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Updated: May 23, 2025
Everything I see is full of her, everything I do is done for her. "Perhaps she'll see it and know the hand, and remember," I think, even when I do the mail-coaches and the milestones. I used to draw for her at Brighton when she was a child. My sketches, my pictures, are always making that silent piteous appeal to her, WON'T YOU LOOK AT US? WON'T YOU REMEMBER? I dare say she has quite forgotten.
Mail-coaches began to overrun the country in all directions at the then remarkable pace of from eight to ten miles an hour, and, let us remark in passing, there was a whirl and dash about these stage-coaches which railway trains, with all their velocity can never hope to attain to, except when they dash into each other! Man is but a weak creature in some senses.
It was the hour for the departure of the mail-coaches and diligences. Nearly all the stage-coaches for the south and west passed through the Champs-Elysees. The majority followed the quay and went through the Passy Barrier.
In the earliest period of European railway construction some "practical" people were of the opinion that it was foolish to build certain lines "because there were not even sufficient passengers to fill the mail-coaches."
"When Bysshe finally came to town to elope with Miss Westbrook, he came as usual to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and I was his companion on his visits to her, and finally accompanied them early one morning I forget now the month, or the date, but it might have been September in a hackney coach to the Green Dragon, in Gracechurch Street, where we remained all day, till the hour when the mail-coaches start, when they departed in the northern mail for York."
As Thackeray so vividly describes it: "The land rang yet with the tooting horns and rattling teams of mail-coaches; a gay sight was the road in those days, before steam-engines arose and flung its hostelry and chivalry over.
Wherever they had to pass, crowds of people waited for them in subdued excitement, hailed them with delight, and waved them on with cheers, for they were almost the only means of distributing news; and when a great victory, such as Trafalgar, Vittoria, or Waterloo had to be announced, the mail-coaches dressed in flowers and ribbons, with guards shouting the news to eager crowds as they passed through hamlet, village, and town swept like a thrill of electric fire throughout the land.
It needed to be near a coaching-road, so that the bushranger's headquarters should be near to his place of business, which was to stick-up mail-coaches and rob them of gold, valuables, weapons, and ammunition. It also needed to be in a position commanding a good view, and with more than one point of entrance.
John Dixon relates with pride the utterance of the master on the occasion. “Now, lads,” said he to the two young men, “I venture to tell you that I think you will live to see the day when railways will supersede almost all other methods of conveyance in this country—when mail-coaches will go by railway, and railroads will become the great highway for the king and all his subjects.
Here and there, I think, it is well written; and here and there it's not.... If it has a merit to it, I should say it was a sort of deliberation and swing to the style, which seems to me to suit the mail-coaches and post-chaises with which it sounds all through. 'Tis my most prosaic book.
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