Charles G. Harper

“ At last, completely exhausted, you fall gradually into a refreshing sleep—your thoughts grow confused—the stage-coaches, which have been ‘going off’ before your eyes all night, become less and less distinct, until they go off altogether; one moment you are driving with all the skill and smartness of an experienced whip—the next you are exhibiting à la Ducrow on the off leader; anon you are closely muffled up, inside, and have just recognised in the person of the guard an old school-fellow whose funeral, even in your dream, you remember to have attended eighteen years ago. ”

“ The final test of a gentleman in those days was his behaviour at a stage-coach dinner. It was, if you consider it, a very severe and unfair test, for it is allowed that politeness generally leaves starving people at an early stage; and the appetites that coach passengers brought with them into the dining-room of an inn were usually very keen. An acquaintance of Constable, the painter, could find no more striking climax to a list of his virtues than to declare that he was “a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner.” ”

“ To the superficial glance it would seem that neither the dictates of humanity towards animals nor even the faintest glimmering perception of the possibilities of speed in constant relays had then dawned upon coach-proprietors; but it would be too gross an error to convict a whole class of stupidity so dense and brutal. It is not to be supposed that, at a time when ten-mile relays of saddle-horses for gentlemen riding post were common throughout the kingdom, the advantages of frequent changes and fresh animals were hidden from men whose daily business it was to do with coaches and horses. ”

“ Passengers sat on the luggage if they felt so inclined; coachmen got drunk, drove furiously, or allowed the deadly amateur to drive; luggage was stacked to alpine heights; guards discharged their blunderbusses everywhere from sheer wantonness or on joyful occasions; passengers were carried to excess; and, indeed, every provision of every Act was flagrantly violated, generally of malice aforethought, but not seldom from very ignorance and the sheer inability of coach-proprietors and the others concerned to keep themselves fully informed on all points. ”

“ The precursor of all public vehicles was the carrier’s waggon, a conveyance of hoary antiquity, intended in the first instance for the carriage of heavy goods, but finding room for those wayfarers who were too poor to own or hire a horse, or possibly too infirm to sit one even if their means sufficed. At least a hundred and fifty years before the earliest stage-coach was put on the road, the waggon, the poor man’s coach, was creaking and groaning on its tedious way at a pace of little more than two miles an hour. ”

“ Yet no one ever thought of denouncing Buckingham or any other of the magnificos when they lolled in easy seats under the silken hangings of their state barges and were rowed by the labour of a dozen lusty oarsmen on the Thames. The work was as servile as the actual carrying of a passenger, but the innate conservatism of mankind could not at first perceive this. On the whole, Buckingham therefore has our sympathy. ”

“ They are often brought to their inns by torchlight, when it is too late to sit up to get a supper, and next morning they are forced into the coach so early that they can get no breakfast. What addition is this to men’s health or business, to ride all day with strangers oftentimes sick, or with diseased persons, or young children crying, to whose humours they are obliged to be subject, forced to bear with, and many times are poisoned with their nasty scents, and crippled by the crowd of their boxes and bundles? ”

“ At other times the stable-lofts of the inns formed their apartments. Landlords of reputable hostelries, mindful of the social gulf that (in the opinion of the insides) existed between the inside passengers of a stage-coach and those off-scourings of the country who rode on the roof or in the “basket,” did not commonly allow those belonging to that even lower stratum, the waggons, to sleep in their houses. A supper of cold boiled beef and bread in the kitchen, followed by a shake-down in the hay or straw of the stables, at an inclusive price of sixpence or ninepence, was their portion. ”

“ The old packmen’s and drovers’ ways, narrow and winding to avoid the turnpike-gates that once took toll of all but the foot-passenger, may still be traced on the Yorkshire wolds, along the shoulders of the Westmorland and Cumberland fells, and by the rivers and moors of Devon and Cornwall. Often they are not even lanes, but only precipitous and rocky tracks, eloquent of those old times that are commonly pictured so rosy, but were really very grey and dour. ”

“ There were many such, but the traditional coachman was a bulky person, helped up to his seat by the combined efforts of the stable-helpers; and Dickens, in picturing Tony Weller, fell in with the public humour, although already the type was become somewhat out of date.
The stage and mail coachmen were no exotics, but, like every one else, the product of their country and their times; and as those times changed, so did they. The evolution of the smart coachmen of the ’thirties can be followed, step by step, until progress, in the shape of railways, extinguished the species. ”

“ The thin young woman is got upon the roof by dint of a great deal of pulling and pushing, and helping and trouble; and she repays it by expressing her solemn conviction that she will never be able to get down again.
“‘All right!’ sings out the guard at last,332 jumping up as the coach starts, and blowing his horn directly afterwards, in proof of the soundness of his wind. ‘Let ’em go, Harry; give ’em their heads!’ cries the coachman—and off we start as briskly as if the morning were ‘all right,’ as well as the coach.” ”

“ Your turn comes at last, and, having paid the fare, you tremblingly inquire—‘What time will it be necessary for me to be here in the morning?’ ‘Six o’clock,’ replies the whistler, carelessly pitching the sovereign you have just parted with into a wooden bowl on the desk. ‘Rather before than arter,’ adds the man with the semi-roasted unmentionables, with just as much ease and complacency as if the whole world got out of bed at five. You turn into the street, ruminating, as you bend your steps homewards, on the extent to which men become hardened in cruelty by custom. ”

“ Smollett’s description of how Roderick Random and Strap easily overtook the waggon journeying to London along the Great North Road naturally leads to an inquiry why, if being ill-provided with money and only lightly burdened with luggage, they, in common with others, preferred to pay for the doubtful privilege of going slower than they could easily walk. The reason, perhaps, lay partly in that lack of appreciation of scenery which characterised the period. Poets had not yet seen fit to rhapsodise upon the beauties of nature, and artists had not begun to paint them. ”

“ In securing a seat by post-coach, the traveller, in view of the limited accommodation, mathematically reduced his chances of meeting and journeying with vulgar and objectionable characters; while the higher fare tended to produce the same effect by eliminating all but those who were rich enough to afford the cost, and were therefore, by an easily understood process of reasoning, likely to be cleanly and well-mannered. How highly objectionable the company in a stage-coach might and could be we have the testimony of many travellers to tell, from Dean Swift to John Wesley and Macready, the actor. ”

“ Will any man keep a horse for himself and another for his servant all the year round, for to ride one or two journeys, that at pleasure, when he hath occasion, can slip to any place where his business lies for two or three shillings, if within twenty miles of London, and so proportionately to any part of England? ”

“ The usual alternative of a halfpenny a mile or a shilling a day gives about twenty-four miles as a day’s journey for the common stage-waggon, and as the Flying Waggon was advertised to go at the rate of thirty miles a day, six miles a day was therefore the measure of the superiority in speed of one over the other. But the accumulated contempt of all those social scales for the occupant of the common waggon did not rest there, any more than it began with the passengers of the “Machine.” ”

“ Coach-proprietors had, indeed, by this time begun to see the commercial advantage of impressing the public with a sounding name. Already, by long use and wont, cars had become blunted by the name of the Flying Machines, which had fallen unmeaningly upon several generations accustomed to liberally discount the absurd pretension. No one at this time, it is safe to say, ever received a mental impression of flying when a flying coach was named. ”

“ No one, nowadays, once set upon the great roads to York and Edinburgh, to Exeter, to Portsmouth, Dover or Bath, need ask his way. It is only necessary to keep straight ahead. In those old days, however, when travellers could describe the visible road as being a narrow track three feet wide, occasionally rising out of the profound depths of mud and water on either side, no one who could afford to pay would walk, even assuming the very doubtful physical possibility of struggling through such sloughs afoot. ”

“ Shergold, who in the coaching era was proprietor of the “Castle Hotel,” Brighton, and had every reason to know what life on the road was like, declared, in a very readable pamphlet he wrote, that “a woman was a creature to be looked at, admired, courted, and beloved in a stage-coach”; but let the rash modern traveller presume to look admiringly at the lady occupant of a railway carriage, and it is not at all unlikely that she will be horribly frightened, and take the next opportunity of changing into another compartment. ”

“ Rowlandson’s picture of a stage-coach in 1780 shows the same preference. Only one passenger is seen in the wickerwork appendage, while the roof, innocent of safeguards or seats, is covered with sprawling passengers who are content to take their chance of an involuntary flight, so that they escape the certain inconveniences of the “conveniency.”
“I observe,” says Moritz, “that they have here a curious way of riding, not in, but upon, a stage-coach. Persons to whom it is not convenient to pay a full price, instead of the inside, sit on the top of the coach, without any seats or even a rail. ”

“ Swift was in bad health and worse spirits when he wrote this diary at Holyhead, where he was detained for seven days by contrary winds. It was written for lack of employment afforded to a cultivated mind in the dreary little seaport, and under the influence of a great sorrow. “Stella” lay dying over in Ireland, and he, raging with impatience at Holyhead, filled his notebook with aimless scribbling. ”

“ Many travellers were never reconciled to railways, and in imagination dwelt fondly in the old days of the road for the rest of their lives; while many more never ceased to recount stories of the peculiar glory and exhilaration of old-time travel, forgetting the miseries and inconveniences that formed part of it. ”

“ They came to and set out from London very much as they had been used to do two hundred and forty years before, and resorted as of old to the ancient inns that lingered in such strongholds of the old road-faring interest as the Borough High Street, Aldgate and Whitechapel, and Bishopsgate Street. It is true they carried passengers no longer, for when railway travel came, and was cheap as well as speedy, there were none who could afford the time taken of old by waggon. It was cheaper to pay a railway fare, and thus save a day or even more. ”

“ Wheeled traffic had been unknown until the early stage-waggons appeared, and those few who travelled otherwise than afoot or on their own horses were content to mount the pack-saddle of a patient and long-suffering pack-horse, themselves only a degree less long-suffering and patient. ”

“ You look down the long perspective of Oxford Street, the gas-lights mournfully reflected on the wet pavement, and can discern no speck in the road to encourage the belief that there is a cab or a coach to be had—the very coachmen have gone home in despair.329 The cold sleet is drizzling down with that gentle regularity which betokens a duration of four-and-twenty hours at least ”

“ Whoever would wish to live long should live here, for a day is longer than a week, and if the weather be foul, as long as a fortnight. Yet here I could live with two or three friends in a warm house and good wine ”

“ Surely in no other business was rivalry so bitter and unrelenting as in that of coaching, and the annals of the road afford occasion for a sigh or a smile as one reads the furious denunciations levelled by one coach-master against another in their old advertisements. This contention started in the very first years of the Brighton Road. In 1757 James Batchelor extended his old Lewes stage to Brighthelmstone (as Brighton then was known) . ”