Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors (68 page)

Before descending into the bowels of the ship, we had passed from the deck into a long narrow apartment, not unlike a gigantic hearse with windows in the sides; having at the upper end a melancholy stove, at which three or four chilly stewards were warming their hands; while on either side, extending down its whole dreary length, was a long, long table, over each of which a rack, fixed to the low roof, and stuck full of drinking-glasses and cruet-stands, hinted dismally at rolling seas and heavy weather.

–Charles Dickens,
American Notes
(1842)

From the 1840s to the 1890s ships became faster, larger, safer, and more comfortable. By the late 1870s the average Liverpool to New York crossing had been reduced to approximately ten days, with seven day record runs. By 1900, ships like White Star’s 17,274 ton, steel hulled, twin screw liner
Oceanic
were regularly making the crossing in five days. First and Second Class passengers crossed in relative comfort, and even the immigrants in Steerage fared better than passengers on the early steamers.

Coaches to Trains and Automobiles

The earliest years of Queen Victoria’s reign saw the beginnings of a railway boom. The early railways were short lines begun in the 1820s, but they really got up a head of steam in the late 1830s and 1840s, with track spreading out across Britain. In 1840 there were approximately 1,500 miles of track, in 1850 more than 6,600, and by 1900 approximately 22,000 miles carried millions of passengers and immense quantities of freight. Speed, safety, and comfort improved significantly during that period.

Novelists noted the change and not necessarily with admiration. For example, Dickens used the railways as a metaphor for the dark side of progress, comparing the speed of the locomotive to the onward rush of life toward its inevitable end:

Away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, from the town, burrowing among the dwellings of men and making the streets hum, flashing out into the meadows for a moment, mining in through the damp earth, booming on in darkness and heavy air, bursting out again into the sunny day so bright and wide; away, with a shriek, and a roar, and a rattle, through the fields, through the woods, through the corn, through the hay, through the chalk, through the mould, through the clay, through the rock, among objects close at hand and almost in the grasp, ever flying from the traveller, and a deceitful distance ever moving slowly within him: like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death!

–Charles Dickens,
Dombey and Son
(1848)

Artists also used the railways of that era as subjects for their paintings, most notably J.M.W. Turner’s
Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway
.

The development of the automobile had been retarded in Britain by a law that set a 4 mph speed limit for “locomotives” driven on the roads and required the “locomotive” to be preceded by a man on foot carrying a red flag. The Locomotive Acts (or Red Flag Acts) had been passed to control heavy steam driven road vehicles that were considered dangerous and damaging to the roads when driven at speeds in excess of a walk.

In 1896, the speed limit was raised from 4 mph to 14 mph for “Light Locomotives” and the requirement of the man on foot was abolished. The change is celebrated in the annual London to Brighton run for veteran cars. With the change in the law, motoring became popular among the British upper classes including the Prince of Wales, the first member of the Royal Family to own a car, a 1900 Daimler.

Telegraph, Telephone, and Wireless

Many believe that electric telegraphy began in 1844 in the United States when Morse opened a line between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. However, in 1837 the English inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone devised an electric telegraph that used magnetic needles to transmit messages. Their first telegraph linked Euston station and Camden town, and from there it spread through the burgeoning British railway system, carrying messages and controlling signals, improving efficiency and safety.

The first cable crossed the Channel in 1851, followed by others across the Irish and North Seas. In 1866, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s giant steamer,
The Great Eastern
, laid the first successful trans-Atlantic cable. The electric communications revolution spread, and by the late 1870s, the whole world was connected by a great telegraphic web.

In 1876 the telephone was pioneered and patented in the United States by Alexander Graham Bell. The new invention became a “hit” at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition when the Emperor of Brazil remarked, “My God, it talks!”

The first London telephone directory (1880) listed 255 names. That same year there were approximately 30,000 telephones in the entire United States. However, there were more than 25,000 phones in use in Britain by the late 1880s, and more than 200,000 in the U.S. by 1890. The novelist Theodore Dreiser took particular note of the new technological wonder by referencing the pay telephone in a dramatic scene:

At the first drugstore he stopped, seeing a long-distance telephone booth inside. It was a famous drugstore, and contained one of the first private telephone booths ever erected. “I want to use your phone a minute,” he said to the night clerk.

–Theodore Dreiser,
Sister Carrie
(1900)

Marconi’s Wireless Telegraph Co. formed in London (1897) established radio communications between England and France (1898), and in 1901, the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign, succeeded in sending and receiving signals across the Atlantic. Thus, the Victorian telecommunications revolution laid the foundations for the global communications network of today.

In 1873 Jules Verne wrote
Around the World in Eighty Days
, taking into account all the recent advances in transportation and communications, including the completion of the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad, the Suez Canal, and the extension of the Indian railway system. His fictional traveller, Phileas Fogg, could plan his journey based upon reliable steamship schedules and railway timetables, and he could also take advantage of improved communications provided by the worldwide telegraphic network.

To demonstrate the viability of Verne’s hypothetical journey, in 1889
New York World
reporter Nellie Bly made the globe circling trip in seventy-two days. Her feat would have seemed as incredible at the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign as a manned lunar landing to folks watching their twelve-inch black and white, vacuum tube televisions in the early 1950s. Like a Victorian, I have seen Science Fiction become Science Fact within the span of my lifetime.

For better or worse, technology took off like a rocket in the Victorian era, and it’s been streaking its way to the stars ever since.

Sir Goldsworthy Gurney and His Steam Carriage

by Gary Inbinder

O
n a warm summer day in Southwest England during the ninth year of the reign of His Majesty King George IV, a handsome couple—I’ll call them Mr. and Mrs. Darcy—were out for a breath of air, dashing through the verdant countryside along one of Mr. McAdam’s new roads. They travelled in a jaunty red curricle drawn by a matched pair of high-stepping grays. Pale sunlight streamed through a stand of trees lining the turnpike. A mild wind rustled the leafy branches, barely raising a dust-cloud on the newly laid roadbed.

As they whirled along, the Darcys noticed a strange dark object looming on the horizon. From a distance, it appeared to be a large carriage of some sort, shimmering in the heat waves and moving toward them at a great rate of speed. The horses sensed it coming; skittish, they broke stride and started to gallop. It required all Mr. Darcy’s strength and skill to rein them in.

The unidentified vehicle bore down upon the Darcys; its features soon became distinguishable. Could it be the Royal Mail Coach out of London led by a galloping team, on its way to Bath? They could see no horses.

Instead, they spotted a coachman, or more appropriately a “driver” perched on a seat over a single wheel. He was dressed in top hat and red coat; instead of holding reins, he grasped a large handlebar attached to a steering mechanism. Passengers, both ladies and gentlemen, sat above and behind the driver on a dragon-like contraption that belched smoke and cinders and hissed steam from every orifice. There were no familiar sounds of pounding hooves, the slapping and rattling of leather straps and fittings, but rather a mechanically rhythmic thumping, puffing, and chuffing and a grinding of wheels on macadam as the monster rumbled forward at a blazing twenty miles per hour.

Mr. Darcy steered the jolting curricle to the roadside where they came to an abrupt halt beside a drainage ditch. He tried to quiet his horses as they snorted, whinnied, and stomped the turf with restless hooves. The “thing” chugged by in a cloud of steam, soot, and dust. Presently, Mr. Darcy turned to his wife with a scowl: “I say, Lizzy, I’m deuced if it ain’t Gurney’s blasted steam carriage!”

Mrs. Darcy frowned and nodded in silent agreement. She lowered her parasol, then shook and dusted off her white muslin dress. The rumbling subsided; the steam carriage vanished in the distance, leaving a thin trail of smoke in its wake. Mr. and Mrs. Darcy continued their journey in a decidedly less jolly mood following their confrontation with the monstrous progeny of the Industrial Age.

My sketch of an encounter with the steam carriage is fanciful, but such an incident might have occurred on an English road prior to the passage of the Locomotive Acts (aka Red Flag Laws) that reduced speed limits for “locomotives” to 4 mph in the country and 2 mph in towns and cities and required a man carrying a red flag to precede each vehicle. These laws retarded the early development of the automobile in Great Britain and their repeal (in 1894) is celebrated in the annual London to Brighton run for veteran cars.

The steam carriage was the brainchild of Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, one of those extraordinary self-taught “gentleman inventors” who seemed to flourish in the 19th century. There were other steam road vehicles at the time, but Gurney’s was among the first and arguably the best.

Gurney was born in Cornwall in 1793 into a well-to-do family, studied medicine and practiced as a surgeon, but is best known for his practical inventions including the oxyhydrogen blowpipe, a high-pressure steam jet for extinguishing fires in mines, the Gurney burner, and Gurney light.

Gurney was knighted in 1863 for improving the lighting and ventilation of the House of Commons. But of all his scientific achievements, he is chiefly remembered for building a steam carriage that in 1829 travelled from London to Bath at an average rate of 15 miles per hour.

The steam carriage owed its success to another Gurney invention, the “steam-jet” or blast system that produced greater power in a considerably lighter engine. Interestingly, Gurney’s improvement was incorporated by George Stephenson into his highly successful track locomotive Rocket that made railway travel practical.

For a time, Gurney was associated with the great Scottish civil engineer, Thomas Telford. Telford’s roads had foundations better able than McAdam’s to bear the weight of the steam carriages. He envisioned a British highway system open to steam powered traffic that would compete with the existing canal system and the new railways. There was some interest in Telford and Gurney’s schemes. For example, the famous London to Bath journey was made at the request of the army.

But there were powerful lobbies against the development of the steam carriage, and they had some good arguments on their side. Mining and industry were financially committed to the railways; Stephenson’s improved engines and a faster and cheaper method of producing wrought-iron rails made the fixed track system more efficient and cost effective. The Stockton-Darlington railway (1825) was a commercial success, and that led to the building of the ambitious Liverpool-Manchester line (1830) where passenger trains could run at speeds of 35 miles per hour.

Following Gurney’s successful demonstration of the steam carriage, Sir Charles Dance, using Gurney’s design, initiated a regular service between Gloucester and Cheltenham, the nine mile distance being covered in about 45 minutes. This service ran for three months in 1831. Dance also financed a Gurney-designed “drag and omnibus” (the engine pulled the omnibus, an attempt to overcome passengers’ objections to sitting over a boiler) that ran from London to Brighton and made a demonstration run on London streets in 1833.

But by that time the light road locomotive was already doomed by commercial and political opposition and the railway’s success. The railways had the mining and manufacturing interests on their side; they were joined by the toll road owners and the mail coach lobby. This combination persuaded Parliament to raise tolls on the steam carriages, effectively driving them out of business.

Thomas Telford died in 1834; his vision of a British highway system built for motorized traffic would not be fully realized until the next century. Goldsworthy Gurney went on to other projects and would be honored for his achievements. By the time Gurney died in 1875, Siegfried Marcus in Austria and Etienne Lenoir in France had experimented with vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. These automotive pioneers were followed by the Germans—Daimler, Maybach, and Benz—who began marketing his gasoline powered automobiles in the late 1880s. Almost sixty years after Gurney’s steam carriage journeyed from London to Bath, the age of the automobile had begun.

The Rebecca Riots

by Anita Davison

Genesis XXIV:60—
”And they blessed Rebekah and said unto her, let thy seed possess the gates of those which hate them...”

O
n the night of 6 June 1839 the tollgate at Yr Efail Wen [Efailwen] was destroyed and the tollhouse set on fire by men dressed in women’s clothes with blackened faces for the second time. These incidents marked the start of the Rebecca Riots which spread to many communities in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire.

In the early 19th century, farming was the main industry in Wales, where life was both hard and primitive. Only a few people could read and write. Wales had seen a population increase which increased competition for land and jobs, thus adding to unemployment and poverty. Wet summers ruined corn harvests, forcing farmers to buy corn at famine prices to sustain themselves, their animals, and their families.

Rents remained static, as did the turnpike tolls, so seeing themselves as victims of “tyranny and oppression”, farmers and their workers took the law into their own hands to rid themselves of these unjust taxes.

The first institutions to be attacked were the hated toll gates, which were controlled by Turnpike Trusts, comprised of wealthy businessmen who owned most of the main roads. They decided on how many tollgates (turnpikes) could be built and what charges they made to those using them. The tolls were intended for maintenance and improvement of the roads; however, many trusts charged extortionate tolls and diverted the money to other uses.

Most people in rural Wales made their living on small tenant farms they rented from wealthy landlords and relied on the roads to take their produce to market. They were also burdened with having to pay tithes, payments for the support of the Anglican parish church payable in crops or wool. Their landlords were members of the Anglican church who mostly spoke English, whereas in the 1830s, eighty percent of the population of west Wales was Welsh-speaking and Non-Conformist. Thus they resented having to pay tithes to a church that was not their own.

Farmers collected lime to improve the quality of the soil, but the Tollgate Trust set a toll of five shillings (25p) to move a cart of lime eight miles inland. Eleven different Turnpike Trusts operated around Carmarthen, each with several gates, and each time people passed through the gates with produce or lime carts, they had no choice but to pay the toll.

Harvests in 1837 and 1838 were poor, increasing shortages. Smallholders could barely afford to take their goods to market, and in addition they were being charged high tolls for using the roads.

In 1839, a group of toll-renters, led by Thomas Bullin, an Englishman, increased toll rates and installed side-bars, simple forms of gates set on side roads to catch any traffic that had attempted to bypass the main toll booths. These side-bars dramatically increased the cost for farmers carting lime to their fields and almost ruined them.