Carriages, Chaise, and Gigs, Oh My!

What exactly is the difference between a chaise and a coach? Why is Admiral Croft’s gig also referred to as a one-horse chaise? Why does Captain Wentworth return post from Lyme, and what does that mean anyway? Learn the answers to these questions and more in this episode of My Cousin Jane.

Welcome back to My Cousin Jane. Today we’re going to be talking about Persuasion Chapter 12, but not like your English teacher might discuss it, more like the deleted scenes and bonus features of your favorite movie.

Also, before I forget, if you’re listening to this episode the day it comes out, which would be Christmas Eve, this marks the 204th anniversary of Persuasion’s original publication, which was December 20th, 1817. We’ll talk more about that publication and the events that surrounded it in a later episode, because they’re pretty interesting. I didn’t want to forget that, because I was also reminded that I missed giving a shout out to Jane Austen’s birthday last week, December 16th, so I’m trying to be better about Austenesque anniversaries.

Chapter Summary

Regency Vehicles

We talked a lot about Lyme Regis and the Cobb already in our last episode, but I wanted to take this episode as a chance to try and detangle some of the often confusing vocabulary surrounding vehicles in Jane Austen’s writing.

Vehicle discussion can get a bit confusing in the Regency era, because some words for vehicles can refer to both a specific type of vehicle as well as a generic class of vehicle. It’s like how in our day, the word Xerox can mean we’re going to make a copy of something, or a very specific brand of copier.

Regency authors, both historical and modern, are often inexact in the terms they use for vehicles. What one person implies, or even outright says, that a term means may not be what it actually meant in every single circumstance you’ve seen it.

Even though I’m running the risk of a flood of angry emails about my getting everything about barouches and post-chaises wrong, we’ll try our best to be as accurate as verifiable sources allow.

First, there were broadly two classes of vehicles in the Regency world. There were carriages, which was the general term for a people carrier. That would be a carriage, much how we often use the word car to mean anything from a convertible to a minivan. “What kind of car do you drive?” “Well, I drive a Tesla.” “I drive a, you know, Honda Odyssey.” Those were all cars. Every vehicle in the Regency era that carried people was considered a carriage.

Then there were wagons. Wagons were mainly used for hauling freight, hauling things, though people would sometimes ride in them, especially amongst the lower classes, or even sometimes in the upper classes as a form of novelty and amusement, much like we might go on a hayride today in a wagon.

A common type of carriage was the coach. The coach was a four-wheeled enclosed carriage, and there are a whole bunch of different types. The word coach is sometimes used to refer specifically to the larger style of coach used for long-distance travel. Other times, it can refer to any four-wheeled enclosed vehicle.

A chaise was a smaller version of the coach, usually, but not always, four-wheeled as well. It comes from the French word for chair, and it originally referred specifically to sedan chairs.

This is one of the hardest terms to distinguish, because in some writing and in different contexts, it can still mean a sedan chair. In other places, it can mean a two-wheeled carriage pulled by either a person or one horse or two horses. It can also mean a smaller, lighter version of the full-size coach that is still fully enclosed and fits three people. In this context, the driver would usually sit on one of the horses that pulls the chaise, rather than having a seat on the box as with larger coaches.

For more efficiency, power, and prestige, some chaises were pulled by four horses, which is what is meant when someone says “a chaise and four.” A chaise and four is almost always an enclosed box seating for three. The driver sits on one of the horses, one of the ones closest to the coach.

Public and Hired Transport

On the less prestigious end of the coach world, we have various means of public and hired transport. First of all, there’s the stagecoach or “traveling stage,” and that was the Regency equivalent of riding a public bus. They traveled set routes with predetermined stopping points. Some passengers even rode on top of the stagecoaches along with the luggage.

They were cheap modes of travel, but rather undesirable for the upper class, because they were fairly crowded and looked down upon by people with ways and means, so to speak. This can be seen in Sense and Sensibility in the way Lucy Steele expresses her disdain for that mode of travel, or even more markedly in Mansfield Park, by the way that Mrs. Norris suggests that it’s an appropriate mode of travel for Fanny Price, that she should take the stage to Portsmouth when she’s going to visit her family.

There were also mail coaches. Those were a special type of stagecoach that, as the name implies, carried the mail. They would also carry passengers, and were usually faster and more expensive than regular stagecoaches, and they didn’t stop as often. They had access to better horses. They had access to better roads.

Everyone had access to pretty good roads at this time, and Mr. Darcy makes a comment about this in Pride and Prejudice, but mail coaches could travel on toll roads without having to pay tolls, and so they would often stick to as good a road as possible, whereas stagecoaches would sometimes travel on the cheapest road possible in order to save costs.

Another term that you hear is “traveling post” or “traveling post-chaise.” This was a way for private carriage owners to travel long distances more quickly than normal.

If you had a chaise and you wanted to go a long distance, you would normally go as far as your horses can manage. Then you’d stop somewhere and let them rest, and then continue on the next day, usually. When traveling post, what you would do is you’d make the first leg of the journey with your own horses, and then you would change horses at a post station and use rented horses, and then you would continue on immediately with those fresh rented horses, and you’d go to the next stage and the next stage and the next stage, etc.

This is why Lady Catherine asked Elizabeth and her party where they planned to change horses. You would change horses at what were called post stations, and some of these post stations were better than others.

Travelers could either start out with rented horses, if they had access to them, or pay to have their own horses sent home after the first leg, or pay to have them boarded somewhere at the posting station, or somewhere close by, until they returned and then took them home again on the final leg of their return journey.

Sometimes the term traveling post implies that you’re renting the chaise as well, but most often the term refers to using your own vehicle and just renting the horses.

To recap what we’ve covered so far: you have people that have their own private coaches and their own horses. You have people that are going to go on a stagecoach because they don’t own a coach or horses and can’t afford a private rental like a post-chaise. You have the post-chaise, which can be rented by the carriage and the horses, or just the horses.

If you wanted to travel in a private coach, and you couldn’t afford the post-chaise, and you didn’t own your own vehicle at all, your main option was the hackney coach or “hack.” A hackney coach was like the modern day taxi cab.

The term hackney itself is pretty interesting. In Regency times, hackney coaches were older, usually secondhand coaches that people owned and would be hired out for both short and long journeys.

There are a bunch of theories on where the term hackney originated. First of all, just like the Cobb, they’re all theories. Nobody really knows where the term comes from. You’ll hear a lot of people say that it comes from the French term for rented horse, but there’s really not a ton of evidence for that.

What’s interesting, though, is the term hackneyed. Since hackney coaches were older secondhand coaches that people looked down upon if you had to use one, there’s also the phrase hackneyed, which Jane Austen uses quite a bit in her writing, which means a tired and overused expression. Interesting that that’s the same term.

There were lots of types of hackney coaches with varying names and designs and styles. Another interesting note is that in the UK and in some parts of New York, taxis are still referred to as hackney coaches. It’s also interesting in that hackney coaches in the Regency era were almost always painted a characteristic yellow color, just like the classic New York taxi cab that you picture today.

Gigs and Curricles

We also have a set of what we might consider shorter range vehicles, and an example of this is the gig, which Admiral Croft and his wife were driving at the end of Chapter 10. There are a whole bunch of different types of gigs, and if you’ve read Northanger Abbey, different styles of gigs play an interesting part for one of the characters there.

At the end of Chapter 10, we run into Admiral Croft and his wife driving a gig. I want to listen to a quick clip here from that chapter. I know we’re not on that chapter anymore, but I want to listen to this to bring up an important point. As always, our audio recordings come from the talented Karen Savage, courtesy of LibriVox.org. Let’s listen to this.

and when the party had all reached the gate of exit, the carriage advancing in the same direction, which had been some time heard, was just coming up, and proved to be Admiral Croft’s gig. He and his wife had taken their intended drive, and were returning home. Upon hearing how long a walk the young people had engaged in, they kindly offered a seat to any lady who might be particularly tired; it would save her a full mile, and they were going through Uppercross. The invitation was general, and generally declined. The Miss Musgroves were not at all tired, and Mary was either offended, by not being asked before any of the others, or what Louisa called the Elliot pride could not endure to make a third in a one horse chaise. Persuasion, Chapter 10

Here we have the same vehicle being referred to by Austen as a carriage, a gig, and a “one horse chaise.” Pretty interesting, and an example of why it’s hard to definitively say what one of these terms always means, because they get used so interchangeably all over the place.

Finally, the last one I want to talk about today is the curricle, and I think it’s interesting to hear this term used in context. This does come from Chapter 12. We’ll listen to this clip.

They had nearly done breakfast, when the sound of a carriage, (almost the first they had heard since entering Lyme) drew half the party to the window. It was a gentleman’s carriage, a curricle, but only coming round from the stable-yard to the front door; somebody must be going away. It was driven by a servant in mourning.

The word curricle made Charles Musgrove jump up that he might compare it with his own; the servant in mourning roused Anne’s curiosity, and the whole six were collected to look, by the time the owner of the curricle was to be seen issuing from the door amidst the bows and civilities of the household, and taking his seat, to drive off. Persuasion, Chapter 12

A curricle, you probably won’t be surprised to learn from this description, is the Regency equivalent of the sports car or convertible. It was considered a young man’s vehicle, and they were two-wheeled vehicles, usually pulled by two horses.

Daniel Pool, in his book What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, mentions that this was the first purchase Charles Dickens made with his own money, when he had money to spend on himself. He bought a curricle.

Also, I want to mention here this phrase, “the servant in mourning.” It was the custom that when the master or mistress of the house were in mourning from the loss of a close family member, that the entire household staff would take steps to express that mourning. That included dressing in mourning clothes instead of the standard livery that servants would normally dress in, with their master’s coat of arms or house colors or whatever.

A Chaise and Four

Now that you’re an expert in Regency transport, we’re back at the house after Louisa Musgrove’s fall, and we’re trying to decide how we’re going to get back to Uppercross quickly to let Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove know what happened to their daughter, and let’s listen to this clip where we have a brief discussion of transport.

One thing more, and all seemed arranged. Though it was rather desirable that Mr and Mrs Musgrove should be previously alarmed by some share of delay; yet the time required by the Uppercross horses to take them back, would be a dreadful extension of suspense; and Captain Wentworth proposed, and Charles Musgrove agreed, that it would be much better for him to take a chaise from the inn, and leave Mr Musgrove’s carriage and horses to be sent home the next morning early, when there would be the farther advantage of sending an account of Louisa’s night. Persuasion, Chapter 12

We read a few sentences later, after a little interlude about Mary’s petulant behavior, that the chaise in question, the one that Captain Wentworth rents, is in fact a chaise and four. Then at the end of Chapter 12, we see that Captain Wentworth takes that same chaise back to the inn as soon as the horses were baited, which means as soon as they were given a little bit of food and a brief rest, so that same night.

We can make some inferences here about those horses. In the Regency era, if you were in the lower ranks of the upper class, like Elizabeth Bennet’s family (Mr. Bennet mentions this specifically), and probably the Musgroves, most of the time, for families of that class, horses were so expensive to keep up that they were used not just for pulling the carriage, but also as some type of work animal in a farm setting as well. Mr. Bennet mentions it specifically in Pride and Prejudice, that he wishes his horses were in the field more often than they were.

Mr. Musgrove’s horses probably would have been sturdier, possibly slower horses that would have been suited equally well for working in the fields as well as for pulling a carriage.

Meanwhile, the horses that Captain Wentworth would have rented from the inn as part of the chaise package that he rented (rent a chaise and get four horses for free, or whatever) were probably bred specifically for long-distance road travel, or for faster travel when pulling a lighter chaise, compared to a sturdier and heavier full-size coach that the ladies came to Lyme in.

That would have made the carriage faster and more efficient, which is why it was probably suggested that they rent that from the inn to get back to Uppercross quickly. That’s all conjecture based on what we know about Regency hire coaches and horses, but I think it’s a pretty safe bet.

Of course, there are a bunch of other vehicle types we haven’t touched on today, and we’ll be discussing those in future episodes, now that we have this firm background of Regency-era transport, things like barouches or phaetons and dogcarts, but we’ll get to those as they come up.

Conclusion

That wraps up this episode of My Cousin Jane. As always, if you enjoy the show and would like to help support us, please consider clicking the little donate button or subscribing to our newsletter. Either way, thanks so much for listening.