The Large Queens: Part III
Even before the fellas undertook the project of Canadian Confederation, myth-making bureaucrats had already wielded their powers of political persuasion to start building the fledgling nation.
This is the third story in a four-part series exploring the “Large Queens,” Canada’s first post-Confederation stamp issue. Finally, we’ve reached the story’s philatelic bits and pieces—and I thank you all for following along. This and the final story, coming later this week, will discuss the Large Queen stamps, their regal design and their interest among collectors worldwide. (For a recap of the series’ first half, read parts one and two here.)
“Everything is about power. Everything has to have a side. Everyone knows what side they should pick. Pick it—and you're a collaborator. Reject it—a dissident. Nor are these labels chosen to mean that dissidents are always right, and collaborators always wrong. Far from it. Sometimes power is right; sometimes power is wrong. Always and everywhere, power defines and is defined by what you should think, do and say if you wish to flourish. This is the only sure way to know whether you are a dissident or a collaborator.”
—Curtis Yarvin, “A General Theory of Collaboration,” Gray Mirror (2020)
“Politics is the art of controlling your environment.”
—Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-Crossed Child in the Final Days of the American Century (2003)
At the beginning of July 1867, Canadians began enjoying the newfound freedoms granted by their nation’s crown-sanctioned evolution from a fledgling colony to a sovereign dominion.
But even before the fellas undertook the project of Canadian Confederation, myth-making bureaucrats had already wielded their powers of political persuasion to start building the nation. These architects of identity used symbols, stories, songs and ceremonies as myth-making tools to develop the allegories we still use to decipher our national je ne sais quoi today.1
In April 1868, eight months after Canada gained dominion status, postal officials unveiled the first stamps issued under Canadian Confederation.2 While earlier colonial issues saw use in the Province of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, the 1868 dominion issue featured “handsome stamps of large size and uniform design, intended for use not merely in one colony as the previous stamps had been, but for the whole Canadian Dominion,” according to the a March 1893 edition of Bowmanville, Ont.’s Canadian Statesman.3
But by that time, a quarter century had passed since the feds launched what’s now known to collectors as the “Large Queens.”
Back in September 1868, reporters with Halifax’s Morning Chronicle described the situation in this way: “For the first time in the history of this country, we have been blessed with stamps—blessed with that peculiar mode of taxation which was said to be one of the chief causes of the American revolution.”4
Published five months after first Large Queens started franking mail in Canada, the Chronicle story reported the Post Office Department had already realized a princely revenue of $4,666 from selling the stamps.5 Postal revenue for the year ended March 31, 1869, would exceed $640,000 (about $14 million today) with 161 new post offices and way offices added to the more than 3,600 offices already operating across the dominion’s four provinces.6
Despite the promising revenue, the stamps proved expensive to produce and initially struggled to gain the public’s popularity; however, they’ve since aged into a collector’s dream as handheld history and a testament to Canada’s early myth-making ambitions.7 Beyond the papers, inks and perforations lie the story of a young nation eager to make its mark—even if it relied on its monarchical upbringing to do it.
MAKING A LARGE QUEEN
Several key figures collaborated to create the Large Queen design, a meticulous process led by Canada’s Post Office Department and Alexander Campbell, the country’s first postmaster general.8
Postal officials wanted the stamps to serve as symbols of Canada’s new national identity. But in practical terms, they needed the stamps to meet the needs of the country’s rapidly expanding postal system, whose services were integrated and connections improved as a part of Confederation.
The department commissioned the recently established British American Bank Note Company (BABN), formed in Montréal two years earlier by former employees of the American Bank Note Company (ABNC), to design and print the stamps.9 The BABN had facilities in both Montréal and Ottawa, and it printed the Large Queen stamps in the both cities at different times throughout the series’ production.
On April 1, 1868, postmasters received the first truly Canadian stamps, which featured a right-facing diademed portrait of Queen Victoria. Each stamp uses a similar design centring on the queen’s vignette and surrounded by various ornamentation. Issued through 1875, the stamps also include the words “CANADA POSTAGE” at the top and their respective values written in English and with numerals at the bottom.10
Liverpudlian artist Alfred Jones, who immigrated to New York and worked for the ABNC before joining the break-off BABN, engraved the portrait from a similar work by famed British engraver Charles Jeens.11
The Philadelphia-born artist Henry Earle Sr. engraved the stamps’ lettering and frame while W.C. Smillie, BABN president, is believed to have produced the ornamental work.
MORE THAN MERE STAMPS
More than mere stamps indeed—the Large Queens served as a declaration of Canada’s new identity while honouring its ongoing connection to the British crown.
Canada continues that connection today with its constitutional monarchy, whose current head of state is King Charles III, and its parliamentary democracy, based the British or “Westminster” tradition.12
The stamps’ shared portrait of Queen Victoria, then the longest-reigning British monarch, symbolized Canada’s colonial past while conveying the sense of stability and continuity essential for a young nation finding its footing on the world stage.
The Large Queens also played a key role in bolstering Canada’s emerging independence by helping to establish its postal system. This essential institution – spurred by the global communication revolution brought about by postage stamps – connected the vast and diverse lands and people of the newly formed dominion. The stamps facilitated both communication and commerce, bridging the gaps between communities and fostering a sense of national identity.
People used tens of millions of Large Queen stamps to send mail in the second half of the 19th century. The three-cent issue – used to pay the rate for domestic letters – became the series’ most common stamp with more than 22 million examples printed. The series’ second most common stamp, with 10.3 million examples issued, was the two-cent denomination, which paid either the registration fee for local letters, the rate for transient newspapers or double the drop-letter rate.13
Many more millions of pieces of mail travelled around Canada and abroad with the series’ successor, the Small Queen issue, which used a similar design but in a smaller size.14
The legacy of the Large Queen series extends beyond its national story; it also inspired generations of philatelists. Their historical significance, beautiful design and well-known rarities have placed them among Canada’s most sought-after stamps, some of which have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.15 This enduring popularity is a testament to the postage stamp’s ability as a medium to transcend the boundaries of its ephemeral nature and connect with the universal human desire to appreciate tangible history in our hands.
Forever known as the first stamps issued under the Dominion of Canada, the Large Queens played a pivotal role in shaping the nation’s early identity. Today, the stamps offer an enduring reminder of our legacy on the world stage as a “great and independent country.”
The next edition of Power & Philately – the fourth and final part of this series – will come on Thursday evening. Check back here or in your inboxes on Jan. 23.
P.S. Remember, subscriptions for Power & Philately are free. Subscribers receive an utterly luscious story in their inbox each week with full access to the archive of past stories plus Substack’s large reader community. While no payment is ever necessary to access Power & Philately, many righteous readers have opted to pay for donation subscriptions ($5 a month or $50 a year) or join the founding member plan ($100 a year) as “esteemed financiers.” Each of my esteemed financiers receives in the mail a special gift related to philately, propaganda or both.
While the beaver officially became a symbol of Canadian identity when the National Symbol of Canada Act received royal assent in 1975, its use predates the act by more than a century. In 1851, Canada’s first postage stamp centred on the industrious beaver (as covered in an earlier edition of Power & Philately). It broke with tradition to become not only the first stamp to depict an animal but the first pictorial stamp in the world and the first issue under the banner of the British Empire to forgo a traditional portrait of the reigning monarch or another royal family member. Also seen on totem poles in First Nations communities on Canada’s Pacific coast, the beaver stands as “the first universally popular symbol of Canada, even before the maple leaf,” according to the Government of Canada website.
The British government only allowed some of its colonies – the ones founded by British settlers – to become sovereign dominions. The Brits’ imperial policy centred on “responsible government,” which gave legislative power to the elected assembly of a British colony rather than the monarchy. Aside from Canada, it allowed colonies in present-day Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland, the latter which only joined Confederation in 1949, to become dominions. On the flip side, India received dominion status in 1947, but it took three more years for the country “to break free from the monarchy and transform into a sovereign democratic republic,” according to a 2022 Indian Express report. “The British were unsure of India’s dominion status, and even others dominions like Canada did not want to share this status with a non-white polity.”
The large size of the “Large Queen” series, excluding its half-cent denomination, surpassed the size of most other postage stamps issued before that time. While the printed portion of the half-cent stamp measured about 17 millimetres by 21 millimetres (vertical), the other seven denominations measured 20 millimetres by 24 millimetres.
Many sources claim the term “philately” originated in France (as “philatélie”) with stamp collector Georges Herpin, of Paris, coining the term in 1864. Herpin considered his word “a more suitable alternative to the original pseudo-scientific word ‘timbromanie,’” or “stamp madness,” according to a Dec. 11, 1983, New York Times report. While French people used the word “timbromanie” to describe stamp collecting in the early 1860s, two decades after Britain issued the world’s first stamp, Herpin outlined his suggestion in the Nov. 15, 1864, issue of Le Collectionneur de Timbres-poste. “Philatelie est formé de deus mots grecs” (“Philately is made up of two Greek words”). He combined the Greek root word “phil,” meaning “to love,” with “atelēs,” another ancient Greek word meaning “free from tax or charge,” which “nearly matched the concept of what a postage stamp does,” according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. “It is a reminder of the original function of postage stamps: the cost of letter-carrying formerly was paid by the recipient; a stamp indicated that carriage had been pre-paid by the sender, thus indicating to the recipient’s postmaster that the letter so stamped was ‘carriage-free.’” As for the widely disliked “timbromanie,” it fell out of favour as Herpin’s term came in, according to brothers L. Norman Williams and Maurice Williams in their early 1970s book, Fundamentals of Philately. About a year after Herpin coined philately, Britain’s Stamp Collectors Magazine announced it, along with “philatelist” and “philatelic,” had become “household words in the postage stamp collecting world.” Using the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tracks the use of words and phrases across a corpus of books over time, I searched for “philately,” “philatelist” and “philatelic” from 1800-2020. The viewer showed how writers used these three phrases in English books over more than two centuries with each of the terms peaking by 1940 followed by smaller peaks in the late 1950s and early 1980s.
The $4,666 revenue from the Post Office Department’s sale of Large Queen stamps between April and September 1868 would be worth more than $100,000 today (adjusted for inflation).
An April 1870 edition of the Sarnia Observer features an abstract for the annual postmaster general’s report, which provides an update on the Post Office Department’s finances and operations.
“The Large Queen issue is complex,” according to a 2015 Ottawa Philatelic Society study group presentation. “Collecting the issue and correctly assigning an individual stamp to its correct printing involves a combination of shade, paper, perforation, gum (if mint) and the sharpness of the impression.” Collectors can expand a Large Queen collection with re-entries (which occur when parts of a design are mistakenly doubled during the printing process); plate flaws (which include colour dots, lines, missing design features and plate damage); plus cancellations on used stamps (including numeral cancels with two-ring, squared-bar, squared-circle and oval-bar designs and fancy cancels).
Also a Father of Confederation, provincial lieutenant-governor, senator and lawyer, the England-born Alexander Campbell moved to Canada with his family at age one in 1823. They arrived in Québec before settling in Kingston 13 years later. At age 17, Campbell became John A. Macdonald’s second articled law student before his admission to the bar in 1843. While Campbell initially practiced law as Macdonald’s partner, the duo had an on-and-off relationship, described as “extremely unpleasant” by the Canadian Encyclopedia, and dissolved the partnership after six years. Next, a successful political career led him to the Charlottetown and Québec conferences, which laid out the plans for Canadian Confederation. Then called to the Senate in 1867, Campbell served as Canada’s first postmaster general in Macdonald’s first Cabinet as prime minister.
Two printing operations, one headed by George Burland and another one by W.C. Smillie, joined forces in 1866 to form the British American Bank Note Company (BABN), which later acquired two smaller printers, the Dominion Bank Note Company and the Canada Bank Note Company. The BABN opened its first facility in Ottawa before moving its headquarters to Montréal in 1871 and finally back to the nation’s capital in 1889. While Smillie “knew all about the design, engraving and the production of postage and bill stamps,” he lacked business experience, according to a May 2014 issue of Gibbons Stamp Monthly, published by the U.K.-based firm Stanley Gibbons. Luckily, Burland “had a business track record” as the owner of the Montréal Gazette and a man “with political connections were willing to, and did, play dirty to get the contract—but who knew nothing about the design, engraving and production of postage stamps, or bill stamps for that matter.”
Numeral values in the lower corners are also sometimes repeated at the top of the stamps.
Alfred Jones also served as the BABN’s vice-president from 1868-70. He previously engraved the first stamps issued by pre-Confederation Canada in 1851 while working at Rawdon, Wright, Hatch & Edson in New York. Fellow engraver Herbert Bourne would later copy Jones’ portrait while working on definitive stamps for the Falkland Islands. “It is generally thought that Bourne’s rendering of the portrait is actually superior to that of Jones,” according to a 2018 story published by Stamp Engravers.
Canada’s prime minister, a role currently served by outgoing Liberal Party leader Justin Trudeau, is the country’s head of government.
In the 19th-century, a drop letter referred to a letter dropped off at a post office for delivery at the same office. The postal service made its rate cheaper than a regular letter since a drop letter required no mail carrier for delivery.
By repurposing the Large Queen series’ common design, the BABN could more quickly print the same number of Small Queen stamps with less paper and at a lower cost owing to smaller engraved plates and printing presses, according to a 2015 Ottawa Philatelic Society study group presentation. “The public also preferred the smaller-sized stamps which retained the same popular design and colours. This helped postal workers and the public ensure mailed items were properly franked.” Of the eight Large Queen denominations, only the 15-cent issue remained in use and on sale at post offices – for more than three decades – following the Small Queens’ release. The next 15-cent stamp wouldn’t appear until 1897, when the Post Office Department marked the diamond jubilee (or 60th anniversary) of Queen Victoria’s reign with the country’s first commemorative issue.
The fourth and final part of this series will highlight the 1868 two-cent Large Queen on laid paper, the rarest Canadian stamp, later this week.