What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  Carriages were, in fact, the cars of the nineteenth century—part status symbol, part self-expression, part necessary means of transport. They were often lavished with care when first built to make sure, for example, that the coat acquired just the right sheen—the Bertrams’ coachman in Mansfield Park, we are told, “complains bitterly of the narrow lanes scratching his carriage,” since part of a coachman’s task was to maintain as well as drive the household carriages. It was important to have the right kind of carriage. Closed carriages seem to have been the fanciest, no doubt because they were associated with the chariot and private coach used by the rich. There were other distinctions, however. In the 1830s, a contemporary recorded that in the countryside the “close carriage” set looked down on the people with barouches or phaetons, and the barouche and phaeton people in turn looked down on those who drove gigs. Even the rules of the road seemed to reflect acknowledgment of a hierarchy. “Carriages painted with a coat of arms take precedence over all others,” wrote a foreign observer in the 1840s, “middle-class carriages with four horses have precedence over those with only two, the latter over cabriolets and tilburys, hired landaus over coaches, coaches over omnibuses, omnibuses over cabs, and so forth down to the trap, and even it has right of way over the cart.”

  One cannot appreciate many of the fine points of nineteenth-century life and fiction, however, without understanding that some carriage was absolutely crucial to any pretense of social standing. “Evil-doing will be spoken of with bated breath and soft words even by policemen, when the evil-doer comes in a carriage, and has a title,” says Trollope apropos of Lizzie Eustace in The Eustace Diamonds. Prime Minister Pitt taxed carriages during the Napoleonic War on the understanding that it was really a disguised income tax on the rich, while at the beginning of Pride and Prejudice Mrs. Lucas expresses some understanding of why Mr. Darcy did not talk to Mrs. Long at the ball, given his exalted social status: “I dare say he had heard somehow that Mrs. Long does not keep a carriage, and had come to the ball in a hack,” a remark that might have seemed silly or exaggerated to a nineteenth-century audience, but one that they would have understood. Fictional examples could be multiplied at length. In Vanity Fair, the young William Dobbin at one point mocks George Osborne for being a merchant’s son: “My father’s a gentleman, and keeps his carriage,” retorts Osborne.

  Barouches and landaus were the fancy family vehicles of the gentry and the nobility in the early part of the century. Then came the brougham, the idea, not surprisingly, of Lord Brougham. It was an effort to produce a two-wheel vehicle like the gig or curricle, except—unlike them—one with a “closed” or hard top. Why not? The new French cabriolets of the 1820s demonstrated that you could have a small, light vehicle enclosed just like a coach. The brougham was very successful, so successful that it gave way to a four-wheel variety as well, which was like the old coaches except sleeker and built lower to the ground. It became the “in” family vehicle for the latter part of the 1800s, playing perhaps the same role as that played by the barouche in the first half of the century, and, since it is always best to be a two-car family, you supplemented it where possible with a victoria. These little numbers were also low built—like the brougham—but, in addition, were open and thus suitable for summer or daytime driving. Primarily, they were regarded as ladies’ carriages.

  The carriage did not die with the coming of the railroad. The railroads did nothing, for example, to eliminate the private vehicles that took you from the station to your front door. Nor did they really interfere with the flourishing horse-drawn public transportation system that London enjoyed right up to the turn of the century. In 1800 the market for cabs in the great city was dominated by hackney coaches—basically, old noblemen’s coaches that someone hitched up and drove around for hire. Pip hires one of these magnificent, if fatigued, specimens when he first arrives in London to see Mr. Jaggers; “it was a wonderful equipage, with six great coronets outside, and ragged things behind for I don’t know how many footmen to hold on by, and a harrow below them, to prevent amateur footmen from yielding to the temptation.” They could be hired at stands where they were attended by “watermen” who watered the horses.

  Cabriolets were a big innovation in the 1820s. These hackney cabriolets, or cabs, as they came to be called, thus giving birth to a whole new generic term, were the inspiration for Lord Brougham’s brougham. They were, in turn, succeeded by cumbersome four-wheel coaches called growlers. Their competition for the last half of the century were the famous hansom cabs, which first appeared in the late 1830s, and which were marvelous two-wheel vehicles that perched the driver way up in back behind the passengers so they could get an unobstructed view of the city streets ahead. The speedy hansom was a big item for years and years, but it was tippier than the four-wheelers, which drew the patronage of the timid and the elderly, and it lacked room for luggage.

  Engine, tender, and carriage.

  THE RAILROAD

  The railroad, like many technological innovations, was not immediately seen as radically different from its predecessor modes of transportation, with the consequence that just about everything about it was initially modeled on the stagecoach.

  The nomenclature and design, first of all. The engineers were called “drivers” and the conductors “guards.” The railway cars were called “carriages,” and the first-class carriages were made up of three “coaches,” each with room for six passengers, as in a stagecoach, with semicircular stagecoachlike windows next to them and coach-bodylike curves reproduced on the outside of the car. Until 1891, there were no common passageways or corridors, so there was no way to get from one compartment to another.

  There were originally just two classes of passenger, first and second class, corresponding to the inside and outside of the coach. It was not until later that a third class was added and, when it was, it consisted initially simply of cattle cars with no covering from the elements or, as the board of directors of one railway casually described them in the minutes of an 1838 meeting, “open boxes—no roofs.” Thomas Hardy described what a ride was like for the poor in those days: “The seats for the humbler class of travellers in these early experiments were open trucks, without any protection whatever from the wind and rain . . . the unfortunate occupants were found to be in a pitiable condition from their long journey; blue-faced, stiff-necked, sneezing, rain-beaten, chilled to the marrow.”

  There was no illumination on many trains—people often brought candles for night reading. Until 1874, when steam heating came in, keeping warm during a winter journey meant having the porter bring you a metal foot warmer filled with hot water. Dining cars did not exist for any class of passenger until 1879, so people brought prepacked lunches or made a mad dash for the station eatery when the train stopped. They also made a mad dash for the lavatories, since there were no toilets on trains until 1892. Ladies might travel together in compartments separate from the gentlemen, for long journeys bringing chamber pots concealed in discreet baskets, while for gentlemen long tubes that could be strapped along the leg under a trouser were advertised.

  On the other hand speeds were (relatively) fast and fares undeniably cheap. Trains in the 1850s averaged more than twenty miles per hour, the expresses almost forty, although the engines were initially not all that powerful. Sometimes they were brought to a halt along the coast of North Wales by a high wind. By the end of the century the Flying Scotsman that ran from London to Edinburgh, supposedly the speediest train anywhere, averaged fifty-five miles per hour. Fares were cheaper than stagecoach fares, and, then, in 1844, Parliament required every railroad to run at least one train a day along its entire route, making all stops and charging no more than a penny a mile. These “parliamentary” trains, as they were called, were even cheaper than third class, and for the first time whole categories of people who never dreamed of travel before could get around England, as Mrs. Bounderby in Hard Times eagerly relates when asked how she got down to Coketown to see her somewhat less than gratef
ul son. “By parliamentary, this morning. I came forty mile by parliamentary this morning, and I’m going back the same forty mile this afternoon.” By the 1870s third-class passengers—perhaps as a consequence—outnumbered first and second class almost two to one.

  The social and economic effects of the railroad were, of course, many. Stagecoaches vanished, great herds of sheep and cattle no longer had to be driven to market along the roads, and new industries that needed overnight access to large markets because of their perishable products sprang up to take their place. “Londoners will drink it at their breakfast tomorrow, won’t they?” Tess shyly asks Angel Clare when they drive the milk cans from the dairy to the train one day during their courtship, and, indeed, a farm given over wholly to producing milk like the one where Tess and Angel meet would have been impossible in prerailroad days.

  THE MAIL

  Letters!

  Letters told you whether or not you had inherited the estate—whether someone had agreed to marry you—whether cousin Frank was lost at sea—whether a long-lost heir was actually alive and in New Zealand and was now returning to claim his fortune—

  The mail was expensive, except to M.P.s, who, until 1840, could “frank” it, i.e., send it free. Postage was billed on the basis of the number of miles the letter traveled in England, fourpence for the first fifteen miles, eightpence for eighty, and so on up to seventeenpence for a letter going seven hundred miles. In addition, if you put any enclosures in the letter (even a second sheet of notepaper) the charge was double. And the recipient always paid, not the sender. We learn how beloved Amelia Sedley was of her classmates at Miss Pinkerton’s at the start of Vanity Fair when a classmate who is “generous and affectionate” cries out at her departure, “never mind the postage, but write every day, you dear darling.”

  Naturally people tried to avoid paying these charges. One obvious technique, employed by Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park to help his homesick cousin Fanny Price send a letter to her brother, was to get a friend or relative who was an M.P. to send the letter for you. “As your uncle will frank it,” he says, knowing of the Prices’ poverty, “it will cost William nothing.” Or, perhaps, you could find a friendly—or mercenary—coachman to take the letter some miles farther toward its destination before mailing it. The poor used a simpler device. Coming one day upon a postman disputing with an old lady about a shilling charge for a letter from her son, Coleridge was sufficiently moved by her poverty to pay the charge for her. As it turned out, the letter was empty—by simply writing her name on the outside in his handwriting, her son was able to let his mother know when she saw it that he was still alive and well. More genteel ways to save postage included using lots of abbreviations in one’s letters and also “crossing,” or turning the letter at right angles after one had written a page and writing over it. In general, says Miss Bates of a correspondent to the heroine in Emma, “she fills the whole paper and crosses half. My mother often wonders that I can make it out so well. She often says when the letter is first opened, ‘Well, Hetty, now I think you will be put to it to make out all that checker-work.’ “

  Local mail was not as expensive, at least in big cities like London. Within the city and the surrounding area, there was a “two-penny post” that was organized and run separately from the General Post Office that handled national mail. The two-penny post delivered letters left at designated local shops or with its carriers for the price indicated by the service’s name. It was fast—a letter dropped off before ten went out on a noon route, and, if the carrier waited for a quick reply, the response could be back in the first sender’s hands by about seven that evening. A sort of proto zip code was developed for London, too, that permitted letters to be “directed” or addressed in accordance with a letter code that marked letters E for the East End, W for the West End, EC for the City, WC for Holborn, N and NW for north of the old City, and S and SW for the south bank and the like.

  In 1840 the postal system changed. A “penny-post” was created that permitted one to send letters anywhere in England for a uniform rate of one penny per half ounce. At about the same time the railroads began to take over the job of transporting the mail from the horse-drawn mail coaches, which vastly increased the speed and ease with which letters could be sent, although before the coming of the railroads, the mail consistently traveled faster than almost anyone or anything else in England. Starting in 1784, the mail was carried in special stagecoaches carrying only a few or no outside passengers at an average speed of eleven miles an hour, which made them a good bit faster than ordinary stagecoaches. Turnpike keepers had to open the gates when they saw the mail coach coming or heard the sound of the guard’s warning bugle, innkeepers could lose their licenses for delaying one, and anyone else was subject to a five-pound fine if they interfered with a mail coach in transit.

  Until the 1840s envelopes were not in widespread use so you wrote your letter on a sheet of paper, folded it up and then sealed it and that was your de facto envelope. In Jane Austen, we find the characters using a wafer to seal their missives. This was a small disk made of gum and flour which you licked and then stuck on to the letter to close it. Alternatively, there were seals—gentlemen sometimes carried them on a chain hanging from their waistcoat—which were dipped in beeswax or a similar compound that was melted with the aid of a little desk taper and then applied to the letter. Red sealing wax was for business, other colors for social correspondence, and black for mourning. “In those days there was an art in folding and sealing,” wrote Jane Austen’s nephew in a memoir of his aunt in 1870. “No adhesive envelopes made all easy. Some people’s letters always looked loose and untidy; but her paper was sure to take the right folds, and her sealing-wax to drop into the right place.” We are forcibly reminded of the dangers of sloppy letter sealing when Mrs. Henchard’s letter about her daughter’s past falls prey to her husband’s snooping eyes in The Mayor of Casterbridge, with the usual dire Hardy consequences: “In sealing up the sheet, which was folded and tucked in without an envelope, in the old-fashioned way, she had overlaid the junction with a large mass of wax without the requisite undertouch of the same. The seal had cracked, and the letter was open.”

  The day came, of course, when letters were not the only means of communication across long distances in the country. By 1857 most of the large towns in England were linked by telegraph, and in 1879 the first telephone exchange in the country appeared in London.

  LIFE ON THE FARM

  The English countryside dominates many of the great nineteenth-century novels. Hardy, of course, writes at length of farming customs and practices, notably in Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess, but its rhythms are in the background of his other novels, too. We also find Mr. Rochester talking with Jane Eyre in the drowsy orchard as “a splendid Midsummer shone over England . . . the hay was all got in”; Heathcliff concerned with the safety of his flock during a winter storm; and the rural laborers in Middlemarch rising in protest to denounce the incursion of the railroad into their countryside as Mr. Garth plots ways to improve farming in the area. There were, after all, only nine English towns in 1801 with a population over 50,000. We may therefore have a better understanding of many of the novels if we know the rhythms and practices of everyday farm life in nineteenth-century England.

  The three great products of English farming in the 1800s were corn, sheep, and cattle. “Corn” as the English used the term was not the American corn of corn on the cob, i.e., maize, but rather referred to grains such as wheat, barley, and oats. Wheat was grown to make bread, barley to make beer and ale (and sometimes bread), and oats to make oatcakes and other food as well as feed for horses. Sheep were raised for wool and for mutton, and, secondarily, as a portable source of manure. Cattle provided meat, butter, and milk and pulled ploughs and farm waggons. (Turnips, Swedes (Swedish turnips), and mangel-wurzels were grown to rest fields and as fodder for the animals during the winter.)

  Wheat harvest.

  There was some specialization, but
generally sheep, cattle, and corn were all raised on the same farm. Bathsheba Everdene, for example, though she concentrates on growing corn, also keeps sheep, as readers of the sheep-washing and -shearing scenes in Far from the Madding Crowd will recall. Raising corn, sheep, and cattle simultaneously was good insurance against a bad year with any one or more of them. In addition, sheep and cattle needed the hay from arable fields to sustain them, and cornfields benefited from sheep manure and plowing by cattle.

  Together with her neighbor, Farmer Boldwood, Hardy tells us, Bathsheba farms about two thousand acres. This was not an inordinately large farm. A contemporary study found that the typical Dorset farm had about 660 acres. On it there worked twenty-nine men and boys, who were helped by fifteen more men and women at harvest time, the work force being made up mostly of carters to deal with the horses and waggons, shepherds, and ordinary farm laborers and ploughboys to do the basic work of ploughing, sowing, and weeding.

  Farming practices varied from farm to farm, and local wisdom dictated when various activities were to be carried out, along with the farmer’s own inclinations and the climate of the regions; planting and sowing took place somewhat earlier in the warmer, southern parts of the country. Nonetheless, all farms followed a basic seasonal calendar for the cultivation of crops and the raising of livestock. The year’s work often began with plowing in late fall or early winter for a spring wheat crop. This involved driving a plough in long straight lines through the earth to break up the ground, a boring task usually allocated to the adolescent ploughboys. The fields were then harrowed, which meant that the remaining clumps of earth were further broken up by dragging a toothed instrument called a harrower across them. Lambs were born in the winter, and shepherds stayed up day and night, as Gabriel Oak does at the beginning of Far from the Madding Crowd before his flock is killed, ensuring that they got enough milk and care if their mothers were unable or reluctant to provide it. The only other significant winter work was threshing the corn harvested during the preceding summer and fall. Before the advent of the mechanical threshing machine, this involved walking around in a circle in the barn with wooden instruments called flails, literally “flailing away” at the corn until the grain separated from the stalk. The grain was then sifted, or “winnowed,” to separate the wheat, or other desirable end product, from the chaff, after which the former would be put into bags for market.