The Adhesive Postage Stamp

When a man of note dies, the journalist of the day can only reproduce in an obituary notice the accepted position of his life and works--it is no part of that writer's duty to examine, so as fully to certify, all the statements at hand, or to ransack old volumes dealing with the times when such reputation was established. That is the duty and the task of the later historian, or of some one specially interested. Such has been my duty, my task, as respects that public benefactor, the late Sir Rowland Hill, with the result arrived at in this and former publications.

Upon the death of Sir Rowland Hill in August, 1879, a series of letters with comments thereon appeared in the Dundee press, recalling the name and services of a townsman who, in his day, had taken an active interest in post-office improvement, and had worked in that field to some purpose. Mr. James Chalmers, bookseller, Dundee, who died in 1853, had been an earnest postal reformer. Through his efforts, and after a long correspondence with the Post Office in London, he brought about such an acceleration of the mail as to lessen the time necessary for the reply to a letter from Dundee to London, or betwixt the chief commercial towns of the north and south, by two days--a day each way. Subsequently he conceived the idea of an adhesive stamp for postage purposes; and it was this invention, made known to such post-office reformers as Mr. Hume and Mr. Wallace--with both of whom, as with others, he was in communication--that formed the origin of the adoption of the adhesive stamp in the reformed Penny Postage system of 1840, the plan proposed by Mr. Rowland Hill in 1837 having been that of the impressed stamp.

These letters in the Dundee press from old townsmen and friends of Mr. Chalmers, personally unknown to me as I was to them (I having left Dundee while a youth, over fifty years ago, and passed much of the interval abroad), with the consequent attention drawn to the subject, naturally called upon me to make an endeavour to vindicate my father's claim to the merit of such an important feature in the success of the Penny Postage scheme as was, and is, the adhesive stamp. These letters, moreover, acquainted me with what I was previously unaware of--that on the 1st January, 1846, a public testimonial had been presented in the Town Hall of Dundee to Mr. Chalmers, in recognition of his postal services, and of his having been the originator of the adhesive postage stamp; thus all the more calling upon me to investigate a subject of which hitherto I had only a dim and partial idea. This investigation was further facilitated by my withdrawal just before the same period of 1879 from active business, thus enabling me to examine at the library of the British Museum the papers, documents, speeches, and motions in Parliament, Reports of Parliamentary Committees, and all such evidence and information tending to throw light upon, from the year 1832 onwards, the history and events preceding the reformed system of postage introduced to the public in the year 1837 by the then Mr. Rowland Hill.

My father long since dead (while I was abroad), and his establishment long ago broken up, difficulty was at first experienced in obtaining the specific evidence necessary to enable me to establish my claim on his behalf, but the attention publicly drawn to the matter by former publications of my own, and of Mr. Pearson Hill to which I was called upon to reply, brought forward ever-increasing evidence of the most conclusive nature, and to which I am now enabled to add material and interesting confirmation from papers left by the late Sir Henry Cole, whose connection with the Penny Postage Reform of 1837-40 is well known.

THE PENNY POSTAGE SCHEME OF SIR ROWLAND HILL NOT ORIGINAL.

My business, of course, in the investigation just named, was to ascertain what plan Sir Rowland Hill had proposed in his pamphlet of 1837 for the purpose of carrying out his Penny Postage Scheme, and to trace therefrom the adoption on his part of my father's plan of the adhesive stamp. But a discovery of much more historical importance before long presented itself, namely, that neither the conception of uniform penny postage itself, nor of any one of the valuable principles and figures of the penny postage scheme, were original conceptions on the part of Sir Rowland Hill.