Coaches and Coaching

Leigh Hunt wrote this love letter to the open road when horse-drawn coaches were beginning their slow retreat into nostalgia. In these wandering, witty essays, he celebrates every manner of carriage: the stately private coach with its fat, fair-wigged driver, the hurrying mail coach, the humble hackney carriage, and the post-chaise with its "equivocal dignity." But this is far more than a catalogue of vehicles. Hunt transforms the simple act of coach travel into a meditation on English life itself: the peculiar hierarchies among passengers, the strange camaraderie of strangers sharing a lurching compartment, the poetry hidden in a horse's proud stride, and the philosophical patience required when roads were mud and time was measured in hours rather than minutes. Interspersed with verse and anecdote, the book captures a world where a journey from London to Oxford was an event worthy of preparation, anticipation, and remembrance. For modern readers, it offers a window into an era when travel was slow enough to be savoured, and the road itself was a destination.