If you did not put in an appearance, the deposit was, of course, forfeited.
Dickens, who as a reporter in his early years was very intimately acquainted with coach travelling and all the manners and customs connected with it, has left a very picturesque description of a coach booking-office and its occupants. The first impression received by the prospective traveller was of his own unimportance. One entered a mouldy-looking room, ornamented with large posting-bills, the greater part of the place enclosed behind a huge lumbering rough counter, and fitted up with recesses like the dens of the smaller animals in a travelling menagerie, without the bars. At these booking-offices, in fact, one booked parcels as well as passengers, and into these recesses the parcels were flung, with an air of recklessness at which the passenger who might have chanced to buy a new carpet-bag that morning would feel considerably annoyed.
The booking-office to which Dickens here refers was at the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross; but booking-offices were all very much alike, and were exceedingly dreary and uncomfortable places, resembling modern offices for the reception of parcels:—
“Porters, like so many Atlases, keep rushing in and out, with large packages on their shoulders; and while you are waiting to make the necessary inquiries, you wonder what on earth the booking-office clerks can have been before they were booking-office clerks; one of them, with his pen behind his ear, and his hands behind him, is standing in front of the fire like a full-length portrait of Napoleon; the other, with his hat half off his head, enters the passengers’ names in the books with a coolness which is inexpressibly provoking; and the villain whistles—actually whistles—while a man asks him what the fare is outside—all the way to Holyhead!—in frosty weather too! They are clearly an isolated race, evidently possessing no sympathies or feelings in common with the rest of mankind. 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.”
The long-distance coaches—divided into the “day” and “night” varieties—started very early in the morning, or late in the afternoon. The midday aspect of such yards as Sherman’s “Bull and Mouth,” Chaplin’s “Swan with Two Necks,” the “Belle Sauvage,” the “Cross Keys,” the “Golden Cross,” and others was one of repose, but from unearthly hours in the forenoon until nine or ten, or from three o’clock in the afternoon until nine at night, they were the scenes of bustling activity. Any reference to old coaching time-bills will show that the majority of the day stage-coaches to places distant a hundred miles or more from London started about 6 a.m. Thus in 1824, among the coaches from London to Birmingham, eight are found timed from London between five and a quarter to eight in the morning; leaving the rest of the day blank until 3 p.m., when the earliest of the night coaches set out. The “Sovereign” went in 1824 from the “Bull,” Whitechapel, at 5 a.m. Half an hour later went the “Crown Prince” from the “Belle Sauvage,” and the “Aurora,” from the “Bull and Mouth”; followed by the “Courier,” from the “Swan with Two Necks,” and the “Light Coach” from the “Cross Keys” and “Golden Cross” at 6. At 6.30 went the “Oxonian Express” from the “Bull and Mouth”; the “Independent Tally-Ho,” from the “Golden Cross,” while “Mountain’s Tally-Ho,” from the “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, left at 7.45. In the same year the three early coaches for Bath left London at 5, 5.45, and 6.15 a.m. These hours, which we should nowadays regard as extravagantly early, were necessary if those coaches were to properly serve the roads they travelled, for even a fast coach, doing its 9 or 9½ miles an hour, including stoppages, would not reach Bath or Birmingham before the day had nearly closed.
These unseasonable hours meant, of course, very early rising indeed for would-be passengers, and not even that hardy generation endured the infliction without a very great deal of grumbling. But there was no remedy. It was only a choice of ills, whether you had to be called at a little after three o’clock on perhaps a winter’s morning for a day’s journey, or whether you elected to wait until the afternoon, and so, travelling through the night, were deposited at your journey’s end on the pavements of Bath or Birmingham, or some other strange place, at the inhospitable hours between midnight and six a.m.; in which latter case you would be in that extremely unpleasant position of wanting to go to bed when the rest of the world was considering the expediency of getting out of it.
Some, difficult to arouse in the early morn, adopted the heroic expedient of sitting up all night. Others, like Leigh Hunt and James Payn, taught by long experience, engaged a bedroom overnight at the inn whence the coach started, so that they might be on the spot and lie two hours longer. Even then, as Payn confessed, he often slept too long, and so, without breakfast, often carrying his boots in his hand, and in other ways not completely dressed, would dash into the coach at the very moment of its moving away.
“We have often wondered,” wrote Dickens, “how many months’ incessant travelling in a post-chaise it would take to kill a man; and, wondering by analogy, we should very much like to know how many months of constant travelling in a succession of early coaches an unfortunate mortal could endure. Breaking a man alive upon the wheel would be nothing to breaking his rest, his peace, his heart—everything but his fast—upon four; and the punishment of Ixion (the only practical person, by-the-by, who has discovered the secret of the perpetual motion) would sink into utter insignificance before the one we have suggested. If we had been a powerful churchman in those good times when blood was shed as freely as water, and men were mowed down like grass in the sacred cause of religion, we would have lain by very quietly till we got hold of some especially obstinate miscreant, who positively refused to be converted to our faith, and then we would have booked him for an inside place in a small coach, which travelled day and night; and, securing the remainder of the places for stout men with a slight tendency to coughing and spitting, we would have started him forth on his last travels—leaving him mercilessly to all the tortures which the waiters, landlords, coachmen, guards, boots, chambermaids, and other familiars on his line of road might think proper to inflict.
“If,” he continued, “there be one thing in existence more miserable than another, it most unquestionably is the being compelled to rise by candle-light. If you ever doubted the fact, you are painfully convinced of your error on the morning of your departure. You left strict orders overnight to be called at half-past four, and you have done nothing all night but doze for five minutes at a time, and start up suddenly from a terrific dream of a large church clock with the small hand running round, with astonishing rapidity, to every figure on the dial-plate. 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. At last you fall into a state of complete oblivion, from which you are aroused, as if into a new state of existence, by a singular illusion. You are apprenticed to a trunk-maker; how, or why, or when, or wherefore, you don’t take the trouble to inquire; but there you are, pasting the lining in the lid of a portmanteau. Confound that other apprentice in the back-shop, how he is hammering!—rap, rap, rap—what an industrious fellow he must be! you have heard him at work for half an hour past, and he has been hammering incessantly the whole time. Rap, rap, rap, again—he’s talking now—what’s that he said? Five o’clock! You make a violent exertion, and start up in bed. The vision is at once dispelled; the trunk-maker’s shop is your own bedroom, and the other apprentice your shivering servant, who has been vainly endeavouring to wake you for the last quarter of an hour, at the imminent risk of breaking either his own knuckles or the panels of the door.
“You proceed to dress yourself with all possible despatch. The flaring flat candle with the long snuff gives light enough to show that the things you want are not where they ought to be, and you undergo a trifling delay in consequence of having carefully packed up one of your boots in your over-anxiety of the preceding night. You soon complete your toilet, however, for you are not particular on such an occasion, and you shaved yesterday evening; so, mounting your Petersham greatcoat and green travelling shawl, and grasping your carpet bag in your right hand, you walk lightly downstairs, lest you should awaken any of the family, and after pausing in the common sitting-room for one moment, just to have a cup of coffee (the said common sitting-room looking remarkably comfortable, with everything out of its place, and strewed with the crumbs of last night’s supper), you undo the chain and bolts of the street-door, and find yourself fairly in the street.