Passengers is a social history of Britain between 1790 and 1840. This is the period of the Napoleonic War and of rapid technological change and social tension. It was a contradictory age, simultaneously the elegant era of Jane Austen and the inspiration for Charles Dickens’s work on poverty and injustice. The book has an initial focus on transport and hospitality, but it is also a wider portrait of this important but neglected period of British history. The author covers all aspects of the period-work, law, technology, finance, politics, poverty and crime are the most prominent. The inn and the stagecoach were some of the few places that the different classes met and coexisted in a country that was stratified and deferential. The poor served the transport and hospitality system, the middle classes used it and the ruling classes profited from it. The life of women is an important part of this book; they worked at levels in the travel and hospitality industries. This is everybody’s story, an exposition of real places and real people in a society that was ‘on the move,’ in all senses of the phrase.
Introduction: Is there Really a Stagecoach History of Britain?
1 The Walking Classes
2 Scandal at the Swan
3 Respectability
4 Bad Education
5 Calculated Charity
6 The Stagecoach Masters
7 The Entrepreneurial Widows
8 Crime in the Coaching Inn
9 Crime On The Road
10 Roads Work
11 Who’s on Board Today?
12 The Stagecoach Driver: A Class Act
13 A Georgian Family and their Struggle with Transport
14 Melancholy Events
15 The Stagecoach v the Law
16 Hell for Horses
17 A Journey up the Great North Road
18 Moving the Mail
19 Attacked by a Lioness
20 The Brighton Line
21 Inn Hospitality
22 Poor Women and their Work
23 New Times, New Time and New Timing
24 First with the News
25 The Stagecoach Defeats the Steam Engine
26 The Steam Engine Defeats The Stagecoach
Conclusion: Immortality via Nostalgia.