Jane Austen's England

by Roy Adkins,Lesley Adkins

  The footway, paved with large stones, on both sides of the street, appears to a foreigner exceedingly convenient and pleasant; as one may there walk in perfect safety from the prodigious crowd of carts and coaches that fill the centre. However, politeness requires you to let a lady, or any one to whom you wish to show respect, pass, not as we do [in Germany], always to the right, but on the side next the houses or the wall, whether that happens to be on the right or on the left. People seldom walk in the middle of the streets in London, excepting when they cross over; which at Charing-Cross, and other places, where several streets meet, is sometimes really dangerous.38

  The surfaces of the actual streets might be laid with cobbles, though they would still become filthy, while minor streets and lanes were more likely to remain unsurfaced, dusty in dry weather and a quagmire when wet. Paupers who could get hold of a broom appointed themselves crossing-sweepers, clearing a path for anyone wanting to cross the street, in the hope of a tip. This method of begging continued long into the Victorian era. With so many horses, huge quantities of manure filled the streets, made worse by the herds of animals that were driven to market, and so houses had boot scrapers outside for scraping footwear clean of detritus. In April 1809 Sarah Wilkinson was living in Church Street, Kensington, awaiting the return of her husband William from the navy: ‘This morning while at breakfast, hearing the bell ring and somebody scrape their shoes as you used to do, I told Fanny it was you, and I ran down like a wild thing. Then think what I felt on seeing the washer woman stand at the door.’39

  In towns and cities, the numerous wheeled vehicles led to congested streets and accidents, and there was endless noise from the iron tyres and the hooves of the horses, added to which was the sound of horns, animals being herded, the hubbub arising from traffic jams and the cries of pedlars and hawkers trying to sell their wares. In May 1805 Silliman arrived for the first time in London: ‘We drove [on top of the stagecoach] through Piccadilly, and were instantly involved in the noise and tumult of London. We were obliged to hold fast as we were driven furiously over rough pavements [the street surfaces], while the clattering of wheels, the sounding of the coachman’s horn, and the sharp reverberations of his whip, had there been no other noises, would have drowned conversation.’40

  Only heavy snowfall could silence the city, as Gilbert White experienced in January 1776: ‘the metropolis itself exhibited a still more singular appearance than the country; for being bedded deep in snow, the pavement of the streets could not be touched by the wheels or the horses’ feet, so that the carriages ran about without the least noise. Such an exemption from din and clatter was strange, but not pleasant; it seemed to convey an uncomfortable idea of desolation.’41

  In the countryside, the condition of roads varied greatly. The problem was that there was no central fund or taxation to pay for their upkeep. Instead, everyone was supposed to spend several days each year repairing the roads near where they lived, but the organisation of such labour was inefficient and haphazard. ‘Mrs Poole’s cart busy in doing statute labour,’ William Holland noted with pleasure in June 1800. ‘I hope we shall have the road a little better. A great many stones I see have been carried and laid down in the middle of the road. The Somersetshire Boobies have strangely mended the road.’42 It was not feasible to bring in good-quality materials to those areas that had no stone, and so many roads in England remained pitted and rutted in dry conditions and deep in mud once it rained.

  Such was the bad state of roads that John Byng preferred travelling on horseback during his annual summer excursions: ‘Whoever speaks of touring in chaises or phaetons, (as many ignorants will,) let him attempt to travel thro’ these…rough roads; and then he will recant, and say with me, – there is no touring, but on horseback.’43 He deplored the short-cut practices of the roadmenders in obtaining materials: ‘how barbarous to pull down old ruins, as is commonly done; to fill up cart-ruts!’44 Charles Fothergill in Yorkshire likewise opposed the destruction of ancient monuments for repairing roads: ‘What will the lovers of antiquity and all wise and good men say to this when they are told…that this is a co[u]ntry abounding with stones and every necessary material for the making and mending of roads.’45

  On main cross-country routes, the solution to poor roads was privatisation, and from the mid-eighteenth century turnpike trusts had been established on a piecemeal basis, each one authorised by Act of Parliament. These private companies were licensed to maintain and operate turnpike roads as toll roads, and in return for collecting tolls, they took responsibility for their maintenance. Turnpike roads were so-called because of their barriers, often gates, that were set across the road where tolls were collected. The term ‘turnpike’ had been used from at least the early fifteenth century for a spiked barrier of pikes (a long-handled spear) that was rapidly placed as a makeshift obstacle, especially against attackers on horseback. By the mid-eighteenth century ‘turnpike’ was used generally for barriers, even for the locks and barriers on navigable waterways.

  Turnpike trusts usually gained their initial capital by publishing a prospectus and inviting investors to lend them money, offering interest in the region of 4 or 5 per cent. This money covered initial repairs to the road, the establishment of gates and tollhouses at regular intervals and the wages of the toll collectors who were paid to live in the tollhouses and collect tolls at all hours, every day of the year. Once established, the trusts often farmed out the collection of tolls and repairs of the road to a contractor, in return for a guaranteed fixed sum, leaving the contractor to squeeze as much profit from travellers as possible. Understandably, toll collectors were unpopular, and ‘turnpike man’ became a derogatory term for a clergyman, on the grounds that his fees for baptisms and burials were tolls on passing in and out of the world of the living.

  Many travellers tried to avoid the toll gates, but some trusts forced people to use them by blocking up alternative routes. Gangs occasionally broke down the gates, destroyed tollhouses and assaulted toll collectors. Turnpike roads did greatly improve many cross-country routes and opened up the country by making it easier to travel long distances, but not all were of high quality, as Byng found near Gloucester: ‘No turnpike road is so bad as the last six miles to Gloster, narrow, wet, and stoney; and only mended with black iron ore, dangerous to man, and horse.’46 Less than 20 per cent of the road network was run by the trusts; the majority of minor routes and side roads remained as bad as ever.

  Along turnpike roads travellers had relatively little trouble finding their way, because there were milestones or mileposts at every mile, which appealed to Moritz: ‘The English milestones gave me much pleasure, and they certainly are a great convenience to travellers. For, besides the distance from London, every mile-stone informs you, that to the next place is so many miles; and where there are cross-roads, there are direction-posts, so that it is hardly possible to lose one’s self in walking.’47 Each turnpike had an individual style of milestone, and a guidebook to Norfolk published in 1803 was impressed by the local design: ‘The mile stones from Thetford to Norwich are well adapted for travelling in carriages, having two sides towards the road, not square, but slanted so that the number may be seen at a great distance.’48 The turnpike trusts erected these milestones and mileposts, and they are still shown on modern Ordnance Survey maps, marked as MS or MP, revealing the old arterial roads.

  Away from the turnpikes, following the correct route was not so easy, with no road names and little to guide the traveller. In August 1781, William Dyott was travelling by night in a post-chaise to Chester: ‘I was awakened by the chaise stopping, when the post-boy did me the satisfaction of telling me he was lost, for which I made him a low bow and then kicked him. It was in the middle of an immense forest, and not near light.’49 Even close to home it was easy to go astray, as Woodforde discovered: ‘I went to Brand this morning for Mr. Bodham and there read prayers and administered the H. Sacrament for him, as he served Mr. Hall’s church at Garveston. Brand is about 7 mile from
my house and very difficult road to find.’50 Most people had scant geographical knowledge beyond their own locality, something Byng noticed at Buxton in Derbyshire in June 1790: ‘I travell by map, for none can inform you [of the way]; the only people who become acquainted with counties, are tourists, or a canvasser at a general election.’51 Three weeks later he was exasperated with one hostler: ‘enquiring the road to Grantchester, only 3 miles distant, he answer’d, (after a long stammer) “Were you ever there, sir?” “No, or I wou’d not have ask’d you the way”.’52 Maps were little better than sketches, which experienced travellers like him found wholly inadequate:

  I have often thought that maps, merely for tourists might be made. And have wish’d that some intelligent traveller (for instance Mr [Francis] Grose) wou’d mark on such touring maps, all the castles, Roman stations, views, canals, parks, &c &c. which accompanied by other common maps, wou’d lead the researching tourist to every proper point & object; and not subject him (as at present) to ask questions of ignorant innkeepers, or to hunt in books, for what is not to be found; for till lately we had no inquisitive travellers and but few views of remarkable places.53

  The threat of invasion during the wars with France made an accurate survey of England essential. It was begun in 1790, and its primary purpose was to enable the best positions to be chosen for defensive gun (ordnance) emplacements. They were therefore called Ordnance Survey maps, the name by which they are still known. Surveying started in the southern counties, where invasion was most likely, and the first map, of Kent, was produced in 1801. These maps were not available to the public until years later.

  Long-distance travel was so slow that overnight stops were unavoidable. While Moritz was shunned at inns whenever he was on foot, Silliman noticed the difference between the treatment shown towards those passengers arriving by post-chaise and those by stagecoach: ‘the strangers in the post-chaise were expected to pay well…while the men on top of the coach might possibly have money, but, in all probability, rode there to save it. Thus it is, that…the attentions which a traveller receives at the inns are proportioned very exactly to the style in which he arrives.’54 He also found that everyone expected to be tipped: ‘The guard and coachman as well as the servants at hotels expect their regular douceur…This tax is inevitable, and Americans, from ignorance of the country, and fear of being thought mean, usually pay more liberally than the natives.’55

  When Silliman first arrived in London, ‘We were driven through the Strand, Temple Row…and Fleet-street. The coach stopped at the Belle Savage on Ludgate Hill. The coachman, by a short turn, drove us, with astonishing swiftness, through a narrow opening, where the least deviation would have overturned the coach, and we were set down in a large back yard, full of coaches, horses, servants, and baggage.’56 Surviving inns of this period usually retain the telltale arched entranceway for horse-drawn vehicles, and some still have the yard at the rear as well.

  Whenever he travelled to London, Woodforde always stayed at the same historic coaching inn as Silliman, the Belle Sauvage, despite its bedbugs. In June 1786 he wrote: ‘I was bit so terribly with buggs again this night, that I got up at 4 o’clock this morning and took a long walk by myself about the City till breakfast time.’57 The next night he tried a different tactic: ‘I did not pull off my cloaths last night but sat up in a great chair all night with my feet on the bed and slept very well considering and not pestered with buggs.’58

  In Emma Mrs Elton says of Selina, her sister, that if staying at an inn, ‘She always travels with her own sheets; an excellent precaution.’ Byng regularly took his own sheets, but failed to do so when he was at the Black Bear Inn at Rugby in July 1789: ‘My sheets were so damp, and the blankets so dirty and stinking, and the room so smelling of putridity, that I slept very little; tho’ I took off the sheets, and employed all the brandy, near a pint, in purifying the room, and sprinkling the quilt, and blankets.’59 The following year, the Black Bull Inn in Trumpington Street in Cambridge provoked his anger even more:

  I never was in a worse or a dirtier inn; for ALL Cambridge is in comparison of Oxford…about 100 years behind hand: the best Cambridge inn wou’d form but a bad Oxford alehouse! – Dirty glasses; bad wine; vile cookery; but I answer to any question of hope, ‘Oh, it is excellent’; and why should I not?…I, resolv’d never to come again, don’t like to vex myself; and so I say ‘It is all very good’. Tho here it went much against the grain…This wretched inn, with most of this wretched town, ought to be burnt down!60

  Cambridge was not burnt down, but the inn was rebuilt in 1828 and renamed ‘The Bull’.

  Rather than stay at inns, some people travelled all night, and Byng complained that inns wanted to do business only in horses, not hospitality: ‘Most inns, now, are kept by, and for, a change of post horses, as fine gentleman never step out of their chaises in the longest journies; and all others travell in the mail, or post coaches: so that the tourist who wants only a supper and a bed, is consider’d as a troublesome unprofitable intruder.’61 This kind of non-stop travel, with the horses being changed at intervals, was relatively fast but bitterly cold in winter. In November 1805 Silliman had left London and was journeying from Newark to York by stagecoach: ‘The night had been one of the coldest that I have experienced in England; we were obliged to close the windows of the coach entirely; but still my feet suffered considerably…The coachman and guard, who had been all night in the open air, were completely encrusted [with frost].’62

  Night journeys were hazardous because of the absence of lighting. It was much easier if a full moon lit the way, which Woodforde and his niece Nancy found when travelling from Bath to London in 1795: ‘I thank God we had fine weather and a good moon all last night, and about 10 o’clock this morning we got safe and well to London…We were not much fatigued with our journey or otherwise indisposed, tho’ travelling all night.’63 In Weston Longville on another occasion Woodforde had an unpleasant night-time walk from a neighbouring house: ‘As there was no moon to come home by, it was very disagreeable to come home thro’ the wood that I did, but I thank God I got safe and well back tho’ very dark. When there is no moon for the future will get back before it is dark.’64 Moonlight was desirable for going to evening entertainments, and in Sense and Sensibility Sir John Middleton is hoping to organise a small social gathering at the last minute, ‘but it was moonlight and every body was full of engagements’.

  Only in the main urban streets was there any street lighting, and London’s was praised by Moritz in 1782: ‘I was astonished at the admirable manner in which the streets are lighted up; compared to which our streets in Berlin make a most miserable show. The lamps are lighted whilst it is still day-light; and are so near each other, that even on the most ordinary and common nights, the city has the appearance of a festive illumination.’65 An improved type of lighting was tried in May 1803, which The Times reported:

  A satisfactory experiment was first made on Friday evening last, at the Upper end of New Bond Street, to dissipate the great darkness that has long prevailed in the streets of this metropolis. It consisted in the adaption of twelve newly invented lamps with reflectors, in place of more than double that number of common ones; and notwithstanding the wetness of the evening…that part of the street [was] illuminated with at least twice the quantity of light usually seen.66

  Although this experimental lighting still comprised oil lamps, they were so effective that ‘the faces of persons walking, the carriages passing &c. could be clearly seen’,67 an indication that the old lamps were very inadequate. Shops began to be lit by gas in 1805, and gas street lighting was demonstrated in Pall Mall in 1807, which gradually replaced oil lamps from 1812, making a significant improvement.

  Lamps were useless during the dense fogs caused by adverse weather conditions and coal smoke, and Lady Bessborough described one terrifying journey she made in London on the night of 5 November 1805:

  The fog, which was bad when I set out, grew thicker and thicker, but when I
got into the park was so complete it was impossible to find the way out. My footman got down to feel for the road, and the holloing of the drivers and screams of people on foot were dreadful. I was one hour driving thro’ the park; Queen St it was impossible to find, and as…it was as dangerous to try to go home, I set out with two men walking before the horses with flambeaux [flaming torches], of which we could with difficulty perceive the flame – the men not at all. Every ten or twenty yards they felt for the door of a house to ask where we were – it was frightful beyond measure; in three hours’ time I reached Chelsea.68

  That very night Lieutenant Laponetiere was groping his way towards the Admiralty through the same fog, bringing news of the naval victory at Trafalgar and the death of Nelson.69

  Bad weather regularly disrupted travel, particularly as winters in England were more severe than today. Heavy snowfall at times persisted into spring when the thaw would lead to severe floods. In Norfolk in early February 1799, during one bitter winter, Woodforde described the roads still blocked with snow:

  Most of the poor people employed in clearing the public road from the late great fall of snow. Never known such a depth of snow for the last 40 yrs. People obliged to walk over hedges &c. In almost every place the roads impassable. The snow near our great gate in the yard almost as high as the gate, above the pales in some places. Dreadful weather indeed for the poor people now…All travelling is almost at a stand, the drifting of the snow making almost every place impassable.70

  Two weeks later, conditions had not changed:

  Very dismal accounts on the papers respecting the last severe weather – many, many people having lost their lives thro’ the inclemency of the same. Mail coaches &c unable to travel. The roads in very, very many places impassable. The long continuance of so severe cold weather having scarce been ever known for the last century. It has lasted now (with scarce any intermission) from the 17th of December last past and [more] still likely.71