TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST COPY OF "BRADSHAW."
How, it may be asked, did the railway companies of 1840 receive the first general railway guide? Odd to relate, not with any great favour. They even refused to supply their time-tables to Bradshaw when they ascertained the use to which that enterprising Quaker was putting them. "Why," they said, "if this fellow goes on in this way he will make punctuality a kind of obligation, with penalties for failure. Whereas at present, if the ten minutes past three train steams gently out at twenty minutes to four, or even four o'clock, we do not fall much in the esteem of the public, accustomed to the free and easy methods of the stage-coach."
But the Quaker was not thus to be repressed. He got hold of the time-tables somehow: he waited in person on the boards; afterwards he even purchased stock in the hostile railway companies, and the enterprise went on. But as yet the guides we have been describing were not regularly issued. They were mere fitful publications, and it was not until Adams, whom Bradshaw had secured as his London agent, urged upon him the necessity of a regular issue that the first monthly "Guide" made its début in the world. This was on December 1st, 1841. The "Guide" differed from its predecessors in being bound in paper—not cloth—and in consisting of but thirty-two pages of printed matter. By this time, too Bradshaw could announce that "This work is published monthly, under the direction and with the assistance of the railway companies, and is carefully corrected up to the date it bears; every reliance may, therefore, be placed on the accuracy of its details."
Moreover, it was dispensed in another and simpler form. The pages of which it was composed were arranged on a single large sheet or "broadside," "exhibiting at one view the hours of departure and arrival of the trains on every railway in the kingdom, and are particularly adapted for counting-houses and places of business." For this sheet only threepence was demanded, but if mounted on stiff boards the price was two shillings and ninepence.
In 1843 the railway mania, which afterwards enriched and beggared thousands, was advancing apace. There were in that year just forty-eight different railways in kingdom: and as the public were keenly interested in them we find, together with a slight alteration in the title of "Bradshaw" to the "Monthly General Railway and Steam Navigation Guide," more reading matter, and "a list of shares, exhibiting at one view the cost, traffic length, dividend, and market value of the same."
TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST COPY ISSUED WITH THE WORDS "RAILWAY GUIDE."
There is one curious circumstance in the early history of "Bradshaw," which Mr. Percy Fitzgerald has pointed out. Its founder appears to have been ashamed of its youth, for when the fortieth number had been attained we find, in September, 1844, a sudden jump to number 146. Did those missing hundred numbers ever afterwards disturb the pious Quaker's rest?
FACSIMILE OF A PAGE OF THE VERY EARLIEST "BRADSHAW."