people lived in the past, so I turned to a thoroughly modern research tool: the internet!

Finally, I also watched a lot of films and TV shows set in the Victorian era and I also watched many historical documentaries. One of my favourite movies that I saw during research was Enola Holmes, starring Millie Bobby Brown.

Laura's plot takes shape!

When it came to the heist itself, setting my story in the past actually helped in some respects. In 1899, there are no motion detectors, CCTV cameras or complicated security systems to bypass. However, this doesn’t mean that pulling off a heist was easy—Victorians were just as security conscious as we are! Cos and her friends still have to navigate guards, seemingly impenetrable walls, and complicated safes to reach the jewels they’re after.

Heists are full of twists and turns that readers don’t see coming, and I hope I’ve managed to sneak a few into my story. Creating an unexpected twist was really difficult—and I think what helped me to make my twist surprising was that I was also surprised by it.

Bringing the two components of my story together, the historical and the heist, was probably my favourite part of writing my book!

Writing Challenge

I challenge you to plot a historical heist story. This story can be set in any historical period!

Think about how the era will impact on your heist. For example, if your story is set in the pre-historic era, its unlikely that cave-people would want steal a million pounds, because that form of currency didn’t exist then. Maybe instead your cave-people’s target is a Woolley Mammoth! If your heist happens during World War II, what impact will an unexpected air raid have on your characters?

Laura Noakes grew up in Bedfordshire in a home full of books. She loved books so much she went to three universities after school, and graduated with a PhD in Legal History in 2021. Writing stories is her first love. She has Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder, a disability that she shares with her main character, Cosima. Laura now lives in beautiful Cumbria with her husband, Connor, and their two mischievous cats, Scout & Sunny. 

Laura's debut book, Cosima Unfortunate Steals a Star, will be published by Harper Collins on May 25th 2023. Buy a copy online at - https://www.bookscumbria.com/product/uk-books/signed-editions/cosima-unfortunate-steals-a-star/

Learn more about Laura and her writing at her website and follow her on twitter,  Facebook and Instagram

More than just a Game by guest author Richard O’Neill

I stood on the terraces at seven years old and watched my first professional football match, it was a school friend’s birthday treat and I was invited to join him. A very nice thing to do but nothing record breaking about watching your first game at seven, many people watched their first game at a much younger age, the difference being that I was the first person - adult or child - in my family to have done that.

 Richard in his school uniform around the time he enjoyed his first football match!

It had been less than a year before when I’d had my first experience of playing football in any real sense, it was at school as part of a PE lesson and then in the school yard at playtimes where teams were quickly picked and pitched against each other. It seemed I was pretty good at it almost immediately and I was hooked.

I grew up in a nomadic Romani family which meant I went to a number of different schools and whilst I was aware of the games of cricket and football they weren’t part of our culture so we didn’t play them. We played throw and catch but that was mainly as hand-eye coordination practice for our sports like quoits and competitive slingshot.

Discovering not only that I had a passion for the game but also a talent for it, football became my thing I’m hesitant to say obsession but as an ADHD person I guess the term would be hyper-focused.

It was the thing I thought about and talked about and practised at home and there came the problem, none of my large family, close or extended, were interested in the game and practising became a solitary occupation. My Dad had no interest in the game at all in fact thought it was pretty pointless yet even with four other children to share his time with and a business to run he would take time out to stand and allow me, dressed in the football strip that my mam had bought me, to take shots at him with the ball he’d bought me.

I wanted to find out all I could about the game, its history and how to play it better. The first thing I did was to go to the library and get out as many books as I could on the subject and I read them from cover to cover. One day after school my mam showed me a book she’d bought in a second hand shop and I dove straight into my gift. The book written by Billy Wright was a treasure trove of information and read from cover to cover many times and kept safe along with my other prized possession, my football kit.

Book of Soccer by Billy Wright

Every new school or area I went to I found being able to play football well was a major advantage often allowing my inclusion simply because I could score goals. And for me when I was charging down the field with the ball at my feet and with only one aim in mind to beat the goalie and help my team win it was the most amazing feeling of freedom. When I did score my team mates would pat me on the back and shake my hand, something boys would rarely if ever do off the pitch.

As I got older as much as I loved the game I realised that I wasn’t going to be able to pursue it any further. Whether you have the talent and dedication or not, when you move around a lot, when your family culture is different to the mainstream, when there are expectations placed upon you from your culture it often means you have to make a choice, either or.

Richard at a football club in 1998

Which brings me to my book. A Different Kind of Freedom, set in the early part of the last century, is the story of a boy from a Romani family who wants to be a footballer. He encounters a huge amount of resistance from his father but fortunately he finds inspiration in a real life hero who has trodden the same path.

The novel was inspired by real life Victorian footballer Rab Howell who was a pioneer in football in general being one of the first to become a professional player who played for Rotherham, Sheffield United, Liverpool and Preston and went on to also play for England. He also happened to have been born and brought up in a nomadic Romani family.

Rab Howell

I try to show in the book just how difficult it is to overcome the increased obstacles you encounter both from inside and outside when you come from a different background and emphasise the importance of having a mentor and a role model.

I also wanted to show in the book which is also mirrored in my own life that the game isn’t over until the final whistle blows. Whilst I didn’t go on to play football professionally I did get the opportunity to work with professional football clubs and enjoy the excitement, the ups, downs, highs lows and the absolute joy of being on a winning team.

To find out more about Rab Howell and Richard's book visit the Time Tunneller's YouTube channel. https://youtu.be/7CjEgnJhfiA

A Different Kind of Freedom: A Romani story by Richard O'Neill is available from all good bookshops including https://www.mirrormewrite.com/shop and https://www.anewchapterbooks.com/product-page/a-different-kind-of-freedom-a-romani-story

Richard O’Neill is a multi-award award winning author and storyteller.

He is the recipient of the ‘National Literacy Hero’ award, the Beacon Leadership and a Royal Literary Society Award.

Raised in a traditional nomadic Romani family, he has a particular interest in using literature to promote inclusion and social mobility.

His books have received teacher awards in the UK and ‘Book-list’ awards in the USA and an Aesop medal.

Website www.richardthestoryteller.weebly.com 

Twitter @therroneill

 

Child’s play – The wonderful world of the Victorian Toy Theatre by Ally Sherrick

I have long harboured an ambition to visit the wonderfully eccentric Gothic Revival villa of Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham, the creation of writer, art-historian and politician, Horace Walpole (1717-1797).

I read Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, generally regarded as the first gothic novel, in the sixth form at school and I was keen to see what else his imagination had conjured into life in bricks and mortar.

My visit, in late August, coincided with the final weeks of a fascinating exhibition of late Regency and Victorian toy theatres, many of which took as inspiration the gothic melodramas that were so popular on the English stage in those days.

A toy theatre of the play, ‘Blue Beard’ by George Colman, dating from around 1862/3

The exhibition was staged by Strawberry Hill in association with Pollock’s Toy Museum in London who own an extensive collection of toy theatres dating back to the days of Benjamin Pollock, a publisher and seller of everything needed to put on performances of plays in miniature in your own home.

As I peered beyond the proscenium arch into the tiny worlds depicted on stages built from wood, cardboard and paper, I was transported back to a time when plays were the main form of dramatic entertainment, long before the world of film and television came to dominate visual storytelling.

Though people made their own toy stages and enjoyed putting on puppet plays, it wasn’t until 1811 that the first commercially-produced toy theatres, also known as paper theatres, began to be made.

With origins in the theatrical souvenir prints first produced by print publishers in Covent Garden, London’s main theatre district, they sought to replicate the popular theatre productions of the day. These were melodramas, pantomimes, folkloric tales and ballad opera, all of which involved plenty of action, scenery changes and more than a little blood and gore.

Scene from the popular melodrama, The Miller and His Men, or The Bohemian Banditti by Isaac Pocock dating from circa 1862

At first the toy theatre kits were quite limited in scope, made up wooden stages with a few sheets of characters and a selection of scenes. But as their popularity and that of theatre-going itself grew, they became more complex offering complete scenes, a wider range of characters – with costume changes –  and scripts based on the plays being presented on stage, cut down to make them easy to present at home. There was even the chance to buy tiny candles and oil-lamps to light the stage too – a risky business when everything was made of wood, card and paper!

Characters for a toy theatre published by Pollock

The characters and sets were drawn by professional artists including George Cruikshank who went on to illustrate the early editions of many of Charles Dickens’ novels. The artists modelled their work closely on the stage play and were usually given a free seat to make their sketches from life. They even gave the paper version of the actors they drew the same facial expression as the real-life ones. Copies of the original drawings were then printed on to paperboard for sale.

Drawing of Punch and Judy by George Cruikshank

During the first half of the 19^th century 300 of London’s most popular plays were issued as toy theatres and many of them were sold in theatre foyers to members of the audience attending the show as mementoes of their visit as well as playthings for their children. Theatre-owners loved them too because they acted as great free advertising for their shows.

Popular play-kits included Blue Beard, based on the original, grisly French fairy-tale about a man who kills his wives and locks them away in a secret chamber, The Mistletoe Bough, a chilling story about a girl who gets locked in a chest while playing a game of hide-and-seek at Christmas and The Miller and His Men. This, the most popular toy-theatre melodrama of its day, a tale of kidnap and robber-bandits hiding out in the forest, came complete with a small wad of gunpowder for lighting in the final fight scene  (see image above). Shakespeare’s history plays were also a popular subject as were the pantomime stories of The Forty Thieves, Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty.

A scene from The Mistletoe Bough; or, The Fatal Chest, a melodrama by Charles A. Somerset shown at the Garrick Theatre in 1834. Toy theatre version circa 1859

The typical price for a sheet of characters or scenery was “a penny plain and twopence coloured”. The word ‘plain’ referred to sheets printed in black and white. The ‘coloured’ sheets sold were pre-coloured, sometimes by hand.

Aside from the fact they were cheaper, there was great fun to be had from buying the ‘plain’ sheets as you could colour the stages and characters yourself. For either type, you could add extra decorative touches using bits of cloth and ‘tinsel’ (pieces of metal foil). You then cut the characters out and mount them on small sticks, wires or strings for moving around the stage as you spoke the lines.

Copy of The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood toy theatre script

The actual theatre ‘boxes’ the plays were staged in could be made at home or else bought in shops. The latter were quite large and elaborate and the more costly ones even had roll-up curtains. And no toy theatre was without its own orchestra pit!  

Behind the scenes of a toy theatre

Not surprisingly, adult toy-theatre enthusiasts of the day included several authors of children’s stories including, Lewis Carroll, Hans Christian Andersen, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson loved them so much he even wrote about them.

The author of many children’s books, Robert Louis Stevenson was a great fan

The heyday for toy theatres was from the early 1830s to the mid 1860s. After this time, few new titles were added and the move towards more ‘realistic’ plays in the theatre proved less-suited to the medium. The number of toy theatre publishers began to dwindle and, after 1890, there were only two main publishers of toy theatre kits – H.J. Webb and Benjamin Pollock. Pollock kept trading until he died in 1930. His stock was eventually bought up by an enthusiast and went on to form the basis of the collection now owned by Pollock’s Toy Museum.

Some Shakespeare plays were also adapted for toy theatre.
 This picture shows a close up of a scene in Richard III

If you want to marvel at these small miracles yourself and are planning a visit to London in the near future, then, in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: ‘If you love art, folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock’s ...’ Or alternatively, check  out their toy theatre page online including a great short video on how to put on a toy theatre play.

Let the play begin!

Watch Ally's You Tube video on toy theatres by clicking here

Ally Sherrick is the author of books full of history, mystery and adventure including Black Powder, winner of the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2017, The Buried Crown and Tudor-Set adventure, The Queen’s Fool. She is published by Chicken House Books and her books are widely available in bookshops and online. You can find out more about her and her books at www.allysherrick.com and follow her on Twitter: @ally_sherrick

 

 

Andrew Carnegie and his Library Legacy - by Barbara Henderson

I for one visit my library regularly. I was there this morning, in fact, editing my current manuscript. I borrow books, I use the reference section. 

Let’s be clear about one thing: without access to libraries, I may never have become a reader. I certainly wouldn’t have obtained a degree, let alone become a writer. I owe libraries a LOT!

 A postcard of the original Carnegie Library in Dunfermline

A key setting in the manuscript I was editing is the Victorian Carnegie Library in Dunfermline in Scotland. I cannot think of a person with a more significant library-legacy than Andrew Carnegie, the founder and funder of that first Carnegie library, and then, wait for it, over 2500 more around the world!

Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie was born in Dunfermline in 1835. His family home there was a humble weaver’s cottage, now home to the Andrew Carnegie Birthplace Museum. In 1848 when Andrew was 12 years old, the Carnegie family emigrated from Scotland to the New World - the United States of America.

The young Andrew began his working life as a messenger in a Telegraph Company. Always keen to seek opportunities to better himself, he soon progressed to telegraph operator after teaching himself Morse Code. Later he became personal assistant to the Superintendent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, rising to the post of Superintendent himself in 1859.

Carnegie was a skilled businessman, investing wisely in a range of industries such as oil and steel. Soon, the Carnegie Steel Company dominated the market in America and morphed into a billion-dollar company – the first company anywhere to do so.

Andrew Carnegie was not only incredibly wealthy, but he hadn’t forgotten his humble roots. His urge to learn had resulted in unprecedented success – now Carnegie wanted to give back by offering the opportunity of a better life to the people of his hometown back in Scotland. The libraries he was able to use as a young man had enabled him to gain new skills and make something of himself. Perhaps it is not surprising that he chose libraries as his vehicle to do good, a pioneer of philanthropy.

To say it in his own words: ‘No millionaire will go wrong… who chooses to establish a free library in any community that is willing to maintain and develop it’.

However, Dunfermline was only the beginning: the following years saw a growing number of free-to-access public libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. Dunfermline’s Carnegie Library was first, opening its doors to the public in August 1883. All it took was an £8,000 grant donated by Carnegie while the rest was raised by taxation through the Public Libraries (Scotland) Act.

I loved learning about the first library for my manuscript, Rivet Boy, due out from Cranachan Publishing in February 2023. The first librarian there was an Edinburgh bookbinder named Mr Alexander Peebles who was chosen from more than 250 applicants and who lived in the flat above the library, aided in his work by a single assistant. More than 2000 volumes were issued on the very first day of its opening. 

The Carnegie library, now combined into a gallery and museum,
still takes pride of place in Dunfermline's centre 

The combination of public money and Carnegie-backed funding proved a popular finance route to other libraries for decades to come, often ornate and impressive buildings like the Central Library in Edinburgh.

Even now, nothing quite beats walking into a building filled with books for me. The smell, the heavy extravagance of knowledge and imagination, billions of letters and words on millions of pages in thousands and thousands of volumes. It’s rare for me to come across snippets of knowledge I hadn’t searched for on the internet, but such is the richness of a library that we can’t underestimate its value – something always, always catches my eye unexpectedly. Libraries almost everywhere are now under threat. I am sure Carnegie would have a word or two to say about that, and so should we.

What was the impression this new library might have made on a young boy, aged 12, just the same age as Andrew Carnegie was when he arrived in the U.S?

We can only guess.  

 

Barbara outside the old entrance to the building

Barbara Henderson is the author of seven historical books for children, six are published by Cranachan, her most recent - The Reluctant Rebel is published by Luath Press. She has won the Historical Association's Young Quills Award for Historical Fiction for Children in 2021 and 2022.

Find out more at barbarahenderson.co.uk