Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey 1817 (written 1798-9)
On re-reading Northanger Abbey (after a fifty-year break) I was surprised by how much was familiar to me, but also how much seemed to be missing! I particularly remembered more detail about travel by carriage that seemed to show the conventions of the time. On checking the Internet, I found that the details I was missing were actually from Pride and Prejudice, where the types of carriage used for various purposes are used explicitly to signal the social status of the passengers and as a means to shock the reader.
A blog entry on Austenblog by Margaret C. Sullivan: A Closer Look at Carriages and Characters in Pride and Prejudice https://austenblog.com/2010/07/02/a-closer-look-at-carriages-and-characters-in-pride-and-prejudice/ has information relevant to Mr Thorpe’s carriage:
“Younger gentlemen’s personal vehicles were usually either a gig or a curricle. These fast, sporty carriages were similar in being open vehicles with two wheels, seating two comfortably, and driven by one of the passengers; the main difference being that a gig was equipped to be pulled by one horse and a curricle by two, thereby doubling the horsepower—a Trans Am to the gig’s Firebird, if you will. Mr. Collins, predictably, owns a gig, in which he takes Sir William driving while he is visiting Hunsford. Mr. Darcy, also predictably, owns a curricle, which he uses to drive Georgiana to visit Elizabeth at the inn in Lambton.”
And specifically mentions the post-chaise that is ignominiously hired by Catherine Morland: “A woman of gentle birth would not have travelled alone, especially in a hired vehicle, though it was sufficient for Elizabeth and Maria to have each other as a companion. (To step away from P&P for a moment, imagine what Lady Catherine would have to say about General Tilney sending poor Catherine Morland home alone on the post-chaise with no servant in Northanger Abbey! )”
Catherine Morland is sent about sixty miles on an eleven hour journey alone in a carriage at a cost of £3-4 (they were twelve pence a mile plus extras, and Catherine alludes to the extras: “Her youth, civil manners and liberal pay procured her all the attention that a traveller like herself could require.”)
The experience of travelling without supervision for the first time was a rite of passage in the twentieth century. It made you feel a bit more grown up. In my case it was to work in a hotel as a waiter in Swanage in the school summer holidays when I was sixteen. Travelling by train was something I had only done before with my family for holidays. Others did such a trip for a university interview or to start university. Before the first world war, most people never left home, but by the second world war men and women, boys and girls were being drafted into posts far away.
I believe most British students don’t travel alone until they have their own transport now, the normal mode being Mum’s car. Students from overseas of course have much more difficult journeys, but I wonder if a transcontinental trip by plane is much more challenging than Catherine’s sixty miles in very different times.
