Sir Rowland Hill F.R.S. (1795-1879), inventor of penny postage

1 autograph signed letter dated "21st October 72"on embossed headed paper to the Secretary, Society of Arts and 1 undated signed ticket to the Exhibition of the Works of W. Mulready, Esq. R.A., at the Society of Arts.

1872

1 file (2 items)

Purchased from Sotheby's, London, December 1931 (acc.75873) and Glendining, London, May 1935 (acc.68610).

Hill, Sir Rowland (1795–1879), postal reformer and civil servant, was born on 3 December 1795 in Kidderminster. He began his career as schoolmaster and in 1819 he helped his family to establish Hazelwood, a new school in Edgbaston. In the same year as his marriage, 1827, he and his brothers opened the Bruce Castle School in Tottenham, Middlesex which he managed until 1835 when Hill turned over responsibility to his younger brother Arthur.

In January 1837 Hill published the first edition of Post Office Reform: its Importance and Practicability which set out to attack the current postal system and propose a reformation, or an alternative system of a standard prepayment for letters conveyed between principal towns and cities, regardless of the specific distance involved. It was in this pamphlet that he proposed the use of stamps as a method of pre-payment and from which he became most famous for: inventor of penny postage.

For a full biography please see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.