Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 March 19

Welcome to the Wikipedia Humanities Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

March 19

Historic postal address for Bristol

I have looked at the article but I'm just as confused as ever. If someone were to send a letter to someone living in Bristol between, say, 1880 and 1960, and they didn't themselves live in Bristol, what would the full postal address be? --TammyMoet (talk) 15:40, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Surname,

House name or number, Street

District

BRISTOL

There are variations. Prominent landmarks (inns, churches, big houses) were used as much as road names. "Dr Days" was a bridge needed to cross the new railway, near the eponymous doctor's large house. It still gives its name to a railway junction.[1] There was no door-to-door delivery in poorer parts of town for a long time. The notion of "post towns" in the UK is an old one, as is the idea of writing them in an address as uppercase, and for a well known city like Bristol these would be used more than a county. By the 1880s though, everywhere in Britain has a post office and a simple recognised name (Sudbrook grew from nothing but a field beyond Southbrook Farm about this time, as a building worker's encampment for the Severn Tunnel, but couldn't have a post office until it was designated with a proper name.) There was also much use of poste restante addresses, especially in a commercial city such as Bristol. Amelia Dyer, the infamous baby farmer [2], made much use of such addresses and pseudonyms, including one at the 'Ship's Letter Exchange', Stokes Croft, Bristol. The Ship's Letter Exchange by this time was used so much as a commercial mailbox service that it had moved away from the docks to bigger offices on the other side of town.

If you really want to know details, talk to the Postal Museum in nearby Bath. https://bathpostalmuseum.org.uk/ Andy Dingley (talk) 16:43, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

I found this image of an 1875 addressed envelope, although not for Bristol. Bristol straddled two counties, Gloucestershire and Somerset, and was effectively a county in its own right, so I doubt that a county name would have been used. This turn-of-the-century advertisement says "Matthew William Dunscombe, 5, St. Augustines Parade, Bristol". According to this article, house numbering in England started in England in the mid-18th century, but was somewhat chaotic before the Metropolitan Management Act 1855. Alansplodge (talk) 17:39, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Here is a 1932 letter from Gambia to Bristol. I don't recall the postal town being written in capitals until the introduction of postcodes; Andy Dingley may well be right, but if so, it seems to have been a rule widely ignored on handwritten envelopes. Alansplodge (talk) 17:39, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Bristol was always (certainly in 1880) a major city, and the only place of that name in England, so there would have been no confusion if a letter was simply sent to Bristol. And it wasn't (and isn't) only "effectively" a county in its own right, it is in all senses a county in its own right. Ghmyrtle (talk) 17:51, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

But doesn't appear in Historic counties of England#List of counties, neither do Lichfield or Poole etc. Alansplodge (talk) 18:14, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

• House numbering in the UK begins with the building of streets (as unified streets) and deliberate town planning - a largely Georgian development. This was the result of commercial speculative builders, especially in the profitable new town expansions of Bath or Cheltenham, and similar areas in established towns like Bristol. Rather than houses being built one by one for their owners and acquiring names almost randomly from their owners, builders now built a whole row or more of houses and then sold them on - numbering them neatly from the outset as a means of managing them. This in turn required the developed banking of the 18th century, so that these many builders could finance such an outlay. The "Postal Act of 1765" seems to be one of those internet myths which has become recursively self-sourcing.

Uppercase generally begins with typewriters. Someone trained in the calligraphy of the period, using the pens of the period (either quill or steel), just doesn't do this naturally. However it is recorded in addressing. Andy Dingley (talk) 18:00, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

What's your source for that first sentence? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:09, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Mostly OR for the unprovable negative of numbers not being much used beforehand. For the development of British housing as planned estates though, Suburban Style: The British Home 1840–1960. 1987. ISBN 0-356-14054-7. is a good start. Andy Dingley (talk) 11:22, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

According to Letter case, upper and lower case long precede the invention of the typewriter. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 11:31, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Well of course they do! However uppercase (as whole words) is very awkward to write for typical British penmanship of this period, owing to the English use of round hand scripts and the affectation of teaching a copperplate hand. Europe avoided this, with variations on Niccoli amd Arrighi italic across much of mainland Europe and Blackletter remaining in the Germanic north. Andy Dingley (talk) 14:46, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Thank you all for this. I was enquiring to assist an American relative locate her relatives, and as ever Ancestry comes up with some very strange locations, in this case it was "Bristol, Staffordshire, England". Now I know Bristol is 70 - 100 miles from Staffordshire so that was quite obviously not right! But what was right? Hence the confusing search. The other source of my confusion was the reference that said Bristol became a County Borough. Now I used to live in a County Borough, which had a Staffordshire postal address. So I thought there must have been a shire suffixed to Bristol, just as Birmingham was in Warwickshire and Manchester in Lancashire. Obviously the northern half of Bristol was Gloucestershire, and the southern half was Somerset. So to accurately pin down the location, we would need to find the address on a map. I think my next step is to find the census records and get the definitive answer from there. Thank you all. --TammyMoet (talk) 12:25, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Bristol's location within counties is extremely convoluted!

It was never really that firmly in Somerset. Gloucestershire extended southwards to the Avon, Bristol developed mostly on the North bank of the Avon. St Mary Redcliffe was on the South bank, in Somerset, and came under a different diocese: Bath & Wells, rather than Worcester and the county of Gloucestershire. The major church in Bristol was St Augustine's Abbey, which still gives its name to the (now filled-in) main medieval dock area. St Mary Redcliffe grew in the 13th century, with the mercantile money from the developing port, and aiming to become the centre and cathedral of this growing and now important city. The Northern side were against this - they wanted to stay as the major bank of the river, so opposed this. The 1373 charter of Bristol makes it deliberately separate from both counties, an unusual matter for the time, and thus reduced the unwanted influences of the (Baby-eating) Bishop of Bath and Wells from the growing mercantile and secular, if not downright godless, Bristol merchants. Henry VIII later dissolved the monasteries, including St Augustines, leaving the building vacant. In turn this led to the more-compliant and secular suffragan bishops and the new dioceses of Gloucester and in 1542, Bristol - which included Dorset too.

Neither the county status, nor the diocese of Bristol lasted indefinitely, coming and going over the years. The diocese was part of 'Gloucester and Bristol' from 1836 to 1897. The counties are even more complicated. I used to live in Fishponds, a northern suburb, and the county boundary was a large signpost opposite the house, at the corner of one of the otherwise indistinguishable blocks of Staple Hill. Andy Dingley (talk) 17:31, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

See here for other examples Wikipedia:Reference_desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2017 March 25#Dora, Alabama. 92.19.172.248 (talk) 12:37, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

galley proofs

Before the age of digital typography, publishers used to circulate galley proofs to reviewers before final publication, to allow for fixing errors and maybe making last-minute updates. I think the idea is they'd set the type (by hand?) on a letterpress, print a few copies to circulate as proofs, then make any needed corrections by moving the letterpress type around.

I'd think that printing equipment and re-usable type was quite expensive: did they really set up multiple presses to print the pages, then leave them sitting around for days or weeks while waiting for corrections to come back by post? What if it was for a book with 100s of pages? Was the galley itself (i.e. the tray that held the composing sticks) removable from the printer, so you could fully typeset a page and then store the loaded galley for later use? Or did they just remove the loaded sticks and reinstall them, or what? How much time did authors/reviewers usually get to make their corrections? I'm mostly asking in regard to the 1920s-1930s period, but if there's a general history that would be nice. The Wikipedia articles that I looked at don't say much about this topic. Thanks. 173.228.123.121 (talk) 22:30, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Well, from Strong Poison I do know that letting the typeset galleys stand was an option (that wasn't used for arty books with low sales expectations like Phillip Boyes's). It's only a half-sentence in the novel, butDorothy L. Sayers is usually decent for research. --Stephan Schulz (talk) 23:35, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Once the type was set, it was locked into a chase (printing), which could be stored - so you could keep using the press itself for other things. The alternative was to create a Stereotype (printing) which freed up the type for re-use. Wymspen (talk) 11:14, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks! TIL where the word "stereotype" comes from. I'll try to connect up the relevant articles a little bit more. 2607:FCD0:100:8303:5D:0:0:B7D4 (talk) 01:09, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

I think that when using the Monotype System, you could just store some paper tape, rather than metal type... AnonMoos (talk) 12:31, 21 March 2018 (UTC)

Hmm thanks, and I guess there were ways to edit the tape, such as with scissors. But was that a huge expensive chunk of equipment used only at mass-circulation publishers such as newspapers? The situation I was originally wondering about involved math journals. 173.228.123.121 (talk) 04:28, 22 March 2018 (UTC)

For a large part of the 20th century (before the rise of Phototypesetting in the 1960s), newspapers usually used Linotype, book publishers in the UK used Monotype (considered to produce higher-quality output), while in the U.S. many book publishers used Linotype, but self-consciously high-end book publishers used Monotype. I have no idea about math journals (which obviously had some special requirements)... AnonMoos (talk) 05:43, 22 March 2018 (UTC)