Reviews
"An excellent text, a core addition to community and college library history collections."
--The Midwest Book Review
" Catherine Golden offers more than a history of nineteenth-century postal reform."
"Golden provides a wealth of information about the material culture of the post and about the communications revolution that postal reform initiated. Throughout Golden's careful reading s of the many novels and paintings that reference the post and postal products emphasize the parallels between how Vicotirans experienced technological and communications innovations and how twenty-first-century consumers have experienced a wide variety of technological innovations."
--English Literature in Transition, vol. 54 issue 2
"Good read overall, is a fine hybrid of political, cultural (especially literary), social economic, and technological history and will be informative to some readers while reminding the rest of us about how revolutionary cheap postage."
--Journalism History
36:2
"An intimate study of a subject which, as the author recognises, had extraordinarily wide ramifications in time and place.This is a stimulating book."
--Literature & History
"Catherine J. Golden has written a highly readable cultural history of the Penny Post in Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing. The book is full of information, much of it fascinating, on the post's social and material epiphenomena: "writing desks and manuals, pens and inkwells, the official catalogue of the Great Exhibition of 1851, extant correspondence, pictorial envelopes, valentines, biographies, diaries, periodicals, book illustration, and narrative painting" (p. 6). Its forays into literary criticism, content based and thematic, are less compelling."
--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, vol 50 no.4