Charles Dickens – English Carriages and their Changes – Page 4

Stanhope Gig Carriage Without Hood Illustration
from Modern Carriages by Sir Walter Gilbey, 1905

The International Exhibition of 1851 left an indelible scratch — to use the phrase of one of our greatest engineers — on the history of carriage-building, especially in the large class of cheaper vehicles, which good roads, suburban villas, railroad stations, and the repeal of the penal taxes on the owners of more than one carriage, had created. The great builders, the aristocracy of the trade, were there. The four-in-hand drag, fitted with ice-pails and a dozen luxurious contrivances, of which the previous generation never dreamed, was there. There was the capacious coach, of dignity and state, in which the high sheriff of a county meets the judges on circuit, or the many daughtered duchess attends the Drawing-room or the royal ball. There was the stately and elegant barouche; and there was a mob of phaetons, dog-carts, two and four-wheeled, Whitechapels, Coburgs, and pony carriages of every conceivable variety of shape and name. It was in 1851 that the celebrated clothes-basket took up its position as a low-priced, not very clean rural resource. Southampton and Derby became famous; and out of a cottage dog-cart arose, in Nottingham, that steam-driven carriage manufactory which now vies with the best names in London for solidity and taste.

The rise of the four-wheeled pony phaeton — which has since branched off into many varieties of shape and price — dates from the fallen days of George the Fourth, when he entered into voluntary exile at the cottage near Virginia Water. The king’s pony phaeton was one of the rare instances of good taste patronised by the author of white kid breeches, stucco palaces, and uniforms in which fighting was impossible and dancing difficult.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer who reduced the tax on low-wheeled carriages was the real author of the swarms of pony phaetons that branched off and vulgarised, as the French say, the George the Fourth model. The nineteen-guinea dog-cart that never carried dogs, and the thirty-inch wheel pony phaeton, were bred in the same year by the same budget. As a special boon to the agricultural public, in a chronic state of discontent, the exemption from taxation, which had previously been confined to the springless shandrydan, was extended to any two-wheeled carriage built for less than twenty pounds, provided the owner’s name appeared in letters of a certain length and undefined breadth, on the cart or gig. This bounty created a large crop of dog-carts at fabulously low prices, embellished with letters which presented the nearest approach to length without breadth. The exemption has long been repealed, but it lasted long enough to make the “cart” an institution, without which no gentleman’s establishment was complete. It raised a number of ingenious adventurous wheelwrights into builders of carts, who by degrees, when all one-horse springed vehicles were put on the same footing, advanced to better things, broke through the costly traditions of Long-acre, and displayed great ingenuity in varying the form and shape of vehicles, on two and four wheels, for town and country use. These found a place and new customers in the Crystal Palace Exhibition and at agricultural shows.

Among the novelties, is the wagonette, beloved of nursery-maids and children; it is excellent for the ladies with sandwich-baskets and flasks at cover-side, where roads run handy; useful for a country race-course; not bad at a picnic; indispensable where much luggage goes to a station. The wagonette, which one, or two, or four, horses may be harnessed to, which may have a table in the center, and a long boot beneath, and may be as coquettish as a Stanhope phaeton, must not be forgotten. The wagonette is an improvement on the French char-a-banc and the old English break, or perhaps it is an outside car, Anglified, made solid on four wheels, and turned outside in. The wagonette is essentially a sociable carriage, comprehensive, and conversational, but uncomfortable for stout middle age.

Latest of all is the sociable; a light, cheap, and elegant edition of the family coach.

Before the rise and fall of the cabriolet, and before the dog-cart, with its convenient receptacle for luggage, had made its way from tandem-driving universities into private families, the gig, under various names, as Stanhope, Whiskey, Dennet, Tilbury, was both a fashionable and a domestic conveyance, as may be learned from the caricatures of the first half of this century. The Stanhope form — the best — has survived the changes of fashion. The commercial traveler’s gig is almost a thing of the past. Where these ambassadors still use wheels, they now generally go on four, not trusting their necks and parcels to the safety of a horse’s fore-legs.

Public hired carriages, at any rate in London, have closely followed the changes in private vehicles. As long as chariots and family coaches were in common use, the dreadful jingling hackney-coach and pair claimed its place upon the stand. The introduction of the private cabriolet led first to that dangerous rapid high-wheeled cab, with its outside perch for the driver, immortalized by Seymour in the illustration of adventures with which our readers are familiar. The cab that conveyed Mr. Pickwick to Charing-cross is the ancestor of the most luxurious of hired swift carriages, the Hansom, imported from Naples. The private Brougham soon found its way into the street as a four-wheeled cab, and with its one horse killed off the pair-horse coaches. While the Brougham is a purely British invention, the omnibus is a foreign importation. For some mysterious reason, the best omnibuses are to be found in Glasgow; the best Hansoms, in Birmingham. Leamington forty years ago rejoiced in coquettish little open phaetons, drawn by one horse, and ridden by boys in neat postillion costume, but, since the advent of railroads, these have given way to the universal cab. Can any one explain why Ireland, with a damp cli- mate, adheres to that eccentric conveyance, the outside car, while Cornwall, with a like weeping sky, has for an unknown period traveled to market in a covered cart, called in genteel family circles a Coburg, and has per- formed stage-coach business in a boxed-up jolting one-horsed omnibus for ages?

It is, however, due to Ireland to admit that the jaunting-car probably first taught us the capabilities of a single horse, when harnessed to a light vehicle.

A carriage is like a piano as an article of manufacture. You cannot find out whether it is worth its price until you have used it for some time. Paint and varnish hide many defects, and only an expert can judge the value of metal- work. Before Macadam’s time, a nobleman’s coach required to be as strong as one of Pickford’s vans. It was often, on journeys to or from the manor-house, drawn out of sloughs and quagmires. At present, the object successfully pursued by our best manufacturers, is to pro- duce the minimum of lightness with the maximum of strength. The best mechanical arrangements have been studied; foreign woods have, the duty being repealed, largely -replaced native produce; and the toughest and most expensive iron and steel have superseded the cheaper produce of Staffordshire.

The coach-makers’ wood-loft contain oak, ash, and elm, from trees which have lain a year after falling, and which, after being cut into planks of various thicknesses, must remain unused as many years as they are inches thick. A certain class of carriage-builders use green wood of any quality, relying on paint to cover all defects, not expecting or caring to see any customer twice [a serious charge, we are happy to say, finds few imitators in this country]. There are some advertising fabricators of diminutive Broughams who are especially to be avoided.

Besides European woods, there is also a large demand for mahogany and lance-wood from the Gulf of Mexico, Quebec pine, birch and ash from Canada, tulip-wood and hickory from the United States. These, for the most part, are cut ready for use by steam saws before going into the hands of the coach-builder.

The first step for the construction of, say a Brougham, is to make a chalk drawing on a brick wall of the same size. On this design depends the style of the carriage. Some builders are happy or unhappy in designing novelties; others have a traditional design, a certain characteristic outline, from which they will on no consideration depart. The next step is to make patterns of the various parts. In first-class factories, each skilled workman has been apprenticed to, and follows only, one branch of the trade. The leading workmen in wood are body-makers, carriage-builders, wheelers, and joiners — all highly skilled artisans, as may be judged from the fact that a chest of their tools is worth as much as thirty pounds.

The framework is sawn out of English oak. The pieces, when cut by the band-saws, are worked up, rabbet- ed, and grooved to receive the panels, and thus a skeleton is raised ready for the smith and fitter, who, taking mild steel or homogenous iron, forge and fit a stiff plate along the inside cart-bottom framework, following the various curves, and bolted on so as to form a sort of backbone to the carriage, which takes the place of a perch: — Universally the foundation of four-wheeled carriages before the general adoption of iron and steel.