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Early Coaches
George Cruikshank
1839
Etching on copper
121.3 x 9 cm vignetted
"Early Coaches" — the fifteenth chapter in "Scenes," by Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz, facing p. 97.
[Click on image to enlarge it and mouse over text for links.]
Scanned image and text by Philip V. Allingham.
Who has not experienced the miseries inevitably consequent upon a summons to undertake a hasty journey? You receive an intimation from your place of business — wherever that may be, or whatever you may be — that it will be necessary to leave town without delay. You and your family are forthwith thrown into a state of tremendous excitement; an express is immediately dispatched to the washerwoman's; everybody is in a bustle; and you, yourself, with a feeling of dignity which you cannot altogether conceal, sally forth to the booking-office to secure your place. Here a painful consciousness of your own unimportance first rushes on your mind — the people are as cool and collected as if nobody were going out of town, or as if a journey of a hundred odd miles were a mere nothing. You enter a mouldy-looking room, ornamented with large posting-bills; the greater part of the place enclosed behind a huge, lumbering, rough counter, and fitted up with recesses that look like the dens of the smaller animals in a travelling menagerie, without the bars. Some half-dozen people are "booking" brown-paper parcels, which one of the clerks flings into the aforesaid recesses with an air of recklessness which you, remembering the new carpet-bag you bought in the morning, feel considerably annoyed at; porters, looking like so many Atlases, keep rushing in and out, with large packages on their shoulders; and while you are waiting to make the necessary inquiries, you wonder what on earth the booking-office clerks can have been before they were booking-office clerks; one of them with his pen behind his ear, and his hands behind him, is standing in front of the fire, like a full-length portrait of Napoleon; the other with his hat half off his head, enters the passengers' names in the books with a coolness which is inexpressibly provoking; and the villain whistles — actually whistles — while a man asks him what the fare is outside, all the way to Holyhead! — in frosty weather, too! They are clearly an isolated race, evidently possessing no sympathies or feelings in common with the rest of mankind. Your turn comes at last, and having paid the fare, you tremblingly inquire — "What time will it be necessary for me to be here in the morning?" — "Six o'clock," replies the whistler, carelessly pitching the sovereign you have just parted with, into a wooden bowl on the desk. "Rather before than arter," adds the man with the semi-roasted unmentionables, with just as much ease and complacency as if the whole world got out of bed at five. You turn into the street, ruminating as you bend your steps homewards on the extent to which men become hardened in cruelty, by custom. — "Scenes," Chapter 15, "Early Coaches," p. 97-98.
Once again Dickens assails a challenging topic: describing with interest a place in which (like the pawnbroker's shop in Chapter 23) one would rather not be, although the inconvenience of having to arrive so early at the booking-office is nothing compared to the potential danger of wandering through the "Seven Dials" (Chapter 5). The sketch likely refers to those early morning, unanticipated journeys by coach which the young parliamentary reporter had to cover throughout the United Kingdom during the elections of the 1830s attendant upon the Reform Crisis. As is the case with the Eatanswill Election in Chapter 13 of The Pickwick Papers, the coach trip here may be based on a recollection of Dickens's travelling out of the metropolis to cover the 1835 election in Sudbury (Suffolk), about sixty miles northwest of London, for the Morning Chronicle in 1835. The sketch (in essence, a personal reminiscence) originally appeared as "Sketches of London No. 3" in the Evening Chronicle for 19 February 1835. After the dissolution of Parliament in December 1834, general polling took place between 6 January and 6 February 1835, although Dickens's coach journeys were at their height during thegeneral election of 1832, which involved his reporting speeches by prominent Whigs and Toriesduring the period of December 1832 through January 1833. In particular, he covered the speeches of the Whig architect of the Great Reform Bill, Lord John Russell.
In the prosaic Cruikshank illustration, the young man in the silk hat and travelling coat (right of centre, at the counter) resembles resembles twenty-two-year-old Charles Dickens. The five posters, parcels, the central gas-lamp, the coal-fire, the burly porter, andthecloth-capped travellerhanding his case across thecounter, as well as the two office clerks bent upon the tasks under the watchful eyeof the Napoleonic office-manager, suggest that the illustrator has drawn the situation from life, as well as from Dickens. Although he has eliminated entirely the six people sending brown-paper parcels, several such parcels occupy the counter, as if those sending them have just left. Further, Cruikshank invests these realia with verisimilitude by specificity, so that, for example, although Dickens's narrator merely alludes to "large posting bills," the illustrator in three of these specifies "Golden, Charing, Brighton, Manchester, York, London, and Bath."He has even made the office-manager a Napoleonic type as his supervisory gaze takes in every movement and transaction in the office to ensure its efficient operation.
Rather than revisit the gloomycoaching office of the Cruikshank illustration, later illustrator Harry Furniss decided to provide apsychological study of the nerve-wracking journey itself as the traveller has nightmares about as "Early Coaches": á la Ducrow. Thus, like Dickens himself, Furniss casts an imaginative glow over the mundane with sharply realised details and characteristic humor.
Left: Harry Furniss's realisation of the traveller's nightmares the night before the coach journey, Early Coaches: á la Ducrow (1910). Centre: Cruikshank's more prosaic view of the second-hand clothing shops near Covent Garden, Monmouth Street. Right: Cruikshank's depiction of the interior of "uncle's" — a place no respectable bourgeois would wish to go, The Pawnbroker's Shop. [Click on the images to enlarge them.]
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Dickens, Charles. "Early Coaches," Chapter 15 in "Scenes," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by George Cruikshank. London: Chapman and Hall, 1839; rpt., 1890. Pp. 97-101.
Dickens, Charles. "Early Coaches," Chapter 15 in "Scenes," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Fred Barnard. The Household Edition. London: Chapman and Hall, 1876. Pp. 62-65.
Dickens, Charles. "Early Coaches," Chapter 15 in "Scenes," Sketches by Boz. Illustrated by Harry Furniss. The Charles Dickens Library Edition. London: Educational Book Company, 1910. Vol. 1. Pp. 124-129.
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Last modified 8 May 2017