I AM not a coachbuilder. Though such a pronouncement will seem entirely superfluous to any coachbuilder who reads the following pages, it is not perhaps a wholly unnecessary remark. For, with one or two exceptions, such books upon the evolution or structure of vehicles as have been written have been the work of industrious coachbuilders. And I have not the least doubt that they are eminently the fit and proper folk to carry out any such task. It is a melancholy fact, however, that useful though these books may be to coachbuilders, they lack, again with one or two exceptions, any general interest to the layman. The language in which they are written is, to say the least, peculiar, and the authors have obviously had small training in the art of book-making. On the other hand, there is a whole library of books dealing with the old stage and mail coaches, with all the romance and adventure of the roads, packed with delightful anecdotes and personal reminiscences. But such books hardly touch upon the structure of the coaches themselves, and, so far as I know, there is no book entirely devoted to a non-technical description of carriages in general, based upon a chronological arrangement.
The nearest approach to such a book is Mr. G. A.14 Thrupp�s The History of Coaches, published in 1877, a meritorious undertaking from which I have freely quoted. Here, however, there are numerous gaps which I have endeavoured to fill, and the various lectures from which it was composed do not fit together so aptly as might be. As a whole, it is diffuse. Sir Walter Gilbey�s two books, Early Carriages and Roads and Modern Carriages, have also been of great assistance, but here, too, the ground covered is not so large as in the following pages. Other pamphlets and small books have appeared in this country, but seemingly owe a great deal of their information to Mr. Thrupp�s work. Indeed, I notice that some of the authors have been almost criminally forgetful of their inverted commas. For purely technical details there are, of course, many books and trade papers to consult; but with these I have not been concerned.
In the present book there are, indeed, large gaps, and it is not to be taken either as a manual of the art of coach-building or as a history of locomotion. It is merely a book about carriages, in which particular regard has been paid to chronological sequence, and particular attention to such individual carriages as have at all withstood the test of social history. And it is written by a layman who, until he enquired into the subject, had never looked at a carriage with any particular emotion. The result of his labours, therefore, is not meant for the expert, but for the general reader, who may have pondered over the various vehicles he has seen, and idly wondered how they may have been evolved.
Where possible, I have endeavoured to quote from15 contemporary authors and documents. Most of such quotations are now included in a carriage book for the first time.
I wish to thank the various publishers and authors who have given me permission to reprint illustrations of carriages in books published or written by them. Also I am obliged to Messrs. Maggs Bros., the well-known booksellers, for permission to photograph a rare print entitled The Carriage Match, in their possession.
