The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (14 page)

The watermen were poorly dressed, in ‘a sackcloth coat, and apron of the same’, and their tickets – their licences – around their necks; the watermen’s
ankles, said Dickens, were ‘curiously enveloped by hay-bands’, a reference to the men’s sheepskin gaiters, worn for warmth. While hackney drivers were also considered to be stereotypically shabby, hansom-cab drivers were generally represented as smartly dressed. A print in 1850 showed a driver in a snappy brown coat instead of the coachman’s heavy multiple-caped outfit, pale green striped trousers, short boots and top hat, the reins held daintily in his gloved hands. Both cab and coach drivers wore top hats, but cabbies of a sporting bent later switched to bowlers, and in summer donned bright checked outfits.

While providing a useful service, cab ranks also were an annoyance: cabs and horses took up a great deal of space, and the ever-present swilly mix of dropped feed, water and manure underfoot was a constant hazard to pedestrians.

Some stands were said to be better than others, the term ‘better’ implying they were cleaner and less intrusive into the neighbourhood, but mainly referring to the quality of the drivers and the watermen. Of the 200 authorized stands in London in the 1850s, the ones outside the theatres, or south of the river, and in Westminster, were considered to be the worst, while those outside railway stations – where the drivers were fined by the railways if passengers complained of ‘insolence’ or overcharging, or were banned outright for repeated offences – were ‘the top post in the trade’. At a properly run large cabstand, such as that outside Euston, there were two watermen on duty on the fifteen-hour day-shift, two on the nine-hour night-shift, taken week by week in turn, while smaller stands had one man on each shift. The water on better stands was provided free by the water companies, but on smaller or less reputable stands the waterman was responsible for paying the fee to the water company, which could be up to £4 annually, or 2½d a day. Many watermen needed other forms of income as well, running errands for nearby residents, or cleaning pots or boots or drawing water for the local pubs, where they spent a lot of their time anyway. Even for sober watermen, pubs were good places to wait out of the cold and wet. More often, watermen were drivers who had lost their licences, usually for drunkenness, and they naturally gravitated to the pubs.

‘Bucks’, or drivers who had lost their licences but continued to drive illegally, were ubiquitous: many were drunks, with no family or settled life, sleeping in the cabs at night, and dozing in pubs and coffee rooms during the day. Their ability to find employment is unsurprising, for the economics of cabs were harsh. A hansom cost up to £50 to purchase, a horse up to
£20 and a harness perhaps £5, while a cab licence was £5 a year. Duty was payable at a rate of 10s a week and the driver’s licence cost another 5s a year. This meant a capital outlay of £75 and ongoing payments of 12s a week, not including maintenance costs for the cab, or the horse’s feed, stabling and medical bills. A horse, furthermore, could work for only half a shift at a time, so two per shift were the minimum. Over a single shift a cab driver averaged 9s a day in fares in the off-season, and up to 14s during the season. If the drivers were not owners, but leased their cab from a master, as most did, they were, by the 1860s, obliged to hand over 15s of their earnings daily for the long-day shift, with night cabs paying 9s. If they failed to earn the agreed sum, they had to make up the difference themselves. A night driver took home, at best, 18s a week, or £46 a year.

To boost their income, licence-holders sublet their cabs to bucks, who gave the driver 1s for every 1s 6d or 2s he earned. Fares were set down by law: so much per mile. But at the end of each journey, how many miles a journey had taken was easily disputed, and many drivers expected to bully and threaten their way to a higher fare. Dickens and his
Household Words
colleagues fantasized about a world in which ‘eightpence were understood to mean not more than a shilling, and three-quarters of a mile not more than a mile’, but until that happy day arrived, bucks could in effect extort what they liked. If the passenger complained to the police and had the driver brought up before the magistrates, as did happen with some regularity, when the licence-holder arrived the passenger would have to acknowledge that this was not the man who had driven him. From 1853, legislation was enacted to regulate the situation: the driver had to display a table of fares, with the legal distances between specific points.

Yet the question of fares remained ugly. In snow, when cabs had to be drawn by both the driver’s horses at once, passengers were charged vastly inflated sums – legitimately, the drivers thought, as the horses tired more quickly, and they had no extra horses to continue with when the pair tired, forcing them to work a short day. For many passengers, the problem was nothing more than an irritant. Max Schlesinger shrugged it off: the simplest solution was ‘to pay and have done’ with it, but, he added, even those who knew London intimately would at some point in their lives have to ‘appeal
to the intervention of a policeman’ to deal with cabbies. In his fiction Dickens portrayed the very real fears of, particularly, women travelling alone when confronted with these aggressive and often drunken men. Genteel Miss Tox, in
Dombey and Son
, makes ‘systematic’ arrangements before entering a cab, loudly requesting the footman of the grand house she is leaving to note down the cab’s number, before instructing, ‘He’s to drive to the [address on the] card, and is to understand that he will not on any account have more than the shilling...Mention to the man...that the lady’s uncle is a magistrate.’

Even with these problems, cabs quickly became popular as a speedy, efficient and relatively inexpensive means of transport for the middle classes. They were now necessities, even if they were necessities that had to be rationed. In Trollope’s
Phineas Redux
(1873), the middle-class but not rich Mr Maule had to make choices. When the weather is fine he walks to save money, but when it is wet, or at night, ‘A cab...was a necessity; – but his income would not stand two or three cabs a day. Consequently he never went north of Oxford Street, or east of the theatres, or beyond Eccleston Square towards the river’: that is, he confined himself to the fashionable West End, Mayfair and Belgravia.

Most people could not imagine ever owning a private carriage. It was not just the cost of the carriage itself, or the horse and its accoutrements – harnesses and so on – but the running costs: the feed and care of the horse, the stabling, as well as the taxes that were imposed on carriages throughout the century. If a carriage were needed regularly, or the family was large, more than one horse might be required. The needs of the animals constrained people’s movements. In
Our Mutual Friend
, when Mr Veneering campaigns for a parliamentary seat, his friends dash about in their carriages to spread the word, but after a certain amount of time ‘pails of water must be brought from the nearest baiting-place’ to cool the horses before they can set off again. Dickens used this for comic effect, but other novels simply reported these requirements as a natural event. In
London by Night
, a racy novel of about 1862 concerned with fallen women, two prostitutes go out in their brougham in the evening, to drink in a saloon and pick up men. Six hours later, when they are ready to return home, one says, ‘I sent the
[coachman] home to change his horse, but it must have returned some time [ago]’ – horses could not stand about for hours, and visits, even to saloons brimming with loose women, had to be planned. By mid-century there were only 10,000 private carriages in London – 1 for every 260 people, and this number included jobbing carriages, which were actually commercial vehicles, hired out by the day or hour. So low did the number sink that by the 1860s builders no longer routinely built mews behind even prosperous streets, for their owners were unlikely to need stables.

A major component in the cost was the staff needed to service a carriage: the coachman and possibly a tiger, or groom. Footmen stood on the back step, ready to jump down to help the passengers into and out of the carriage.
³⁹
Footmen were also known for the flamboyant manner in which they knocked on doors while their masters waited in the carriages. When Tom Pinch first arrives in London in
Martin Chuzzlewit
, no one answers his polite little rap at a door, at which Tom concludes, ‘I am afraid that’s not a London knock.’ Foreigners were amazed to discover that there was a recognized, if unspoken, hierarchy of doorknocks in the city. The German journalist Max Schlesinger viewed the knocker as

the most difficult of all musical instruments. It requires a good ear and a skilful hand...The postman gives two loud raps in quick succession; and for the visitor a gentle but peremptory
tremolo
is
de rigueur
. The master of the house gives a
tremolo crescendo
, and the servant who announces his master, turns the knocker into a battering ram...Tradesmen, on the other hand...are not allowed to touch the knockers – they ring a bell which
communicates with the kitchen. All this is very easy in theory but very difficult in practice. Bold, and otherwise inexperienced, strangers believe that they assert their dignity, if they move the knocker with conscious energy...They are mistaken for footmen. Modest people [who knock softly], on the contrary, are treated as mendicants.

As well as their salaries and their keep, all of these servants were liveried, that is, they wore a uniform, each household having its own distinctive colours to identify their servants. Livery for footmen was essentially court-dress of the 1770s frozen in time: knee-length coats with metal buttons and braid, long striped waistcoats, breeches, stockings and buckled shoes. Coachmen too wore breeches, waistcoats and coats with parti-coloured collars, facings and cuffs. Tigers, usually boys, wore tight, jockey-like outfits, and their name derived from their striped livery. In
Martin Chuzzlewit
, Bailey the tiger wears white cord breeches, big top-boots, and ‘A grass-green frock-coat...bound with gold! And a cockade in your hat!’

The technology of carriages advanced out of all measure from the 1820s: they became safer, more comfortable and easier to drive. As with cabs, the wheels were larger and the body set lower, making them less likely to overturn, as well as rendering the interior accessible by a double step, instead of the three-fold ladder steps that had previously been needed. Better springs gave a smoother ride, while a strengthened undercarriage improved safety. Different types of carriages had their own strengths and weaknesses, and were liked or disliked for their perceived stylishness or indications of status and income, as cars are today. Broughams were either singles – with one seat holding two people, and a space for a footman behind, pulled by one or two horses – or doubles, always pulled by two horses, with two facing seats – although the one facing backwards was small – accommodating three passengers, plus the footman. Victorias were more ‘modern and stylish’: also four-wheeled, they carried two, with a fold-down leather hood at the back, and were open at the front. Four-wheeled carriages were difficult to turn, unlike the two-wheeled cabriolets, which became more common from the late 1830s. Cabriolets also carried two people, with a boy behind if wanted, and were generally considered more stylish, less bourgeois. They
were also less expensive to run, as one of the passengers drove from inside the cab, doing away with the need for a coachman, a footman or even a boy. However, cabriolets were not particularly easy to drive, and the ride was very rough; as the carriages were heavy to pull, the quality and strength of the horses was crucial. The Tilbury was promoted as easier on the horses, because it was lighter, but it was badly hung, giving a bumpy ride, which in turn made it hard to control the horse.

Another drawback was that, unlike coaches, the cabriolets did not make much noise. This today seems to be a positive, not a negative, but it was the noise that alerted drivers to an oncoming vehicle after dark. By mid-century the London streets were lit by gas street lamps on average just over 200 feet apart: closer on Oxford Street, further apart on secondary roads, and entirely absent on small streets or in impoverished districts. Before this, there were even fewer, so travelling in the dark at a rate of up to ten miles an hour (horses’ top speed when being ridden: less when pulling a carriage) was hazardous. Drivers on the roads into London relied on the ambient light from the numbers of mailcoaches entering and leaving the city, many having five or six lamps, and the guard, ‘especially on thick [foggy] nights’, making ‘free use of his horn to avoid collisions’. In town, by mid-century, the hansoms helped light up the streets, having ‘a bright speck of light fixed in front of the hood’.

Otherwise carriage lighting developed slowly. In the 1820s, carriage lamps consisted of a candle in a glazed container with a spring at the bottom to push the candle up as it burnt, keeping the flame level; behind it were mirrored reflectors to direct the light outwards, around the carriage, to warn oncoming traffic. These lights were placed below and slightly behind the driver, so that he had relatively little light spilt on him: it was important to keep his eyes adapted to the dark. By the late 1830s, the household Argand lamp had been adapted for carriage driving, its main benefit being a clear glass funnel that did not become blackened with soot as the wick burnt. It is indicative of how dirty the older style of glass must have been that in the opinion of one journalist these new lights made coaches look as if they were carrying ‘two harvest moons’. Yet by today’s standards, the lighting was exiguous. In 1855, an engraving of Queen Victoria in a long procession
at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris showed her own carriage as the only one with a light.