Postage: The Dos and Don'ts Of Sending A Letter In The 18th Century

Nashville Tennessee May 29 18 19 mr. Townsend I seat myself and take pen in hand to answer yours of the 20th instant and congratulate you on a safe return to the northward it is a truth generally acknowledged a good company and good discourse are the very sinews of virtue this being so I thank you for providing both during your brief sojourn among us if you had half as much enjoyment in your visit as we had and hosting you I should to steam that a successful endeavor indeed I believe that goes without saying that you were always welcome with your friends here in Tennessee and should you ever return as I hope you shall know that there will always be a place for you at our table my best wishes for yourself and friends and family I look forward to following whatever adventures lie in store for you with great anticipation I shall now close as I wish to get this in the post today I remain served as ever your most particular servant B Allison PS please accept my favour of a full cask of the finest Dutch nutmeg just arrived at this place knowing your proclivities in the area of gastric experimentation I trust you shall find it of use we're here again today with Brian Allison and we're talking more about letters and writing and this is having to do with sealing stamps we are in Tennessee where we add exactly ero to historic münster station at the Beau and Campbell house what's the date for this house is 1787 1787 amazing house beautiful site were having lots of fun and we've covered a lot of writing making quills the kind of paper the kind of ink you need but sealing letter sealing is always a fun thing to talk about so I get a said get us into this the letter sealing well once you've written your letter obviously you want to seal it and of course in those days they didn't have envelopes yes well they did but they were expensive and most people didn't use them so generally you use the back of your letter so you're you actually use your letter as the envelope at the back of the letter so for example if you're riding on this side then leave this stock blank and then this becomes your gonna put your address and hold it up so the envelope starts from that and when it's done you're gonna see something that looks a lot like this with a seal on one side and the address put it together alright so and I've just got here a collection of different seals wafer stamps which is a little bit different different methods that they used in period to close their correspondence to send the mail so the the seal material itself it's called sealing wax right but it is not wax this is not wax it started as wax in the Middle Ages it was a mixture of beeswax and and other different things olive oil was in it and a colorant but that was a very primitive kind of wax and didn't work very well it becomes what we call sealing wax in the 16th century when shellac is starting to be important to Western Europe and then you start getting these sticks kind of like these ones here which are pure you know their shellac rosin a colorant binder different materials that gives you a wax that's very very hard and brittle hmm and that's also kind of a built-in security feature so if your correspondence is being read and somebody's broken the seal you'll be aware of it when you see that so that's the original kind of sealing wax and that's still sold today as traditional wax or they've different names for it but if you want to seal your letter in the period manner that's what you're going to look for the modern wax has tend to be that bright red right there which is fairly close it's not great the difference between modern and the old-style stuff is that this is there's sometimes market this as mailable more flexible wax right that's important if you actually want to send your stuff through the mail the US Postal Service is no longer equipped to handle sealing wax if you use this shellac base the traditional wax and you send that to the mail you may very well Jam the machines and cause all sorts of problems at the post oh yeah if you want to do that put your letter that you've sealed inside of a padded envelope and ship it that way and it'll actually get there intact and not destroyed and destroy your equipment at the same time there is some etiquette to wet so if you're going to be doing it different colors though blues and greens were used for informal correspondence okay the most formal color of all was red so if you're going to be trying to replicate say military or government document government document legal red is really and really in most formal correspondence red is the bill to what you want to avoid is black Oh black is a bad sign this is actually shorthand if you saw a seal with a black ball or a black seal and a black border on your letter it's shorthand for you need to sit down before you open this because bad news a family it's morning okay oh that tradition goes back into the 17th century and so most people would use I've actually seen an expectant letter in which the person apologizes for the shock and saying I'm sorry I use black wax but it's the only thing available the poor person you open it must have been horrified sure sure so how about other methods of sealing no well let's while we're here with these sealing we've got sealing wax stamps here exactly as you can tell I'm a bit of a fanatic about collecting them sure these are different sizes different types many of the seals of the time these are called desk seals and this is the sort of thing a lady or a gentleman would have on their desk her so they could seal formal correspondence but they came in different sizes but there's other types as well and this is I'm just absolutely drooling over I just have to say this is one of my favorite things in your cat it's a it's a signet rings and that's a very typical thing for a lady or gentleman to have their coat of arms or some symbols there and you can you can use it that way most people are off right and if you've ever used one you find that out quickly it's much too much to burn your hand but this is this one in fact is particular it's a memento mori what is the story on that well memento mori is is that 17th and 18th century movement that means remember your your mortality so remember you're gonna die someday so you shouldn't just live life just any old way right and so that's that particular design I think is off as Jamestown final thoughts a wonderful reproduction there's problems with sealing wax it can be messy it can be dangerous in cases you've got to be careful with it so even in that time period the late 18th early 19th century people were looking to come up with alternatives mm-hmm and one of the ones they came up with was the ceiling Waverley okay this is a little bit obscure you've not going to find a lot on the market wafers became the quick easy substitute for sealing wax and really is just a tiny little round dough disc and what they would do normally in those days is put it under their tongue and write their letter and that would soften it while they were going writing then you fold your letter in last minute pull it out stick it under the flap and close it down right and you're gonna close it with what they called a wafer seal and right so it's completely different than these with a special design they all have a grid type pad exactly that grid is characteristic and in fact I didn't want earlier where you can see it right there that is the characteristic stamp you see in a lot of early 19th century letters that indicates it was sealed with a wafer seal now well this was used a lot I mean it was so much more convenience of in the wax stamp a lot of times in especially this climate I'm in the American South which means I've actually seen a petticoat book that says you want to use weight fur seals rather than wax because it'll melt in the unstick together in the postman's pouch in this climate Wow I've actually had that experience ordering it for the mail will stick together so the wafer is very common but also keep in mind the etiquette there's a lot to keep in mind for your writing this if you're of a certain station if you're of a gentleman laughs or something and you receive this in the mail that's a bit uncouth and that was through that whole period you see complaints about this because it came out of somebody's mouth a lot of times so that is considered you don't send that to somebody of importance station you never send formal correspondence this way but for a letter between friends a litter to you know your grocers all I get the wafer seal is so much easier and more than being at the mat and this wafer is it's like a tiny ship's biscuit it's just a very very simple flour very very thin so I want to see a letter get sealed but before we do that let's talk about the folding because we have to have a letter folded before we seal is there any is there special things to folding are there different kinds of full wheels good news and bad news part of the romance I think of this whole process is the letter fold and in the early days of 1516 1700s it was a very individual process and everybody were several different types have followed some very intricate some of them with built-in mechanisms to keep them from being pried into that sort of thing sadly for our time period we're talking in concentrated in the late 18th early 19th century and by the second quarter of the second half of the 18th century letter folding was pretty boring it had gone down to a simple what looks like a very much of a modern envelope today so a lot of those intricate letter folds have been lost over time and they're just now being resurrected Mike one of my favorite channels on YouTube is there's a MIT professor named Janna D'Ambrosio and she runs a channel called letter locking and that's what she's doing is actually reconstructing these intricate ways of folding they used in the pre-modern or the early modern era I'll make sure to put a link down in the description section absolutely so if you're interested in that era and I highly recommend you look at her channel because she's a scholar she's she's done the research probably the foremost expert on that process living today so what we're gonna demonstrate today is really just a simple one sheet letter fold so if you're writing on an eight-and-a-half by 11 piece of paper or something similar this is the sort of thing that almost everybody used to fold their correspondents in the late 18th early 19th century you can do this without but one thing that makes your life a lot easier is invest in a bone folder if you want to do this a lot this helps you make your crease this very sharp and it helps you get into tight corners and you'll see that as powerful exactly so with this sort of letter fold the simplest one what you're going to do is first start with remember all this is you're writing up here this is for your letter is blank for the address so you're gonna start with the writing side up and you're going to fold in your sides try to make them as neat as possible as you go down so you're folding in about an inch and quarter I'm not an inch recorder there isn't exact science and it doesn't have to be said or either because the entire package is going to be a rectangular rectangular anyway so leave a little space in the center a lot of time especially with a letter this size and that should be enough doesn't have to meet in the center and again none of this is set in stone every letter it seems is folded differently by different correspondents so that's your first pulled right there so you've got your two sides fold again now starting from the bottom of the letter you start folding it up and again you rough you rough it out it's probably about a quarter of the way up and this is where the bone folder really pays for itself because once you get up here you're gonna tend to get crinkly and crunchy down with the corners now if you put your bone folder in there pull down nice and everything now here's a little pro tip for everybody at this point stop using this bone folder to crease until you're done because you're going to have to adjust it a little bit let's go up so to keep it neat you've got to just take that right on that line there and keep going on one more time okay and that's gonna give you the top flap if your envelope and if it's flattened that pretty good and then the top flap comes down and now it's starting to really look like an endo the last trick is you don't want to just you can do it this way I've seen examples done this way but it's very neat it's very ugly it's right for Horner's on a cuff and everything and it doesn't hold everything secure alright so this can break loose in the light mail or something like that what they would do generally just take this bottom part here there's your top flap tuck one corner in and this takes a little adjustment the other now that it's done that way now come back in with your bone folder and make sure it's nice and crisp and there right as your folded letter and it doesn't easily come loose right and so plus the other advantage of this is once you put the seal here it's only going through one layer of paper so if you can cut that loose you won't damage hopefully the writing underneath and you want make the letter illegible sure stuff so that's the simplest and most common way of folding a letter in the late 18th and early 19th century so sealing is a little trickier there are a lot of different kinds of Wax we've got you've got the standard red stick the kind we carry that's the real shellac it doesn't have a wick in it right a lot of the waxes you see today have wicks in them at least with this style of wax I don't like it when it has awaken it it really gets in your way it really kind of does and that is not something they would have had at the time the wick and the sealing wax probably dates to the 1890s early 1900s so sealing wax was sold in large sticks ok here we go we're gonna try this it's gonna take a while start probably a quarter down quarter inch down from the top and then just kind of get the sides started be careful because especially the shellac wax it is a tendency if you want to catch fire that's not the end of the world either but you just don't want flaming bits of wax going everywhere or while you're doing this and after a while you'll notice it'll start to want to bubble and melt in me want to try to move around on it once that starts this is just a juggling act start shaking your hand and playing with that little molten ball of wax and keep it moving because if you stand in one place it'll catch fire it'll drip all over the place here we go we're gonna try it on blob there and it goes give it just a second and there's your seal perfect and a prophecy did you did a perfect ah that was surprising because if it was gonna go wrong it usually happens in a situation like this you've got to be careful you might mess it up let's let's do a wafer I was my the wafers is are fairly simple it'll bit it be faster than men because I'm not putting it under my tongue right hold on I guess I don't know what kind of things I might catch but no we're gonna use the the damp cloth we just need a moisturizer stamp here find the spot here where you're going to put that thing in and then just dampen the surface just slightly and that'll help it catch okay and then what we're gonna do is just get this thing with a little bit a little bit of dripping in there okay now that's going on right there and just start melting that glue right there and I can already feel it getting tacky and sticky and yucky and that's what you want and once it gets to about that consistency yeah that's about right stick that up under where the two in Klatt wick annex yeah point is you can even see it ghosting right surface there take your waver stamp and it takes a fair bit of muscle affine - you want a bad impression get those basically those fibers to connect so the glue sticks and then we get a nice limb to it and you get that character bore of court called a waffle effect or checkerboard effect but that's the characteristic effect of a wafer seal and I see that a lot in early 19th century correspondence sort of handled it was advisable to let it dry before you send it in the mail so it might take 10-15 minutes for that to fully dry before the glue is actually set otherwise it can still pop open in the mail pouch yeah I would think moisture or you know if it got damp it might undo but since this letters sort of seal you know it into itself it's not really gonna pop you know and the one I've did earlier you can see it's not coming loose so well come loose so it's a fairly secure way of holding it shut we've got our letter it's sealed up what about postage that's the post office like no you're gonna actually put your address or your direction as they said in those days your direction on the the blank side away from the seal and then you're gonna drop it in the the postman's bag or you're gonna go to the post office is read a big city or you're gonna give it to a friend to drop off at the post office it's not rocket science in those days they're still developing it especially in the late 18th early 19th century there are some advanced post offices like Philadelphia under Ben Franklin they're all based on the British postal service out in the boondocks where I'm from Tennessee it was basically a male man's pouch and taking the mail down the natch has traced in New Orleans and back up into Virginia so that can be haphazard that could be subject to the weather to hazards on the trail and that's all the no effect postage now sometimes you read in the journals like oh I left the letters at the tavern or whatever were they which might come in two weeks to pick them up right and you think of yourself well how did they get them to the to the recipient without paying for they just drop them off well that's one of the things about the postage in those days the recipient paid the charges not the mailer so this is free to drop in the mail it's not free at the other end so whatever charges go through and it's charged on throughout the mileage it went the weight of it that's why they were trying to use this little paper as possible right so you don't use an envelope right weighs more exactly so if you're adding to that that's gonna add to the charges that the difficulty of the journey so it's going over rivers and a postman's pouch that's gonna add to it so all that factors in and then once that gets to the other end whoever gets the letter has to pay all those charges sure so a lot of times you'll see dead letters they call them dead letter office where somebody didn't recognize the signature didn't know what it was about said I'm not gonna go to that much trouble and threw it back and some of those have never been opened in two or three hundred years so I'd be a treasure trove well yeah well there's actually in what was this in the Netherlands recently nice you know draw a trunk of I think it was 1200 and and I think only 800 of them were still unopened and they've been posted anywhere between 1670 and 1720 you talk about a treasure trove it just sat in the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands for the last hundred years and nobody too opened them so they're just now starting to go through and scholarly changing whoo I think it's called the the science the signed sealed undelivered project and it's great to watch online if you really want this the trivia of how to do this well as it goes the journey and this is something I teach in my classes it's going to pick up character and that's one of the things to make it look real postage stamp or excuse me postal stamps not like today they didn't use a prepaid stamp that would come along in the 1840s but as it goes through postal marks would be applied by usually LED stamps in those days didn't ink and stamp with letter I teach methods for replicating at course you get rubber stamps today and it's the similar things as other ways to do it but I find that really adds to the character as shipped letters that came through the post overseas it really kind of adds to the character and lets you see where the journey came from and the narrative that the letter would Doug would tell sure Brian such an interesting story about folding sealing and the Postal Service thanks for bringing that to us if you need more if you if you want more information make sure to check out a brian's website we'll make sure to put a link down in the description section of this video we are at this wonderful site here in Goodlettsville Tennessee we'll put a link down to that in the description section also if you want more information information on quills paper ink make sure to check out this playlist

Channel: Townsends

Views: 817,375

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, postage, post office, wax, sealing wax, brian allison, letters, sending mail

Id: xxb-XqsgaqM

Length: 20min 42sec (1242 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Teekeks]

Didnt think I would watch 20 minutes about wax seals but hey, might need that some day for my DnD game.

[u/sleepygeeks]

The video is interesting, But the audio is horrible.

Even with my sound on max I struggle to hear whats being said.

[u/GruesomeCola]

The green jacket that guy is wearing looks Dapp asf.