I KNOW nothing more delightful than to sit behind two perfectly broken horses or ponies, going well together and well in hand, passing rapidly through the air,’ wrote Lady Georgiana Curzon in 1888. It was not always so. Imagine you woke one morning in 1750 (the year the Jockey Club was founded and Bach died) and felt like going out. At that time, country roads were vestigial and dangerous and urban streets deep in mud and filth. What then? In London, you could call a sedan chair, patented in 1634 by Sir Sanders Duncombe (to the annoyance of the watermen), or perhaps a brouette—a wheeled cabin pulled by one man —or hail a yellow, four-wheeled hackney carriage. There were private vehicles, too, and your bright matutinal mood might prompt a call for your own in which to jostle with the traffic—perhaps an early caleche, a small coach with a collapsible top.
Jane Austen used carriages to denote her characters’ place in society. Dashing Mr Darcy had a curricle