Charles Dickens – English Carriages and their Changes – Page 3
Brougham Carriage Illustration
from Modern Carriages by Sir Walter Gilbey, 1905
The age of Tom and Jerry bucks drove fast trotters in gigs, or dashed along in tandems — tandems which are nearly abandoned by under-graduates, and almost confined to headstrong shop-keepers on Sundays, and the long journeys of young Norfolk farmers on market-days.
The Brougham, invented in 1839, gave a fatal blow to the cabriolet, by affording the maximum of appearance and convenience at the cost of one horse and one servant.
It is rather surprising that the noble lord who gave the idea and his name to this invaluable improvement in town-carriages, has never made it the subject of a paragraph in one of those wonderful discourses on everything in general and nothing in particular, addressed to social science meetings. For the social results of the Brougham have, been immense, harmonizing families, bringing husband and wife together, accommodating children, making beauties look more beautiful, cutting off”the necessity of a footman, and, not least, reforming street conveyance, which traveled through a fearful interregnum of danger and discomfort, between the decline of the hackney-coach of our childhood and the rise of the four-wheeler of our first whiskers. The secret history of the origin, rise, and triumph of the Brougham has never been written, and perhaps never will, yet it is worth the attention of those industrious biographers who devote their whole energies to the researches into the private lives of jockeys, blacklegs, and boxers, record their tastes in meats and puddings, their triumphs, their recondite jokes, and exhaust classical quotations from Mr. Maunder’s manuals on their adventurous lives and premature deaths.
The germ of the Brougham is to be found in certain street vehicles drawn by one horse in use in Birmingham and Liverpool forty years ago, under the name of one horse cars. So recently as 1837 a gentleman’s covered carriage on four wheels drawn by one horse, was entirely unknown to the genteel, not to say the fashionable, world; for in that year the most complete and scientific book on pleasure-carriages was published by Mr. Adams, then a coach-builder, since a distinguished mechanical engineer, and he gives no hint of the coming carriage reform.
Mr. Adams made an early display of his ingenuity by building a carriage now only remembered in connection, with the grand Duke of Wellington, who drove one to the last, the Equirotal, which, in theory, combined the advantage of a two-wheeled and a four-wheeled carriage, the forepart and wheels being connected with the hind body by a hinge or joint, so that no matter how the horses turned the driver always had them square before him; a great advantage. It was also, at the cost of something under five hundred pounds, convertible into a series of vehicles. Complete, it was a landau, holding four inside, besides the servants’ hind dickey; disunited, it formed at will a Stanhope-gig, a cabriolet, or a curricle. In spite of the example of the Iron Duke, and the eloquent explanations of the inventor, the public, either not caring for such a combination, or not willing to pay the price, never took to the Equirotal.
The Brougham, on the other hand, advanced from the first, and eventually spread over the whole civilized world. To obtain lightness, the perch and the C-springs were abolished, at the cost of a certain buzzing noise still to be found in the work of inferior builders. There are Broughams with C-springs, but these are luxuries and a departure from the original principle. Broughams were built at first for two only, then were extended to four seats; single and double Broughams were soon adopted by the fairest of the fair, because it was discovered that the plate-glass windows presented charming portraits, hung, as they should be, exactly on the line, while ascent and descent presented none of the difficulties of the old-fashioned chariot. It was found that the finest cabriolet-horse looked twice as well in a Brougham, and, with the weight off his back and legs, lasted twice as long; besides, if it were necessary to make a long journey instead of a succession of flashes through street or park, then, by exchanging the sixteen-hands stepper for a pair of light blood horses, the Brougham still became the most agreeable conveyance, as long as the beauties of nature were not the object of the journey. In the early days of Broughams attempts were made to reproduce the chariot, with hammercloth and knife-board for the calves, but these were mistakes. The greatest mistake of all is burying a Brougham behind two gigantic horses. A single horse, if well shaped for harness, should not be under fifteen hands three inches high — sixteen hands one inch is better. Remarkable colors, even duns, skewbalds, and white stockings, if with good knee action, are permissible; but when a pair are harnessed, about fifteen hands one inch is the most harmonious height; and blood galloways, even smaller, look very well if the Brougham be built for them. A single-horse Brougham is essentially a town carriage; taken into the country, it is apt to degenerate into a cruelty carriage.