The Pursuit of Glory, page 6
THE POST
Travel by water, whether it was sea, river or canal, enjoyed numerous advantages over its terrestrial equivalents. But it suffered from one serious drawback–its slowness. The ocean-going traveller might sometimes find a following wind to speed his passage, but more often than not he was condemned to becalmed immobility or laborious tacking. On the inland waterways, the barge could proceed only at the pace dictated by the draught-animals, or in other words at walking-pace. This was what Arthur Young discovered when he travelled from Venice to Bologna, first by sea and then by canal: ‘Of this voyage, all the powers of language would fail me to give the idea I would wish to impress. The time I passed in it I rank among the most disagreeable days I ever experienced, and by a thousand degrees the worst since I left England; yet I had no choice: the roads are so infamously bad, or rather so impracticable, that there are no vetturini; even those whose fortune admits posting [travelling by stagecoach] make this passage by water.’ Conditions on the cheap but painfully slow barge were so squalid that Young chose to walk most of the 125 miles (200 km). Even on the more hospitable Dutch canals, the funereal pace was too much for impatient Englishmen to bear. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, James Mitchell commented: ‘This mode of travelling seems to afford a fair example of Dutch arrangements generally; it is economical of money, but expensive of time…While a Dutchman travels three miles in an hour, an Englishman travels six or eight, and this is nearly the difference between the spirit and energy of the two nations.’
By this time, Mitchell and his fellow countrymen had a standard of land travel against which to find the Dutch barges sadly wanting. The rapid increase in the speed of road travel in Great Britain, made possible by the turnpikes, has already been noted. In the 1780s the accelerator was pressed further by another innovation–the mail coach. Hitherto, letters had been carried up and down the main postal routes by a mounted messenger known as a ‘post boy’, defined by one dissatisfied customer as ‘an idle boy mounted on a worn-out hack who, so far from being able to defend himself against a robber, was more likely to be in league with him’. The customer in question was the Bath impresario John Palmer, who believed that he could do better. In 1784, his friend William Pitt, prime minister since the previous December, authorized him to run a scheduled mail coach service from Bristol to London, leaving at four in the afternoon and arriving in the capital early the following morning, carrying both letters and passengers. Such was its success in improving speed and reliability that the service was extended to many more cities during the next two years. In 1786, the travelling time from Edinburgh to London was shortened from three-and-a-half days to sixty hours. It was once thought that it was a combination of the railways and the factory system which introduced a more structured attitude to time. In fact, it was the mail coach which obliged people to think in terms of units as short as minutes. Passengers on the London to Glasgow run, for example, were told that they had exactly thirty-five minutes for dinner, from 4.36 to 5.11 p.m. If they lingered too long over their pudding, they would be left behind when the coach swept away. So the ‘railway age’ found travellers ‘psychologically and horologically prepared’, as David Landes has put it.
The contribution of the letter to promoting passenger travel, and vice versa, encapsulates the symbiosis between physical and symbolic communication. It was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there was a qualitative leap in the movement of private individuals; it was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there was a qualitative leap in postal services. On the continent the lead was taken by the service run by the Thurn and Taxis family, the lucky but also enterprising beneficiaries of an imperial monopoly first granted at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Although their tenure as Imperial Post-Master was hereditary, it was no sinecure, as they faced bracing competition from several German princes, notably Brandenburg-Prussia and Saxony, with 760 and 140 post offices respectively by the late eighteenth century. By that time, the Thurn and Taxis network was dense enough to mean that no German community was further than a half-day’s walk from a postal station, and well-organized enough to move letters 95 miles (150 km) in twenty-four hours and all over Europe. Between 1750 and the outbreak of the French Revolutionary wars, the family is estimated to have generated 25,500,000 gulden (about £2,550,000 in contemporary English currency) in profits. Although finally forced to yield to the pressures of nationalization in 1867, when Bismarck’s new North German Confederation took over the last vestiges of their organization, and despite recent indiscretions, it remains one of the richest families in Germany, if not the world.
In France, typically, there was a greater degree of central control. A ‘Royal Postal Service’ was established as early as 1477, although it was not until 1719 that the University of Paris finally relinquished its ancient right to operate its own postal service. Originally intended simply as a conduit for official business, the opportunities for raising revenue were exploited from 1603, when Henry IV authorized the royal couriers to carry letters for private individuals. By 1671, one of the most celebrated of all correspondents, Madame de Sévigné, could write to her daughter: ‘I am full of admiration for the post-boys who are constantly on the move, bringing our letters to and fro; there isn’t a day in the week when they cannot bring them; they are always there, at every hour of the day, out in the country. What honourable people! How helpful they are, and what a fine invention the post is!’ By 1763 postal services were sufficiently developed to allow a M. Guyot to bring out a Guide des lettres, devoted solely to the coming and going of the post. When the Revolution began, there were 1,320 post offices in France, ready to play a major part in the dissemination of stories true and false about what was going on at Paris and Versailles.
Conditions were even more propitious for a postal breakthrough in England, where distances were shorter, population denser, urbanization more developed and the public sphere especially precocious. Characteristically, the Stuarts viewed the post primarily as a source of funds. When the Duke of York ascended the throne as James II in 1685 he was drawing the colossal sum of £43,000 per annum from the profits of the service, a tribute to his elder brother’s generosity and the volume of letters being despatched. He was not alone: one of his brother’s many mistresses, the Duchess of Cleveland (née Barbara Villiers) drew £4,700 per annum. It is illustrative of the veneration of private property embedded in British political culture that she was able to bequeath this sum to her (and Charles II’s) son, the Duke of Grafton, from whom it passed down through the generations until the late nineteenth century, when it was finally commuted for £91,000.
Two developments in particular helped to create a national network of symbolic communication, first in England and then throughout Great Britain and Ireland. The first was a private initiative by William Dockwra of London, who initiated a private postal system just for London, collecting and delivering mail within a 7-mile (11-km) radius at one penny per item. Recruiting hundreds of taverns, coffee houses and shops as collecting stations, he was able to provide a service more rapid than anything on offer today, as collections and deliveries were made as often as every hour during the daytime. Needless to say, the Duke of York saw this as an infringement of his monopoly and moved quickly to take legal action to close him down. Yet such was the demand–and profitability–revealed by Dockwra’s enterprise, that the official post office was obliged to offer a substitute. The second was the institution of a ‘cross-post’ system by Ralph Allen after 1720, to link towns laterally, without having to go up and down the arterial routes to London. By the 1750s, all of England and much of Wales was included. It can be stated with confidence that by the accession of George III in 1760 most major towns were linked with the capital and with each other by an efficient daily mail service.
The north–south gradient, noted with relation to roads, applies with less force to postal services. Despite the difficulties getting about Spain, it had enjoyed a good postal service since the sixteenth century, a legacy of the Habsburg dynasty’s need to communicate with its far-flung empire. In Italy too, there was a Habsburg legacy to ensure that mail could be moved about the peninsula with reasonable fluency and security. After 1746 it was also the point of departure for a postal link with the Ottoman Empire, running from Naples to Constantinople via Otranto, Ragusa (modern Dubrovnik) and Salonika. In Russia too there was a long tradition of postal service, based on eastern models. In a country where cheap labour was freely available, nearly 13,000 postal workers could be employed on the route from St Petersburg to Moscow in the 1760s. Writing a generation earlier, the diplomat Friedrich Christian von Weber found twenty-four posting stages between the two cities and was impressed by their efficiency: ‘this great Conveniency, added to the Cheapness of Carriage, renders the Communication between Petersbourg, Moskow and Archangel, extreamly easy’. Elsewhere, however, communication problems both physical, in the shape of enormous distances and minimal roads, and symbolic, in the shape of mass illiteracy, prevented the development of anything but the most rudimentary of services. It took weeks rather than days for a dispatch from Moscow to reach even major provincial centres, while communities lying off the main routes lived their lives untouched by news from the world beyond their environs.
Letter-writing was something that could be taught. Manuals and formularies enjoyed enhanced popularity in the late seventeenth century. Aspiring English correspondents could find advice on how best to plead their cause in love or business in, for example, ‘W.P.’ ’s A Flying Post with a Packet of Choice new Letters and Complements: containing a Variety of Examples of witty and delightful Letters, upon all Occasions, both of Love and Business (1678). One of the most successful of the eighteenth-century guide-books was written by none other than Samuel Richardson, who published it in 1741, in other words before he set about his own great epistolary novels. Usually referred to simply as Familiar Letters, the full florid title reveals the extent of his ambition: Letters written to and for particular friends, on the most important occasions, directing not only the requisite style and forms to be observed in writing familiar letters; but how to act justly and prudently, in the common concerns of human life. In 172 model letters, Richardson provided all manner of advice, both practical and ethical, as in ‘To a young Trader generally in a Hurry in Business, advising Method as well as Diligence’ or ‘From a Gentleman, strenuously expostulating with an old, rich Widow, about to marry a very young gay Gentleman’.
This rage for letter-writing owed much to postal improvements. Madame de Sévigné would not have written 1,700 letters to her daughter, nor would Horace Walpole have written 1,600 letters to Madame du Deffand or 800-plus to Sir Horace Mann (whom he did not meet for the forty-four years of their correspondence) if they had not been confident that they would be delivered. Right across Europe (and the Atlantic), the post created a network which ever-increasing numbers of intellectuals could use for the exchange of opinion, information and gossip. The medium also influenced the message, for the relative immediacy now available in long-distance intercourse encouraged a more intimate and subjective style. Indeed Goethe assigned part of the blame for the effusion of sentimental correspondence to the excellence of the Thurn and Taxis postal service.
2
People
In 1798, at opposite ends of Europe, two major treatises on population were published. The more authoritative of the two was written by Joseph von Sonnenfels, the leading political scientist of the Austrian Enlightenment. In his Manual of the domestic administration of states, with reference to the conditions and concepts of our age, he summed up the conventional wisdom, namely that a large and growing population was a Good Thing. Indeed, he went so far as to assert that demographic increase should be made ‘the chief principle of political science’, for the good reason that it promoted the two chief ends of civil society: material comfort and physical security. The greater the population, Sonnenfels argued, the greater the country’s agricultural productivity and the greater the capacity to resist both foreign enemies and domestic dissidents. To clinch it, he pointed out that the more people there were to contribute to the expenses of the state, the less the tax burden on the individual would have to be. This common-sense approach was underpinned by the belief that the population of the world had been declining since classical times. It was a conviction Sonnenfels shared with most of his contemporaries, including Voltaire and Montesquieu. The latter observed gloomily: ‘if this decline in population does not cease, in a thousand years the world will be a desert’.
A very different view was expressed in the same year by the young Englishscholar Thomas Malthus, in An Essay on the Principle of Population as it affects the Future Improvement of Society, At thirty-two, he was almost exactly half Sonnenfels’ age, but his vision of the future was at least twice as bleak. His chief concern was to counter the belief in the perfectibility of the human race advanced by progressives such as William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet. Malthus proceeded from two premises: ‘that food is necessary to the existence of man’ and ‘that the passion between the sexes is necessary, and will remain nearly in its present state’. These two natural laws were not of equal force, however, for ‘the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man’. A man and a woman could give life to several children, each of whom could do the same. Consequently, demographic growth proceeded in a geometrical progression, whereas agriculture could only expand arithmetically. In other words, the number of people generated by the sequence 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128 could not be sustained by resources generated by the sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. The necessary result was that, sooner or later, any expansion of population would be halted naturally when it banged its head against the ceiling imposed by this discrepancy. A combination of misery and ‘vice’ (by which the Rev. Malthus meant contraception) would soon redress the balance.
In the long run, both men were to be proved wrong, but in 1798 either position seemed credible. During Sonnenfels’ lifetime (he had been born in 1732), both the power and prosperity of his country had increased hand-in-hand with its population. One of the four Emperors he served, Joseph II, stated as a central axiom: ‘I consider that the principal object of my policy, and the one to which all political, financial and even military authorities should devote their attention, is population, that is to say the preservation and increase of the number of subjects. It is from the greatest possible number of subjects that all the advantages of the state derive.’ Yet all over Europe, periodic subsistence crises lent support to Malthus’ gloomy forecast, not least the harvest failure which arguably precipitated the French Revolution. If Malthus had lived a little longer (he died in 1834), he might well have found grim satisfaction in observing the misery of the ‘hungry forties’, especially the potato famine and ensuing mass emigration which reduced Ireland’s population from 8,400,000 to 6,600,000 in just five years. As this ambivalence suggests, in this respect the end of the eighteenth century was on the cusp between old and new. As we shall see, demographically the period 1648–1815 was in many respects more like the fifteenth than the twentieth century, although it also had many modern characteristics.
NUMBERS
It is not difficult to appreciate why, of all the branches of historical scholarship, demography should be among the most contentious. On the one hand, its practitioners have the opportunity to crunch numbers down to several decimal points, thus giving a spurious impression of precision. On the other hand, in any period before the censuses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, evidence is so fragmentary that words such as ‘estimate’, or even ‘guess’, seem too precise to describe the results. The choice seems to be between bold statements about national totals and the microscopic ‘reconstitution’ of small communities, on whose microscopic foundations great airy structures are then erected. Especially in regions with poor communications, negligible literacy rates and little or no regular administration, such as Hungary following the Habsburg reconquista of the late seventeenth century, virtually nothing can be known about the level of population. However, demographic developments are so fundamental to an understanding of this, or any other, historical period that an attempt must be made to construct some sort of structure, although the straw and even most of the bricks are lacking.
A good place to start is a summary of the best population estimates for a number of European countries between the middle of the seventeenth century and the end of the eighteenth (see Table 2).
Table 2. Population of European countries 1650–1800(in millions)
All of these statistics are approximate but some are more approximate than others. The figure for England in 1650, for example, can be set down with far greater confidence than that for Russia, which may be completely wrong. To give national figures is also somewhat misleading, as there were wide regional variations within any given country. For example, in Spain the population of provinces on the periphery, notably Catalonia, Valencia and Galicia, increased much more rapidly than in the Castilian centre. In France growth was strongest in Hainaut, Franche-Comté and Berry, moderate in the Parisian basin, Brittany, the Massif Central, the south-west and the Midi, and weakest in Normandy. In Germany, not surprisingly, much higher rates were recorded by the thinly populated east than by the relatively densely populated west–indeed, as we shall see, there was a significant amount of internal migration.
