80 ENGLISH SAGA

to take a journey did so on the roof of a stage coach. Tom Brown
went to Rugby of all places in the old Tally-lio! To travel by
the London Tantivy mail to Birmingham along the macadamised
turnpike, a distance of 120 miles, took twelve hours; to Liverpool
another eleven. One left London shortly before eight in the
morning, changed, in the course of ten minutes into the Bir-
mingham-Liverpool Mail at the same hour in the evening, and
reached one's destination, bleary-eyed and exhausted, at seven
next day. .

That was the very fastest travel. And what travelling it
was! On a cold, damp, raw December morning one waited in
the dark at the posting-house for the Highflyer or Old True
Blue Independent coach "coming hup " and,when the muddied,
steaming horses drew up in the courtyard, took one's "preference"
seat in the hot, suffocating, straw-strewn box. There one sat in
cramped darkness for many hours of creaking, lumbering and
jolting until the "many-coated, brandy-faced, blear-eyed guard
let in a whole hurricane of wind" with the glad tidings that the
coach had reached another inn "wot 'oss'd it," where the com-
pany was allowed half an hour's grace to dine. The only alter-
native was to travel on the roof, in dust and glare in summer,
and muffled to the nose in a frozen eternity in winter. It had
its romantic side, of course, but no man would undertake such
travel lightly. And what with the fare of sixpence a mile for
inside accommodation, the cost of meals at the posting inns,
and the tips to ostler, boots, guard, post-boy and waiter, it was
beyond the means of all but a small minority.

In what seemed to our ancestors only a few years all this
was changed. The first tentative1 steam railway from Stockton
to Darlington had been opened in 1825, anc^ ^e Liverpool and
Manchester line had followed in 1830. A year after Queen
Victoria's accession there were only 500 miles of operating
railway in the British Isles. The first railway boom in 1830-9,
following a run of good harvests and financed mainly by
provincial money, added another 5,000 miles of projected track.
Of these 1,900 miles were open by the summer of 1843. They
included the lines from London to Birmingham, Manchester,
Brighton and Bristol.

xFor long it was an open question whether horses or steam engines should draw
railed traffic, and, after the final triumph of steam, whether the new engines would be
most serviceable on iron tracks or as unrailcd coaches on the turnpike road. J, H. Clap-
ham, An Economic History of Modern Britain, 1,38>, 3#6,