Mulready Stationery - Demise

Demise

Rowland Hill expected the Mulready stationery to be more popular than the postage stamps but the postage stamp prevailed. The design was so elaborate that it generated widespread ridicule and lampooning, and in addition was perceived in some areas as a covert government attempt to control the supply of envelopes, and hence control the flow of information carried by the postal service (which had become a government monopoly under the reforms). Many caricatures (or lampoons) were produced by stationery manufacturers whose livelihood was threatened by the new lettersheet. Only six days after their introduction, on May 12, Hill wrote in his journal:

Within two months a decision had been made to replace the Mulready designed stationery and essentially they were a folly. As a result of the uproar the stationery was withdrawn and a machine was designed and built to destroy the stocks. The Mulready stationery suffered an inglorious demise.

There was nothing to stop one from writing on the inside; consequently the Mulready wrapper was fundamentally akin to the present-day aerogram.

Pre-gummed envelopes as we know them today did not exist. The diamond-shaped sheet and the geometrically more complex short-arm cross-shaped sheet remain essentially the staple designs to this day. (As a point of interest: all mechanical printing devices from the Gutenberg press on are primarily designed to process flat rectangular sheets. Hence the illustration would have been printed using a press and then cut to a diamond shape. The number produced from any one sheet naturally depended on the size of the printing bed and to this day envelope printing and envelope manufacture have maintained a symbiotic relationship.)