TY - CONF

T1 - Tracing lives of three young Edwardian women through picture postcards

AU - Gillen, Julia

N1 - Conference code: 48

PY - 2024/7/8

Y1 - 2024/7/8

N2 - The Edwardian picture postcard was the social media of its day. Analysis of the Postmaster General’s reports demonstrate the enormous growth of the picture postcard since the divided back was permitted from 1902. In year ended 31 March 1903 almost five hundred million cards were sent through the post and this increased annually until the Great War. People took advantage of the first time it was possible to choose (or commission or create) an image, often colourful, append a short message and send it through a postal service so fast it often arrived the same day. Drawing on my open access digitized collection of 3000 Edwardian postcards, in this presentation I introduce the lives of three young women, as glimpsed through sets of postcards. Annie Parrish was a labourer in rural Lincolnshire; Janet Carmichael, a Sunday school teacher in reduced circumstances in the town of Buxton, and Ruby Ingrey a typist and keen cyclist in Islington, London. I discuss how their lives: work; leisure, and consumption are made visible through study of these written, multimodal communicative texts. Despite the differences in their lives, the powerfully competitive and ubiquitous postcard enabled perhaps surprisingly distanced connections and interests. This study demonstrates the place of the picture postcard in Edwardian society. I end by suggesting that this resource can be leveraged further in the study of lives of Edwardians, particularly perhaps shedding a new light on the lives of working-class women.

AB - The Edwardian picture postcard was the social media of its day. Analysis of the Postmaster General’s reports demonstrate the enormous growth of the picture postcard since the divided back was permitted from 1902. In year ended 31 March 1903 almost five hundred million cards were sent through the post and this increased annually until the Great War. People took advantage of the first time it was possible to choose (or commission or create) an image, often colourful, append a short message and send it through a postal service so fast it often arrived the same day. Drawing on my open access digitized collection of 3000 Edwardian postcards, in this presentation I introduce the lives of three young women, as glimpsed through sets of postcards. Annie Parrish was a labourer in rural Lincolnshire; Janet Carmichael, a Sunday school teacher in reduced circumstances in the town of Buxton, and Ruby Ingrey a typist and keen cyclist in Islington, London. I discuss how their lives: work; leisure, and consumption are made visible through study of these written, multimodal communicative texts. Despite the differences in their lives, the powerfully competitive and ubiquitous postcard enabled perhaps surprisingly distanced connections and interests. This study demonstrates the place of the picture postcard in Edwardian society. I end by suggesting that this resource can be leveraged further in the study of lives of Edwardians, particularly perhaps shedding a new light on the lives of working-class women.

KW - Edwardian postcards

KW - social history

KW - Literacy

M3 - Conference paper

T2 - Social History Society annual conference

Y2 - 8 July 2024 through 10 July 2024

ER -