With folded arms, propt back, and outstretched knees;
While the press’d Bodkin, pinch’d and squeezed to death,
Sweats in the mid-most place, and scolds, and pants for breath.”
Canning.
“IN the year 1790,” wrote Mr. William Felton in an account of the carriages of his day, “the art of Coach-building had been in a gradual state of improvement for half a century past, and had now arrived at a very high degree of perfection, with respect to the beauty, strength, and elegance of our English carriages.” And the most cursory glance at his carefully compiled, if technical book, is evidence enough of the truth of his statement. At this time, indeed, the old flamboyant ornamentation had all but disappeared from the carriages, which were in process of taking on the appearance they largely retain to this day. Most vehicles, it is true, were still hung far higher than those of the nineteenth century—a fact due to the curious, though mistaken, belief, “that a high and short load possessed some mysterious property which made it easier to draw than a long one,” but new principles were being adopted as the result of careful experiments. Prizes were offered by learned societies, and won. Men like Dr. Lovell Edgeworth, who had been experimenting so early as 1768, and had shown that springs—then but little understood—were at least as advantageous to the horses as to the passengers, were at work. But it was only in 1804, when Mr. Obadiah Elliott produced his patent elliptic springs, which rendered unnecessary the old heavy perch, that a definite period in the art of coach-building was clearly marked. Thenceforth the older, cumbrous machines disappeared from the roads and made way for the lighter and more comfortable carriages which were to be seen at the time of Queen Victoria’s accession.
The question of the roads, too, was receiving the attention of experts. Anstice and Edgeworth published the results of their investigations, but were both completely overshadowed by James M’Adam, who about 1810 started those metal roads which have proved so wonderfully successful. Before his time gravel and the like had formed the basis of road-material; M’Adam used granite and other allied substances, and produced such a surface as had not been seen since the Romans had constructed their vast highways hundreds of years before.
Methods of travelling, moreover, were altering. The stage-coaches, useful though they were, disappeared before Palmer’s mail-coaches, which held their supremacy until the era of steam revolutionised locomotion. Post-chaises were still in favour, and less dangerous than of old. Incidentally, the highwaymen were taking to less romantic pursuits. And what is true of England was also in a great measure true of Europe as a whole. North America, too, at this period was providing herself with coachbuilders, who produced distinctive vehicles peculiarly adapted to the conditions of that country.
It was, in fact, a transition period.
We may consider in the first place such types of carriages as already existed. There is a whole catalogue of them, and only one of the older carriages is conspicuously absent. This was the calash—“now almost obsolete for any purpose,” comments Leigh Hunt, and indeed there is hardly a reference to it. But the others still survived, and one characteristic is immediately noticeable; the wheels of almost every sort of carriage at this time were enormously large. Consequently the carriages were generally very long. Crane-neck perches were still used, and what was called an upright spring. A coach of this period, belonging to the museum at South Kensington, is now exhibited in Edinburgh. It was built for the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. It has “a large body,” says Thrupp, describing it, “with deep panels, flat-sided, longer on the roof than at the elbow, with windows in the upper quarters; the carriage with two crane perches (easily seen in the accompanying photograph), Berlin fashion, whip springs, and very high wheels. There is no footboard, whilst a hammercloth for the footman is raised upon scroll ironwork, very well made.” Napoleon’s state coach, built at the time of his second marriage, and preserved at Vienna along with a chariot and barouche, is of a somewhat similar pattern. His travelling coach, with all its household contrivances, is now at Madame Tussaud’s exhibition, and must be familiar to all Londoners. Two Spanish coaches of the period are also to be seen at Madrid.
