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In the days before pictures and messages were shared on social media, postcards were the standard means of communications with friends and family.
In 1777 in Paris, French engraver Demaison published a sheet of greeting cards meant to be cut and sent through the post. Although, these didn’t take off as people were wary of servants reading their messages.
In 1840, a postal reform in the UK unified the cost of domestic mail delivery to 1 penny per envelope, to be prepaid by the sender. The pre-payment was made in the form of adhesive stamps. ‘The Penny Black’ was the worlds first adhesive postage stamp, arriving in May 1840.
On the 1st of October in 1869, Dr. Emannual Herrmann (a professor of Economics from Vienna) wrote an article about how the time and effort involved in writing was often inefficient for the size of the message sent. He suggested a cheaper and more practical method, creating the ‘Correspondenz-Karte’; a light-brown 8.5x12cm rectangular piece of card with space for the address on the front, and a short message on the back. The postcard cost half the price of a normal letter, with an imprinted 2 Kreuzer stamp on top right corner. The postcard was born.
In the 1880s, postcards were generally printed with small hand-drawn sketches or designs (called vignettes) on the message side. These started out just in black, with colour designs following.
The 1890s brought about the use of photography in postcards. Various subjects were photographed e.g. street scenes, beach scenes, general views. In 1903 Kodak launched the No. 3A Folding Pocket camera. This was their first ‘postcard camera’ with negatives that were the same size as postcards and so could be printed directly onto postcard card stock without the need for cropping.
The turn of the century is considered the ‘golden era’ of postcards, with multiple daily pickups and deliveries (up to 12 times per day in large cities). Postcards were effectively the text messages of their time.
In 1902 the British Post Office allowed messages to be written on one half of the side normally reserved for the address. This brought about the ‘divided back’ era of postcards and left the reverse side of the card free to be completely filled with an image.
Not only where postcards used for holiday messages, they were made to commemorate important events in Jersey’s history. For example, in 1907 the keys to Mont Orgueil were passed from the Crown to the States of Jersey for the public to enjoy as a historic monument. This is depicted in the postcards below.
Postcards are also a fantastic visual record of how Jersey has changed over the last century and prove very popular with archive users and researchers, the selection below shows postcards of Jersey locations
