Part 7

“By your awkward address, you’re that thing which should carry, With one footman behind, our lover Sir Harry. By your language, I judge, you think me a wench; He that makes love to me, must make it in French. Thou that’s drawn by two beasts, and carry’st a brute, Canst thou vainly e’er hope, I’ll answer thy suit? Though sometimes you pretend to appear with your six, No regard to their colour, their sexes you mix: Then on the grand-paw you’d look very great, With your new-fashion’d glasses, and nasty old seat. Thus a beau I have seen strut with a cock’d hat, And newly rigg’d out, with a dirty cravat. You may think that you make a figure most shining, But it’s plain that you have an old cloak for a lining. Are those double-gilt nails? Where’s the lustre of Kerry, To set off the Knight, and to finish the Jerry? If you hope I’ll be kind, you must tell me what’s due In George’s-lane for you, ere I’ll buckle to.

CHARIOT

“Why, how now, Doll Diamond, you’re very alert; Is it your French breeding has made you so pert? Because I was civil, here’s a stir with a pox: Who is it that values your —— or your fox? Sure ’tis to her honour, he ever should bed His bloody red hand to her bloody red head. You’re proud of your gilding; but I tell you each nail Is only just tinged with a rub at her tail; And although it may pass for gold on a ninny, Sure we know a Bath shilling soon from a guinea. Nay, her foretop’s a cheat; each morn she does black it, Yet, ere it be night, it’s the same with her placket. I’ll ne’er be run down any more with your cant; Your velvet was wore before in a mant, On the back of her mother; but now ’tis much duller,— The fire she carries hath changed its colour. Those creatures that draw me you never would mind, If you’d but look on your own Pharaoh’s lean kine; They’re taken for spectres, they’re so meagre and spare, Drawn damnably low by your sorrel mare. We know how your lady was on you befriended; You’re not to be paid for ’till the lawsuit is ended: But her bond it is good, he need not to doubt; She is two or three years above being out. Could my Knight be advised, he should ne’er spend his vigour On one he can’t hope of e’er making _bigger_.”

Gay seems to have shared the watermen’s disgust at both coach and sedan.

“Boxed within the chair, contemn the street And trust their safety to another’s feet,”

he says of those willing to use the chair. In another place he is comparing the two:—

“The gilded chariots while they loll at ease And lazily insure a life’s disease; While softer chairs the tawdry load convey To court, to _White’s_, assemblies or the play.”

Elsewhere he exhorts the pedestrian to assert his rights:—

“Let not the chairman, with assuming stride, Press near the wall, and rudely thrust thy side; The laws have set him bounds; his servile feet Should ne’er encroach where posts defend the street.”

By this time, however, many changes in the chairs had taken place. They seem to have been introduced into Paris in 1617 by M. de Montbrun, though unfortunately from whence this gentleman brought them we are nowhere informed. They were called _chaises à porteurs_. Possibly English and French chairs were at first quite similar to each other in appearance—square boxes with a pent-house—but in the middle of the century—in Paris, at any rate, they became far more elegant in form, and began to be ornamented and richly upholstered. Some of them resembled, in shape, the body of the modern hansom-cab. This was particularly the case with a new carriage, introduced about 1668, called the _brouette_ (wheelbarrow), _roulette_, or _vanaigrette_, which was merely a sedan upon two wheels. It was drawn in the usual way by a man, and was an early form of that vehicle which still survives in the East as the jin-rick-shaw. The brouette held but one person, its wheels were large, and its two poles projected some way in front. One Dupin was apparently the only person to manufacture them, and after his first experiments he applied “two elbow-springs beneath the front, and attached them to the axle-tree by long shackles, the axle-tree working up and down in a groove beneath the inside-seat.” This improvement is of more than ordinary interest in so far as it is the first mention of steel springs to carriages. In the ordinary coaches these steel springs were first applied beneath the bottom of the body. They were probably formed out of a single piece of metal.

In the case of the brouette there was the usual opposition—this time from the proprietors of the ordinary sedans—but although a temporary prohibition was made, the brouette triumphed, and in 1671 was a common sight in the streets of Paris. It was not very suitable for decoration. As one French writer remarks, it was enough if the machine were solidly constructed. The brouette had windows at the sides and a small support in front of the wheels to allow the carriage to maintain its proper position when not held up by an attendant.

The brouette does not seem to have come immediately to England, though in the eighteenth century there was a _sedan cart_, similar in appearance to it, to be seen in London. On the other hand, the ordinary sedans were rapidly gaining in popularity, and maintained that popularity right through the reigns of the first three Georges.

In appearance they became rather more graceful towards the middle of the century, though less so in later days. The public chairs were generally made of black or dark green leather, ornamented with gold “beading,” the frame and roof, which had a double slope, being of wood, as was also the small square window-frame. Private chairs, however, could be as gorgeous as the owner pleased, though in this respect continental chairs far surpassed our own. At Paris are shown two magnificent chairs which belonged to Louis XV.

“These,” says Croal, “have glass windows in side and front, through which the sumptuous lining of crimson velvet is discernible. The outside is beautifully painted and gilt, and though now somewhat faded, the splendour of the vehicles can be imagined, even in their decay. The gorgeously attired king within, or it might be the queen or some reigning favourite, would be attended by a gay escort of gentlemen of the court, with a crowd of bearers and lacqueys, not to speak of armed guards, whose liveries probably equalled in grandeur the courtly habits of the greater men who surrounded the royal chair.”

At South Kensington a private English chair of about 1760 is shown, “rather handsomely ornamented in ormolu, the sides being divided into four panels, but without windows. In form,” continues Croal, “the chair may be described as ‘carriage-bodied,’ not being, as the later chairs, square at the bottom. At the two front corners heavy tassels are hung, and through the door in front it can be seen that the interior lining is of figured damask. The bearing rings through which the poles passed are of brass.” This, however, cannot compare with an Italian nobleman’s large conveyance of the early eighteenth century which shows a profusion of gold filigree work on the roof that calls to mind nothing so strongly as a Buszard wedding-cake. It belonged to a member of the Grand Ducal family of Tuscany, by whom it was used on baptismal occasions. Here, besides the gilt work on the roof, there is a medallion-painting of figures in antique costume over the door. The walls are painted a pale French grey “with elaborately carved mouldings round the panels, with groups of flowers painted in the middle. The interior is lined with satin corresponding to the painting outside, being in gold and colours upon a pale ground.”

The chairmen do not seem to have been a particularly agreeable lot of fellows. In London they were generally Irish or Welsh. They were often drunk, often careless, and nearly always uncivil. Says Gay:—

“The drunken chairman in the kennel spurns, The glasses shatter, and his charge o’erturns.”

In Edinburgh, however, where there were ninety chairs in 1738, the chairmen were Highlanders and rather more civil. “An inhabitant of Edinburgh,” says Hugh Arnot in his history of that city (1789), “who visits the metropolis can hardly suppress his laughter at seeing the awkward hobble of a street chair in the city of London.” We learn from Markland that in 1740 a chair in Edinburgh could be hired for four shillings a day or twenty shillings a week.[26] In London, according to George Selwyn, you could be carried three miles for a shilling.[27] In Edinburgh, again, where chairs were used at a later date than anywhere in England, rules were made for the public convenience in 1740, the most interesting of these being one which forbade a soldier in the service of the city guard to carry a chair at any time. By 1789 their numbers had increased to 238, including fifty privately owned.

Scattered mention of them occurs amongst British authors. Steele, in one of his _Tatler_ papers, proposes to levy a tax upon them, and regrets that the sumptuary laws of the old Romans have never been revived. The chairmen, or “slaves of the rich,” he says, “take up the whole street, while we Peripatetics are very glad to watch an opportunity to whisk across a passage, very thankful that we are not run over for interrupting the machine, that carries in it a person neither more handsome, wise, nor valiant, than the meanest of us.”

Matthew Bramble in _Humphrey Clinker_ is made to draw a wretched picture of the chairs which abounded in Bath at the middle of the century:—

“The valetudinarian,” he writes, “is carried in a chair, betwixt the heels of a double row of horses, wincing under the curry-combs of grooms and postilions, over and above the hazard of being obstructed or overturned by the carriages which are continually making their exit or their entrance. I suppose, after some chairmen shall have been maimed, and a few lives lost by those accidents, the corporation will think in earnest about providing a more safe and commodious passage.... If, instead of the areas and iron rails, which seem to be of very little use, there had been a corridor with arcades all round, as in Covent Garden, the appearance of the whole would have been more magnificent and striking; those arcades would have afforded an agreeable covered walk, and sheltered the poor chairmen and their carriages from the rain, which is here almost perpetual. At present the chairs stand soaking in the open street from morning to night, till they become so many boxes of wet leather, for the benefit of the gouty and rheumatic, who are transported in them from place to place. Indeed, this is a shocking inconvenience, that extends over the whole city; and I am persuaded it produces infinite mischief to the delicate and infirm. Even the close chairs, contrived for the sick, by standing in the open air, have their fringe linings impregnated, like so many sponges, with the moisture of the atmosphere.”

It was to Bath that Princess Amelia was carried in a sedan by eight chairmen from St. James’s, in April, 1728. This must easily have been the longest, and, so far as the chairmen were concerned, the most wearisome journey ever performed by a chair.

John Wilkes mentions in one of his letters to his daughter that he ascended Mont Cenis in a chair “carried by two men and assisted by four more.” “This,” he says, “was not a sedan chair, but a small wicker chair with two long poles; there is no covering of any kind to it.” Such open chairs seem to have been very uncommon, and were, I imagine, unknown in England. Some, however, had more glass than others, and their size fluctuated. Fashionable ladies must have found a difficulty in getting into a public chair of the ordinary size at the time of the large hoop petticoat, and there is a satiric print, dated 1733, which shows a lady thus attired, being hauled out through the opened roof of one with ropes and pulleys. Similarly, when forty or fifty years later the head-dress of the women became so enormous, a ludicrous print appeared showing a patent arrangement whereby the roof of a chair could be raised on rods to as great a height as was required.

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.

_Chapter the Fifth_

_SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY INNOVATIONS_

“We took our coach, two coachmen and four horses, And merrily from London made our courses. We wheel’d the top of th’ heavy hill called Holborne (Up which hath been full many a sinful soule borne,) And so along we jolted past St. Gileses, Which place from Brainford six (or neare) seven miles is.”

_Taylor._

The seventeenth century saw great changes in vehicular design. In 1660 the first _berlin_ was made. Steel springs, as we have seen, appeared a few years later in the brouette. About this time, too, a hooded gig or _calèche_ made its appearance in the streets of Paris, the first of many carriages to be built upon entirely new lines. Glass windows and complete doors were used in the coaches, both public and private, which became smaller, more compact, and certainly more graceful. Improvements were not confined to one country, but proceeded simultaneously not only in various European countries, but also in South America. Roads, too, were improved, and laws for the regulation of traffic framed with some regularity and effect.

John Evelyn in his Diary gives interesting glimpses of such carriages and other vehicles as he saw during his several European tours. In Brussels (1641) he was allowed the use of Sir Henry de Vic’s coach and six, and travelled luxuriously in it as far as Ghent. “On the way,” he notes, “I met with divers little waggons, prettily contrived, and full of peddling merchandize, drawn by mastiff dogs, harnessed completely like so many coach-horses; in some four, in others six, as in Brussels itself I had observed. In Antwerp I saw, as I remember, four dogs draw five lusty children in a chariot.” When dogs were first used for the purpose of traction does not appear, but they are still to be seen in the Netherlands in a like capacity. A few days later, to continue with Evelyn’s observations, he was going from Ostend to Dunkirk “by waggon ... the journey being made all on the sea sands.” On his return to England, however, it is to be noticed that he rode post to Canterbury. In 1643 he was again in Paris, mentioning “the multitude of coaches passing every moment over the bridge,” this being, he says, to a new spectator, “an agreeable diversion.” In the following year, while standing in the garden of the Tuileries, he saw “so many coaches as one would hardly think could be maintained in the whole city, going late as it was, towards the course”—the fashionable rendezvous of the day—“the circle being capable of containing a hundred coaches to turn commodiously, and the larger of the plantations for five or six coaches abreast.” The road from Paris to Orleans he describes as “excellent.” Coming to Italy, he found Milan, in spite of the narrowness of its streets, abounding in rich coaches. In Paris again, two or three years afterwards, the design of a new coach so took his fancy that he determined, like his friend Mr. Pepys, to possess one for himself. And so on May 29th, 1652, “I went,” he writes, “to give orders about a coach to be made against my wife’s coming, being my first coach, the pattern whereof I brought out of Paris.” This was probably “booted,” but differed from the earlier coaches in having a curved roof.

The commonest French coach of this time seems to have been the _corbillard_, a flat-bottomed, half-open, half-close coach, furnished with curtains of cloth or leather in the front part. These were merely tied on to the supports, and would roll up when required. Doors there were none, but there was a “movable rail, over which a leather screen was hung” at the back portion of the carriage, which was about six feet long, and here were the seats. There were also projecting movable step-seats. Possibly Evelyn saw a newer model with a curved bottom and door half-way up, panelled in the lower part, but curtained above. Such a carriage was hung low, and would have swung from side to side, giving such passengers as were “bad sailors” a fit of nausea.

The English-designed coaches of this time, though without glass windows, were almost completely enclosed, and, compared with the new _chariots_, which were just upon making their appearance, of a huge size. In many of them three people could sit abreast, and seven or eight find room for themselves. In 1641 when Charles I passed through London on his return from Scotland, his was the only coach in the royal procession, but seven people, including His Majesty, were driving, apparently in comfort, within it.

The Commonwealth produced no new carriage, although isolated experiments were already being made. Cromwell himself was wont to drive his own coach and six “for recreation-sake” in Hyde Park, then as now a fashionable resort.