Identifier: stagecoachmailin01harp (find matches)
Title: Stage-coach and mail in days of yore : a picturesque history of the coaching age
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Harper, Charles G. (Charles George), 1863-1943
Subjects: Horses Coaching (Transportation) -- History
Publisher: London : Chapman & Hall, limited
Contributing Library: Tufts University
Digitizing Sponsor: Tufts University and the National Science Foundation

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old advertise-ment we see that he catered for all classes oftravellers—by stage-coach, private carriage, chaise,and waggon—and that he hired out horses to thegentlemen who still preferred their own companyand the saddle to the coach and its miscellaneousstrangers. Even the dead were not beyond theconsideration of Mr. Rothwell, whose Hearse,with Mourning Coach and Able Horses, is setforth to go to any part of Great Britain, atreasonable Bates. Unhappily for the historianeager to reconstruct the road life of those times,this old advertisement is almost all that survivesto tell us of Rothwell, and fortunate avc are tohave even that, for such sheets, as commonplacewhen issued as the advertisements of railwayexcursions are at the present time, are now ofextreme rarity. It would appear, from the rudewoodcut illustrating Rothwells bill, that hiscoach was of the old type, hung on leather strapsand quite innocent of springs—the kind of coachthat Parson Adams, in Meldings Joseph Andrews,
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DAJIW OF THE COACHING AGE 85 outAvalked Avitliout the slio-btest difficulty. Itseems to hid more up-to-date in the matter ofwindows, and to be a glass-coach, if we mayjudge by the appearance of the window at whichthe solitary and unhappy-looking jiassenger isstanding in an attitude suggestive of stomachicdisturbance. There are no windows in the upperquarters of the coach, Avliich in that and someother respects greatly resembles the vehicle pic-tured in 1747 hj Hogarth in his Inn Yard. llothwells coach is drawn by four horses inhand, with a postilion on the off horse of a coupleof extra leaders. The practice of using six horsesand a postilion is one to Avliich we find allusionin Eieldings Joseph Andrews, written nine yearslater than the date of this Birmingham coach.The curious will find the description in the twelfthchapter of that novel, Avhere Josejih, recoveringfrom the murderous attack of tAVO higliAvaymen,attracts the attention of the postilion of a passingstage-coach. The postil

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