On the Feast day of St Gabriel, patron saint of postal workers, this week’s picture is George Elgar Hicks’s The General Post Office:One Minute to Six, a clamorous tribute to the energy of the Victorian post office worker. Formerly owned by the well-known novelist (less well-known as a connoisseur of Victorian art), Evelyn Waugh, the work was bought in 1990 by the Museum of London, where it can still be seen.
Hicks’ most ambitious attempt at a social panorama, the picture was first exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1860. According to a report by ‘Jack Easel’, in Punch, it attracted a huge number of admirers. “The crush represented in Mr HICKS’s picture gives only a faint idea of the crowd around it. The glimpses which you catch of it, between hats, over shoulders, and under arms, only increase the reality of the scene.”
The “scene” is the Grand Public Hall at the front of St-Martin’s-le-grand Post Office, an impressive neoclassical edifice designed by Robert Smirke (who also designed the British Museum) and subsequently demolished in the early years of the twentieth century. The time is, as the artist’s subtitle indicates, 17.59. By 1860, the year when Hicks exhibited his picture, the daily rush to catch the last post at London’s largest Post Office – “the centre of that immense ramification through which circulates to all parts the private and commercial intercourse of nearly half the world,” as it was described in a leader in Times – had acquired legendary status. It was seen as a true modern phenomenon, a living symbol not just of the rapid spread of communication but of the accelerating pace of life throughout Victorian Britain. It even became a popular tourist attraction, rather like feeding time at the zoo. Charles...
