Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. Judith Flanders

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      They were on to a winning thing, for over the next five years another 83 coffee houses appeared; by 1801 there were 500 in London alone, and they had developed as places to drink coffee and meet friends, and, equally importantly, as places to conduct business.

      Outside London, much social life was maintained in these coffee rooms: they were centres of information and news, and they served a wide range of readers, from the whitesmith to the idle dandy. By 1833 the Manchester Coffee and Newsroom took 96 papers a week, plus several periodicals and reviews; it cost 1d. to sit and read, 2d. with coffee thrown in. The Exchange Coffee House, also in Manchester, riposted with 130 papers a week, 186 on Saturdays, as well as a range of foreign papers.¹⁵ The upper classes had their own coffee houses, particularly in the spa and resort towns. In 1739 Tunbridge Wells had three coffee houses that we know of, perhaps more, where for 5s. visitors could have ‘the use of pens, ink, paper &c.’ In Bath, the fashionable coffee house was Morgan’s, where, jibed one satirist, regular customer

      …cannot drink his coffee with a goû t, ‘Till he has read the papers thro and thro…

      Another visitor

      …joined by a whole unthinking crowd, At least once ev’ry day calls out, aloud, Boy, does the London post go out?¹⁶

      What time the post went out was becoming an increasingly important question for newspapers and their readers. As we saw above, newspapers were transported by an elaborate system of stagecoach routes in the early part of the century. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, newspapers had been carried post-free, as a way of increasing the circulation of pro-government papers around the country. By 1782 the Post Office was sending 3 million papers a year from London to the country, and in 1788, a parliamentary inquiry recommended that a separate newspaper office be set up by the Post Office to deal with the volume. The Post Office was happy to comply: fraud was keeping its income down. In 1710 the Flying Post newspaper had routinely left a section of the page blank, so that people could write a message of some length and then legitimately send the paper on through the post without paying for it.¹⁷ This had been halted, but there was still nothing to stop individuals slipping letters between the pages and posting the newspapers on without charge. It was hoped that a separate department could give better oversight to the problem.

      Certainly it could improve the delivery service. The old system of post boys had asked them to travel at a rate of seven miles per hour in summer, five miles per hour in winter, but this was next to impossible to achieve, given the state of the roads. Ralph Allen, from Bath, had done as much as was possible. One of the early eighteenth-century developers of Bath as a leisure town, he had been a shareholder in the Avon Navigation System, and he had furthermore acted as postmaster for the town. By 1719 he had taken charge of all the post roads nationally - that is, the six roads that carried the inter-city posts, which were, in theory, partly maintained by the government. By the time Allen died, in 1764, he had overseen the development of these six roads into a network of nearly twenty main arteries that now reached the new manufacturing towns as well as a number of subsidiary routes. He had also begun to regularize deliveries so that an extensive six-day-a-week service was beginning to emerge.¹⁸

      After his death, however, the system stopped improving and simply stagnated. The post was still being carried by boys on broken-down packhorses, or on small carts. Twenty years later, a letter sent from London to Birmingham on a Monday could not be acknowledged that same week.¹⁹ John Palmer, who held a patent for theatres in Bath and Bristol, grew impatient with the state of communications along the roads and determined to follow in the footsteps of his Bath predecessor. In 1784 he presented to William Pitt, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, a system he had devised to set up contracts with stagecoach owners, who would carry the post in newly designated mailcoaches at between eight and nine miles per hour, providing changes of horse as necessary. They would have an armed guard to sit next to the coachmen, and commit themselves to meeting exact schedules, which would mean that each postmaster would now know exactly what time his post was leaving - and would arrive.* To increase speed still further, these mailcoaches would also be exempt from toll fares along the turnpikes. Pitt agreed to a trial, and the Bristol-London route was chosen. The coach was to leave Bristol at 4 p.m., and was scheduled to arrive in London at 8 a.m. the next morning. It arrived well within that time and, with Pitt’s help, by early 1875 mailcoaches were running in Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and on the cross roads between Bristol and Portsmouth. By the summer, Leeds, Manchester and Liverpool had their own coaches; by October, mailcoaches had reached Milford Haven and Holyhead, Birmingham, Carlisle, Dover, Gloucester, Nottingham, Shrewsbury and Worcester. (Now that letter from London to Birmingham could be acknowledged in a mere two days.) By the following summer the 400 miles between Edinburgh and London could be traversed in 60 hours, down from the 85 it had taken 25 years before. (Further development in Scotland had to wait because its road improvements lagged behind England’s: until 1800 there was only one all-Scottish mailcoach route, Edinburgh to Aberdeen, which after some years was finally extended to Thurso, then to Inverness and on to the Highlands.)²⁰

      Time, and the spending of it, began to take on more urgency. (It would become a more compelling subject still with the arrival of the railways; see pp. 194-5.) Advertisements for stagecoaches before the turnpike age had said that coaches would arrive ‘in about two days’, or ‘if the roads are good’. Now the Post Office was determined that outside conditions should not interfere. In 1789 snow had caused a driver on the Glasgow route to spend twelve days almost entirely on the road, ‘to get the coach through on time’; he was so exhausted by this feat that he had to stay in bed for a week afterwards, but the Post Office paid for his recuperation period in order to encourage others to emulate his dedication.²¹ In a similar manner, while newspapers continued to be carried free if they were brought to the post office before 7 p.m., there was a surcharge of ¹/₂d. per paper if they came after that hour, to discourage late delivery and permit the eight o’clock mailcoach to depart on schedule.²² (Although this is not to say that there was not always a way around the schedule: the General Evening Post struck a deal with the Post Office, paying a flat fee so that, even if its papers were late, the mailcoaches would wait for them.)²³

      Getting the post to the country was, in many ways, the same thing as getting the news to the country. In the 1810s, some newspapers began to produce boards with breaking news on them, to stand outside the offices of local distributors and to hang on the sides of the mailcoaches as they raced through towns and countryside. In 1837 the Reading Mercury had placards on mailcoaches giving the news of William IV’s death, and ‘in less than an hour…there was scarcely a person within the borough’ who had not heard: unimaginable speed.²⁴ In the 1770s, during the American Revolution, and through the late 1780s, with the impeachment and trial of Warren Hastings, the concept of parliamentary reporting in the newspapers was created. There were no facilities for writing in the House of Commons, so the Gazetteer paid ‘impecunious barristers’ to sit in relays, listen, then rush across to the newspaper’s office and scribble down a précis of what they had heard for publication. Evening newspapers, with the day’s news in them, could by 1875 reach some parts of the country by morning: the Courier went from selling 1,500 copies to selling 7,000 in four years (it was also the first paper to have a second edition).²⁵

      All this created a demand СКАЧАТЬ