2 May 1840

2 May 1840 is the date printed in a Bath postmark on a surviving envelope bearing a Penny Black, one of an unknown number of letters mistakenly date-stamped before the new postal service was due to begin. The date joins a documented early-postal error to the novel’s present-day mystery: when the envelope turns up inside Milo Motion’s copy of The Hollow Man, its sharply legible postmark makes the past suddenly material and unexpected.

The historical date

The date refers to an incident in Bath on 2 May 1840. The Postmistress mistakenly date-stamped an unknown number of letters bearing the new Penny Blacks four days before the service was due to start. The postmark therefore records more than the age of a stamp: it captures a brief discrepancy between the postal system’s planned beginning and the moment its first letters were actually marked. The surviving envelope preserves that discrepancy in a compact form, joining place, day, month, year, and stamp on a single object.

The envelope had survived for more than a century and a half. It was not normally kept in the Postal Museum; its owner, whose identity remained secret, had loaned it for a special exhibition. That distinction matters to the date’s status in the story: the mark is not a routine detail in a museum collection, but part of a rare object temporarily made available for public display. The date also gives the artifact a precise historical anchor, rather than leaving its age to be inferred from the stamp alone.

The postmark and its value

The surviving envelope’s address, written in fine copperplate, had faded until it was barely legible. By contrast, the postmark remained remarkably even and clear. Its three lines read BATH, MY 2, and 1840, while the stamp showed Queen Victoria’s head against a black background and the words ONE PENNY. A cancellation mark over the stamp read PAID. The legibility of the date beside the fading address creates a striking imbalance: the envelope’s destination has almost disappeared, while the evidence of when and where it passed through the post remains readable.

The object’s rarity is explained through the distinction between a stamp and a cover, the term used for the entire face of an envelope. Only two examples were said to be known. A comparable cover sold at auction in 1991 to a Japanese collector for £1,350,000, a price identified as the highest ever paid for a postage stamp and recorded in the Guinness Book of Records. This is the sale price of a comparable example, not a stated valuation of the particular envelope later discovered in the novel. Its value is thus tied both to scarcity and to the survival of the complete envelope with its early postmark intact.

The date in the mystery

The historical date becomes a present-tense clue when the envelope is found between the pages of The Hollow Man during a Bloodhounds gathering in a church crypt. Milo Motion first treats it as an unexplained bookmark, then looks at the envelope and falls silent. The aged paper, nearly illegible address, Penny Black, and clear Bath postmark disclose what the object is before he can make sense of how it came to be in the book. His visible disbelief underscores the gap between recognizing a historical artifact and explaining its unexpected presence.

The date’s role depends on that delayed recognition. The group has assembled to hear a chapter called The Locked-Room Lecture, and the envelope appears inside the very book at the center of the reading. Its postmark is precise enough to authenticate the letter’s historical identity, but it does not explain how the letter arrived there. In this way, 2 May 1840 serves two functions at once: it fixes the envelope in a specific moment in postal history and makes its appearance in the present more puzzling. The firm clarity of the date contrasts with the unresolved circumstances of the discovery.