In general the roof opened upwards, being hinged at the back. This is clearly shown in a print published in 1768, called The Female Orators, in which a clergyman is stepping out of his chair, and the chairmen very obviously demanding their fare. Another print published about 1786, called the Social Pinch, shows a very famous chairman, Donald Kennedy, offering his “mull” to Donald Balack, a native of Ross-shire, whom he had just set down. Here the structure of the public chair in use at this date is clearly shown.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the chair as a mode of conveyance was on the wane. Fenimore Cooper in his Sketches of English Society (1837) was able to write: “Sedan chairs appear to have finally disappeared from St. James’ Street. Even in 1826 I saw a stand of them that has since vanished. The chairs may still be used on particular occasions, but were Cecilia now in existence, she would find it difficult to be set down in Mrs. Benfield’s entry from a machine so lumbering.” Which suggests that the chair had not only degenerated in numbers, but also in appearance. They had become larger and uncouth in Cooper’s day. One is reminded of that chair in Pickwick, which “having been originally built for a gouty gentleman with funded property, would hold Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Tupman at least as comfortably as a modern post-chaise.” Yet so late as 1775 the popularity of the chair had been at its highest. It was the old story. With the new century were coming new ideas. The chair slowly and quite naturally was dropping out of existence.
In Edinburgh, as I have said, it lingered on for rather a longer time. In 1806 stringent regulations were still required. Those chairs which maintained their stand at night had to have “a light fixed on the fore part of one of the poles.” On the occasion of a fire or a mob the chairmen had to hurry to the scene of excitement, and there await the magistrate’s orders. They were not allowed to charge more than ninepence a mile, seven-and-six a day, or a guinea and a half a week. Such rates, too, continued to be set out in the Edinburgh Almanac until 1830. After that comes an ominous silence. By that time only the private chair was in use.
“Lady Don,” says Lord Cockburn in his Memorials, “was about the last person (so far as I recollect) in Edinburgh, who kept a private sedan chair. Hers stood in the lobby and was as handsome and comfortable as silk, velvet, and gilding could make it. And when she wished to use it two well-known respectable chairmen, enveloped in her livery cloaks, were the envy of her [superannuated] brethren. She and Mrs. Rochead both sat in Tron Church; and well do I remember how I used to form one of the cluster that always took its station to see these beautiful relics emerge from coach and chair.”
The time, indeed, had come when the sight of a chair was as much a public entertainment as it had been when Buckingham had been borne through the streets “on men’s shoulders.”
Yet although they so rapidly disappeared off the face of Europe, in Asia they lost little of their popularity, and in many places to-day are the only methods of conveyance in common use. China, in particular, had long been a land of sedans. John Barrow in his Collection of Authentic, Useful, and Entertaining Voyages and Discoveries, 1765, mentions the fact that at an early date the Chinese “small covered carriages on two wheels, not unlike in appearance to our funeral hearses, but only about half their length,” had been superseded by chairs. To a European, he relates, this was hardly surprising, as the carriage was anything but comfortable, and required you to sit on your haunches at the bottom—“the most uneasy vehicle that can be imagined.”
“‘The Chinese,’ records another eighteenth-century traveller, ‘occasionally travel on horseback, but their best land conveyance by far is the sedan, a vehicle which certainly exists among them in perfection. Whether viewed with regard to lightness, comfort, or any other quality associated with such mode of carriage, there is nothing so convenient elsewhere. Two bearers place upon their shoulders the poles, which are thin and elastic and in shape something like the shafts of a gig, connected near the ends, and in this manner they proceed forward with a measured step in an almost imperceptible motion, and sometimes with considerable speed. Instead of panels, the sides and back of the chair consist of woollen cloth for the sake of lightness with a covering of oilcloth against rain. The front is closed with a hanging blind of the same materials in lieu of a door, with a circular aperture of gauze to see through.... Private persons among the Chinese are restricted to two bearers, ordinary magistrates to four, and the viceroys to eight, while the Emperor alone is great enough to require sixteen.’”
There is further mention of these Chinese chairs in Oliphant’s much later account of Lord Elgin’s mission. Lord Elgin himself travelled in a chair of the kind usually reserved for mandarins of the highest rank, which was larger than those in ordinary use and had a fine brass knob on the top. Eight bearers carried it. In processions a hwakeaou or flowered chair was often used.
Japan, too, had early had sedans both for travelling and for more purely ceremonial purposes. Light bamboo chairs, they were, called kangoes or norimons, which were borne by two or more persons. On the introduction of the European coach, however, a kind of brouette, as I have said, was substituted, and in a few years there were hundreds of thousands of these jin-rick-shaws on the streets, not only in Japan, but throughout Asia. At first many of these were grotesquely adorned, but their appearance is too well-known at the present day for need of a lengthy description. Equipped with “every modern convenience” and very well built indeed, they afford a European a delightful sensation on his first ride, even though he may have visions of those earlier days of his youth when he was carried about in a similar way (though at a less speed) in the homely perambulator.