The Victorian City: Everyday Life in Dickens' London (16 page)

The great coaching yard of the Swan with Two Necks on Lad Lane was one starting point for the great procession of mailcoaches setting off daily. (Note the royal arms on the coach’s door, indicating the Royal Mail.)

Guidebooks in the 1820s set out the system for coaching. The fare was approximately 2½d to 3d per mile outside, or 4d to 5d inside. Seats were booked on payment of half the fare at the inn where the coach started, or at any of the inns where the horses were changed en route, with the balance of the fare payable at the beginning of the journey; alternatively a traveller could wait at a crossroads and flag down a passing stage. Outsides were expected to tip the coachman and the guard 1s each, with 3d to the porter at the inn where they set off; the tip for insides was 2s, to the outrage of many tourists. The stages carried four passengers inside, and ten or twelve outside, who perched up on benches on the roof. This was more than the mails could accommodate, as they didn’t have to make space for the postbags, which by the 1820s were heaped four or five layers high on the roof. One lucky outside passenger got the box seat beside the coachman. This was the most desirable outside seat, and dashing young men tipped the booking clerk well to reserve it for them. Theoretically, the stage was more comfortable than the mailcoaches, with cushioned outside seats, while the mailcoaches offered only bare boards.

Seating, inside and out, was on a first come, first served basis, so passengers generally arrived a little before departure time to reserve a particular seat. Once that seat had been taken, no matter how many changes and rest stops there were, etiquette required that each passenger always returned to the same place. Trunks and boxes were then handed over; it was advisable for passengers to ensure that they were stowed on the right coach, or were not left sitting in the coaching yard. Likewise at any stops on long trips when the coach was changed, seasoned travellers watched out for their bags
at the transfer point. If passengers arrived at the inn to find that the stage had left early, a not infrequent occurrence, they were entitled to order a post-chaise to chase down the slower-moving vehicle. It was stipulated that ‘the Proprietors pay the Expense of your Ride’.

There were many little habits and routines specific to the stages. The Revd Heman Humphrey from the United States observed that when two coachmen passed on the road, without fail ‘they exchange salutations, very significantly, by raising the elbow to a horizontal position, at a sharp angle, and turning it out toward the other’. Dickens concurred that there was a greeting ‘strictly confined to the freemasonry of the craft’, but he described it differently: it was more ‘a jerking round of the right wrist, and a tossing of the little finger into the air at the same time’.

While this freemasonry did not extend to the passengers, they too fell into recognizable patterns of behaviour. In
The Pickwick Papers
, ‘The outsides did as outsides always do. They were very cheerful and talkative at the beginning of every stage, and very dismal and sleepy in the middle, and very bright and wakeful again towards the end.’ There was always one young man who smoked endlessly; another who pretended to be an expert on cattle, while another was the real thing. These were interspersed by locals, familiar to the guard and ‘invited to have a “lift”’. And, most familiarly, ‘there was a dinner which would have been cheap at half-a-crown a mouth, if any moderate number of mouths could have eaten it in the time,’ for there were constant sardonic jokes about the lack of time to eat at stops along the route. Many passengers suspected collusion between the inns and the coachmen, the former bribing the latter to cut the stops short, so that they could serve up several times in the course of a day the same meal that no one had had time to eat.

Despite all its drawbacks, coaching was regarded as glamorous. Fashionable men dressed in caped greatcoats in imitation of the coachmen, ‘ornamented with enormous mother-o’-pearl buttons as big as crown-pieces, with pictures on them of mail-coaches going full speed’. Some upper-class young men even paid coachmen to let them drive on their routes. The playwright Edmund Yates remembered ‘my astonishment at my father shaking hands with the coachman’ of the Brighton coach, until it was revealed that
he was in fact a titled gentleman. One upper-class man recounted how, when he was passing the White Horse Cellar, ‘a coachman had familiarly tapped him on the shoulder with his whip’. He had been enraged by this insolence from a working-class man, until he looked more closely at the supposed driver and recognized his own nephew.

Similarly, the author of
Old Coachman’s Chatter
, a nostalgic look at coaching days, described seeing, in 1837 or 1838, the ‘Taglioni’ leave the White Horse Cellars: it was painted blue, with a red undercarriage, the family colours of Lord Chesterfield, who together with Count d’Orsay and Prince Bathyani paid for the privilege, and supplied their own horses.
⁴¹
The aristocratic ‘coachman’ wore a scarf in the same colours, with ‘Taglioni’ embroidered on it ‘by the Countess’s own hands’. This reality had fictional antecedents: in the 1821 novel
Real Life in London
, Bob Tallyho drives ‘about twice a week’ on the Windsor–London stage, ‘tipping coachy a crown for the indulgence’, acquitting himself well, apart from ‘two overturns only...and...the trifling accident of an old lady being killed, a shoulder or two dislocated, and about half a dozen legs and arms broken, belonging to people who were not at all known in high life’: ‘nothing worthy of notice’, the author concludes with a wink to the reader.
⁴²

Such satires apart, coaching was dangerous. When it was not dangerous it was uncomfortable, so much so that its discomforts became proverbial: it was said that the painter Constable, known for his sunny good nature, could manage to remain ‘a gentleman even on a coach journey’. Sitting
facing the rear caused queasiness in many, but insides in front-facing seats were at the mercy of the wind and rain unless the window was kept closed, in which case the queasy insides complained, or even let their ‘Stick or...Umbrella fall (accidentally) against one of the Windows’. Many passsengers considered paying for a breakage preferable to hours in an increasingly fetid atmosphere, but if it rained the insides became nearly as wet and muddy as the outsides. Straw was scattered on the floor for insulation against the cold although, as with the omnibuses, it was usually dirty and wet. Some coaching inns supplied a ‘
Calefacient
’, a pewter container that could be refilled with hot water at each stop, to put under the feet and mitigate the cold.

And yet, inside was a considerable improvement on outside.
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
(1857) described a ride on the Tally-ho stage with ‘your feet dangling six inches from the floor. Then you knew what cold was, and what it was to be without legs, for not a bit of feeling had you in them after the first half hour.’ Tom rides on a fairly empty stage, and the guard helps him pack his feet in straw for warmth, as well as giving him a piece of sacking to cover himself with. A queasy passenger complained that on his first stagecoach ride, in 1835, the choices were sitting facing the horses, ‘but without anything against my back (for the iron bar...four inches above the seat, can hardly be called a resting-place)’, or facing backwards, ‘but secured from falling over...and breaking my neck’.
⁴³
In either case, all that protected him from the bare boards was a cushion, which ‘is, alas, soaking from the previous day’. This misery was replicated in fiction. When Mr Pickwick and his friends take a stage to Birmingham, Bob Sawyer ends up with rain ‘streaming from his neck, elbows, cuffs, skirts, and knees...his whole apparel shone so with the wet, that it might have been mistaken for a full suit of prepared oilskin’.

Whilst a wetting was miserable enough, Dickens’ novels are filled with much more serious stagecoach accidents. in
Nicholas Nickleby
, the
London–Yorkshire stage overturns, with the result that ‘the lady inside had broken her lamp, and the gentleman his head...the two front outsides had escaped with black eyes, the box [passenger] with a bloody nose, the coachman with a contusion on the temple, Mr Squeers with a portmanteau bruise on his back’. In
Martin Chuzzlewit
, a storm made the horses uneasy even before they set off; once on the road, ‘they gradually became less and less capable of control; until, taking a sudden fright at something by the roadside, they dashed off wildly down a steep hill, flung the driver from his saddle, drew the carriage to the brink of a ditch, stumbled headlong down, and threw it crashing over,’ while a boy is ‘thrown sheer over the hedge...and was lying in the neighbouring field, to all appearance dead’.

Dickens had extensive experience to draw on, for his career as a journalist for the
Morning Chronicle
, from 1834 to 1835, had been in the surprisingly short golden age of coaching, from the spread of macadamized roads in the mid-1830s to that of the railways in the early 1840s. In 1841, in Scotland, he found himself in a coach with a broken drag, forcing the passengers to get out ‘every now and then’ and hang on to ‘the back of the carriage to prevent its rolling down too fast’. It was, naturally, also raining, even before the carriage broke a spring, and was ‘in a ditch and out again, and [having] lost a horse’s shoe. And all this time it never once left off raining.’

Other natural hazards included fog. In 1840, one coaching enthusiast remembered ‘seven or eight Mails following one after the other’ in a particularly dense fog: the guard on the first coach held up a flare at the rear of his coach, which could just be seen by the driver of the next, whose guard in turn held up his own flare, ‘and so on till the last’. In this manner one ten-mile stretch took three hours, instead of the more usual one, and even then one coach ended up in a ditch, where its wheelers – the pair of horses nearest the stage’s wheels – drowned, while the outsides were ‘thrown into the meadow beyond’, and the insides ‘extricated with some difficulty’.

Even without fog, writers listed an array of accidents: from obstructions on the road that could not be seen by the driver; to horses that ran up a bank, upsetting the coach into the road; broken reins; a broken pole, which tipped the coach over; horses that jammed together and, with their heads turned the wrong way, could no longer be controlled by the coachman; a lead
horse falling, and the wheelers in turn stumbling over it; a driver hitting his head on an overhanging branch and falling off, upon which the horses then bolted; a driver being jounced off the coach by a rut or an obstacle; outsides falling off regularly (‘It’s like helping an outside passenger up ven he’s been pitched off a coach,’ says Tony Weller in
Pickwick
aphoristically); or horses shying and running off. All of which makes Dickens – ‘I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known...I have been...belated on miry by-roads...in a wheelless carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken postboys’ – seem positively understated.

The romance nonetheless survived. In 1860, Dickens recalled his childhood: ‘The coach that had carried me [to London as a child], was melodiously called Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson, at the coach-office up-street; [while] the locomotive engine that had brought me back [as an adult] was called severely No. 97, and belonged to S. E. R. [the South-Eastern Railway], and was spitting ashes and hot-water over the blighted ground.’ Dickens never quite made up his mind about trains. He used them frequently, travelling to seaside holidays, to the continent, to his house in Kent; and then relentlessly once he started his famous reading tours, repeatedly criss-crossing the country. Yet long before he was in a terrible train crash in 1865 – in which ten people died just outside Staplehurst, in Kent, and which left him with a fear of train travel that lasted the rest of his life – long before this, while he welcomed the railways as a convenience and a sign of modernity, he also regretted them as symbols of a time that was passing, or past.

Thackeray, his elder by a year, wrote elegiacally: ‘what a gulf between now and then!
Then
was the old world. Stagecoaches...riding-horses, pack-horses, highwaymen, knights in armour, Norman invaders, Roman legions...all these belong to the old period...But your railroad starts the new era and we of a certain age belong to the new time and the old one.’ Looking both backwards and forwards from the start of his career as an author, writing in 1836–7, Dickens set his first novel,
Pickwick Papers
, a decade earlier, opening in 1827, before the arrival of the railways, but one chapter was nevertheless entitled ‘Strongly illustrative of the Position, that the Course of True love is not a Railway’. Ten years later in
Dombey and Son
,
he was still looking both ways: he described the savage destruction that the building of the railways caused, but he also saw that ‘The miserable waste ground, where the refuse-matter had been heaped of yore, was swallowed up and gone; and in its frowsy stead were tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich goods and costly merchandise...the new streets...formed towns within themselves, originating wholesome comforts and conveniences...Bridges that had led to nothing, led to villas, gardens, churches, healthy public walks.’ Even so, he finishes: ‘But Staggs’s Gardens had been cut up root and branch. Oh woe the day when “not a rood of English ground” – laid out in Staggs’s Gardens – is secure!’

In some ways, the arrival of the railways didn’t shrink London, but made it appear to be expanding at the seams. Trains made areas seem suburban that had previously been rural, while suburbs became part of the city; Dickens wrote in 1847, ‘places far apart are brought together, to the present convenience and advantage of the Public’. At a time when an exasperated commuter claimed that it was quicker to walk the two and a half miles from London Bridge to Trafalgar Square than to take a bus, Max Schlesinger praised the marvels of the suburban line, ‘a miraculous railway’ that ran from Blackwall and Greenwich in the east and over the northern section of the City to north-west London: every quarter of an hour, ‘from early morn till late at night’, the ten-mile journey took twenty minutes. Schlesinger was not alone in his attitude. Within a quarter of a century, 160 million journeys a year were made by rail within London itself. Many places that had recently been quiet suburbs were heavily visited. After the Great Exhibition in 1851, the Crystal Palace was relocated to Sydenham and, with new, elaborately laid out gardens, it opened to the public in 1854. At first trippers had to take the train to the suburb of Penge and walk up a hill, but such was the volume of visitors that the Crystal Palace company set up its own railway branch line. This was so successful that it was soon taken over by the London and Brighton Railway, which built a substantial station, linked to Crystal Palace ‘by long glass corridors embellished with flowers and climbing plants’. By the 1860s, Crystal Palace afternoon concerts were drawing audiences brought by special express trains from Kensington, over twelve miles away.