Form follows function in so many industrial processes, and this is true when it comes to custom cardboard boxes.

Modern packaging is designed to keep specific types of products safe and meet the security and safety needs of the modern supply chain, but the notion of dedicated and astonishingly durable cardboard boxes necessitates a reliable and versatile parcel post system.

Whilst there had been delivery systems throughout history, with some of the most remarkable being the Roman cursus publicus, the Persian Empire’s Agarium and the Pony Express, it took until the late 19th century for a standardised parcel post to emerge in the United Kingdom.

This can be credited in large part to the reforms and advocacy of one man, but he would sadly not live to see the fruit of his labour.

The Confused Courier

The main problems with early courier systems were the sheer cost, as well as the initial convention that the person who received the letter or parcel would be the one to pay.

This led to a confusing service that a lot of people either could not or would refuse to use, not least because successive governments over several centuries had seen it less as a vital service of communication and distribution and instead more as a way to generate tax revenue to fund lengthy wars in France and Spain.

This was a problem for a lot of people, but was a source of infuriation for schoolmaster Rowland Hill, who had seen from local implementations that the way to make more money was to significantly lower the price to send a letter and later a parcel.

He was not the first person to come up with the idea, however. Besides William Dockwra and the London Penny Post in the 1680s, there was the free trade advocacy movement’s position that expensive postal services formed an archaic self-defeating form of protectionism.

However, the later Sir Rowland Hill was the first to fiercely advocate for it, and would ultimately succeed in changing how we package and deliver goods in ways that still resonated years after he died.

Running Up Rowland Hill

Sir Rowland Hill was the son of an educator and would operate schools in an age before mandatory education in a way that was not dissimilar to more modern reforms, with an approach that foreshadowed his effect on postal deliveries.

He believed that what drove children to learn was not the fear of caning but instead compassion and developing a strong sense of moral imperatives and relative independence. It would take over 150 years for most of his ideas to finally become mainstream.

However, an even bigger and arguably more immediate change would be his advocacy for postal reform, allegedly inspired by the story of a young woman who could not receive a letter from her fiancé due to the costs involved with claiming it.

Outside of this and a more general attitude against the perceived elitism of having a postal service that could only practically be used by the wealthy, peers and members of parliament (who did not have to pay), Mr Hill’s argument was that it would ultimately be cheaper to lower costs.

Because postal deliveries were so expensive, the postal coaches and later postal trains that allowed for letters and parcels to be delivered at scale were left underused and thus were not making as much money as the cost per letter sheet would suggest.

If it were to be utilised more, so the argument by Robert Wallace and Rowland Hill went, not only would more money be made through the collection of small fees, but the benefits of a faster system of communication and commerce would finally be realised.

The Penny And The Parcel

Rowland Hill initially called for a penny per half-ounce rate for any letter sent to a town with a post office, but this proposal very quickly became a universal penny post.

Whilst a penny in 1840 was around 87p in 2025, it was still cheap enough for letters and letter-writing to become available to a wider population who were being taught to read and write.

However, whilst Mr Hill wanted to extend the universal system to parcels, it was at the time monopolised by the railway networks, and it would take until after Sir Rowland Hill passed away in 1879 before the parcel post service as we recognise it today started to take shape.

This started to take shape thanks to the establishment of the Universal Postal Union and the slow transition of authority for parcel post away from the railways and into the hands of the Royal Mail.