ABSTRACT

In 1865, Heinrich von Stephan asked delegates at the Austro-German Postal Conference to imagine a new “open” mode of communication. The postcard4 or “open post-sheet” (offenes Postblatt) promised to bring “simplicity” and “brevity” to national communications.5 But this invention came at a price, the loss of the guarantee of epistolary privacy. Fears were regularly expressed that postal clerks or servants would spend their time reading the postcards that passed through their hands. For correspondents of the late-nineteenth century, this introduced a new system of postal writing in which traditional epistolary values and protocols were challenged and questions of class were raised. A newspaper of 1870 warned of the “absurdity of writing private information on an open piece of card-board, that might be read by half a dozen persons before it reached its destination.”6 And an etiquette manual of the period advises that “a private communication on an open card is almost insulting to your correspondent.”7 According to Frank Staff, particularly strong opposition came from those who feared that the postcard’s “open” mode of communication would become a vehicle for defamation and libel,8 a possibility endorsed by an advertisement that appeared in the “personal, lost and found” section of The Times newspaper in 1870:

Anonymous Postal Cards FIFTY POUNDS REWARD-Whereas several leading West-end fi rms complain to me respecting certain postal cards received by them, containing malicious innuendoes and purporting to emanate from my offi ce-The above reward will be paid by me for such INFORMATION as shall lead to the conviction of the writer of said spurious and infamous productions.9