Jane Austen and Her Times

by G. E. Mitton

In the London of that date, many things we now take as commonplace necessaries were altogether wanting, and if we could be carried back in time it would be the negative side that would strike us most; for instance, there was very little pavement, and what there was was composed of great rounded stones like the worst sort of cobble paving in a provincial town. Most of the roads were made of gravel and dirt; Jane mentions a fresh load of gravel having been thrown down near Hyde Park Corner, which made the work so stiff that “the horses refused the collar and jibbed.” Grosley tells us many little details which are just what we want to know, of the kind which in all ages are taken for granted by those who live amid them, so that they need a stranger to record them.

He gives us first an account of his arrival in London by coach over Westminster Bridge.

“I arrived in London towards the close of the day. Though the sun was still above the horizon, the lamps were already lighted upon Westminster Bridge, and upon the roads and streets that lead to it. These streets are broad, regular, and lined with high houses forming the most beautiful quarter of London. The river covered with boats of different sizes, the bridge and the streets [were] filled with coaches, their broad footpaths crowded with people.”

The group of buildings on the west of the bridge belonged of course to the old Palace, where, in the chapel of St. Stephen, sat the House of Commons. The Abbey would be much as it is now, also St. Margaret’s Church. The splendid Holbein gate standing across Whitehall had been removed about fifteen years before Grosley’s visit. He tells us that: “Means, however, have been found to pave with free-stone the great street called Parliament Street. The fine street called Pall Mall is already paved in part with this stone; and they have also begun to new pave the Strand. The two first of these streets were dry in May, all the rest of the town being still covered with heaps of dirt.”

The dirt is what strikes him most everywhere: “In the most beautiful part of the Strand and near St. Clement’s Church, I have seen the middle of the street constantly foul with a dirty puddle to a height of three or four inches; a puddle where splashings cover those that walk on foot, fill coaches when their windows happen not to be up, and bedaub all the lower parts of such houses as are exposed to it. The English are not afraid of this dirt, being defended from it by their wigs of a brownish curling hair, their black stockings, and their blue surtouts, which are made in the form of a nightgown.”

On each side of the road ran a kind of deep and dirty ditch called the kennel, into which refuse and rubbish was thrown, and from which evil and unwholesome odours came. When vehicles in passing splashed into this, a shower of filth would bespatter the passers-by behind the posts, therefore it was of no small consequence to keep to the wall, and the giving up of this was by no means a mere matter of form, and frequently produced quarrels between hot-tempered men. Toward the end of the century, however, swords were not usually worn, except by physicians, therefore these quarrels were not always productive of so much harm as they might have been.

The streets were full of enormous coaches, sometimes gilt, hung on high springs, drawn by four, and even six horses; footmen, to the number of four or six, ran beside them, and the wheels splashed heavily in the dirt described, sending up the mud in black spurts. It was early in the nineteenth century that a new kind of paving was tried, blocks of cast-iron covered with gravel, but this was not a success. Besides the large coaches there were hackney coaches, which would seem to us almost equally clumsy and unwieldy. Omnibuses were not seen in the metropolis until 1823, but there was something of the kind running from outlying places to London, for Samuel Rogers tells a story as follows:—

“Visiting Lady —— one day, I made inquiries about her sister. ‘She is now staying with me,’ answered Lady ——, ‘but she is unwell in consequence of a fright which she got on her way from Richmond to London.’ On enquiry it turned out that while Miss —— was coming to town, the footman observing an omnibus approach, and thinking she might like to see it, suddenly called in at the carriage window, ‘Ma’am, the omnibus!’ She, being unacquainted with the term, and not sure but an omnibus might be a wild beast escaped from the Zoological Gardens, was thrown into a dreadful state of agitation by the announcement, and this caused her indisposition.”

Hackney coaches were in severe competition with sedan chairs, for to call a chair was as frequent a custom as to send for a hackney coach. The chairmen were notorious for their incivility, just as the watermen had previously been, and as their successors, the cabmen, became later, though now the reproach is removed from them.

The rudeness of chairmen is exemplified in Tom Jones, for when Tom found himself after the masqued ball unable to produce a shilling for a chair, he “walked boldly on after the chair in which his lady rode, pursued by a grand huzza from all the chairmen present, who wisely take the best care they can to discountenance all walking afoot by their betters. Luckily, however, the gentry who attend at the Opera House were too busy to quit their stations, and as the lateness of the hour prevented him from meeting many of their brethren in the street, he proceeded without molestation in a dress, which at another season would have certainly raised a mob at his heels.”