Hansom cab

“ To Stevenson and to the romanticist generally, a hansom cab-driver is a mystery behind whose apparent commonplaceness lie magic possibilities beyond all telling; not one but may be the agent of the Prince of Bohemia, ready to drive you off to some mad and magic adventure in a street which is just as commonplace to the outward eye as the cab-driver himself, but which implicates by its very deceitful commonness whole volumes of romance. ”

“ The patent had attached to it another plan for entering the cab through the wheel, a suggestion which has never been carried out. One of the great advantages of Hansom's cab was that the wheels, being much larger than usual, and the body of the vehicle nearer the ground, it could be worked with less wear and tear, and with a diminished risk of accidents. Hansom disposed of his rights to a company for the sum of 10,000l., but no portion of this money was ever paid to him. The company got into difficulties, and in 1839 Hansom took the temporary management, and again put matters in working order. ”

“ It is not an extravagant theory that the cabby’s singleness of purpose and concentrated view of life are the results of the hansom’s peculiar construction. The cock-of-the-roost sits aloft like Jupiter on an unsharable seat, holding your fate between two thongs of inconstant leather. Helpless, ridiculous, confined, bobbing like a toy mandarin, you sit like a rat in a trap—you, before whom butlers cringe on solid land—and must squeak upward through a slit in your peripatetic sarcophagus to make your feeble wishes known.
Then, in a cab, you are not even an occupant ”

“ The "man" was placed in a hansom cab in Weymouth Street, under the shadow of a house on the south side of the street, between Portland Place and Portland Road. It was a beautiful moonlight night, and both the Legation entrances could be clearly seen. The hansom cab was a necessary part of the sentinel on duty, as, supposing I had been hurried from the house across the pavement and into a carriage, I should have been carried beyond the reach of a person on foot in a few minutes. Cabs cannot be had at any moment in the early morning hours ”

“ What short cuts the driver took, darting across street-corners, shaving lamp-posts and imperilling the lives of small boys and old women selling apples, as only a London hansom-cab driver can! Everybody turns around as the white horse with the short tail, dragging the cab with its pale-faced occupant, dashes down the street, through the squares, across the park, round the crescent, where the policeman looks almost inclined to stop it, until he sees the anxious look of the girl inside ”

“ The hero in charge of the hansom cab generously gave his more heavily-weighted competitors a start of fifty yards; and, standing up in his perch, shook his reins defiantly and smacked his whip, to the infinite delight of everyone but the licenced gentleman who was the nominal proprietor of the vehicle. Of the omnibuses, one got speedily into difficulties, owing to the charioteer getting the reins a trifle mixed and thereby spinning his vehicle round in a semicircle, and bringing it up finally in the middle of the lawn, where he abruptly vacated his post and retired into private life. ”

“ He deposed: I am a cabman, living in Collingwood, and usually drive a hansom cab. I remember Thursday last. I had driven a party down to St. Kilda, and was returning about half-past one o'clock. A short distance past the Grammar School I was hailed by a gentleman in a light coat; he was smoking a cigarette, and told me to drive him to Powlett Street, East Melbourne. I did so and he got out at the corner of Wellington Parade and Powlett Street. He paid me half a sovereign for my fare, and then walked up Powlett Street, while I drove back to town. ”

“ Several clubs of this kind are now flourishing to encourage manly sport, and with the capacity to promote improvements in the form of the “drag,” as it is now called.
It is to an architect that we owe the invention of the Hansom cab. The safety consisted in the arrangement of [21] the framework at the nearest part to the ground, so as to prevent an upset if the cab tilted up or down. The inventor was Mr. Hansom, the architect of the Birmingham Town Hall. Numberless improvements have been made on this idea, but the leading principles are the same. ”

“ Lord Brougham was highly pleased with the new vehicle, and in 1840 he instructed his coachbuilder—Mr. Robinson of Mount Street—to make him one of a superior description. Hence the brougham.
The first four-wheeled cab. Elderly and sober-minded people showed a market preference for riding in clarences, and hansoms soon became considered the vehicles of the fast and disreputable. This reputation has not been lived down entirely, for, at the present day, there are some old ladies who will on no account enter a hansom, and shake their head sorrowfully when they see their grand-daughters doing so. ”

“ However, that drive spun a thread of intimacy between them. There are few conditions of companionship so favourable as those in a hansom cab. The driver is practically non-existent; the three sides and roof of the vehicle form a temporary home, a chez soi. The outside world lies in front of one, very near, and yet one is out of it. ”

“ The man in the second cab was dressed the same as the first, he was wetter than the first, for the sleet had fallen all night, but evening dress is evening dress all the world over. The driver wore the same oiled hat, the same waterproof cape as the other. And when the cab had passed the darkness swirled back where the two small lamps had been, and the slush poured into the wheel-tracks and nothing remained but the speculations of the shepherd to tell that a hansom cab had been in that part of China ”

“ A hansom cab was waiting at the entrance to the flats. Wrayson glanced once more instinctively towards the clock. Who on earth of his neighbours could be keeping a cab waiting outside at that hour in the morning? With the exception of Barnes and himself, they were most of them early people. ”

“ Parkman, "we can take a Hansom cab, and drive down through the streets, or we can walk down to the river side, and there take a boat. The boats are a great deal the cheapest, and the most amusing; but the cab will be the most easy and comfortable, and the most genteel. We shall have to walk nearly half a mile before we get to the landing of the boats." ”

“ London, moreover, is rendered habitable by hansom cabs. Young Walshingham was a natural cab-taker, he was an all-round large-minded young man, and he had in the course of their two days' stay taken Kipps into no less than nine, so that Kipps was singularly not afraid of these vehicles. ”

“ In those dull days we can imagine a scientific student of the novel studying that delectable work The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, and arguing elaborately that the work was written to illustrate the remarkable properties of hansom cabs. Remarkable they are, and we take them nowadays, perhaps, too much as a matter of course ”

“ I called a hansom from the rank just opposite to me, and jumped in, after giving my directions to so much of the driver as I could make out between his hat and his collar.
I felt tired, hungry, and depressed, so that I was glad to drop off to sleep, and forget weariness and worry for a little while; and I remained unconscious of bad pavement and rattling rain, blurred glass and misty lights, until the stoppage of the cab roused me. Thinking that I had arrived at my journey’s end, and wondering why the glass was not raised, I smote lustily on the roof with my umbrella. ”

“ Soon after breakfast Martin Gurwood issued from the house, and hailing the driver of a hansom cab, which was just coming out from the adjacent mews, fresh for its day's work, stepped lightly into the vehicle, and was driven off. ”

“ The cab horse, proceeding at a sharp trot, found himself suddenly at the top of an incline, where through the rain the pavement shone like an expanse of ice. It looked to me as if there was going to be a tumble. In an accident of such a kind a hansom becomes really a cannon in which a man finds that he has paid shillings for the privilege of serving as a projectile. ”

“ It is now improved with a circular back and rubber tires, while the very latest has a driver's seat behind, like a hansom cab. We can speak truthfully of the jaunting-car, after having tested its qualities for three hundred and fifty miles on this trip; but would add that care is requisite in arranging for and selecting a car, as many of them are old and worn out. ”

“ After plying for hire for a few weeks they were taken off the streets and have not yet reappeared.
The electric cab that is to be an all-round success has not yet been invented, but experience is being bought, and it will be strange if we have to wait long for it. But that it will ever supersede entirely the horse-drawn hansom is far from being likely, for while you meet hundreds of people who have had one ride in an electric cab, you come across very few who have had two. ”

“ Having at last managed to get some lunch, Tom went to bed to rest, after his two hard nights' work, and the rest of us went on shore. Directly we landed at the jetty we were rushed at by a crowd of jinrikisha men, each drawing a little vehicle not unlike a Hansom cab, without the seat for the driver—there being no horse to drive. The man runs between the shafts, and is often preceded by a leader, harnessed on in front, tandem fashion. Each of these vehicles holds one person, and they go along at a tremendous pace. ”

“ The Hansom Cabs, which of late years have been exported to Paris and Vienna, are generally in a better condition than the four-wheeled vehicles; but their drivers are to the full as exacting and impertinent as their humbler brethren of the whip. To do them justice, if they are exorbitant in their demands, they at least are satisfactory in their performance. They go at a dashing pace whenever they have an open space before them, and they are most skilful in winding and edging their light vehicles through the most formidable knots of waggons and carriages. ”

“ THE COCKNEY CABBY COMEDIAN
I was returning from the Newmarket races in England after a very poor day, having failed to back a winner. Arriving at Waterloo station I found it was raining in torrents. Not fancying hansom cabs in that kind of weather I permitted the crowd to rush along the platform in a frantic endeavor to secure a cab, having made up my mind to content myself with a four wheeler. It is not a particularly attractive vehicle (four wheelers are generally in use all night and retain a stuffy and most uncomfortable aroma therefore) , but it is safe! ”

“ To a realist a hansom-cab driver is a man who makes twenty-five shillings a week, lives in a back street in Pimlico, has a wife who drinks and children who grow up with an alcoholic taint; the realist will compare his lot with other cab-drivers, and find what part of his life is the product of the cab-driving environment, and on that basis he will write his book. ”

“ In 1836, hackney-coaches, “outrigger” cabriolets, and back-door cabs were still plying for hire, but the immediate and continued success of Chapman’s cab prompted the proprietors of those [Pg 223] decaying vehicles to start similar conveyances. Cabs painted and lettered in close imitation of the new patented vehicle were soon as plentiful as the real ones. Some proprietors, who prided themselves on being very smart, always had the word “not” painted in very small letters before the inscription, “Hansom’s Patent Safety,” believing that this would save them from being prosecuted. ”

“ If so I can understand the uses for the beheading blocks exhibited at the Tower.
All the vehicles used in the city are massive and solid. You see none of the flimsy spider-web wheels and light airy bodies in carriages that we affect in America. The wheels of a cab to carry four people are quite three inches thick, and the bodies are correspondingly clumsy. Like their owners, they are very solid.
But the hansom is the peculiar vehicle. The four-wheeler is a sort of a sober-going cab, the one you would expect the mother of a family or a respectable widow lady to use. ”

“ Another gent who is on the square comes up and sings out for a cab for him—first he says he don't know him, and then he shows plainly he does—he walks away in a temper, changes his mind, comes back and gets into the cab, after telling the cabby to drive down to St. Kilda. Then he polishes the drunk one off with chloroform, gets out of the cab, jumps into another, and after getting out at Powlett Street, vanishes—that's the riddle I've got to find out, and I don't think the Sphinx ever had a harder one. There are three things to be discovered—First, who is the dead man? ”

“ I've got a cab round the corner, this way."
He whirled her round into an alley which she would hardly have noticed if it had not been for him. In the dim light a hansom stood waiting. He lifted her in without a with-your-leave or by-your-leave, sprang in after her, and in a moment the horse, urged by its driver, tore off at the top of its speed. So soon as they had started the man at her side broke into a peal of laughter, which, despite its heartiness, had about it a peculiar quality of silence, beginning at the same time to talk with surprising volubility. ”

“ The Hansom cabs are the best and most convenient vehicles that can possibly be used for short excursions about the city. A shilling will carry you a smart fifteen minutes' ride, the legal price being sixpence a mile, but nobody ever expects to give a cabman any less than a shilling for ever so short a ride. Eighteen pence is readily accepted for a three mile trip, and it costs no more for two persons than one. There being nothing between the passenger and the horse but the dasher, as the driver is perched up behind, an unobstructed view is had as you whirl rapidly through the crowded streets ”