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"Coach!"
George Cruikshank
August 1836
Etching on copper
8.7 x 7.6 cm
"Hackney-Coach Stands" in "Scenes," by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, First Series (1836).
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
The servant-girl, with the pink ribbons, at No. 5, opposite, suddenly opens the street-door, and four small children forthwith rush out, and scream "Coach!" with all their might and main. The waterman darts from the pump, seizes the horses by their respective bridles, and drags them, and the coach too, round to the house, shouting all the time for the coachman at the very top, or rather very bottom of his voice, for it is a deep bass growl. A response is heard from the tap-room; the coachman, in his wooden-soled shoes, makes the street echo again as he runs across it; and then there is such a struggling, and backing, and grating of the kennel, to get the coach-door opposite the house-door, that the children are in perfect ecstasies of delight. What a commotion! The old lady, who has been stopping there for the last month, is going back to the country. Out comes box after box, and one side of the vehicle is filled with luggage in no time; the children get into everybody’s way, and the youngest, who has upset himself in his attempts to carry an umbrella, is borne off wounded and kicking. The youngsters disappear, and a short pause ensues, during which the old lady is, no doubt, kissing them all round in the back parlour. She appears at last, followed by her married daughter, all the children, and both the servants, who, with the joint assistance of the coachman and waterman, manage to get her safely into the coach. A cloak is handed in, and a little basket, which we could almost swear contains a small black bottle, and a paper of sandwiches. Up go the steps, bang goes the door, "Golden-cross, Charing-cross, Tom," says the waterman; "Good-bye, grandma," cry the children, off jingles the coach at the rate of three miles an hour, and the mamma and children retire into the house, with the exception of one little villain, who runs up the street at the top of his speed, pursued by the servant; not ill-pleased to have such an opportunity of displaying her attractions. She brings him back, and, after casting two or three gracious glances across the way, which are either intended for us or the potboy (we are not quite certain which), shuts the door, and the hackney-coach stand is again at a standstill. — "Hackney-Coach Stands," p. .
The [Morning] Chronicle's owners determined to establish a sister paper, The Evening Chronicle, to be published three times a week and aimed, as all evening papers were at this time, rather at country readers than at metropolitan ones. The appointed editor was George Hogarth, a distinguished Scottish music critic and former editor of The Halifax Guardian. He asked Dickens to contribute an original sketch to the first number of the new paper (31 Jan. 1835). Dickens made a counter-proposal, reflecting his rapidly growing confidence in Boz's marketability. He suggested that he might write 'a series of articles under some attractive title' for the new paper for 'some additional remuneration'. Hogarth agreed and Dickens's salary went from five to seven guineas a week, a substantial rise. The first of the new series, 'Sketches of London. No. 1. Hackney-coach Stands', duly appeared in the first issue of The Evening Chronicle. It was to be followed over the next seven months by fourteen more such sketches intermingled with half a dozen of those 'Parish' papers that he had for some time had in mind. — Michael Slater, "'The Copperfield Days': 1828-1835," pp. 46-47.
Whereas the illustrator of the First Series of Sketches by Boz, George Cruikshank, elected to depict an earlier incident in the "Scenes" sketch, in which an adolescent maid-servant in pink ribbons suddenly opens the door at No. 5 (perhaps in Fitzroy Square), and four small children in her charge rush to the kerb screaming "Coach!" at the top of their collective lungs, Fred Barnard chose a textual moment that captures the fashions of that earlier period rather better than Cruikshank's depiction of the children and the maid. In It was a wedding party and it emerged from one of the inferior streets near Fitzroy Square, a bridegroom, in blue topcoat, yellow waistcoat, white trousers and matching white Berlin gloves stops at the street-corner to hail the cab. Barnard's is not merely a scene of shrill children and a housefront; rather, it is a scene full of exuberant promise and youthful bonhommie, and therefore something of a contrast to the shabby-genteel and sordid "Sketches" found elsewhere in the series.
Although Dickens concedes that other urban centres in 19th c. Britain may have cabriolets for hire at various designated spots, he finds the yellow "hackney-cab" a distinctive part of the London cityscape. And, as it is a traditional, slow, ramshackle sort of vehicle, Dickens even implies that it is like Great Britain's other public institutions, notably Parliament, and therefore also badly in need of reform or repair. London, in fact, can boast the first true "hackney cabriolet"; this was the product of a coach-builder in Albany Street, David Davies, licensed in 1823 as a public conveyance. The term "cab" is derived from "cabriolet," a French term borrowed in the eighteenth century and denoting a "two-wheeled coach drawn by a single horse with the driver perched on a seat at the rear." Although the British Parliament passed a regulatory "Ordinance for the Regulation of Hackney-Coachmen in London and the places adjacent" in 1654, and hackney-carriage licences date from 1662, the first recognizable (enclosed) hansom cab for hire appeared on London streets in 1834, so that Dickens's essay is quite topical. The Hansom rode on two wheels, with the driver sitting up and in the back, so that passengers would have a clear view of where they were going. There was a distinction between a general hackney carriage and a hackney coach, a hireable vehicle with specifically four wheels, two horses and six seats, and driven by a "Jarvey" (also spelled "Jarvie," the title of Sam Weller's comic song in the Phiz's July 1836 illustration of him in the White Hart's inn-yard, The First Appearance of Sam Weller). The Clarence or growler was a type of four-wheel, enclosed carriage drawn by a pair of horses used as a hackney carriage, that is, as a vehicle for hire with a coachman. It was distinguished from a cab, hansom cab, or cabriolet, which had only two wheels, and from other types of coaches in that the growler was slightly smaller, held up to four passengers, and was somewhat less ostentatious. The first "stand" or waiting area for cabs was established at the Maypole Inn at the Strand in London as early as 1643. By 1823 there were 1,200 plated and numbered hackney coaches in London. Dickens is describing one of two cab stands in Tottenham Court Road: Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street, and Tottenham Court Road, New Road, although in early Victorian London there were 82 principal cab stands. In the April 1836 instalment of the Pickwick Papers, a rather bellicose Samuel Pickwick has a sharp altercation with a hansom cab driver, a situation comically depicted by Robert Seymour in The Pugnacious Cabman (Chapter 2), set on 13 May 1827, at the Golden Cross Inn (a family hotel at which passengers could book coaches by various routes to Dover, Brighton, Bath, Bristol, Cambridge, Holyhead and York), at Charing Cross — the very destination of the children's grandmother in Cruikshank's illustration for Dickens's "Hackney-Coach Stands." After the establishing of the twin railway stations at Charing Cross in 1864, the centre of metropolitan London mid-way between The City and Westminster, the Golden Cross degenerated into a railway parcel-office. First mentioned in 1643, the inn, possibly a remnant of the original village of Charing, occurs in three Dickens works: Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, and David Copperfield.
Above: Fred Barnard's realistic full-page wood-engraving of the wedding party, with the groom hailing a cab, It was a wedding party and it emerged from one of the inferior streets near Fitzroy Square. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Bentley, Nicolas, Michael Slater, and Nina Burgis. The Dickens Index. New York and Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1990.
Dickens, Charles. "Hackney-Coach Stands." "Scenes," Ch. 7. Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839, rpt., 1890. Pp. 60-63.
Dickens, Charles. "Hackney-Coach Stands." "Scenes," Ch. 7. Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Pp.38-40.
Dickens, Charles. "Hackney-Coach Stands." "Scenes." Sketches by Boz Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-Day People. Ed. Thea Holme. The Oxford Illustrated Dickens. Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1957; rpt., 1987. Pp. 81-85.
"Hackney Coach." http://www.georgianindex.net/transportationLondon/Hackney_Coach.html. February 2004. Accessed 24 March 2017.
Slater, Michael. Charles Dickens: A Life Defined by Writing. New Haven and London: Yale U. P., 2009.
Thornbury, Walter. Chapter 19, "Charing Cross, The Railway Stations, and Old Hungerford Market." Old and New London: A Narrative of Its History, Its People, and Its Places>. London: Cassell, Petter & Galpin, 1878. Pp. 123-124. British History Online. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol3/pp123-134 [accessed 26 March 2017].
Last modified 5 May 2017