Franking letters and letter-writing

While I’ve only read Pride and Prejudice aside from Mansfield Park, I remember that the information revealed in letters in the former were pivotal in Elizabeth Bennet’s understanding of Mr. Darcy. In fact, Mr. Darcy’s one letter quelled all of Lizzie’s reservations about Mr. Darcy, making him a sympathetic character to her and the audience. Similarly, in the last book of Mansfield Park, letters appear with greater frequency and at greater length from Edmund, Lady Bertram and Miss Crawford to Fanny while she is at Portsmouth to tell her of the news from her true home--Henry Crawford’s affair with Maria, Julia elopement with and Tom Bertram’s illness. The importance of letters in Austen’s novels, what they accomplished for the plot and character development in comparison/and or contrast to their usage in Mansfield Park would be interesting for biography critics and zeitgeist critics alike note Mansfield Park’s uniqueness.

Letter-writing was also personally important to Austen, which was a reflection of her own character and also of the times. She wrote letters over the course of several days to keep her friends informed of her shopping details, gossip, visits and progress on her latest writing project. During Austen’s lifetime, the British post improved greatly from mounted postboys to a system of armed mailcoaches. Despite such an improvement though, post was relatively expensive and was only free for Members of Parliament and Members of the House of Lords who could “frank” letters. Around 1813, the recipient of letter paid four pence for letter from 15 miles away. The price of the letter varied with weight, distance, whether it was paid for on dispatch or on receipt. Because of the cost, resourceful methods of letter writing to conserve paper arose like folding the letter into its own envelope as well as turning the paper sideways to write in the opposite, intersecting direction. Also, letter-writers crammed as much text as possible into one sheet of paper by writing very small texts with very little space between the lines—such letters would contain news of what had occurred over the past few days.

With all of the cost-saving methods in mind, I am interested in researching how this affected the nature and prominence of letter-writing/epistolary relationships in Mansfield Park and other writings of the Regency Era. Perhaps so much information was contained in each letter that moved the plot along quickly in the final five or so chapters of the novel because of cost of sending a letter.