There is no consensus of opinion to be found among travellers by coach on the subject of the joys or sorrows of old-time travel. Everything depended on the weather, the coach, the other passengers, and upon the nature of the traveller himself. Sometimes a coach journey was a misery; at others it was a joy to look back upon. Humourists of the early and mid-eighteenth century found the subject of coach-travelling very attractive, and returned again and again to the stock characters of the braggart and domineering military man among the passengers, who was really a coward, and the modest, unassuming young man who always killed or dispersed the highwaymen while the captain, who by his own account had fought at Ramilies with Marlborough, prostrated himself on the floor and tried to crawl under the petticoats of the lady passengers or cover himself with the straw that strewed the floor. Those humourists could always get a laugh from such accounts, and sighs of appreciation from the ladies, who all wished they numbered among their acquaintance such proper young men as Roderick Random, who in Smollett’s romance performs such prodigies of valour in the “Exeter Fly” somewhere about the neighbourhood of Turnham Green.

“When I had taken my seat,” says Roderick, after an adventure of the kind already hinted at, “Miss Snapper, who from the coach had seen everything that had happened, made me a compliment on my behaviour; and said she was glad to see me returned without having received any injury; her mother, too, owned herself obliged to my resolution; and the lawyer told me I was entitled by Act of Parliament to a reward of forty pounds for having apprehended a highwayman. The soldier”—who had behaved in the conventional style of poltroonery—“observed, with a countenance in which impudence and shame, struggling, produced some disorder, that if I had not been in such a d——d hurry to get out of the coach, he would have secured the rogue effectually without all this bustle and loss of time, by a scheme which my heat and precipitation ruined. ‘For my part,’ continued he, ‘I am always extremely cool on these occasions.’

“‘So it appeared by your trembling,’ said the young lady.

“‘Death and the deuce!’ cried he. ‘Your sex protects you, madam; if any man on earth durst tell me so much, I’d send him to hell in an instant.’

“So saying, he fixed his eyes upon me, and asked if I had seen him tremble. I answered, without hesitation, ‘Yes.’

“‘Damme, sir,’ said he, ‘d’ye doubt my courage?’

“I replied, ‘Very much.’

“This declaration quite disconcerted him; he looked blank, and pronounced in a faltering voice, ‘Oh! ’tis very well! I shall find a time.’

“I signified my contempt for him by thrusting my tongue into my cheek, which humbled him so much that he scarce swore another oath aloud during the whole journey.”

These soldiers, or pretended soldiers—for it would not be fair to those who warred under Marlborough to assume that such cowardly ruffians were genuine military men—were found hectoring in every coach in those picturesque times, threatening to run everyone through the vitals, and rarely, it is to be feared, meeting with those modest and self-possessed young demigods who wore all the lackadaisical airs of an Apollo superimposed upon the brawn and biceps of a Hercules, and with those biceps always at the service of the ladies at precisely the psychological moment.

Ladies, strange to say, seem at a very early date to have travelled unaccompanied by friends or relatives. The way was long, the discomforts great, and so the politeness and attentions shown them were proportionately increased. Thoresby, who in 1714 travelled to London by the York stage with some ladies of sorts, speaks of the well-established custom of paying for their refreshments on the road, and mentions, between Grantham and Stamford, that they were “more chargeable with wine and brandy than the former part of the journey, wherein we had neither; but the next day we gave them leave to treat themselves.” So the line was drawn somewhere.

Shergold, who in the coaching era was proprietor of the “Castle Hotel,” Brighton, and had every reason to know what life on the road was like, declared, in a very readable pamphlet he wrote, that “a woman was a creature to be looked at, admired, courted, and beloved in a stage-coach”; but let the rash modern traveller presume to look admiringly at the lady occupant of a railway carriage, and it is not at all unlikely that she will be horribly frightened, and take the next opportunity of changing into another compartment.

An amusing tale, declared to be true, has been told of the possibilities of a coach in the love-making sort. It was about 1780 that a young gentleman, anxious to win the good graces of a lady, and lacking other opportunities, engaged all the remaining inside seats of the coach between Glasgow and Edinburgh by which he knew she would travel. He succeeded so well in his enterprise that the lady consented on the journey to be his bride; but candour compels the admission that the marriage thus romantically agreed upon turned out a particularly unhappy one.

The final test of a gentleman in those days was his behaviour at a stage-coach dinner. It was, if you consider it, a very severe and unfair test, for it is allowed that politeness generally leaves starving people at an early stage; and the appetites that coach passengers brought with them into the dining-room of an inn were usually very keen. An acquaintance of Constable, the painter, could find no more striking climax to a list of his virtues than to declare that he was “a gentleman at a stage-coach dinner.” “Then,” said his companion, “he must have been a gentleman indeed!”

What, then, did it mean, this gentlemanly conduct? It meant, in short, that one who could fairly lay claim to it must take some lady of the party into his care, escort her from the coach into the inn, see to it that she was provided with dinner, and pay her reckoning, he must not first attempt to satisfy his own hunger, although perhaps he was up at five o’clock in the morning, and had only taken a hurried coach-breakfast at the first stage out.

The gentleman who fulfilled the canons of this time could rarely hope to get any dinner for himself. On the later coaches, time was so strictly kept that the coachmen were off to the minute; and the landlords, who, of course, knew that, were generally suspected of delaying the appearance of the food so long that not one of the party could have time to do justice to it. Our gentleman, therefore, often had the mortification of paying both for the lady’s dinner and for his own, of which he had not tasted a mouthful. He returned to the coach as hungry as he had left it, and kept his gentility as warm as it was possible to do on an empty stomach. A very little of this was sufficient to wear the nap off the politeness of a Chesterfield, and it must not infrequently have happened that the person who had been all courtliness at dinner became selfishness incarnate at tea.

Those who did not come up to the high standard that Constable attained—and they were in the majority—hurried out of the coach without the slightest consideration for any one else, and flinging themselves into the inn, roared out for “dinner, d——d quick”; or—older travellers and more wary—filled their spirit flasks at the bar, and made sure of having a meal of sorts by demanding cold ham or beef, or any of those dishes which the hostelries of that time possessed in abundance.

Many writers have attempted to describe those coach-dinners, and one endeavoured to vividly picture them by declaring that they reminded him more of hounds feeding at a trough than human beings; but none have equalled the anonymous account quoted here.

“First of all, you had, in winter, to be called before daylight; then you had to proceed in a rattling hackney-coach (your teeth rattling to match with the cold) to the office from which the ‘Wonder,’ ‘Telegraph,’ ‘Regulator,’ ‘Highflyer,’ or ‘Independent’ started; then you were hurried over your meals, as the following account will show:—

“‘Twenty minutes allowed here, gentlemen, for dinner,’ exclaims the coachman, as we drive up to the ‘Bull’ at Smallborough.

“What a scene of confusion ensued! Bells rang, ostlers halloed, waiters ran, or rather broke into that shambling shuffle whose secret seems to be known only to those who ‘stand and wait’—at least, no other creature practises it.

“‘Please to alight, ladies and gentlemen,’ exclaims the landlord, addressing the four insides; while the ostler, bringing a somewhat crazy ladder, makes a similar request to the eleven outsides.

“The day has been a miserable specimen: incessant rain, with a biting easterly wind, giving an inappropriately jocose gentleman the opportunity of offering facetious remarks upon ‘heavy wet,’ and ‘cold without.’ You enter the best parlour of the inn, anticipating a warm welcome and a share in those creature comforts looked forward to in such circumstances by all. But here the legal axiom, that ‘possession is nine points of the law,’ is realised to your horror and dismay in a sight of the first-comers on an earlier coach occupying every seat near the fire; while a tablecloth covered with fragments, and a disarray of empty glasses tell a tale of another dinner having recently been ‘polished off.’

“‘Waiter, waiter!’ shriek half a dozen voices in as many keys, and in accents ranging from the imperious to the imploring. Enters then a slipshod, soiled being, with watery eyes and apologetic mien. ‘Here, you, where’s the dinner?’ chorus the starving, half-drenched passengers.

“‘Dinner?’—scratching his head; ’er—well—er: beg pardon, gents, but the “Independent” was rather late like to-day, and the “Highflyer,” she were down early, and—er——’ Well, the gist of all these apologetics was that the company had to wait while the next joint was being dished up.

“Meanwhile the ‘Independents’ absorbing all the fire are bustled off by a portly man in a low-crowned hat and a huge caped box-coat, or ‘upper Benjamin,’ as it used to be called. ‘Gentlemen,’ he roars, ‘time’s up!’ With great to-do of cloaking, shawling, greatcoating, and paying, they are outside, and we, in the twinkling of an eye, in their fireside seats, listening to the curses levelled at the ostler by the outsides for letting the seats get wet. With a precautionary ‘Sit tight,’ they lurch violently off, and we are left anxiously awaiting the arrival of that dinner.

“At last it comes: a procession of three—the landlady, parlourmaid, and waiter—bearing dishes with tin covers. These battered relics removed, a coarse fat leg of mutton, roasted to a cinder, is unveiled, together with a huge joint of boiled beef, very much underdone; potatoes, hot without and hard within, and some gritty cabbage.

“‘Slice of mutton for a lady,’ says the waiter, approaching a stout gentleman in the act of helping himself to that part of the joint so highly prized by epicures, called the ‘Pope’s eye.’ The direction of the knife is instantly changed, and the lady’s plate filled with a somewhat less desirable ration. ‘Please, sir, a little fat,’ continues the assiduous waiter, ‘and a little gravy,’ he adds, anxious to earn a tip from the old stager of the male sex, who thus invariably forwarded his demands, as coming from a lady. Numerous other applications are made to the carver, who, disgusted with his place, helps himself to his coveted delicacy, and requests the waiter, with emphasis, to attend to the other passengers himself.

“Time flies fast, and especially time devoted to pleasure, and none of the party are aware how fast the glass has run, until the entrance of the coachman, informing all concerned that the coach is ready.

“Up starts the stout gentleman. ‘Coachman, the time can’t be up; I’ve not eaten a morsel.’

“‘Full twenty minutes, sir,’ replies that Jehu.

“‘Abominable,’ continues the first speaker.

“‘Who riseth from a feast with that keen appetite that he sits down?’ quotes a stage-struck attorney’s clerk.

“‘I have,’ mutters the Daniel Lambert of the party; ‘and if Shakespeare wrote that—well, coach-dinners were not known in his time.’

“Now we do as we saw the ‘Independents’ do before us, and fee the coachman, scramble for greatcoats, cloaks, shawls and umbrellas, in addition to ringing for the waiters to bring that brandy-and-water ordered ten minutes before, but not yet forthcoming.

“Half-crowns and shillings are tendered in payment to the waiter, who of course has no change: what waiter ever had, when you were in a hurry? It is a mere additional annoyance that the stage-struck youth finds this an opportunity of quoting from Pizarro, ‘We want no change, and, least of all, such change as you would give us,’ concluding with the lines of one of Haynes Bayley’s popular ballads:—

“Now, at the ultimate moment, the waiter appears with a tray containing ‘one cold, without,’ ‘four hots, with,’ ‘two hots, sugar and no fruit,’ and ‘three with the chill off’—the ‘with’ and ‘without’ referring to sugar, the ‘no fruit’ applying to lemon. Fortunate now are the owners of cold beverages, for none but a fire-eater could swallow the scalding potations that are now left as perquisites to the waiter. Amid the babel of departure may be distinguished, ‘Please remember the waiter, sir!’ ‘Didn’t take for your dinner, sir.’ ‘Glass of brandy, ma’am.’ ‘A basin of soup and a pint of ale gone away without paying!’ ‘Chambermaid, ma’am.’ ‘Ostler, sir! I got you some nice dry straw.’

“Away, away. ‘Now, gentlemen, sit fast. Let ’em go, Jem—I’ve got ’em!’ and off goes the ‘Highflyer.’”

Here is another such scene, observed with another pair of eyes, or imagined by another brain:—

“‘Put the joints opposite the women,’ says the landlord to the waiter taking in the dinner; ‘they’re slow carvers.’

“Meanwhile, passengers are busy, taking off coats, one, two and three in succession (those were the days of bonâ-fide ‘great-coats,’ nowadays become lessened, and merely overcoats). Chins appear out of their many wrappages of silk, and fur caps are bundled into pockets. Inside passengers eye outsiders with suspicion, while a deaf gentleman who has left his trumpet in the coach meets an acquaintance whom he has not seen for seven years, and in consequence of not having that instrument with him can only shake hands and grimace in return to the speaker’s greetings:

“‘You find it very warm inside, I should think, sir, don’t you?’ says the acquaintance.

“‘Thank ye, my good friend; I am rather deaf, but I suppose you are inquiring after my wife and daughters: they are quite well, thank you.’

“‘Where will you sit at dinner?’ rejoins the acquaintance.

“‘It is two years since I was there,’ replies he.

“‘No: where will you sit, sir? I said.’

“‘Oh! John: he is still in Jamaica with his regiment.’...

“‘Come, waiter, d—n it all, why was not the dinner on the table when we arrived?’ demands a superfine inside passenger. ‘This is always the way with your confounded coach-dinners. And what have you got under there,—goose, eh?’

“‘No; pork, sir.’

“‘What is under that cover?’

“‘Pork too, sir.”

“‘Great heavens! pork again! the country is deluged with pork: who the devil do you think can dine off pork?’

“‘A couple of ducks coming, sir,’ says the waiter.

“‘Confound your ducks! What with your pork and ducks, you’ll make the whole inside of the coach reek with onions and vulgarity.’

“‘There’s a cold collation on the side-table, sir, if you prefer cold meat.’

“‘Hang your cold collation! have you got any real Devonshire cider in the house?’

“‘Yes, sir; some very excellent.’

“‘Then bring me a bottle, and a toothpick.’

“‘Now, look here, waiter,’ says one of the diners, ‘there are the horses out already, and we have not half done yet: blow me if I go before the half-hour’s up.’

“‘Take any cheese, sir?’ asks the waiter.

“‘No, to be sure, not yet; have you no tarts?’

“‘Why, none, I am afraid, that we can recommend, sir; but there’s some very nice cold plum-pudding you can have.’

“Enter coachman: ‘I leaves you here, if you please, sir.’

“‘Just as you please; I have no objection,’ says a satirical passenger.

“‘Please to remember the coachman—driven you forty-five miles.’

“‘Yes, but you will recollect you were very impertinent about my wife’s bandbox;—there’s a shilling, between us, for you.’

“‘Oh! sir, I’m sure I didn’t mean no unperliteness—I hopes you von’t think nothink about it; it were wery aggravising that the box was forgot, but I hopes you’ll give me a trifle more—forty-five miles.’

“‘No, no more—so be off.’...

“‘Please to remember the coachman, ma’am—forty-five miles. Leave you here, sir, if you please—go no further, sir—forty-five miles, ma’am.’...

“‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, the coach is quite ready: time’s up,’ says the guard, entering the room....

“‘What’s dinner, waiter?’

“‘Two-and-three, and eighteenpence—one-and-eightpence—is three-and-eleven, sir,’ says the cunning waiter, whose artful arithmetic is decidedly not ‘according to Cocker.’ ‘Yours is three-and-sixpence, ma’am—two glasses brandy and water. Yours is four shillings, sir—a bottle of real Devonshire cider, sir.’...

“‘Now, sir, coach is ready—time up; can’t wait,’ roars out the guard. ‘Here, Joe, set the ladder for the lady’; and the passengers are hurried into their places.”

Not so hurried was that gentleman who on one of these quick-change and pantomime-rally occasions remained calmly drinking his tea while his fellow-passengers were jostling each other in their anxiety to regain their seats.

“You’ll miss the coach, sir!” shouted the landlord in his ear, under the impression that he was deaf and had not heard the stampeding feet.

“I want a spoon to stir my tea,” said this last-remaining guest: “why didn’t we have any?”

The landlord glanced hurriedly round—not one spoon of all those that had been on the table remained. He rushed out to the coach to find who among the passengers had stolen them; and by the time he had delayed the coach and insulted everyone, the last passenger, having finished his breakfast at leisure, came out with the information that they had been found in the teapot, where, as will by now have been suspected, he had himself placed them.

There is no generalising on the subject of coach-breakfasts or dinners. Some inns were famous for good fare, others were notorious for bad provisioning and worse service; and all were liable to change from good to ill, or the reverse, according to how they changed hands from time to time. Sidney Smith, who was under no illusions, and lived well into the railway age, did not lament the days when he travelled post from Combe Florey to London—“living for three days on veal-cutlets and waiters”; but, on the other hand, travellers equally familiar with the roads were heard lamenting the good and varied fare they had been used to find, and sought in vain in later days. Lord William Lennox wrote regretfully of the “plain and perfect” English dinners down the road, generally consisting, he said, of mutton-broth, rich in meat and herbs, fresh-water fish in every form, eels—stewed, fried, boiled, baked, spitchcocked, and water-souché; salmon, the purest butter, green gooseberries, the earliest cucumbers, saddle of Southdown mutton, kept to a moment and done to a turn, mutton chops, hot and hot, Irish stews, rump-steaks tender and juicy, chicken and ham, plum-pudding, fruit-tarts, and trifle and gooseberry-fool.

Then the produce of the grape! No thin, washy claret, at 18s. a dozen, no fiery port, one day in bottle, no sherry at 25s. the cask; but fine, sound vintages, fit for any private cellar.

Other travellers tell less roseate tales. Often they had the sole choice between ham and eggs, ill cooked, and nothing at all; or, if the choice was there, the mutton was half-done and stringy, the chops greasy and cold, and the rump-steaks tough and dry, with everything else in accordance. If we like to take Thomas Hughes, in Tom Brown, as an authority, however, the breakfasts were really noble meals; for Tom, going to Rugby, is represented at a table spread with the whitest of cloths, and rich in cold pigeon-pie, a Yorkshire ham, a round of cold boiled beef, and a loaf of household bread. On these the guests made a beginning, but the waiter entered “in an instant” (paragon of waiters!) with kidneys, steak, rashers of bacon, poached eggs, and buttered toast and muffins. Tom fell-to with a will, and put away kidneys and pigeon-pie and coffee until his little skin was as tight as a drum—little pig!

It is a coach-breakfast that is so well pictured by James Pollard in the accompanying illustration. The company, with an indescribable air of having been up all night, are just finishing their meal, and the polite gentleman in the ample overcoat is trying to induce the two ladies under his charge to take a little more. It is quite evident that this has been a more leisured affair than usual, for the yawning travellers by the fireplace have finished their meal long ago, and a stout person is being shaved by a barber in knee-breeches, with legs of a distinctly Lowther-Arcadian type, suggestive of bran and sawdust instead of bone and muscle. The coachman, appearing hat in hand and touching his forehead, has come to the end of his stage: he “goes no further, gents,” and is here to claim his dues. Meanwhile, the guard outside is lustily blowing his horn, and the empty coach is seen waiting.

The scene, in fact, here pictured is the last halt on a long journey; an opportunity seized by the passengers, not only for a meal, but for a shave and a general brush-up preparatory to alighting at their destination. Such scenes were the commonplace incidents to be observed at Highgate, Barnet, Hounslow, and other stages near London in the coaching age.

Here at least—for there are twelve passengers present—the insides and the outsides have foregathered, and for once the gulf socially dividing them has been bridged. This generally impassable gulf was more marked in the case of the mails than in that of the stage-coaches. The very superior and exclusive travellers who went in their own chariots or by post-chaise resorted to well-known hotels and posting-houses on the roads, whose chaste halls were never profaned by coaches. Even the superior persons who travelled inside the mails could not hope to win to those expensive and select abiding-places; but they formed a caste by themselves, who never willingly sat at meat with the outsides. De Quincey, who often travelled outside, experienced something of this contempt, and the recollection seems to have lent eloquence to his remarks on the subject. It was, he tells us, “The fixed assumption of the four inside people that they, the illustrious quaternion, constituted a porcelain variety of the human race, whose dignity would have been compromised by exchanging one word of civility with the three miserable delf-ware outsides. Even to have kicked an outsider might have been held to attaint the foot concerned in that operation, so that perhaps it would have required an Act of Parliament to restore its purity of blood. What words, then, could express the horror and the sense of treason in that case, which had happened, where all three outsides (the trinity of Pariahs) made a vain attempt to sit down at the same breakfast-table or dinner-table with the consecrated four? I myself witnessed such an attempt; and on that occasion a benevolent old gentleman endeavoured to soothe his three holy associates by suggesting that if the outsides were indicted for this criminal attempt at the next assizes, the court would regard it as a case of lunacy or delirium tremens rather than that of treason. England owes much of her grandeur to the depth of the aristocratic element in her social composition when pulling against her own strong democracy. I am not the man to laugh at it. But sometimes, undoubtedly, it expressed itself in comic shapes. The course taken with the infatuated outsiders, in the particular attempt which I have noticed, was that the waiter, beckoning them away from the privileged salle-à-manger, sang out, ‘This way, my good men,’ and then enticed these good men away to the kitchen. But that plan had not always answered. Sometimes, though rarely, cases occurred where the intruders, being stronger than usual, or more vicious than usual, resolutely refused to budge, and so far carried their point as to have a separate table arranged for themselves in a corner of the general room. Yet, if an Indian screen could be found ample enough to plant them out from the very eyes of the high table or dais, it then became possible to assume as a fiction of law that the three delf fellows after all were not present. They could be ignored by the porcelain men, under the maxim that objects not appearing and not existing are governed by the same logical construction.”

Humour had a splendid field in coaching, and the literature of the road is gemmed with twice a hundred good stories and mirth-provoking scenes. Few things seem to have been more productive of funny stories than the undue tendency to fatness on the part of a passenger. There is, for example, the tale of the stupid servant who, having to book two seats inside a coach for his master, a man of prodigious bulk, to whom one seat would be useless, returned from the booking-office with the news that he had secured the only two places to be had—one inside and one out.

This bears comparison with that other story of the stout man’s revenge. He, too, was accustomed to book two seats. On one occasion this amiable eccentricity of his was observed overnight by two waggish fellows who thought they would play a trick on the fat man. They accordingly booked seats also, and took care to be seated in them before the man of much avoirdupois came. They sat facing one another, one back and the other in front, so that he had indeed two seats, but not, as they necessarily should have been, together. He asked them very politely to change their positions, but they refused, although he explained that he had booked two seats, and his reason for doing so. There the seats were, they said.

But the outraged man of flesh determined to be revenged, and, looking round at the next stage where the coach stopped, spied a chimney-sweep, he beckoned.

“Chimley, yer honour?” queried Chummy.

“No: come here. Have you any objection to a ride this morning? I’ll pay you for a day’s work, and your fare back again.”

“All right, yer honour; I’ll just run home and clean myself.”

“No, no! come as you are, and when in the coach give yourself a good shake every now and then, to make the soot fly.”

They got in, Chummy acting his part very well, and greatly to the annoyance and discomfort of the wags, who, however, said nothing. But when the coach stopped at the next change, and for breakfast, they asked the man who had been their butt, and was now their tormentor, how far he was going to take the sweep, as he was not a very desirable companion.

He replied: “I took two seats so that, although corpulent, I should annoy no one. You prevented me occupying them, therefore I filled the remaining seat with Chummy, and he goes as far as the end of my journey. But I will dismiss him if you will agree to what I propose. When I engaged him, I agreed to pay him for his time, and to pay his fare home, with all other expenses incurred. He is now at breakfast. If you agree to pay him, he goes no farther; if not, he proceeds.”

Having listened to this ultimatum, and being completely discomfited, they accepted these terms, and the sweep was dismissed.

Among the most laughable of old-time skits on coaching miseries is the following breathless account, in the style of the immortal Jingle. Its humour is somewhat broad, and indeed all coaching humour was of the smoking-room rather than of the drawing-room order:—

“Stage-Coach Adventures.

“Inside.—Crammed full of passengers—three fat fusty old men—a young mother and sick child—a cross old maid—a poll parrot—a bag of red herrings—double-barrelled gun (which you are afraid is loaded)—and a snarling lapdog, in addition to yourself. Awake out of a sound nap with the cramp in one leg and the other in a lady’s bandbox—pay the damage (four or five shillings) for gallantry’s sake—getting out in the dark at the half-way house, in the hurry stepping into the return coach and finding yourself next morning at the very spot you had started from the evening before—not a breath of air—asthmatic old woman and child with the measles—window closed in consequence—unpleasant smell—shoes filled with warm water—look up and find it’s the child—obliged to bear it—no appeal—shut your eyes and scold the dog—pretend sleep and pinch the child—mistake—pinch the dog and get bit—execrate the child in return—black looks—no gentleman—pay the coachman and drop a piece of gold in the straw—not to be found—fell through a crevice—coachman says ‘He’ll find it’—can’t—get out yourself—gone—picked up by the ostler—no time for blowing up—coach off for next stage—lose your money—get in—lose your seat—stuck in the middle—get laughed at—lose your temper—turn sulky—and turned over in a horse pond.

“Outside.—Your eye cut out by the lash of a clumsy coachman’s whip—hat blown off into a pond by a sudden gust of wind—seated between two apprehended murderers and a noted sheep-stealer in irons, who are being conveyed to gaol—a drunken fellow half-asleep falls off the coach—and in attempting to save himself drags you along with him into the mud—musical guard, and driver horn mad—turned over—one leg under a bale of cotton, the other under the coach—hands in breeches pockets—head in hamper of wine—lots of broken bottles versus broken heads—cut and run—send for surgeon—wounds dressed, lotion and lint, four dollars—take post-chaise—get home—lie down—and laid up.”

A “humorous” story is told of a coach coming into Dover at night, and the coachman, “feather-edging” a corner, running into a lamp-post. It was the period just after Waterloo. A little French count, who occupied the box-seat, was thrown off, and, falling on his side, had three ribs fractured. The coachman pulled up and asked a passing sailor to pick up the unhappy passenger. The half-drunken tar, seeing a heap of limp clothes on the pavement, said, “There’s no gemman here—on’y a lot of coats.” At that moment the Count groaned, “Oh! by gar! I brake tree rib.” “Damn your eyes!” roared the sailor, “you’re a Frenchman, are you? Lie there and be damned,” and so went on his way.

I think the brutality of this tale is even more noticeable than its humour, but it is distinctly redolent of the age when people only laughed on seeing others placed in a painful or uncomfortable position. When no one was hurt there was no humour, according to the notions of that time—a time when to crush a man’s hat over his eyes was exquisitely funny, and for half a dozen lusty Toms and Jerrys to overturn a decrepit old watchman was a screaming farce. It is, by the way, significant that that was the era when screaming farces held the theatrical stage, and the rough-and-tumble of the harlequinade was at its zenith. The practical joker was then prominent, and the more “practical” (i.e. the more wantonly cruel and injurious) the joke the more it was applauded. If the victim ever thought of resenting a witticism of this kind, he was, in the cant of that period, “no sportsman,” and behind that formula the blackguard jokers screened themselves. If they had not very carefully, for their own protection, erected that obligation to “take a thing in good part” which stayed the heavy hand of revenge, it is quite likely that some of these humourists would have been very severely mauled. The amazing thing is that the victims agreed to that convention, and allowed themselves to be harassed with impunity.

Practical joking affected every class. One of the old borough members of Parliament—Francis Fane, who began his long Parliamentary career in 1790—was a practical joker of the most desolating kind. Travelling by coach to London along the Exeter Road on one occasion, he saw, from his seat inside, the coat-tails of one of the outside passengers—a barber, of Dorchester—hanging down. This gave him the pleasing notion of cutting open the pocket and extracting its contents, which happened to be a bulky parcel of banknotes the unfortunate shaver had had given in his charge. The extraordinary cruelty of the practical jokers who made existence a burden to their victims a hundred years ago promised Fane to gloat over the barber’s terror when he found the notes gone, and only to restore them when his enjoyment could be carried no farther. As some amends, he entertained his victim at the White Horse Cellar on the eve of the barber’s return to Dorchester; but his practical joking was not yet complete, for, taking excellent care that his victim should be fully charged with liquor, he hustled him into the night coach for quite another Dorchester—Dorchester, Oxfordshire—where he was duly set down the following morning.