Like, you aren’t necessarily next door neighbors. You’d have to take the streetcar or bus or commuter rail some distance to go meet your friend. You can’t text “sorry the train is 30 minutes late”, because no cell phones, no internet, no tracking buses or trains on your smartphone. No payphones or landlines.
Letters are only for those cross-continental, cross-oceanic relationships. If you live in the same city, then well you’d still have to meet in person cuz it’s not the digital age, no doomscrolling social media and sending texts and memes.
I feel like those were the days where you could have true friendships in society, not “having friends to send memes”.
Other people have touched on it, but I really want to emphasize how completely ordinary it used to be to go to someone’s house uninvited, unannounced. Well into the telephone age, it was regularly done. And you were expected to always invite them in.
If you wanted to appear to be an at least minimally functional member of society, you would keep some sort of snack food, a cake, cookies, scones, muffins, et cetera, constantly in stock so that you could offer refreshments to literally any person anyone in your household had ever met in their lives, showing up at your door at absolutely any time.
Refreshments were the bare minimum. The further back you go, the more likely your guests were going to want to live with you for a while.
Recently got a friend into anime and he was complaining how unrealistic it was for a unannouced guest to just be invited in, given a spare bedroom and given food and drink no questions asked basically.
To be fair while it was a shit isakai and very nonsense. This bit of it was an extremely accurate depiction.
We were having a fun time picking apart the nonsense of a low effort shit show. But was just funny that out of everything the only thing they got remotely accurate was the hosting manners.
The further back you go, the more likely your guests were going to want to live with you for a while.
As an introvert this might as well be a horror movie.
Before landlines, you’d write them a letter to arrange a meeting.
The mail was delivered up to 4 times a day depending on where you lived.
And since only one family member (generally the father) had to work to support the family, there was almost always someone home.
So another option would be to simply visit them unannounced at a time you knew they’d be there.
In many regions, it would have been normal to simply walk in to a friend’s house, even without knocking.
Also, you’d know this person from somewhere. Somewhere you met.
Either at work, or at a club, or a union meeting, or a pub. You get the idea.
So you’d see them regularly in person, cause otherwise you wouldn’t get to know them in the first place.Also, you’ve probably heard of a “calling card,” but these were actual physical things. If you dropped by someone’s home or business when they weren’t there, you could leave behind a card saying you were there and wanted to get in touch.
Letters are only for those cross-continental, cross-oceanic relationships.
Letters were commonly written for people in the same city. Some posh neighborhoods in major cities would have hourly mail service.
Before landlines?
As in prior to 1876?
hop on a donkey, slap its ass, get lost in a forest, get eaten by a bear.
eeeazeeeee…
This mental image just made me chuckle. 🤭
In school. We used to plan where we want to go on certain date and time and just meet there. Admittedly this was still a time with a landline and payphones and my part of the world was just getting cellphones but that’s for middle to upper class.
If this is about that period of human history where we had long-distance transportation (ie railroads) but didn’t yet have mass communication infrastructure that isn’t the postal service – so 1830s to 1860s – then I think the answer is to just plan to meet the other person at a certain place every month.
To use modern parlance, put a recurring meeting on their calendar.
I feel like those were the days where you could have true friendships in society, not “having friends to send memes”.
Um, excuse me? You need to get out of your internet bubble. Tons of people still have friends in real life - most of them, actually. If you don’t, and you wish you did, then you have an unusual problem and you should start working on solving it asap
Your message might be correct (maybe) but the way you wrote it could not be wronger.
For starters, it’s not an unusual problem at all: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loneliness_epidemic?wprov=sfla1
Secondly, your whole comment is really aggressive, from “Um, excuse me?” to “you should work on it asap” it’s all just attacks as if it’s as simple as that.
Sending letters via post to friends in the same city wasn’t uncommon—but beyond that, you could leave messages at common locations. Like if you both go to the same shop once a week, you could leave messages for each other with the shopkeeper.
Depends on where you lived.
In some places, you’d leave a note with someone you knew the recipient was going to see that day. In some places, note passing was quite an artform, including special paper folding to protect the contents from prying eyes.
In Paris, they had the tubes — the entire city was plumbed with vacuum tubes, and you could write a note or even pack a small object into a capsule with an address, drop it in your local receptacle, and it would zip across town in minutes to the recipient address.
In other places, markings on trees, mirrors, flags, smoke signals and various musical instruments and bells have been used.
Go out earlier is a practice that I think it is not done anymore. If I have a meeting at 4pm and I know that it takes me 30 minutes to get there, I go out of my house one hour before. This is for answer your doubt about how would you let know to your friend that you will be late, you weren’t able, the best you can do is be preventative.
Imagine you send a letter to a fellow who lives overseas, you expect to see him september the 3rd in a concrete place. I can bet that person would arrive like a month before and wait the right time. (Obviuosly would not wait for you in that very place, that person can stay in a hotel or whatever).
My parents lived in a part of the world where they didn’t always have phones. Dad lived on a farm, mom lived in town. School together, Church together. After school, Dad would go “help around the house” at mom’s. Or vice versa. Once they got old enough, one or the other would go to the city in the family car for shopping, and bring the other with. Go see a movie, grab a bite to eat together.
Just arranging it the last time in person. Mail worked just fine to confirm or cancel a bit before since the same city. If you needed things more quickly, couriers was one way. There were also a lot third spaces and people met out and about more and more often. They might see each other every Sunday at the same church for instance.
Up until I was in uni, even payphones didn’t matter most of the time since there’s no guarantee both parties are going to be near one and no normal person had a pager. If you were going to a business that had a phone, you could look up their number and call them to put one of your buddies on the line or at least send a message (see the running gag on the Simpsons where Bart calls the bar to ask for someone).
We also just waited a bit and if they didn’t show, we went on with our plans.
You just got to take chances and hope the person you’re meeting is where you’ll end up meeting them in. Also, random chance happenings.
Before landlines? You know those have been around for over 100 years?
I was explicitly referring to the pre landlines/payphone era. So this is the time before landlines and payphones.
Were streetcars and buses around before the telephone? I’m honesty not sure.
Mom and dad tell me you would go outside and talk to people in your neighborhood. Letter delivery was a couple times day so writing letters was common.
They were certainly around before most people had a telephone.
My mother grew up in a household without a telephone. In a big city. She was born in 1951.For a very short period.
Phones became a mainstream way of communication in the 1880s.
Public transport, in the form of trains and buses and street cars have become widespread in the early 1800s, mostly around 1830-1850 (e.g. London had railway services but the first underground service opened in 1863).
Mind you, most of these services were connecting small-ish town sections (even London wasn’t really a unified city until the 1900s, but a bunch of parishes, boroughs and towns connected by railway), so your “friend living on the other side of town” was usually a 15-30 minute walk away at most. In fact most people, the average people anyway, had friends only in the local community as they’ve rarely left said community and ventured beyond their immediate vicinity. Those who’d have friends from far away - let it be a city a few dozen to a few hundred miles away or even another country - would be either the upper class (nobility and high earning professions like solicitors), or merchants (also rich). Long distance travel was a luxury most couldn’t afford.
It was the industrialisation that allowed for cheaper transport and for towns to grow larger and denser, so the overlap of the availability of public transport, the NEED for such transport to meet friends, and the lack of telecommunications wasn’t as widespread as one would think.
