Where the Duke and the ’prentice they dress much the same:
You cannot tell the difference, excepting by the name!
Then push along with four-in-hand, while others drive at random,
In buggy, gig or dog-cart, in curricle or tandem.”
Egan, Life in London.
IF William Felton’s book shows the great improvements that had taken place in English carriage-building during the latter half of the eighteenth century, William Bridges Adams’s English Pleasure Carriages, published in 1837, sufficiently shows the enormous improvements which had followed upon Obadiah Elliott’s invention of the elliptic springs.[47] In the first place you had a whole series of light, perchless carriages being built, and in the second you had the new macadamised roads upon which to run them.
In treating of all these various carriages, it is difficult to know where to begin. A mere catalogue with a few lines of description cannot be very satisfactory, and yet there seems no other method to adopt. Bridges Adams, who was a coachbuilder himself and the inventor of several novel carriages, is a good guide, but one could have wished that his book had been illustrated by anything rather than those fearsome diagrams which mean so little to any one but a coachbuilder himself. From the beginning of the century, indeed, illustrations of carriages began to take on that diagrammatic aspect which the trade-papers still maintain; while at the same time the old prints and caricatures began to disappear. It is a pity, but it cannot be helped.
“Though it would be difficult,” says Bridges Adams, “to describe every particular variety of carriage now in use, it is comparatively easy to set forth the leading features—the original models, as it were, of each particular class. The distinguishing characteristics are to be found in the form of the bodies and not in the mechanism of the springs or framework. Thus a particular shaped body entitles the carriage to the term Chariot, whether it be constructed with under springs or C springs, or with both, or whether it be with or without a perch. This rule obtains throughout the whole varieties of carriages; and in those bodies which are formed by a combination”—as now began to be the case—“it is customary to call them by a double name—as Cab-Phaeton, Britzschka-Chariot, Britzschka-Phaeton, &c.” Accordingly, I shall endeavour in a brief catalogue to point out such changes as were being made in each broad class of vehicle.
The coach was still being made with a perch. It was not hung so high, but in other respects it differed but little from its predecessors. The Salisbury boot, which carried the coachman’s seat, and the hammercloth, were still used, but for travelling long distances were removed, a smaller platform being substituted in their place. In the Driving Coach, a novelty which now became popular with gentlemen of means, and at a later date came to be commonly known as the four-in-hand, the wheels were rather nearer together, and the perch was short and straight. This had the boots which, as we have seen, had been already added to the mail-coaches for the convenience of outside passengers. “The boots and body,” says Bridges Adams, “are framed together, and suspended on springs before and behind—the connection with the carriage being by means of curved blocks.”
Another variety of the coach was the barouche, which, though, I suppose, not technically a coach at all, if one accepts Thrupp’s definition—for it was roofless—is generally classed with this kind of vehicle. There had been, I believe, a barouche in England so early as 1767, but it was not popular until a much later date. The barouche was simply a coach-body without its upper portion—an open carriage, that is to say, with high driving seat, and a hood fixed to the back if required—not indeed unlike an opened landau to look at. It was purely a town carriage. Its driving seat, similar to that in a landau, was built to hold both coachman and footman, “the hinder part being unprovided with a standard, which would,” says Bridges Adams, “be useless, as when the head is down there is little convenience for the servant’s holders, and he would moreover be unpleasantly placed, looking down on the sitters within, and listening to all the conversation,” a matter of course which he would have been only too pleased to do. The barouche would hold four or six persons, and in fine weather was considered to be “the most delightful of all carriages.” There was, too, a certain amount of state about it, and several noble families continued to drive in them long after most other people had given them up. When Ackermann, the publisher, invented his patent movable axles about 1816, the barouche was one of the carriages to which these axles were fitted. A print of this carriage is shown in the accompanying illustration. A barouchet, corresponding to the landaulet, was also built at this time, but was never popular. Bridges Adams speaks of it as a graceless carriage for one horse.