V
But they, and a host of Dickens’ characters, are very devils for post-chaises.
“If I had no duties, and no deference to futurity, I would spend my life in driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman,” said Dr. Johnson. “There are milestones on the Dover Road,” and we spin past them. You will remember that Dickens in his apprenticeship spent a brief but amazingly strenuous while as reporter for the Morning Chronicle, scouring the country after political meetings by road-vehicles in all weathers. As he told his audience, twenty years later, at the annual dinner of the Newspaper Press Fund:
I have often transcribed for the printer, from my shorthand notes, important public speeches in which the strictest accuracy was required, and a mistake in which would have been, to a young man, severely compromising, writing on the palm of my hand, by the light of a dark lantern, in a post-chaise and four galloping through a wild country, and through the dead of night, at the then surprising rate of fifteen miles an hour.... Returning home from exciting political meetings in the country (and it might be from Exeter west, or Manchester north) to the waiting press in London, I do verily believe I have been upset in almost every description of vehicle known in this country. I have been, in my time, belated in miry by-roads, forty or fifty miles from London, in a wheel-less carriage, with exhausted horses and drunken post-boys, and have got back in time for publication....
So, you see, this world Dickens imagined was more than crowded; it was a hurrying, a breathless one. This sense of speed in travel, of the wind in one’s face; of weight and impetus in darkness, with coach lamps flaring through the steam from your good horses’ hindquarters, runs as an inspiration through much of the literature of the early nineteenth century. De Quincey has hymned it magnificently in The English Mail Coach, and you may enjoy a capital drive of the sort in Tom Brown’s School Days: and always the rush of air whets your appetite for the hot rum-and-water at the stage hostelry or the breakfast of kidney-pie. Dickens saw the invasion of the railway train, and lived to be disastrously mixed up in a railway collision. But railway-train travelling at sixty miles an hour or over, has a static convenience. For the pleasures of inconvenient travel, without a time-table, I have recourse to a sailing-boat: but I can well understand my fellow-creature who prefers a car or a motor-bicycle to the motion of four horses at a stretch gallop. With the wind of God in his face he gets there (wherever it is) before the dew is dry, does his business, swallows his bun and Bovril and is home again with an evening paper for the cosy gas-cooked meal, ere yet Eve has drawn over his little place in the country her gradual dusky veil.
Rapid travel, as Dickens well knew it and how to describe it—with crime straining from what it fears—is one of his most potent resources. Read the flight of Carker in Dombey and Son.