Chapter 41 Transport
During his lifetime, Dickens saw the roads around him becoming ‘macadamised’, or paved. He saw stiff lumbering coaches overtaken
by fast, light, more comfortable coaching ‘machines’, as they were sometimes called. And, most importantly, he saw the rise
to its peak of a stagecoaching public transport system that within living memory tripled the speed of road vehicles between Britain’s major towns and regularised those towns’ connections,
thus bringing the nation three times closer together. The highway corridors and roadside inns filled with a newly mobile people.
Then, in the 1830s and 1840s Dickens saw this nationwide long-distance stagecoaching system rapidly disappear and the direct
highways around him empty. New railed roads ridden by coal-eating, steam-driven iron horses, pulling coaches trained together
reduplicated the whole system with a new celerity of mobility ‘realising the Arabian Nights in these prose days’, as Dickens
marvelled.1 Along with the long-distance regional transport of stagecoach and rail, short-distance, horse-drawn transport flourished
on tributary routes and in the bustling cities, and passenger travel over water gradually shifted from wooden sailing ships
to iron and steam boats, eventually also revolutionising international ocean crossings. Throughout his career, Dickens engaged,
both in terms of content and form, with this rapid development of the transport system unfolding all around him. Some modern
readers and critics have taken the fact that Dickens’s novels generally gravitate towards the depiction of coaching (often
of the 1820s) as indicating a nostalgia on his part for a premodern past. Nothing could be further from the truth.
16. Dickens and his daughters in his phaeton, c. 1866.
After a successful beginning recording parliamentary speeches in shorthand for the papers, Dickens’s career as a news reporter
literally and figuratively took off in the mid 1830s (concurrent with his beginning to publish his first sketches) when he
began racing around England by coach to report on events. ‘There never was … anybody connected with newspapers who, in the
same space and time, had so much express and post-chaise experience as I’, he later recalled.2 This experience of stagecoaching provided not only materials but also the infrastructure for his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Pickwick is a road novel. The titular hero, Pickwick, takes his name from the Bath stagecoach line, and the story is structured around
his five round-trip coach journeys out from London, with a dramatic counterpunctal stop in the Fleet prison. What Dickens
is doing in this novel is explicitly rewriting the picaresque tradition of Don Quixote by updating it to the era of public stagecoaching, specifically to the late 1820s. Significantly, according to Philip Bagwell
in The Transport Revolution, this was the decade when for the first time coach travel outpaced horse riders. Thus ended an epoch, almost as long as the
history of western civilisation, of stratification based upon equestrianism. Pickwick, who pointedly cannot ride, plunges
us instead into the young Dickens’s contemporary world of long-distance public stagecoaching: his ‘only question is … where
shall we go next?’ (ch. 35). Three essential components constituted this inland passenger transport system: the stagecoaches,
the roadside inns (where horses would be changed) and the ‘direct’ roads. Each is briefly discussed separately below. All
would receive continued consideration and reconsideration by Dickens even after Pickwick’s breakthrough rendering.
17. ‘Phiz’ (Hablot Knight Browne), ‘Mr Bob Sawyer’s Mode of Travelling’, The Pickwick Papers, 1836–7.
The stagecoach, from the perspective of its contemporaries, embodied the unprecedented acceleration of passenger transport.
In 1784, John Palmer reformed postal delivery by mandating that new, timed and speedy Royal Mail coaches replace the plodding
mounted post boys, and because those Royal Mail coaches, their bugles trumpeting their arrival in every town, carried a few
paying passengers they unintentionally ignited a revolution in competitive passenger transport. Especially for a period of
about fifty years, from roughly 1784 to 1836, stagecoaches tore faster and faster around the highways of Britain, ushering
in the intercity circulation of ordinary people as an everyday norm. Reaching an average of over 10 miles an hour, with an equine-capped top
speed of around 14, the stagecoaches left all previous forms of vehicular road transport in the dust. Favourite names tell
the story: the Quicksilver, the Telegraph, the Comet, the Dart and a huge number predictably called, simply, the Express.
There were many technical advances in coach design and construction making the new speed possible, but one of the most important
was the metal elliptical spring suspension system. Coaches thus equipped met the road gently and flexibly and much more stably,
to the benefit of the road, the coach, the horses, everyone. Passenger rooftop seats multiplied. By the peak of its operation
in the 1820s and 1830s, the stagecoaches were carrying as many as sixteen passengers with their luggage. These passengers
were divided in self-explanatory fashion between two differentially priced tiered classes, ‘insides’ and ‘outsides,’ and Dickens
often attends to this distinction, even sometimes further refining it, as when David Copperfield recounts his summary displacement
from his ‘box seat’ located beside the driver, labelling this dislodgement his ‘first fall’ in life (ch. 19). There is sometimes
a further distinction made between booking on a commercial stagecoach and on the Royal Mail, which took fewer passengers at
a higher price, often travelled at night, and was generally faster, partly because the turnpikes were required to have their
tollgates open for them. But, more importantly, neither of those public conveyances should be confused with the hiring of
a post chaise. The post chaise was by definition generally a much smaller two-person vehicle, used for independent, individual
stage travel. In The Old Curiosity Shop, for example, the single gentleman twice races after Little Nell in a hired post chaise with four horses, striking ‘fire
from the flints of the broad highway’ (ch. 47), while Quilp keeps up with him on his first pursuit by catching the night stagecoach.
A post chaise could also include a dickey, or rumble, outside and behind, where a servant might additionally ride along –
Sam Weller, Kit Nubbles and Mr Bailey all take their places there on noteworthy coach rides. And instead of a driver up top
and in front and a bugle guard riding behind, as on a stagecoach, the smaller post chaise typically employed a postillion,
or post boy, who rode one of the horses and guided the carriage that way. This distinction matters in part because the new
race of stagecoach drivers, and not postillions, were regarded as heroes. The cosmopolitan stagecoachman, his vehicle fully
loaded, discoursing casually, whip relaxed, ‘four in hand’, racing along the highway, was an iconic image for Dickens, repeatedly
illustrated by ‘Phiz’. Mr Weller is Dickens’s most extended depiction of the type. The whole system was, of course, premised upon the horses, whose efficiency was maximised through selective breeding and the system of stages, which
provided fresh legs every eight to ten miles along the coach’s route. The requisite changing of horses, like a racing-car
pit stop, took only a few minutes for a coach and only five were allotted by postal regulation. A network of roadside coaching
inns, which frequently form the scene of action in Dickens, underpinned the transport system.
In their own day stagecoaching inns, which offered travellers waiting rooms or ‘commercial rooms’, dining rooms and coffee-rooms,
private meeting rooms, bedrooms and a yard where the coaches arrived and departed, bespoke the accommodation of the increasing
circulation of strangers. Some of their main customers were bagmen, or travelling commercial salesmen, to whom Dickens pointedly
compared himself in creating the semi-narratorial, journalistic persona ‘the uncommercial traveller’ (All the Year Round, 28 January 1860). The coaching inns thus differed from village taverns or public houses (pubs), such as the Three Jolly
Bargemen where Joe smokes his pipe till Pip fetches him. The village pub holds the local against the outside. By contrast,
the set-piece picture at a stagecoaching inn is the departure or arrival of passengers, as Vincent Crummles melodramatically
stages when Nicholas Nickleby exits his theatrical troupe. The stagecoaching inn was thus a step before the grand railway
hotels of which Dickens would decry that in staying there ‘we have no individuality, but put ourselves into the general post,
as it were, and are sorted and disposed of’.3 In ‘An Old Stage-Coaching House’, Dickens autopsies the inns after their murder by the railways (All the Year Round, 1 August 1863). The Maypole Inn in Barnaby Rudge represents what an inn looked like before the revolution in stagecoaching; its stables empty, isolated though a mere twelve
miles from London, all in all offering a parallel to Jarvis Lorry trudging beside the (anachronistic) Dover Mail in A Tale of Two Cities. Equally in depicting the coaching inns, in other words, Dickens focusses on the rapid transformations of the passenger transportation
system, attending to its various and uneven face – to the process of change and to change to the process of change. When,
for instance, Pickwick discovers Sam Weller, Sam is working as a boots at the quiet White Hart Inn, which had once been a
‘head quarters … when coaches performed their journeys in a graver and more solemn manner’ (ch. 10). By contrast, Pickwick,
commencing his adventures by catching a cab to the Golden Cross Inn at Charing Cross to take the stagecoach for Rochester,
enters the public transport system at one of its busiest, perpetually modernising terminals. The year before, in his important
1835 sketch ‘Early Coaches’, Dickens details the bustling booking office at the Golden Cross, and ‘Cruikshank’ fittingly pictured
Dickens booking in.
The roads’ paving underlay the whole passenger transport revolution. Having suffered essentially a millennium of neglect after
the departure of the Romans, the highways began reviving in earnest in the second half of the eighteenth century with the
growth of a turnpike system that funded road improvement and maintenance by charging tolls to travellers. Broadening road
widths, straightening routes, thickening supporting foundations and building bridges, Thomas Telford led the way in demonstrating
the power of professional road engineering over filling potholes with boulders. His contemporary John Louden McAdam then subsequently
simplified and cheapened a process of paving, which came to bear his name, and smooth and waterproof roads rapidly became
virtually ubiquitous in the early nineteenth century. In America in 1842 Dickens lamented that there, unlike at home, macadamised
roads were still unfortunately only a ‘rare blessing’ (American Notes, vol. 2, ch. 6). The precise mileages and interconnections of Britain’s direct and cross roads were detailed by the popular
Paterson’s Roads, which still remains a useful resource for recreating Dickens’s characters’ journeys. Unlike Dickens, however, Paterson’s fails to capture not only the shrinking distances that the re-engineered highways produced by accelerating stagecoach travel,
but also the comparative by now onerous slowness felt by those left walking, such as Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or
Little Nell. Miss Wade may make it sound as if she is uttering some kind of timeless truth when she prophesies ominously that
‘in our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to meet us, from many strange places and by many strange roads’ (Little Dorrit, vol. 1, ch. 2), but in Dickens the road is historical and it matters precisely because, both figuratively and literally,
it is changing and estranging beneath his characters’ feet.
The steam railroads shape even the perspective from which Pickwick was written, and after 1836 they rapidly superseded the stagecoaching system. Dickens was 17 years of age when the 1829 Rainhill
trials (a contest between locomotives, with the winning designers, George and Robert Stephenson, receiving prize money and
the contract to supply engines for the Liverpool and Manchester Railway) proved locomotives easily could outfly stagecoaches.
The first commercial passenger railway began operating the next year between Manchester and Liverpool, and during the subsequent
fifteen years the major cities were all connected into a national rail system. By 1851, hordes travelled to the Great Exhibition
via railway, which was now operating at speeds of up to fifty miles per hour. Dickens’s portrayal of the railway in Dombey and Son is famous, but equally significant are his many scattered writings in journals, and taken together these constitute the best
context for understanding his dealings with the railways. In his February 1839 farewell as editor to readers of Bentley’s Miscellany, Dickens first elaborates an extended view of the railways as seen by an ‘Old Coachman’ (as he signs himself off), and by
the time Pickwick’s Old Weller returns soon after in Master Humphrey’s Clock to recapitulate this viewpoint, Dickens himself was travelling regularly by train: ‘All right / In great speed / Off!’ he
wrote, departing for Birmingham to be out of town for the first day of Clock’s publication.4 A comparison of the state of British and American railroads opens the fourth chapter of American Notes, reappearing in chapter 21 of Martin Chuzzlewit. By the time we get to Dombey, Dickens is actually looking back over a decade to the beginnings of the railways: the chaos and rebirth of Staggs’s Gardens
recounts the London–Birmingham line coming through Camden Town in the mid 1830s; Toodles finds work in the new vocation of
locomotive engineer; and, as Humphry House observed, Dombey’s ride takes place in his private coach strapped on to a rail
undercarriage, a practice common in the early days of rail.5 More current is Dickens’s vivid celebration of the trip by railway and steam packet from London to Paris – only eleven hours!
– ebulliently described in ‘A Flight’ (Household Words, 30 August 1851). There is also a ‘chip’ on ‘The Individuality of Locomotives’ (Household Words, 21 September 1850); a discussion of ‘Railway Strikes’ (Household Words, 11 January 1851); and an acute comic dissection of Bradshaw’s railway timetables in ‘A Narrative of Extraordinary Suffering’ (Household Words, 12 July 1851). In ‘An Unsettled Neighbourhood’ (Household Words, 11 November 1854) Dickens describes the railway’s whirling of Londoners into ‘perpetual motion’; he does the same for international
travellers arriving at Folkestone in ‘Out of Town’ (Household Words, 29 September 1855); and casts a trip to Paris as a journey to the moon in ‘Railway Dreaming’ (Household Words, 10 May 1856). The third chapter of ‘The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices’ (Household Words, 17 October 1857) offers his most detailed description of a railway station, while he picks over the dismal decline in the
quality of food and lodging in ‘Refreshments for Travellers’ (All the Year Round, 24 March 1860). In 1865, Dickens’s train crashed at Staplehurst, killing ten, and following this Dickens wrote a stunning
ghost story, ‘No. 1 Branch Line. The Signalman’ in Mugby Junction (the 1866 Christmas number of All the Year Round). ‘The Signalman’ grimly addresses the railway’s warping of time, an effect repeatedly meditated on and mediated in Dickens’s
railway writings. During his lifetime, one of the most important effects of the revolution in long-distance passenger transport was
to create standardised time, first called ‘railway time’, later Greenwich Mean Time, in place of the differential local times
previously kept by towns at a distance.
Horse-drawn, short-distance passenger transport increased dramatically alongside the rise of the national long-distance public
transport system based first on the stagecoaches and then on the railways. In London in the late 1820s the fast, somewhat
dangerous cabriolet, or ‘cab’, broke into the old monopoly of plodding hackney coaches, and horse-drawn omnibus or ‘bus’ service
also began. Sketches is filled not only with ‘Boz’ walking among teeming urban foot-passengers, but with descriptions of London in vehicular motion,
especially in the sketches: ‘Omnibuses’, ‘Hackney-Coach Stands’, ‘The Last Cab-Driver, and the First Omnibus Cad’, and a Thames
‘Steam Excursion’. This last sketch reminds us that while Dickens twice cast Venice’s streets of water as a dream (in an ‘Italian
Dream’ in Pictures from Italy and volume 2, chapter 3 of Little Dorrit), the Thames was often depicted by him as a crowded, industrially polluted waterway, particularly in Our Mutual Friend. The massive long-distance canal system, originating in the eighteenth century and extinguished by the railways, was designed
primarily for freight transport, and it was, according to Dickens, no place for passengers; it almost kills both Nell and
Eugene Wrayburn.
Ocean travel – meaning round trips, not emigrations – expanded gradually but surely during Dickens’s lifetime, as steam replaced
sail. With the reopening of the European continent at the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815, the cutting-edge navy sailing
ships, which had formed Britain’s protective ‘wooden walls’, began to give way to an international commercial steam-powered
future. Turner famously captured the transition in The Fighting Temeraire (1839), one of Dickens’s favourite paintings. (He used its steam-tug to characterise Pancks in Little Dorrit.) In 1842, Dickens took The Brittania, the Cunard line’s first paddle steamer – in typical fashion still fully equipped with sails – to America (American Notes, vol. 1, ch. 1). It was, however, a miserable little boat, and Dickens discovered for himself that the addition of steam
power did not suffice for ocean travel the way it did for coastal or cross-channel packets such as ‘The Calais Night Mail’
(written up in All the Year Round, 2 May 1863). Two more ingredients were needed: first, massive iron hulls, which gave the ships strength and tremendous size
(requiring an industrialisation of shipbuilding examined in ‘Chatham Dockyard’, All the Year Round, 29 August 1863), and second, the replacement of the paddle by the screw propeller (described by Dickens in ‘Aboard Ship’, All the Year Round, 5 December 1868). These definitively came together in Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s SS (for steam ship) Great Britain, which was officially launched in 1843 and first crossed the Atlantic in 1845. An era of routinised, global round-trip travel
was dawning, and a decade later, in 1855, the monthly wrapper of the internationally oriented Little Dorrit quietly pictured a distant steamship as its backdrop. Though Dickens did not live to see the dramatic effects of what a Household Words contributor called the ‘Short Cuts Across the Globe’ – such as the Suez Canal, opened in 1869 – or the golden age of ocean
liners that preceded air travel, on his shelf at his death was a book aptly titled Our Ocean Highways (1870).
Notes
1 Charles Dickens, ‘A Flight’, Household Words, (30 August 1851), 533.
2 John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 2 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872–4), vol. I, 77.
3 All the Year Round (24 March 1860), 515.
4 Letter to Chapman and Hall, [? 3 April 1840], Letters, II, 50.
5 Humphrey House, The Dickens World (Oxford University Press, 1971), 140.