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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Sometimes they slept in the shelter of the waggon itself, under the substantial covering of the great canvas tilt, snugly curled up in the hay and straw and barricaded by the crates and boxes that formed part of the load - not an altogether uncomfortable, if certainly too promiscuous, a sleeping arrangement. At other times the stable-lofts of the inns formed their apartments. Landlords of reputable hostelries, mindful of the social gulf that (in the opinion of the insides) existed between the inside passengers of a stage-coach and those off-scourings of the country who rode on the roof or in the basket, did not commonly allow those belonging to that even lower stratum, the waggons,to sleep in their houses. A supper of cold boiled beef and bread in the kitchen, followed by a shake-down in the hay or straw of the stables, at an inclusive price of sixpence or ninepence, was their portion. Swift himself, that terrible genius of the eighteenth century, who knew the extremities of obscurity and fame, of penury and affluence, was, in his early days, of this poor company. When a young man, travelling from the house of his patron, Sir William Temple, at Moor Park, near Farnham, in Surrey, to see his mother at Leicester, he rode in the waggon, and slept at the…
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THE STAGE-WAGGONS 133 …penny hedge-inns, where they were not above letting a bed for the night to a young man so unusually particular as to pay sixpence extra for clean sheets and a bed to himself — an exclusive arrangement, it would appear, not within the everyday philosophy of those humble caravanserais. He whom not only later ages, but even his contemporaries, unite in acclaiming a genius, generally chose to take his food with waggoners,ostlers, and persons of that station. The superfine Lord Orrery, who recorded these facts, and tells us that Swift delighted in scenes of low life, says he dined with them; but if Lord Orrery had been as well-acquainted with humble circles he would have known that the low people in them do not dine at all; they just have dinner. It is impossible to obtain more than a glimpse of the early carriers, and even the later stage-waggons were only occasionally advertised in the newspapers of the past. Thus, turning to Sussex, we only hear of ‘Thomas Smith, the Old Lewes Carrier’, in a reference to him after his death.

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