The preceding year Sir Rowland Hill introduced a uniform system of cheap postage.  The rate had been as high as a shilling for a single letter.[1] Such a charge was practically prohibitive, and, as a rule, no one wrote in those days if he could possibly avoid it.  Sir Rowland reduced it to a penny (paid by stamp) to any part of the United Kingdom.[2] Since then the government has taken over all the telegraph lines, and cheap telegrams and the cheap transportation of parcels by mail (a kind of government express known as “parcels post”) have followed.  They are all improvements of immense practical benefit.

[1] An illustration of the effects of such high charges for postage is related by Coleridge.  He says that he met a poor woman at Keswick just as she was returning a letter from her son to the postman, saying she could not afford to pay for it.  Coleridge gave the postman the shilling, and the woman told the poet that the letter was really nothing more than a blank sheet which her son had agreed to send her every three months to let her know he was well; as she always declined to take this dummy letter, it of course cost her nothing.  See G.B.  Hill’s “Life of Sir Rowland Hill,” I, 239, note. [2] The London papers made no end of fun of the first envelopes and the first postage stamps (1840).  See the facsimile of the ridiculous “Mulready Envelope” in Hill’s “Life of Sir Rowland Hill,” I, 393.

591.  Rise of the Chartists (1838-1848).

The feeling attending the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 (S582) had passed away; but now a popular agitation began which produced even greater excitement.  Although the act of 1832 had equalized parliamentary representation and had enlarged the elective franchise to a very considerable degree, yet the great body of workingmen were still shut out from the right to vote.  A Radical Party called the “Chartists” now arose, which undertook to secure further measures of reform.

They embodied their measures in a document called the “People’s Charter,” which demanded: 

1.  Universal male suffrage. 2.  That the voting at elections should be by ballot. 3.  Annual Parliaments. 4.  The payment of memebers of Parliament. 5.  The abolition of the property qualification for parliamentary candidates.[1] 6.  The division of the whole country into equal electoral districts.

[1] Property qualification:  In 1711 an act was passed requiring candidates for election to the House of Commons to have an income of not less than 300 pounds derived from landed property.  The object of this law was to secure members who would be comparatively free from the temptation of receiving bribes from the Crown, and also to keep the landed proprietors in power to the exclusion of rich merchants.  This law was repealed in 1858.

The Chartists held public meetings, organized clubs, and published newpapers to disseminate their principles, but for many years made very little progress.  The French revolution which dethroned King Louis Philippe (1848) imparted fresh impetus to the Chartist movement.  The leader of that movement was Feargus O’Connor.  He formed the plan of sending a monster petition to Parliament, containing, it was claimed, nearly five million signatures, praying for the passage of the People’s Charter.