Edwardian picture postcards were a craze of the early twentieth century,
comparable in many ways with social media today. For the first time
people could cheaply exchange communications that combined a picture and
a short message that would reach the sender often within hours. The early
twentieth century post was extremely fast with around 6 deliveries a day
in many towns and cities, potentially from as early as 6am to 10pm. The
Edwardian Picture Postcard Project is so-called because the Golden Age of
the picture postcard coincided with the reign of Edward VII (1901-1910).
After this, the opportunity to exchange cheap, attractive, written texts
was absent from society until the onset of the digital revolution.
Julia Gillen, the project director, is still actively crowdsourcing scans
of postcards, accepting donations and developing the research. The
Edwardian Postcard Collection here constitutes the project’s first
principal collection of 3,000 cards that have been transcribed and
analysed.
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