Pressing The Flesh
There really isn’t any substitute for meeting people face to face. We live in the teeth of the world’s second information revolution: the first one was Victorian London, where the postman might call twenty times a day.
Reunited: the importance of being together
The Victorians and early Edwardians were obsessed with their postal service. Great chunks of novels of the period – Dracula, Wuthering Heights and Howard’s End are just three that spring to mind – feature letters as part of the text. But from the Great War right up to the invention and propagation of email, correspondents could only look back at the past with envy, much as we might now look at the seventies and marvel that it was a time when people walked on the moon and you could get from Heathrow to New York in three and a half hours.
