The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1840-05-12 00:00:00

PENNY POSTAGE PICTURES.

(From the Blackburn Standard)
The penny postage plan has come into fuller operation,
inasmuch as the long-talked-of system of pre-payment by
means of stamps and stamped envelopes has been adopted.
For several months past fine descriptions of these envelopes
have been flying about among the newspapers, and we our-
selves,' reposing faith in others, have lent our aid to their
promulgation. Now, however, we can speak for ourselves,
for the devices, in their matured beauty, are lying before us.
The pre-payment affairs are in the form of envelopes and
half-sheets of letter-paper, both embellished with the same
pretty picture ; and we have also little bits of stuff like stick-
ing plaster, with a dirty-looking bust of her Majesty, for
dabbing on the back of a letter.
There has been a vast deal of talk about the device on the
envelopes ; we will tell our readers what it is like, and.they
may test our accuracy by the first London letter they re-
ceive. It occupies about one-third of the upper portion of
the envelope, and a small portion of each side. In the cenr
tre of the group of figures whereof it is composed is a heap
of mud, or something very like it, whereon is a figure of
Britannia sitting upon nothing, with a shield at her knee,
and a very unleonine lion at her feet. The lady's counte-
nance stamps her as a bit of a termagant (we hope the artist
did not mean to insinuate anything against a certain august
personage), and she is throwing out her arms in a tempest
of fury, and scattering to the Lord knows where four naked
individuals, with eithr wings or fins on their backs—we are
not certain which, but we think fins, for the naked indivi-
duals are striking out as though they were swimming. Be-
hind the genius, and in the extreme distance, are three ships,
and a reindeer mail-cart rather larger than the three ships;
but whether the ships are on land and the reindeer mail-cart
at sea, or the reindeer mail-cart on land and the ships at sea,
we cannot for the life of us discover. _

On the right of Britannia, and consequently on the left of
the envelope, there are a couple of mighty grand elephants,
backed and ready to start, and a pair of dromedaries presided
over by a man with a beard and a turban. We presume these
these animals are symbolical of the speed and lightness with
which the penny post will travel. Near the dromedaries
there is a group consisting of a determined looking gentle-
man, very like one of Lord Palmerston's opium smugglers,
and three persons with no hair on their heads. One of them,
we understand, is the High Commissioner Lin, and another
Hokey Pokey Whankey Funi, the King of the Cannibal
Islands : the third, we believe, is young Hokey. What
these three people are doing deponent sayeth not. On the
extreme left of the device are two men with great loaves on
on their backs, which they seem about to hoist upon the ele-
phants' backs, for provision on the journey perhaps, and two
others, beturbaned and bemoustached, sitting a la Snip, alias
crosslegged, and writing letters galore, as our Irish friends
say, on the uneven surface of their knees. Below these a
dutiful son is reading a letter to his bedridden mother, pro-
bably communicating his father's death, for which the old
lady seems duly thankful.
Turn we now to Britannia's left. Here we have as queer a
lot as on the right. There is, first, a most affecting shaking
of hands between a collection of native Indians, with cock's
feathers in their heads, and three Yankees in Mackintoshes ;
while a little inquisitive terrier dog is poking its nose in
amongst the mysterious conclave to see the row, and a ma-
ture savage, in puriB naturalibus, is squatted in front, with
his dorsal side, in full-blown luxuriance, presented to the cri-
tical eye of the spectator. A little further on a saragess is
" doing the maternal " under a cocoa nut tree, and a quaker
looking genius, in a sombrero, is superintending two stalwart
men hammering away at some casks of " raal Varginny."
Below these again, two damsels are devouring a love-letter,
and a smaller chip of the old block is manifesting a precoci-
ous desire to become acquainted with the contents of such an
inflammatory missive.
This is a true description of the postage device. Reader.
if you want to know what it all means, we must confess to
you we have puzzled our brains in vain attempts to decipher
it. We know not what peculiar connexion there can be be-
tween that curious assortment of figures and faces—that har-
monious melange of elephants, camels, mandarins' tails, Yan-
kee beavers, naked Indians squatted with their hind quarters
in front, Cherokee chiefs with feathered tufts, sucking babies,
and casks of baccy, which figure so grotesquely on these en-
velopes, and the newly-fangled system of penny postage.
Perhaps Rowland Hill, Esq. or the artist, W. Mulready, Esq.
R.A. can explain, but for our part, we give up the attempt
in despair.