It’s Universal Letter Writing Week, which is perfect for a Victorian historical author like me! Of course letters were the mode of communication back then. But instead of talking about the art of letter writing, which is very tempting, I want to share with you the method of delivery. Did you know that some areas didn’t deliver letters directly to people’s homes, and instead they needed to collect their mail at the post office? So what would happen if they didn’t collect their mail when they were expected to?

In doing massive amounts of research for my upcoming third book in the Dark Victoriana Collection, I found that newspapers used to list the people who needed to collect their letters. Some did them like the above list, with men and women mixed together, while others separated “ladies” from “gentlemen.”

So it’s almost like having a P.O. Box, only your box is the whole post office. I like how each newspaper I looked at formatted their list differently; I expected all of them to be the same, but they each did their own thing.

Believe it or not, discovering this historical fact is a huge breakthrough for book three of the Dark Victoriana Collection. I was struggling with a plot point centered around my detective character, Timothy, discovering letters to a certain character, and this has solved it! Woohoo! So watch out for this historical tidbit in book three.

Like the Victorian era?

Read my Victorian suspense books and short stories and dive into a world where no one goes unscathed.