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| A Sketch of Jane Austen |
It's mentioned in Austin's novel twice when a character not only states how fast and reliable it was, but how nice are the clerks in the post office. This surprised me, because I wasn't aware that England had postal service back then.
When I first started reading Emma, I thought that when someone received a letter--something that happens often in this novel--that it probably had been delivered by the sender's servant on horseback, until I read the comments about the postal service, which take place in a conversation between two people.
In Austen's novels, letters often play a crucial role, as in Pride and Prejudice, in which a letter totally turns the story around. Novelists often use letters as a literary device. I did that myself in my own novel That Smooth-Faced Gentleman. It's a convenient way to deliver information in a different way--adding variety. It's also a way to change a character from the third person into the first person voice. I've totally gotten off the subject here, which is supposedly the postal service, something that obviously has quite a history. Did America adopt the English postal service as a model when we were starting out? I wonder from when the USA postal service dates from. I will have to Google this.
I don't see why we need post office delivery service on Saturdays. I can't think of anything that has to be delivered on a Saturday that couldn't wait until Monday. If something has to be delivered on a Saturday, the person could use a private delivery company. The USPS needs to reduce real estate and workforce. People who insist upon being a computer illiterate need to be encouraged to learn computer technology at least to the point of sending and receiving emails. If the price of sending a letter skyrockets, perhaps that would encourage them.
