Mulready stationery describes the postal stationery

Postal stationery

A piece of postal stationery is a stationery item, such as a stamped envelope, letter sheet, postal card, lettercard, aerogram or wrapper, with an imprinted stamp or inscription indicating that a specific rate of postage or related service has been prepaid...

 lettersheets

Letter sheet

In philatelic terminology a Letter sheet, often written lettersheet, is nowadays an item of postal stationery issued by a postal authority. It is a sheet of paper that can be folded, usually sealed , and mailed without the use of an envelope...

 and pre-gummed envelope

Envelope

An envelope is a common packaging item, usually made of thin flat material. It is designed to contain a flat object, such as a letter or card....

s that were introduced as part of the British Post Office postal reforms of 1840. They went on sale on 1 May, 1840, and were valid for use from 6 May. The Mulready name arises from the fact that William Mulready

William Mulready

William Mulready was an Irish genre painter living in London. He is best known for his romanticizing depictions of rural scenes, and for creating Mulready stationery letter sheets, issued at the same time as the Penny Black postage stamp.-Life and family:William Mulready was born in Ennis, County...

, a well-known artist of the time, was commissioned to illustrate the part of the precut sheets and envelopes which corresponded with the face area.

Design

The design incorporated a munificent Britannia

Britannia

Britannia is an ancient term for Great Britain, and also a female personification of the island. The name is Latin, and derives from the Greek form Prettanike or Brettaniai, which originally designated a collection of islands with individual names, including Albion or Great Britain. However, by the...

 at the centre top with a shield and a reclining lion surrounded on either side by a representation of the continents of Asia and North America with people reading their mail in the two lower corners, bestowing the benefits of mail

Mail

Mail, or post, is a system for transporting letters and other tangible objects: written documents, typically enclosed in envelopes, and also small packages are delivered to destinations around the world. Anything sent through the postal system is called mail or post.In principle, a postal service...

 services to the countries of the world under British control. The Mulready illustration was printed such that it appeared on the face of the sheets when folded. The Mulready lettersheets followed the traditional lettersheet design and could be folded as normal while the envelopes were a diamond-shaped sheet which, when the sides were folded about a central rectangular area, became an envelope when the overlapping edges were pasted.

The Mulready illustration was effectively a very elaborate frank indicating that postage had been pre-paid. In the same way that the first postage stamp

Postage stamp

A postage stamp is a small piece of paper that is purchased and displayed on an item of mail as evidence of payment of postage. Typically, stamps are made from special paper, with a national designation and denomination on the face, and a gum adhesive on the reverse side...

s were issued in two values (Penny Black

Penny Black

The Penny Black was the world's first adhesive postage stamp used in a public postal system. It was issued in Britain on 1 May 1840, for official use from 6 May of that year....

 and Two Penny Blue

Two pence blue

The Two Penny Blue was the world’s second official postage stamp, issued after the Penny Black.It was issued in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and was first sold to the public at the London Inland revenue office in the afternoon of May 8th 1840. Except for its denomination of the...

) both the lettersheets and envelopes were issued in one penny and two penny values in the same black and blue colours as the same value postage stamps.

Demise

Rowland Hill

Rowland Hill (postal reformer)

Sir Rowland Hill KCB, FRS was an English teacher, inventor and social reformer. He campaigned for a comprehensive reform of the postal system, based on the concept of penny postage and his solution of prepayment, facilitating the safe, speedy and cheap transfer of letters...

 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 caricature

Caricature

A caricature is a portrait that exaggerates or distorts the essence of a person or thing to create an easily identifiable visual likeness. In literature, a caricature is a description of a person using exaggeration of some characteristics and oversimplification of others.Caricatures can be...

s (or lampoon

Parody

A parody , in current usage, is an imitative work created to mock, comment on, or trivialise an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation...

s) 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

Postage stamp error

A postage stamp error is any of several types of failure in the stamp printing process that results in stamps not having the intended appearance. Errors include use of the wrong colors, wrong denominations, missing parts of the design, misplaced or inverted design elements, etc...

. 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

Aerogram

An Aerogram, Aérogramme or Air Letter is a thin lightweight piece of foldable and gummed paper for writing a letter for transit via airmail, in which the letter and envelope are one and the same. Most postal administrations forbid enclosures in these light letters, which are usually sent abroad at...

.

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.)

External links

• First Day of Issue, 6 May 1840, Mulready letter sheet Royal Insight (British Monarchy website)
• Mulready's, Parodies, Lampoons & Caricatures
• Propaganda Envelopes, Hand-Painted Envelopes, Reproductions and Forgeries
• Proof of One Penny Mulready lettersheet British Postal Museum and Archive
• Proof of Two Penny Mulready envelope British Postal Museum and Archive