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consolation to poor Joseph Andrews, who was thought to be dying. Andrews having expressed contrition for his sins, 'Barnabas said that was enough and proceeded to prayer with all the expedition he was master of, some company then waiting for him below in the parlour, where the ingredients for punch were all in readiness, but no one would squeeze the oranges till he came.' Travellers whose pockets would not allow them to take up their quarters in the inns, sought the shelter of the roadside alehouses which were to be met with frequently. One such is described by Smollett in his novel of 'Sir Launcelot Greaves.' 'The kitchen was the only room for entertainment in the house, paved with red bricks, remarkably clean, furnished with three or four Windsor chairs, adorned with shining plates of pewter and copper saucepans nicely scoured, that even dazzled the eyes of the beholder.' It would seem that as the years sped on, innkeepers and their wives got more and more to fight shy of accommodating those who were not richly apparelled, and of all who did not travel in coaches or carriages. This did not fail to escape the observant eye of the foreigner. Moritz, a Lutheran pastor, who undertook a walking tour through the midland counties of England in the summer of 1782, specially noted this unwillingness. Oftentimes, he states, he was refused both food and shelter at a common roadside alehouse merely because he journeyed on foot. Once, during his progress through Oxfordshire, he contrived to procure admission to an inn at Nettlebed, where, as he says,

They showed me into the kitchen, and set me down to sup at the same table with some soldiers and the servants. I now for the first time found myself in one of those kitchens I had so often read of in Fielding's fine novels, and which certainly gave me on the whole a very accurate idea of English manners.

The following day, being the Sabbath, Moritz arrayed his person in clean linen, whereupon he was ushered by the host and hostess into the parlour, where he was addressed by the most respectful term, Sir; whereas the evening before he had been called only Master.'

Reise eines Deutschen im England im Jahre 1782.

Speaking of a tour into the north of England made in the summer of 1775, George Colman the younger, writing in August 1827, says :

I thought little about travelling expenses; I cannot therefore, with any accuracy, tell at how much less cost a man might take his ease in his inn' in those days, than in the present; my father, however, frequently observed upon the gradual lowering of charges in proportion to the distance from London : the articles enumerated in a bill for dinner, which were then cheap, not only grew cheaper as we went on, but, when we reach'd the northern counties were not enumerated at all; and, instead of swelling the account with a roast fowl, sauce for ditto, potato, melted butter for ditto, to poach'd eggs, to cheese, to toasted ditto, &c. &c., the items were all consolidated under the head of EATING,' against which was regularly placed the sum of One Shilling ; and this for no scanty meal, but plenty of everything; fish, flesh, and fowl, and excellent of their kind.1

The results of the statutes enacted in the reign of Anne added very considerably to the public revenue, but for long the nation did not benefit by them. Prior to 1784 the system for the transmission of letters was inefficient and ill regulated, and many a long year came and went before any plans of readjustment were carried into practical effect, so great was the indifference, so numerous the obstacles. The mail-bags were carried from place to place by messengers, on worn-out hacks, at the rate of between three and four miles an hour. Direct communication there was none. The postboys, who corresponded to the description of the one who lives for all time in the pages of Cowper's 'Task,' were miserably underpaid and often bore exceedingly doubtful characters. They dawdled on the road or they did not. Of censure or punishment, discipline or control, there was little. If the letter-bags and their contents found their way to their destinations instead of into the hands of highwaymen and footpads who waylaid them for the purpose, or at their connivance, it was a wonder. An instance of this occurred in 1757. The boy entrusted with the Portsmouth mail dismounted at a tavern near Hammersmith, Turnham Green, about three miles from Hyde Park Corner, and called for beer.

While he was drinking some footpads seized the

Random Records, i. 215.

opportunity of cutting the mail-bags from off the horse's crupper, and decamped. Nor were they ever captured.

In a newspaper paragraph of 1725, quoted by Harris in hist 'Life of Hardwicke,' it is stated that

there were no Western letters yesterday, the mail being robbed on Monday last between 11 and 12 at night, in the road near Chinock, in the midway between Crewkern and Sherburn, by one footpad, who carried off the bags belonging to all the towns between Land's End and Yeovil.'

Shortly afterwards the carrier of the western mail was again robbed by two footpads, who tied the postboy and carried away the Plymouth and Exeter bags.2

Although the Post Office Bill passed in 1710 afforded scope for the establishment of cross posts, it was not until the reign of George I. that any advantage was taken of it. In the year 1719, Ralph Allen (immortalised by Fielding in the character of Allworthy in his novel of Tom Jones'), postmaster at Bath, laid before Parliament a proposal for the reconstruction of the system, and succeeded in obtaining a lease of the cross posts for the term of his natural life. He became in effect 'the farmer of the cross posts,' and a vast improvement was secured to the country. Allen died in 1764.

Exactly twenty years after that event a great revolution was destined to be accomplished under John Palmer, who about 1783 was manager of the Bath and Bristol theatres. The frequency with which he corresponded with the various parts of the kingdom caused him to observe that the post which left Bath on Monday night did not deliver its letters in the metropolis until two or three o'clock on the afternoon of the following Wednesday, and oftentimes later, the letters being delivered in London at different times of the day after the arrival of each post. Palmer also noted that the Diligence coach, which left Bath early on Monday afternoon, arrived in London by ten o'clock in the morning of the following day. This led him to submit an elaborate scheme of improvement to Pitt, who was the Prime Minister of that day, in which he urged the discontinu

Harris's Life of Hardwicke, i. 170-1.

See also Walpole's Letters, ix. 35, and Palmer's Yarmouth, i. 241.

ance of the horse post system, and the employment of coaches which in consideration of their liability to attack from robbers should each be provided with a man armed to the teeth for their defence. He was acquainted with tradespeople who adopted the plan of sending their letters by coach. 'Why, therefore,' he asked, 'should not the stage-coach, well protected by armed guards, under certain conditions to be specified, carry the mail-bags?' He also suggested that the times at which these mail coaches left should be regulated in such a manner that their arrival in London at an early hour of the morning should be simultaneous, and that their departure at the same hour in the evening should be conducted likewise. After many delays, and in the teeth of a vast amount of opposition and dissatisfaction, which proceeded from the chief officials of the Post Office, Pitt decided upon putting Palmer's scheme to the test, and the first two mail coaches, upon the plan recommended by him, left London on August 8, 1784. The first, departing at eight o'clock in the morning, reached Bristol at eleven o'clock the same night, thus accomplishing the distance between the capital and Bath in fourteen hours; while the second, quitting Bristol at four o'clock in the afternoon of the same day, reached London sixteen hours later. There is no necessity to enlarge upon the success of this plan. Correspondence was not only transmitted in safety, but left the old plan at an immeasurable distance as regards the rate of speed at which it was transmitted.

1 Lewin's Her Majesty's Mails, pp. 76–83.

CHAPTER XII.

FAVOURITE HEALTH RESORTS.

The rise of the spas - Metropolitan spas-Hampstead Wells-Islington spa--The new Tunbridge Wells-Sadler's Wells-The provincial spas Epsom-Tunbridge Wells-The baths of Bath-Beau Nash and the world he lived in The Bristol hot-wells-Malvern, Cheltenham, Buxton, Harrogate, and Scarborough-The seaward movement Brighthelmstone - The South coast--The Isle of Thanet-CromerThe Lake district.

THE first quarter of the eighteenth century was specially characterised by an intense hankering, which arose primarily among the votaries of fashion and ultimately by degrees extended itself to all classes of society, after 'fresh fields and pastures new.' The earliest indications of this early awakened desire are discernible in the tendency exhibited by the fashionable world to migrate at a certain season of the year to the vicinity of some one or other of the many medicinal springs, for the purpose of taking a course of their waters, in the fond hope that it would thereby recruit its exhausted energies and acquire a new lease of life. In course of time, drinking the waters,' as the phrase went, came to be regarded as an absolute necessity, and thus it was that quiet hamlets, peaceful villages, and out-of-the-way spots achieved notoriety on account of a mineral spring or well which had been discovered in their neighbourhood, and were dignified with the grandiloquent designation of 'health resorts.' Posterity has not been left altogether in the dark as to the everyday life of those who favoured these localities, and from the occasional references to them in the pages of diaries, novels, and periodical publications, there is every reason to believe that all these 'health resorts,' without exception, speedily became con

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