Which shows that in 1837, at any rate, people’s ideas had undergone a considerable change with regard to a really fashionable equipage.
The only other four-wheeled vehicle I need mention here was the sociable which, according to Felton, was “merely a phaeton with a double or treble body.” It was made with or without doors, and with or without a driving seat. A good example of this carriage is shown in Gillray’s print The Middlesex Election of 1804.
Coming to the two-wheeled vehicles, the chief of these were the curricle, the gig or chaise, and the whiskey. As a general rule it may be taken that when a gig had two horses it was called a curricle, and when there was only one, a chaise. In the Prince Regent’s time the curricle was “the most stylish of all conveyances.” In shape nearly all these gigs were identical, though one reads that the notorious “Romeo” Coates drove in one whose body was shaped like a shell.[44] They were of various heights, a particularly lofty one being known in Ireland as the suicide gig. The caned whiskey was a gig whose body, “fixed upon the shafts—which again were connected with the long horizontal springs by scroll irons,” had a movable hood. The Rib Chair was similar to the whiskey, but without springs. It is really only possible to differentiate properly between these light carriages and the other hybrids, so soon to appear, by means of prints and photographs. To the non-technical mind they are almost identical with each other.
“The prettiest of these vehicles,” Leigh Hunt writes, after confessing that he has no ambition to drive tandem, as was so often done, or to run into danger with a phaeton, “is the curricle, which is also the safest. There is something worth looking at in a pair of horses, with that sparkling pole of steel laid across them. It is like a bar of music, comprising their harmonious course. But to us, even gigs are but a sort of unsuccessful gentility. The driver, to all intents and purposes, had better be on the horse.”
I need say very little of the public carriages. There is, however, one point in connection with the later stage-coaches which bears upon the question that was only solved by Obadiah Elliott in 1804. On September 20, 1770, according to the Annual Register, there was an accident to one of them which was growing increasingly common.
“It were greatly to be wished,” runs this account, “the stage coaches were put under some regulations as to the number of persons and quantity of baggage. Thirty-four persons were in and about the Hertford Coach this day when it broke down by one of the braces giving way.”
No wonder it broke down! It is interesting to note, however, that even the more humane stage-coachmen, so far from objecting, as you might imagine they would have done, to such overcrowding, actively encouraged it and for a very odd reason. At this time springs of a kind were being applied to the coaches, which consequently travelled with greater ease than before, but the coaches themselves happened also to be built very high, like all other vehicles, and nothing could convince the silly coachmen that the easy running was not due to a heavy load being applied to the top of a high carriage. It became necessary, therefore, to pass legislation, which was accordingly done in 1785 and again in 1790, restricting the number of passengers allowed.
At this time, too, Mr. John Palmer’s first diligence, or mail-coach, had appeared as a quick and cheap method of carrying letters, and these mail-coaches very rapidly took the fancy of passengers. Palmer, however, was a man with great powers of organisation, and before the new century had dawned, had his coaches running upon every high road in the country.[45]
“The mail coaches,” wrote a French nobleman after visiting this country at the beginning of the new century, “afford means of travelling with great celerity into all parts of England. They are Berlins, firm and light, holding four persons; they carry only letters, and do not take charge of any luggage. They are drawn by four horses, and driven by one coachman; they travel never less than seven to eight miles an hour.”
One or two particular inventions may also be noted. This same nobleman, continuing his account, says:—