One would like to know who was the inventor of this coach, which, however, did not prosper—I doubt if it performed another journey—for it dropped out of history as suddenly as it had appeared. It would seem that the inventor was a Birmingham man. Possibly he was helped in his scheme by a very extraordinary character who lived and flourished in that town at this time—John Baskerville, successively footman, schoolmaster, graver, japanner, typefounder, and printer—a man whose beautifully printed books have hardly been excelled to this day. Baskerville had made a fortune japanning bread-baskets and the like, and now drove about the country wonderfully dressed in a coach apparently of his own design—he was a man who had to do everything for himself, and being of somewhat eccentric disposition, never did anything like anybody else—and his coach, like his house and his printing and his religious opinions, was like nothing in the world. He had a considerable idea of his own importance, and his coach was a reflection of his character. With its wonderful arms—the real Baskerville arms, to which the printer had no right whatever—it was standing until quite recently in an old barn in a field at Manton. It was thus described fifty years ago:—
“The body hangs by double straps, from the coachman’s seat under the carriage, to which they are fastened, to the frame behind.... It could be either closed or open, and when open the leather top was rolled back upon crossed straps hung from the coachman’s seat, and hooks secured to the front part of the body. The whole framework of the carriage has been elaborately carved and gilt, and the panels painted with what appears to be a brownish green, with flowers and vases, rock and shell-work, among which were numerous figures of boys and emblems. In the centre panel on each side were the arms, on the side panel the crest....”
None of the panels were identical, but all had been decorated by his workmen. “The pattern-cart of his trade,” Hutton, the Birmingham historian, calls this curiosity, which was once familiar to every village in the Midlands, and his daughter, Catherine Hutton, could remember the printer, “in his gold-laced waistcoat, and his painted chariot, each panel a picture, fresh from his own manufactory of japanned tea-boards.”
A most extraordinary conveyance appeared in London in 1771—this being “Mr. Moore’s new-invented Coal-carriage,” the wheels of which were no less than fifteen feet high.[42] A great concourse of people followed it through the streets, and no doubt applauded its ability to draw two caldrons and two sacks of coal, using only two horses abreast, “with more ease and expedition than the common carts do one caldron with three horses at length.” Unfortunately I have not been able to discover a print of this monstrous vehicle, which, like so many of the other mid-century freaks, disappeared almost at once.
To this period also belongs that wondrous phaeton, which in a few years threatened to become so lofty as to suggest to some ingenious artist the possibility of applying to it some pantograph arrangement whereby its seat could be raised or lowered at will. This print, called The New Fashioned Phaeton—Sic itur ad Astra, was published in 1776, a curious mezzotint showing a lady of fashion stepping out of a first-floor window into the seat of a phaeton which has been raised to the required height. The phaetons, indeed, seem to have been built high since their invention, and the importance of this feature must not be overlooked, when one remembers that almost every carriage, both English and foreign, was hung enormously high in the last years of the century, nine or ten steps being sometimes necessary to get inside.
Exactly when or where the phaeton was first made I cannot determine, but, like the landau, which has generally, though incorrectly, been considered to have been first built in 1757, it is mentioned so early as 1747 in the poem quoted at the end of the last chapter. That it was already popular with the fashionable people is shown by Tom Warton’s poem, The Phaeton and the One Horse Chair, which was first published in the Gentleman’s Magazine for December, 1759. This is worth quoting in its entirety:—
“At Blagrave’s once upon a time,
There stood a phaeton sublime:
Unsully’d by the dusty road
Its wheels with recent crimson glow’d;