Bang-up! Theatricality and the "diphrelatic art" in De Quincey's English Mail-Coach.

Rzepka, Charles J.

This article examines implicit connections between Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail-Coach and the English popular stage during the first two decades of the nineteenth century. At this time, London included among its entertainments equestrian spectacles, re-creations of historical and contemporary warfare, and farcical commentary on the so-called "Four-in-Hand" or "Driving" mania that seized the city early in 1809. From February to July of that year De Quincey was in town seeing Wordsworth's Convention of Cintra pamphlet through the press, a task that left him well-schooled in the campaigns of the Peninsular War that figure prominently in the section of his essay called "Going Down with Victory." Given the long-standing preference of De Quincey and his college-age peers for riding "on the box," which he describes in the first part of The English Mail-Coach, he is unlikely to have overlooked this new frenzy for coach-driving in the nation's capital. In fact, the fundamental crisis that shapes the entire Mail-Coach essay concerns skill in driving coaches, not just in sitting atop them. Moreover, the "diphrelatic" or "charioteering art," as De Quincey calls it, links three contemporary arenas or "theaters" for the testing and evaluation of equestrian skill in the pages of his essay: the London popular stage, the streets and highways of England, and the "theater" of war.

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In the century and a half since 1849 when Thomas De Quincey's The English Mail-Coach first appeared in print, no one has examined the essay's possible connections to the English popular stage, which included among its offerings equestrian spectacles, re-creations of historical and contemporary warfare, and farcical commentary on the so-called "Four-in-Hand" or "Driving" mania that seized London early in 1809. From February to July of that year De Quincey was in town seeing Wordsworth's Convention of Cintra pamphlet through the press, a task that left him well-schooled in the campaigns of the Peninsular War that figure prominently in the section of his essay called "Going Down with Victory." (1) Given the long-standing preference of De Quincey and his college-age peers for riding "on the box," which he describes in the first part of his essay, he is unlikely to have overlooked this new frenzy for coach-driving in the nation's capital. In fact, the fundamental crisis that shapes the entire Mail-Coach essay concerns skill in driving coaches, not just in sitting atop them. Moreover, the "diphrelatic" or "charioteering art," as De Quincey calls it (215), (2) links three contemporary arenas or "theaters" for the testing and evaluation of equestrian skill in the pages of his essay: the London popular stage, the streets and highways of England, and the "theater" of war.

The English Mail-Coach is divided into three prelusive narratives--"The Glory of Motion," (3) "Going Down with Victory," and "The Vision of Sudden Death"--followed by a "Dream-Fugue" incorporating themes, events, and images from all three sections of this "prelude." Each preliminary narrative corresponds to a different period in the history of the author's life-long infatuation with coach-travel.

In 1804, De Quincey matriculated at Oxford and began riding atop public coaches, along with the rest of "young Oxford" (188). This was the period when, as he says, he was first introduced to the lovely "Fanny of the Bath road," whose grandfather--later metamorphosed into a "crocodile" in De Quincey's oneiric imagination--drove the Royal Mail on the Bath-to-Bristol run. Stopping regularly along the route to greet his granddaughter, this "crocodile" coachman remained ever "vigilant over her deportment in any case where young Oxford might happen to be concerned" (195)--De Quincey included. In July of 1809, soon after De Quincey's stay in London, Wellesley achieved his hard-won victory at Talavera. In "Going Down with Victory," De Quincey conveys the excitement and prestige of being an outside passenger on the Royal Mail from 1805 to 1815, as the coaches carried news of victories like Talavera, Badajoz, and Salamanca throughout the kingdom. "Five years of life it was worth paying down," he writes, "for the privilege of an outside place on a mail-coach, when carrying down the first tidings of any such event" (202). The years 1816-1817 comprise the period, according to Grevel Lindop (Opium, 211-12), when the incident recounted in the third section, "The Vision of Sudden Death," probably occurred. Sitting next to a sleeping driver atop the Royal Mail on its way to Preston, De Quincey narrowly averted a serious collision with an oncoming gig by shouting a warning to its young driver and his female companion.

Theatrical imagery, metaphors, and themes appear throughout the first three sections of The English Mail-Coach: analogies between coach "box" and theater "boxes," pantomimic metaphors, "legends" from dumb-show, and the road itself viewed as a "stage," all culminate in the scenic tableaux and spectacles of the "Dream-Fugue." Here, Waterloo represents the Apocalyptic omega of all the battles that preceded it, from Creci to Salamanca (230), and the redemption of their accumulated sacrifices--their many "sudden deaths," civilian as well as military--by "Recovered Christendom" (228). As the world-historical impetus of the "Dream-Fugue," Waterloo also transposes into a military key the "diphrelatic art" that De Quincey, according to his own account, had tried to master as a civilian noncombatant. From a helpless passenger on His Majesty's Royal Mail speeding along a moonlit road toward "Sudden Death," De Quincey is magically transformed into a "laurelled" messenger in a "triumphal car," racing down the central aisle of an "infinite cathedral" and spreading the news of Armageddon--a militant evangelist in His Majesty's holy war.

The trauma that seems to have invested all of De Quincey's mail-coach memories with the anxieties of agency reprised in the "Dream-Fugue" was the near-fatal collision on the road to Preston in 1816-1817. In the "Vision of Sudden Death," these anxieties crystallize in one harrowing test of De Quincey's driving skill: he must take the reins from the iron grip of the sleeping coachman and steer the horses to the other side of the road. His failure to do so reveals him to be "a traitor to his duties" (211) and motivates the "diphrelatic" climax of the "Dream-Fugue," with its apocalyptic and military themes.

Bang Up, Prime!

The popularity of coach-driving among London's aristocrats and wealthy young professionals in 1809 and 1810 anticipated by a century and a half the popularity of hot-rodding in America, and like hot-rodding, the "Four-in-hand" mania arose partially in response to technical advances enabling greater speed and better handling. (4) Like the characters in American Graffiti, the "Whips" were in love with velocity, recklessness, and public displays of driving proficiency. They formed clubs, wore coaching "uniforms," and raced each other through the London streets, a practice probably encouraged by the example of competitive, sometimes inebriated, professional coachmen. (5) The "mania" inspired satirical illustrations, stock characters in farces and pantomimes, and even, in 1812, A Bang-Up Dictionary by an anonymous "Member of the Whips."

The "Whips" were notoriously indifferent to status distinctions between passengers and coachmen. Not only did they supplant their own drivers on the box, but they also adopted the livery, mannerisms, and slang of the drivers they displaced. Still more alarming was the practice of commandeering public carriages and endangering the lives of paying passengers (Mayer, 185). According to Ellen Moers, many of the "Whips" "consider[ed] a day behind the reins of the public coach the height of amusement" (63).

Though the "driving mania" was largely an affectation of the dandies, it had been anticipated early in the decade by solitary eccentrics among the aristocracy such as Tommy Onslow. (6) In addition, college students like De Quincey had long made a practice of sitting on the outside of passenger coaches and bribing the coachmen to surrender their reins for a few minutes. (7) Thus, says De Quincey, for "young Oxford," the great attraction of riding atop the Royal Mail that surpassed all others, including "the air, the freedom of prospect, the proximity to the horses, [and] the elevation of seat," was "the certain anticipation of purchasing occasional opportunities for driving" (186).

With driver and passenger exchanging or sharing roles, issues of class and education sometimes arose in coach-driving accounts. In his Autobiography, De Quincey's contemporary, Leigh Hunt, recalled riding outside on the Oxford coach as a young man and conversing with the driver, Tillamant Bobart, who had given up his position as a former sizar at the college for the life of a coachman. Having realized every Oxford student's dream of permanent elevation to the "hammer-cloth" of the box, Bobart nevertheless still enjoyed "capping" Latin verses with his student passengers, quoting "his never-failing line out of Virgil and Horace" (127). In an earlier appearance in Hunt's essay on "Coaches," published in The Indicator for 23 and 30 August 1820, the contempt of this "Baccalaureated charioteer" for the "four-in-hand gentry" is surprisingly understated: "he shakes his head, and thinks they might find something better to do" (367). De Quincey seems to have had Bobart in mind when creating his opposite number in the phlegmatic person of an uneducated coachman upon whom he tries a Virgilian quotation, with comical results (189-90). A college education, however, makes a poor showing in De Quincey's eyes compared to the secrets of "the diphrelatic" or "charioteering" art that a certain one-eyed driver, dubbed Cyclops Magistophorus, or "Cyclops the whip-bearer," has imparted over the years, "for extra fees," to De Quincey "and to others known" to him (215).

The popular theater derided the coach-driving fad in plays like Isaac Pocock's Hit or Miss!, a musical farce premiering at the Lyceum in February 1810. Here the popular comic actor Charles Mathews appeared in the role of Dick Cypher, a young London "Whip," whose first entrance is announced by a crash off-stage and whose first line upon entering comprises popular driving slang: "that's prime!--that's bang up!" (31), which the Bang-Up Dictionary defines as "Quite the thing, hellish fine." Cypher's dress--"the honourable Uniform of the 'Neck or Nothing'" driving club--is mistaken by other characters for a coachman's livery, and, to compound the confusion, he also wears a "Benjamin" or coachman's greatcoat.

Like De Quincey and some of his Oxford cohorts, Cypher has been tutored in the "diphrelatic art": I've had a complete education--gone through all the gradations of buggy, gig, and dog-cart, tandem, curricle, unicorn, and four-in-hand--neglected nothing--dash'd at every thing--pegg'd at a jervy--tool'd a mail-coach--and now having attained the credit of being bang up, have met the reward of all my labours, by being elected Member of a Society [the Neck or Nothing Club] who are famous for having repeatedly saved their necks by sheer management and dexterity. (33) (8)

Mathews became so famous playing Dick Cypher that Leigh Hunt was to single out the role in his two-part Examiner essay on comic actors, 22 and 29 January 1815. (9) By the early 1820s, a "Mail-Coach" routine had become a regular feature of Mathews' At Home shows. (10)

Not only in farce, but in pantomime, too, the "driving mania" made its impact, especially on the routines of Joseph Grimaldi, the most popular player of the "Clown" role in the harlequinade portion of the standard pantomime. Charles Dibdin, Jr., and Grimaldi collaborated on one of the earliest pantomimical satires of the "Whips" in a scene from Fashion's Fools, which premiered at Sadler's Wells on 3 July 1809. A year later, on 23 July, again at Sadler's Wells, Dibdin and Grimaldi contrived an entire pantomime lampooning the driving clubs called Bang-Up! or Harlequin Prime, which ended with "a Procession of Carriages used by the Four-in-Hand, Whip, & c. Clubs" (15). Here Grimaldi out-did himself with a "trick of construction" in which a child's cradle resting on four wheels of cheese and pulled by two dogs substituted for the dandy's carriage and team (Mayer, 188). The trick was repeated the following year, at Covent Garden, in Harlequin and Padnamaba.

The coach-driving fad lasted for at least another decade. Mrs. Pinmoney, in Thomas Love Peacock's 1818 novel, Melincourt, includes among the "fashions" of the day the "taste for driving the mail" (I.28)just before the arrival of her young nephew, Sir Telegraph Paxarett, (11) "bowling his barouche along a romantic valley" (I.37) with his coachman asleep inside (I.39). The next year Shelley made the Devil himself a member of the "driving schism" in Peter Bell the Third (96-97). The fashion soon spread to the United States, where it became standard practice in all ranks of society and, according to David Mayer, helped to inspire the chariot-racing scene in Lew Wallace's Ben Hur. (12)

If De Quincey attended a farce or a pantomime during his trip to London in 1809, he never mentioned it. This trip was by no means his first, however, and was far from his last. As a young truant from Manchester Grammar School in the winter of 1802-3, he had spent several months in the city, which he later memorialized in the "Preliminary Confessions" of the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. He continued to visit London with some frequency for many years, even while living in Oxford and Grasmere. He attended the Opera, wandered the streets, frequented the bookstores, loosely "kept term" at the Middle Temple (1812-1815), and, in the early 1820s, joined the circle of writers connected with the new London Magazine. Throughout this period he would have had many opportunities to attend the popular London theaters, where characters like Dick Cypher continued to supply belly-laughs at the expense of the "Whips" well after the "Four-in-Hand mania" had died down. He would also have had many opportunities to view the "theater of war" staged almost nightly atone or another of London's "legitimate" patent theaters or its many "illegitimate" popular venues.

Theaters of War

Elaine Hadley (3-4) and Jeff Cox (404-5) have remarked the unusual degree to which popular theater and public life merged and mutually reinforced each other in Regency London. This "sophisticated circulation of theatrical images from life into the theater and back out into the world" (Cox, 405) must have dove-tailed nicely with De Quincey' s own imaginative tendency, vigorous since childhood, to "project a vast theatre of phantasmagorical figures" into real space and rime (Japp, I.7-8). Out of these hallucinatory realizations of mental theater evolved that "corresponding change" in the adult opium-eater's dreams where, as he writes, "a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour" when he was under the influence of the drug (Confesssions, 67). On any one of these laudanum "debauches," suggests De Quincey, a walk along the streets of London could become as compelling "a spectacle" as an Italian opera, and one with which his "sympathy" was "entire" (44-47).

During the period in which De Quincey was a regular visitor to London, the streets also provided a medium for the public representation of war. According to Gillian Russell, during England's protracted conflict with France, from 1793 to 1815, street, stage, and battlefield often became superimposed "theaters of war" in the public imagination. Not only were file engagements of the war on sea and land an almost constant subject in the "shows" of London, but similar dramatizations, sometimes using similar stage machinery, also appeared on the streets of the major cities in the form of pageants and fetes. With "news of every major victory," Russell writes, the townscape was transformed "into a celebratory theatre" (63-64).

The theatre proper, however, remained the primary means of envisioning world-historical happenings for the public imagination. As Richard Altick points out, several decades were to pass before newspapers began to carry illustrations. In the interim, "it fell to ... the theatre and the new [as of 1794] panorama, to give pictorial realization to events" (176). Russell provides a rich and detailed survey of the prevalence of war as a topic and theme in the playhouses, whose "managers and playwrights were adept at devising entertainments that could be staged within a few days of dispatches reaching London, thereby exploiting immediate public interest in the events of the war" (63). In the vast patent theaters of Drury Lane and Covent Garden, for example, spectacles capping off an evening' s entertainment were ordinarily either pageants or "the representation of military or naval engagements." In addition, afterpieces would often "combine elements of dramatic action with a spectacular" battle scene (Russell, 60). Russell notes particularly the rise to dominance of the popular theaters in the competition to visualize contemporary and historical "theaters of war." Here the legal prohibition against spoken-word drama led to ever-increasing attention to, and investment in, spectacular verisimilitude, particularly at Sadler's Wells, Astley's Amphitheater, and Hughes' Royal Circus (66-74). At the first of these venues, the fitting up of enormous tanks and hydraulic pumps facilitated the re-enactment of naval engagements, while at the latter two, equestrian performers recreated land battles in combined proscenium and amphitheatrical spaces.

These so-called "hippodramas" became a dominant form of spectacular military entertainment in the first decade or so of the nineteenth century, beginning with the summer of 1800, when the Royal Circus and Astley's staged competing hippodramatic pantomimes, including elaborate harlequinades (Saxon, 39-40). These shows marked the first attempts to combine equestrian displays with fully theatrical stage performance. In one of them, the Circus' The Magic Flute; or, Harlequin Champion, which was set at the court of Charlemagne, Charlemagne himself entered in the first scene driving a "Chariot of Chivalry" around the stage, pulled by three horses (Saxon, 40). The use of carriages, coaches, gun-carriages, chariots, and even mail-coaches in hippodrama was apparently not unusual, to judge from remarks by Charles Dibdin, Jr., on the stage constructions at Astley's. These were so "exceedingly massive and strong" that "they [would] adroit a carriage, equal in size and weight to a mail coach, to be driven across them" (quoted in Saxon, 13). In fact, the York mail-coach made repeated appearances in the long-running Richard Turpin, the Highwayman, beginning in November 1819 (Saxon, 68). Three years later, Astley mounted Dibdin's own Alexander the Great and Thalestris the Amazon, in whose opening scene "chariots, horses, banners, and actors thronged the stage and went through the military evolutions ... arranged for them" (Saxon, 57).

The rage for hippodrama was, for the first decade of its formal existence, confined to Astley's and Hughes' venues, with Astley coming to dominate by 1807 with its production of The Brave Cossack; or, Perfidy Punished. Here, for the first time, highly coordinated and fast-paced equestrian action en masse became a focus of attention, as the final battle scene presented a thrilling display of "a troop of horse at full speed" (Saxon, 46). The Brave Cossack and similar entertainments seem to have had an effect on public driving habits as well as theatrical taste. Within two years, the "Four-in-Hand mania" had made the London streets hazardous to pedestrian and passenger alike, and in another two years, at the end of its 1810-1811 season, Covent Garden sullied its distinguished reputation for "legitimate" drama and bowed to the bottom line: in order to boost sagging revenues, John Philip Kemble decided to allow horses on stage in a revival of Blue Beard. Drury Lane, Covent Garden's patent competitor, held out for more than a decade, but finally succumbed in 1823 (Saxon, 97)

The rise and legitimation of hippodrama from 1800 to 1811 bears an interesting relationship to the "Four-in-Hand" mania as mediated by the theater of war. The inception of the land war in the Spanish peninsula in 1808, only a year after Astley's triumphant production of The Brave Cossack, seems to have increased the popularity of equestrian spectacle even further, eventuating in its acceptance by Covent Garden three years later. At the same time, only a few months after the beginning of the Peninsular Campaign, young male civilians started showing off their equestrian skills by driving their own coaches or hijacking public conveyances.

Regarding this last development, we should take note of the features that the driving clubs shared with their military equestrian counterparts. Each club had its own uniform, and was devoted to high risk displays of driving skill. The members of these clubs, like many a dashing troop of dragoons, sought to become, in the words of Dick Cypher, "famous for having repeatedly saved their necks by sheer management and dexterity" with horses (Pocock, 33). These vaguely militaristic elements of the driving mania reflected a more general interest among the dandies with things military that increased as the war approached its triumphant conclusion. Mayer, for instance, describes the on-stage ridicule of "those who, during the Napoleonic wars, affected military styles without serving in the army or navy" (177), especially dandies wearing "Hessian boots" (179). At one point, the Prince Regent himself affected Hussar attire (Mayer, 281). In addition, cavalry officers were often lampooned for their self-conscious attention to theatrically elaborate dress uniforms, "which were worn with the same concern for neatness and detail as the finery of the dandies" (Mayer, 279). For that matter, what Moers describes as "the great ritual of the dandy day: the long, portentous drama of the toilette" (61) reveals an almost military fastidiousness over proper "uniform" dress. What epaulettes, insignia, and ribbons signified according to ancient codes of military tailoring, "a pair of Stays," "a Frill," "a pair of ruffles," or "a cravat" (Mayer, 177) signified according to the latest "dandy regulations" (Moers, 61). In short, the "driving mania" seems to have given expression to a desire among dandified civilians to emulate the style, panache, and risk-taking behavior--the "Glory of Motion"--of their military equestrian counterparts, a desire reciprocated by officers seeking to emulate the dandies' pre-occupation with attire. To this extent, the mania for coach-driving among dandies and bucks participated in the larger infiltration of London street-life by the "theater of war," both on the London stage and on the stage of the world.

"Organized" Display

De Quincey's familiarity with the popular English theater is a subject that has only recently begun to receive attention. (13) One reason the topic has all but escaped notice is that De Quincey rarely mentions actual attendance at the playhouse. His Saturday nights at the English Opera House are probably the best known of such occasions, since they figure largely in the "Pleasures of Opium" portion of The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (Confessions, 44-46). However, evidence suggests that De Quincey began attending pantomime and regular theater as early as his fourteenth year (Rzepka, "Thomas," 121-23; 130 n. 10, 11).

While De Quincey's Saturday nights at the Opera offer one obvious source for theatrical material found in The English Mail-Coach, spectacular processions in palace or cathedral settings, like that in which the final scenes of the "Dream-Fugue" are set, were more common in the huge patent theaters. (14) William Capon, for instance, once designed a chapel resembling a Gothic cathedral for cavernous Drury Lane, with orchestra and singers included in the set (Rosenfeld, 97-98), as well as an enormous Gothic interior for Joanna Baillie's De Monfort representing "a 14th century church with nave, choir and side aisles in seven planes" (Rosenfeld, 98). Efforts like these culminated in Comelius Dixon's designs for the coronation scene in Robert Elliston's 1821 revival of Henry IV, Part 2, which was inspired by the coronation of George IV. Dixon depicted "the interior of the Abbey with all the ceremonial appurtenances." As in De Quincey's "Dream Fugue," "Real horses were brought on for the champion" (Rosenfeld, 101-2).

The title, "Dream-Fugue," and the musical indication, "Tumultuosissimamente," have inspired at least one study of De Quincey's familiarity with musical counterpoint (Brown). But references and allusions to theater also appear throughout The English Mail-Coach, beginning obliquely with its opening reference to the genius of John Palmer, M.P. of Bath, who according to De Quincey "invented mail-coaches" when he persuaded the government to create a mail-coach system in 1784-86. Nothing less than the "moons of Jupiter" are apparently as good at "keeping time" as Mr. Palmer's mail-coaches (183). As it happens, John Palmer was also the manager of the Royal Theater in Bath until 1785, and apparently continued as its owner, and as owner of the Bristol theater, until his death in 1818. (15) Thirty years later, John Palmer, former stage-manager of the Royal Theater, is managing the "stages" of the Royal Mail in The English Mail-Coach: "these mail-coaches," writes De Quincey, were "organised by Mr. Palmer" (183), and "to this hour," he adds, "Mr. Palmer's mail-coach system tyrannises by terror and terrific beauty over my dreams" (184).

Of the rive "agenc[ies]" (183) by which "Mr. Palmer's mail-coach system" exercised this imaginative tyranny, according to De Quincey, four of them--"velocity," "animal beauty and power," "the conscious presence of a central intellect" in charge of coordinating the action, and the system's "awful political mission" of spreading the news of English victories throughout the kingdom (183-84)--are also characteristic of patriotic hippodrama. Leaving aside "animal beauty and power," the remaining three could be said to characterize nearly all pantomimes produced from 1806 to 1815 as well. Few of these, according to David Mayer, "are without a comic scene or patriotic song or military display reminding audiences of British or allied prosecution of the war" (270).

The remaining "agency" of the mail-coach's power--"grand effects for the eye between the lamp-light and the darkness upon solitary roads" (183)--recalls the effects of the "magic lantern," first introduced to London audiences in 1802. By the 1820s, magic lantern effects had become part of the spectacular scenic repertoire of the popular stage. (16) For De Quincey, the driver's seat of a mail-coach seems particularly well-suited for observing such "grand effects," as he explicitly suggests when he invokes "the analogy of theatres" to compare the privileged view from the "boxes" in a playhouse to that obtainable from the driver's "box" atop the mail-coach (186). Reciprocally, the "galvanic" or "electric" (194) power of the mail-coach system that animates the nation's imagination as a whole flows not through the dissemination of spoken or printed information, but by means of the mail-coach's own theatrical display.

One of the most important features of the mail-coach, according to De Quincey, was its ability to concenter the interests of crowds for the communication of powerful visual effects. "The gatherings of gazers about a mail-coach had one centre, and acknowledged only one interest," he writes, but the spread of railroads has destroyed "multiform openings for sublime effects ... that could not have offered themselves amongst the hurried and fluctuating groups of a railway station" (194). Focusing public attention on its "sublime effects" in this way, the mail-coach executes its "awful political mission" much more powerfully through spectacular display than through spoken or printed intelligence. Thus, the parade of vehicles assembled on Lombard Street to carry the news of Talavera to the most distant provinces offers the interested viewer a beautiful "spectacle" on any night, writes De Quincey, but especially on this one: The absolute perfection of all the appointments about the carriages and the harness, and the magnificence of the horses, were what might first have fixed the attention.... But the night before us is a night of victory; and behold! to the ordinary display, what a heart-shaking addition!" (202-3)

These "additions" to the "ordinary display"--laurels, flowers, oak leaves, and ribbons on the equipages, guards and coachmen in royal red livery--cause "the spectators, who are numerous beyond precedent, [to] express their sympathies ... by continual hurrahs," as if at a coup de theatre. The climactic drawing off of the coaches in procession is the "finest part of the entire spectacle" (203).

De Quincey's descriptions of such gatherings provide a vivid firsthand account of what Russell calls the linking of "urban ritual and the use of spectacle in the theatre" (63), an account informed, apparently, by personal theatrical experience. On the road, for instance, De Quincey interprets activities in passing coaches as "unpremeditated pantomime." A carriage with a mother and her daughters offers its interior to view, "and one may read, as on the stage of a theater, everything that goes on within.... What lovely animation, what beautiful unpremeditated pantomime, explaining to us every syllable that passes, in these ingenuous girls" (205). Riding atop the mail-coach, De Quincey becomes not only a spectator of this "pantomime," but a participant in it. The sight of the Royal Mail's "laurelled equipage" evokes a "sudden start and raising of the hands ... the sudden movement and appeal to the elder lady ... the heightened colour on [the girls'] animated countenances," in short, a dumb-show corresponding to the unspoken words (verbalized by De Quincey for our benefit), "See, see! Look at their laurels. Oh, Mama! there has been a great battle in Spain; and it has been a great victory" (205). This reciprocal dumb-show continues as the mail-coach passes by--raised hats and salutes are answered by "a winning graciousness of gesture: all smile on each side in a way that nobody could misunderstand" (205-6). Later, another private carriage approaches, "nearly repeating the circumstances of the former case" (206). Here, the "countenance" of an elderly female passenger dressed in mourning "expresses sorrow." When her eyes "settle ... painfully on our triumphal equipage," says De Quincey, the "decorations explain the case to her at once; but she beholds them with apparent anxiety, or even with terror" (206). "It could not be doubted," he concludes, "that she had suffered some deep personal affliction in connexion with this Spanish war" (206).

What is most striking about these episodes is how little information whatever is exchanged by word of mouth--indeed, how little specific information is communicated or exchanged at all. Nearly everything takes a pantomimic form. Even De Quincey's only reported conversation, with a mother in a little town where the mail stops to change horses, is related in indirect discourse, as though by means of subtitles. In addition, we learn more of what De Quincey does not tell the woman--a harrowing description of the suicidal charge of the 23rd Dragoons, to which her son belongs--than of what he does (207-8). This reported conversation unfolds as part of a "picture at once scenical and affecting," complete with the diabolical "blue tire" of popular Gothic melodrama that greets the mail-coach on its arrival: "many lights moving about ... the flashing of torches and the beautiful radiance of blue lights (technically Bengal lights) ... together with the prodigious enthusiasm of the people" (207).

The mail-coach carries out its mission not only through pantomimical "decorations" and "ensigns of triumph" (206), but also through a device common in staged dumb-show, the written sign-board or "legend." The coachman has cast De Quincey's open newspaper onto the box, "so folded that the huge capitals expressing some such legend as--GLORIOUS VICTORY, might catch the eye at once. To see the paper, however, at all, interpreted as it was by our ensigns of triumph [laurels, oak leaves], explained everything" (206). At no point in The English Mail-Coach is this newspaper opened up and read: it is never passed around to the assembled crowd, nor are its contents read aloud to them. It is meant, as De Quincey clearly indicates, to be "seen" and "interpreted" like a stage prop in the context of other props, the coach's "ensigns of triumph." The lady in mourning in the passing carriage, who reacts in sorrowful dumb-show to the sight of the mail-coach's pantomimical display, responds to the newspaper headline particularly "with a gesture of horror" (206). Three hours later, the woman whose son is in the 23rd Dragoons advances "eagerly," says De Quincey, "at the sight of my newspaper" (207).

The newspaper headline is not the only example of De Quincey's use of the pantomimical "legend" or sign-board technique in The English Mail-Coach. Earlier, recalling Fanny and her coach-driving grandfather "out of the darkness" of memory, De Quincey envisions the mail-coach halted by "a mighty dial ... with the dreadful legend of TOO LATE" (198-99). Earlier still, he describes an occasion when the Royal Mail was overtaken by a "tawdry thing from Birmingham, a Tallyho or Highflier, all flaunting with green and gold" and covered with "as much writing and painting on its sprawling flanks as would have puzzled a decipherer from the tombs of Luxor" (191). The Birmingham coach tries to pass the Royal Mail, which bears "the mighty shield of the imperial arms," but the challenger is soon put in its place.

It is clearly important to De Quincey that this symptom of the "driving mania," a nineteenth-century equivalent of street-racing, be emblazoned in highly visible "legends," in "writing and painting" and a "mighty shield." The episode seems to unfold as in a harlequinade, with the indispensable help of signage to convey the topical satire: boorish Clown, perhaps, in the "flaunting" Tallyho representing "plebeian" (191) Birmingham, notorious for its "tawdry" mass-produced goods, with Harlequin Prime atop the dignified and patriotic Royal Mail, blowing a "shattering blast of triumph" on his coach trumpet "that was really too painfully full of derision" (192).

When events like these undergo translation into the images of the "Dream-Fugue," the device of the pantomimical "legend" reappears in the highly visible display of the "secret word" that De Quincey's "triumphal car" is to spread throughout the land: "Waterloo and Recovered Christendom! The dreadful word shone by its own light; before us it went; high above our leaders' heads it rode, and spread a golden light over the paths which we traversed" (228). In the final dream segment, De Quincey imagines himself looking up at another "secret legend--ashes to ashes, dust to dust" written "aloft among the stars" (232). Advances in stage pyrotechnics had placed such scenes well within reach of even the minor theaters by 1809. Consider the following description of the conclusion to The Glorious First of June, a spectacular commemoration of Howe's naval victory staged at Drury Lane in 1794: "The conclusion was a brilliant display of Fire-works, one of which exhibited the words RULE BRITANNIA in capital characters, a shower of tire descending from each letter." As in the final scenes of De Quincey's "Dream-Fugue," this display was accompanied by "performers in full chorus" (quoted in Russell, 63).

In short, the sister art (or, step-sister art) that most clearly shapes the prose of The English Mail-Coach is not music, per se, but musical theater, and especially pantomime. This is most evident at the end of "The Vision of Sudden Death," in the utterly mute, mimed reaction of the young woman sitting in the gig when the Royal Mail strikes one of her carriage's wheels: But the lady--! Oh heavens! will that spectacle ever depart from my dreams, as she rose and sank upon her seat, sank and rose, threw up her arms wildly to heaven, clutched at some visionary object in the air, fainting, praying, raving, despairing! ... The turn of the road carried the scene out of my eyes in an instant, and swept it into my dreams forever. (224)

As though to interpret the lady's silent, pantomimic gestures for us, in the second tableau of the "Dream-Fugue" De Quincey materializes the "visionary object in the air" for which she seems to be clutching as the "tackling" of a frigate (226), and in the next scene as "some false deceiving hand stretched out from the clouds," but just out of reach (227). In the final scene, the pantomime is concluded when the lady from the gig reappears atop a towering altar, enveloped in clouds of incense, "sinking, rising, trembling, fainting--raving, despairing" (231), and threatened by "the dreadful being that should baptise her with the baptism of death," a being prefigured at the end of "The Vision of Sudden Death" as a pantomime figure: "Death the crowned phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors, and the tiger roar of his voice" (224). (Sound effects and nonverbal utterances were permissible in pantomime.) The young lady's "better angel" pleads for her, however, and merely by seeing "the glory in his eye" De Quincey can tell "that he had won at last."

"Keeping Time" and "Horrid Inoculation"

Melodramatic and pantomimical displays in The English Mail-Coach include tender as well as terrific scenes. In "The Glory of Motion," De Quincey finds himself dallying along the Bath road at regular intervals in order to "make love" (196) to the lovely Fanny. However, he has only "four hundred seconds ... for whispering into a young woman's car a great deal of truth; and (by way of parenthesis) some trifle of false-hood" before the coach leaves (196). Seven or eight years of this, "timed ... by the General Post-Office," says De Quincey, "left it easy for me to do a thing which few people ever tan have done--viz., to make love for seven years, at the same time to be as sincere as ever creature was, and yet never to compromise myself by overtures that might have been foolish ... or misleading..." (197). Making love repeatedly, in exactly the same way, in exactly the same circumstances, in discrete increments of four hundred seconds precisely "timed" over a period of seven or eight years, without ever arriving at an "overture" or "a foolish declaration" (197), looks much like acting in a farce or a pantomime, playing the same role, in the same four-hundred-second scene of interrupted wooing, for a sevenor eight-year run.

In pantomime, as on the Bath road, "keeping time" is everything, and everything is repeated, one performance after another, like clockwork. Moreover, anyone might metamorphose into anything at any time. Fanny's grandfather resembles a crocodile (196), and Fanny resembles roses, as do the crocodile coachman's "ale-house" cheeks. Suddenly, in reverie, De Quincey sees, "one after the other," Fannies and roses, roses and Fannies, "without end--thick as blossoms in paradise. Then comes a venerable crocodile, in a royal livery of scarlet and gold ... and the crocodile is driving a four-in-hand from the box of the Bath mail" (198). The scene is worthy of Grimaldi, and its fantastic metamorphoses recall the "tricks of construction" featured in the typical harlequinade, where windmills can become giants, cheeses can become coach-wheels, and lobsters can turn into red-coated soldiers (Mayer 113, 188, 279), all in an instant.

Eventually, the crocodile "awakens a dreadful host of wild semi-legendary animals--griffins, dragons, basilisks, sphinxes ... unutterable horrors of monstrous and demoniac natures" (199). De Quincey professes disgust at this "horrid inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures" (200). Pantomime audiences, however, delighted in such "inoculations," particularly in the so-called "animal drama." In Harlequin and the Red Dwarf (1812), according to David Mayer, Clown dresses Pantaloon's corpse "'in the Skin of a Lion, the head of an Ass, Eagle's Wings, Cat's Feet, and a Fish's tail' to create a beast called a 'Nondescript'" (104). Mayer goes on to say that "variations of the Nondescript continued to appear in Pantomime" well into the 1830s. Similarly, in Harlequin and Fancy (1815), Fancy invites a "starving poet" "to her splendid hall where the materials of imagination are to be found: an elephant, dog, magpie, kangaroo, goose, peacock, and penguin. These animals are animated, then transformed to make the traditional ingredients of the harlequinade" (Mayer, 104).

Sudden, dream-like metamorphosis was the rule not only for the characters and props of pantomime in general, but for the scenes of the harlequinade in particular. Something of their bewildering discontinuity is reflected in the pictorial sequences of De Quincey's "Dream-Fugue": 1) "an English three-decker" or man-o'-war sailing among "tropic islands" (225-26); 2) the man-o'-war in a storm at sea, complete with "mighty mists," "maddening billows," and "driving showers" (226-27); 3) a shoreside view, with death by quick-sand (227-28); 4) the headlong journey of a "triumphal car" through the "vast necropolis" of "warrior dead" buried within a "mighty cathedral" (228-31); 5) "The golden tubes" of an organ spraying "columns of heart-shattering music" and accompanied by "choir and antichoir" and trumpet calls, as "hosts of jubilation" overtake De Quincey and his companions and sweep them heavenward (231-32).

Many sources have been round for the content and themes of De Quincey's dream visions, as well as for his theories of dreaming, especially among the writings of Jean Paul Richter (see, e.g., Burwick). The distinctly theatrical form of his dream-sequences, however, especially in The English Mail-Coach, seems to derive largely from the stage sets of pantomimic spectaculars. If the "triumphal car" that De Quincey rides in the last two scenes of the "Dream-Fugue" owes something to the hippodrama, its nautical counterpart, the "English three-decker" or battleship on which he sails in the first two scenes recalls the naumachia, or spectacular battle re-enactment, of nautical pantomime. Naumachia was confined mostly to the "Aquatic Theater" at Sadler's Wells, which also happens to have been the venue where Dibdin's and Grimaldi's pantomimic lampoons of the driving mania, Fashion's Fools and Bang-Up!, premiered in 1809 and 1810.

The same geographical and topical disconnection apparent in De Quincey's dream sequences, if not their apocalyptic tone, can be found in a synopsis of scenes from the harlequinade portion of Fashion's Fools: "[P]art of the Monastery of the Blackfriars," "Camp Scene" (with "animated cannon"), "Ouse Bridge, York," "Caen Wood, Middlesex," "Smithfield Market," "Billingsgate," ... "A Mason's Yard" (with "Magical Fruit" and "Magic Toilet Table"), "Clown's Lodge and Odd Fellows," "Scarborough Castle," and "Garden of Fashion, with Fountains of Real Water." Pantomimes also included more exotic settings like Japan, China, Venice, Paris, Egypt, and the Arctic, sometimes painted on massive, scrolling panoramas. Bang-Up, for instance, offered audiences views of Holland and Lapland, in addition to Cornwall, London, Twickenham on the Thames, the deck of a ship crossing the equator, and a race-course. Among these views of the Thames, equatorial seas, and "Fountains of Real Water," the "Aquatic Theatre" at Sadler's Wells could easily have accommodated De Quincey's "English three-decker," reduced to scale, as well as his storm at sea. Together with the equestrian milieu of the final two set-pieces of the "Dream-Fugue," such scenes point to the general influence of the "theater of war"--both on stage and on the battlefield--in the composition of the "Dream-Fugue" and The English Mail-Coach as a whole.

Harlequin as Clown: "The Aboriginal Fall"

De Quincey links the world-historical "theater of war" to the "Glory of Motion" atop the mail-coach in an ambiguous passage describing how the "speed" of the coach was sympathetically "incarnated in the fiery eyeballs" of its horses (194): This speed was incarnated in the visible contagion amongst brutes of some impulse, that, radiating into their natures, had yet its centre and beginning in man. (194; De Quincey's emphasis)

At first glance, it appears that the "man" De Quincey is referring to must be the driver of the coach. But a second glance shows the coach-driver to be indistinguishable from his military counterpart, the true "centre and beginning" of this "visible contagion" of bellicosity ultimately infecting the mail-coach horses. De Quincey exploits this ambiguity by invoking "the glory of Salamanca" as the ultimate source of the "contagion": The sensibility of the horse uttering itself in the maniac light of his eye, might be the last vibration in such a movement; the glory of Salamanca might be the first--but the intervening link that connected them, that spread the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse, was the heart of man--kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife, and then propagating its own tumults by motions and gestures to the sympathies, more or less dim, in his servant the horse. (194)

It is hard to tell, by the time we reach the end of this passage, whether "the glory of Salamanca," the victorious culmination of Wellington's 1812 Spanish campaign and the turning-point of the Peninsular War, is communicating its "visible contagion" to the eye of the coach-horse, or to the eye of a charger on the field of Salamanca itself. Accordingly, it is difficult to tell if the "heart of man--kindling in the rapture of the fiery strife" and spreading "the earthquake of the battle into the eyeball of the horse," is the heart of the cavalry officer in the midst of that "fiery strife," or the heart of the coach-driver envisioning it.

The mutual "inoculation" of coach-driver and cavalry officer in this passage helps explain what is ultimately at stake in De Quincey's dreams of "diphrelatic" skill in The English Mail-Coach: driving His Majesty's coach-horses along the mail-routes of England is symbolically equivalent to riding His Majesty's horses into the thick of battle. In place of achieving victory, however, De Quincey seeks to achieve, or to identify himself with the successful achievement of, the display of victory. It is, after all, the mail-coach's theatrical or pantomimic display--its royal insignia, its "additions," the driver's livery, the newspaper legend--that by association with "the state and the executive government," says De Quincey, "invested us with seasonable terrors" (190). At the sight of these "terrors" and the apocalyptic trumpet-sound of the coach horn, "with what deferential hurry, with what an obedient start" the turnpike gates "fly open," and "with what frenzy of trepidation" the "carts and carters" "deprecate our wrath by the precipitation" of their flight (190). This triumphant progress reaches its anti-climactic moment of truth, however, on the road to Preston, at a turning in the road that, as De Quincey says, "opened upon us the stage where the collision must be accomplished, the parties that seemed summoned to the trial, and the impossibility of saving them" (221; emphasis added).

The "parties ... summoned to the trial" on this public "stage"--a "scene" that another turn in the road will sweep "into [De Quincey's] dreams for ever" (224)--are the anonymous young man and woman in the gig. Arden Reed has observed how, by shouting his warning "ostensibly [to] save them both," De Quincey also seeks to "disrupt the couple's intercourse"--the young man is "whisper[ing]" sweet nothings in the ear of his inamorata--and "insert himself between them" (297). Thus, he "simultaneously identifies with the young man and desires to evict him." In support of this reading, Reed cites "the digression on Fanny" in "The Glory of Motion," which "introduces the story of De Quincey's romantic pursuit on the mail of a young woman" (296-97)--an episode, we might add, in which De Quincey is the young man "whispering into a young woman's ear" (196). As it happens, this implied romantic rivalry between De Quincey and the young man in the gig conforms to the standard plot of pantomime.

According to David Mayer, a two-part structure had evolved in pantomime by 1806 (2). In the first part, the "Opening," the audience was presented with the tale of two young lovers thwarted by a cruel father intent on marrying his daughter off to a rival (usually richer) suitor. In the second, the "Harlequinade," the main characters of the "Opening" were magically transformed into the sempiternal figures of Harlequin (young man), Columbine (young woman), Pantaloon (father), and Clown (rival suitor), and thrown into a series of knockabout pursuits, escapes, and magical transformations proceeding at breakneck pace. In "The Glory of Motion," we encounter a similar story of a young man (De Quincey) wooing a young woman ("Fanny of the Bath road") under the baleful eye of a disapproving grandfather (the "crocodile" coachman). De Quincey's "rival lovers" can be numbered, perhaps, among the nearly two hundred local suitors "from her own neighborhood" whom Fanny's grandfather apparently prefers to candidates from "young Oxford" (195).

As De Quincey himself indicates, however, he is not a serious suitor, and it is clear that he would not have made a very good Harlequin Lover. The role of Harlequin demanded strength, agility, and physical dexterity, for the hero had to foil or elude repeated threats of destruction at the hands of Pantaloon and Clown during the Harlequinade. (17) Such physical talents were not, to put it mildly, De Quincey's strong suits. They are prominently displayed, however, by the young man driving the gig on the road to Preston, while Fanny's Columbine role is re-assigned to the young lady who is listening to the "whispers" of her Harlequin Lover, presumably a "professed admirer" "from her own neighbourhood." (18)

Here, in a scene made dream-like by the light of the moon and the power of laudanum (a "small quantity" of which De Quincey had taken upon mounting the coach box in Manchester [214]) the young man looks up when he hears De Quincey's shout and sees the oncoming mail-coach: Then suddenly he rose; stood upright; and, by a sudden strain upon the reins, raising his horse's forefeet from the ground, he slewed him round.... One blow, one impulse given with voice and hand by the stranger, one rush from the horse, one bound as if in the act of rising to a fence, landed the docile creature's fore-feet upon the crown of the arching centre of the road. (222-23)

Although the Royal Mail clips one wheel of the gig, Harlequin's breathtaking display of "diphrelatic" skill saves both Columbine and himself from impotent Clown (De Quincey as Rival Loyer, comically paralyzed by fear and opium) and sleeping Pantaloon (no longer Fanny's "crocodile" grandfather, but De Quincey's old friend, the one-eyed coachman who gave him driving lessons).

The type of vehicle driven by the anonymous young man is not irrelevant to a full understanding of what is at stake here. A gig was a light, two-wheeled vehicle ordinarily driven by its owner, not by a hired coach-man. Chariots, the classic vehicles of warfare in the ancient world, also had two wheels, and so, presumably, does the "triumphal car" (from the Latin carrus, for "chariot") in which De Quincey, like a victorious Roman general, rides in the "Dream-Fugue." The anonymous young man's masterful handling of his horse and "chariot" thus makes him the real-life personification of De Quincey's "diphrelatic" dream-self or ego-ideal.

Moreover, it places him in "triumphal" civilian counterpoint to the young men of the 23rd Dragoons at Talavera, whose losses De Quincey refrains from communicating to the mother attracted by his newspaper headline in "Going Down with Victory": This sublime regiment ... had made the most memorable and effective charge recorded in military annals. They leaped their horses--over a trench, where they could: into it, and with the result of death or mutilation when they could not. What proportion cleared the trench is nowhere stated ... but eventually, I believe, not so many as one in four survived. (207-8, De Quincey's emphasis).

What has saved one in four of the 23rd Dragoons at Talavera from literally "Going Down with Victory" is what saves Harlequin and Columbine from going down beneath the wheels of the Royal Mail: "One blow, one impulse given with voice and hand ..., one rush from the horse, one bound" and the anonymous young man evades "Death the crowned phantom, with all the equipage of his terrors" (224), while saving the innocent young woman at his side.

We cannot fully understand the anxieties of agency that torment De Quincey in The English Mail-Coach unless we recognize that the events it describes in pantomimic and theatrical terms assume their full psychological dimensions only in the "theater of war," where, as in a hippodramatic pantomime, "keeping time" at high "velocity" is crucial to success. On the public "stage" of this "theater of war" the true moral significance of De Quincey's failure of nerve, like that of his rival's courage and resolve, is displayed for all the world to see.

De Quincey's horror of the "inoculation upon each other of incompatible natures" (200) is rooted, he suggests, in his dim awareness of "some horrid alien nature" within himself (201). That "alien nature" eventually finds expression in his cowardly re-enactment of "the aboriginal fall" (212) on the road to Preston. Faced like the cavalrymen at Talavera or Salamanca with the threat of death--or worse, the responsibility of saving others from death, which "Providence has suddenly thrown into [his] hands" (211)--De Quincey lies down before "the lion" without a struggle. His childhood confirmation as a "crusading soldier[] militant for God, by personal choice and by sacramental oath" (212), his identification with the "seasonable terrors" and "awful political mission" of the Royal Mail as it spreads the news of Napoleon's Armageddon "over the face of the land, like the opening of apocalyptic vials" (184), the "diphrelatic" skills in which he has been tutored, his practice under the watchful eye of his now somnolent companion, "Cyclops the Whip-bearer," all go for nothing at the moment of crisis. In the end, it is "Harlequin Prime," driving a one-horse gig, who proves himself, through "sheer mastery and dexterity," as Dick Cypher would put it, "bang-up prime" in averting "bang up" on the road to Preston.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

To date, we have no conclusive evidence that De Quincey ever attended a pantomime, a farce, or a hippodrama in London, Bath, or anywhere else. What I have offered here is a circumstantial argument based on thematic, imagistic, and structural features of The English Mail-Coach that I believe point to sources for the essay in the "Four-in-Hand" mania of 1809 and in popular stage entertainments of the day, especially pantomime and hippodrama. My hope is that this admittedly circumstantial argument will inspire further research into the influence that Regency and Victorian theater may have had on De Quincey's writings. In that hope, I will end by offering a clue to further investigation.

De Quincey, having finished his labors on Wordsworth's Convention of Cintra, left London early in July 1809 to visit his mother for a five-month stay. He had complained to the Wordsworths in a letter of 25 May, the day the pamphlet was finally printed, that he had spent a solitary three months in London since arriving in February, never going out "excepting 2 evenings ... spent at an Oratorio and a concert" (Eaton, 182). And yet, unhappy and lonely as he says he was, De Quincey stayed on in the city for more than month after finishing his work on The Convention of Cintra.

In part, this can be explained by the sudden appearance in London of his younger brother, Richard, who was iii and in need of money after six months at sea. But Richard left in early June (Eaton, 178), and De Quincey remained for some three or four weeks more. Is it not possible that, having devoted every waking minute from February through May to Wordsworth's pamphlet, and exhausting himself in the process, he may have wanted to relax for awhile and enjoy what the city had to offer by way of amusement?

If De Quincey was frequenting the London theaters in June of 1809, and stayed on until 3 July, he would have been able to attend the premiere of Dibdin's Fashion's Fools, in which, in scene 12, Grimaldi as Clown is "made a Member" of the Whip Club and sings a feature number ridiculing the driving mania: "In the whip-club exalted I stand,/As the cut of my coat will imply;/ And while driving, dy'e mind, four in hand/ Can completely cut out a fly's eye" (12). Three scenes previous to this, De Quincey would have witnessed--along with the "Recovery of Columbine by Harlequin," some "Magical Fruit," a squad of "John Bull's Infantry," and a "Magic Toilet Table"--the sudden appearance of a "Crocodile" (10).

Boston University

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Notes

(1) For De Quincey's work on the Cintra pamphlet and its relationship to The English Mail-Coach, see Russett, 58-64.

(2) All citations of The English Mail-Coach are from the edition by Grevel Lindop.

(3) The first section is actually untitled, but is sometimes referred to by the subtitle of the essay as a whole, "the Glory of Motion." I will follow this convention.

(4) The major impact on coach speed and stability of Obadiah Elliot's invention of the elliptical spring in 1804 is described by Bagwell, 48-49. Major improvements to road surfces, such as macadamizing, were still ten years away (Pratt, 102-4).

(5) For the dangers of coachmen's competitive racing, as well as their tendency to drink, see Copeland, 93-94, and Jackman, 317-18.

(6) On Tommy Onslow's notoriety, see Moers, 63, and George, VIII, p. 40, engraving 9759 (1801): "He was eccentric, with a passion for driving four-in-hands, which anticipated the four-in-hand Club ... to which he did not belong." See also engraving 9743, p. 35, "Lord Dashalong bent on Driving." The taste for driving oneself apparently included women as well. See, e.g., George, VIII, pp. 233-34, engraving 10174 (1803), "A Snow-Drop in Full Bloom," and pp. 859-60, engraving 11405 (1809), "VENUS A LA COQUELLE;--OR--THE SWAN-SEA VENUS." The latter depicts "Mrs. Jones of Swansea, 'a celebrated whip who made herself elegantly conspicuous by driving about in a smart chaise and pair, with two booted and spurred skip-jacks [stable-boy or jockey] as out-riders.'"

(7) This practice apparently pre-dates 1791, to judge from a print from that year satirizing "the bill introduced by Richard Gamon, M.P. for Winchester, for regulating stage-coaches (30.Geo.III,c.36). By this a penalty was imposed on the coachman for permitting any other person to drive without the consent of the inside passengers" (George, VI, p. 763, engraving 7823). In this print, according to George, "The driver is a slim undergraduate in cap and gown," and "the one inside passenger, wearing a coat with a quadruple cape and probably the coachman, leans out of the window, saying, I'm an inside Passenger & gave him leave to Drive if he should brake a few Necks its as the act Directs."

(8) The Bang-Up Dictionary defines "peg" as "a blow with a straightarm: a term used by the professors of gymnastic arts." A "jervy" or "jarvey" is a "hackney coachman" or a "hackney coach" (OED). To "tool" is to drive, although the word is also a slang obscenity ("tools," according to the BUD, meaning "private parts").

(9) "Mr. Mathews ... has latterly, among his other mimicries, shewn himself a great adept in the slang of our fashionable coach-drivers, the cut of whose intellects and greatcoats he imitates with equal felicity" (Houtchens, 101).

(10) In these one-man entertainments, Mathews would impersonate well-known actors and singers, recite monologues, and adopt several roles in quick succession as he mimicked conversations in public settings, including a mail-coach, a steam-boat, or, in a sketch from his "Celebrated Trip to Paris," "La Diligence" (Mathews, Paris, Part IV). One routine, called "Night Coach," began with a song curiously evocative of the prevailing dream-like mood of The English Mail-Coach: "Come all who fly by night,/Now's the time to take your flight,/We are just about to start.... In the morning you will seem/To have travelled in a dream!/Come--set off by our Night-coach!" (Mathews, Memorandum, 7). See also Moody, 191-97.

(11) The word "telegraph" pre-dated the invention of the electric telegraph by several decades and was used to refer to any device for sending messages at a distance, such as the mechanical semaphore. Thus it came to be applied to mail-coaches like the "Cambridge Telegraph," whose driver, Dick Vaughn, a.k.a. "Hell-Fire-Dick," was "'a favourite companion of University fashionables'" (George, VIII, p. 858, engraving 11401 [1809]: "A View of the Telegraph, Cambridge"). By 1810, the "telegraph" was apparently being commandeered by coach-mad dandies, or "ton," as in "the whimsical vehicle which conveys the man of high ton, be it either dog-cart, telegraph, or barouchette" (OED).

(12) Private e-mail communication, 7 June 2000.

(13) See, for instance, Rzepka, "Thomas" and "Dark." As late as 1995, I had accepted the idea that De Quincey never frequented the theaters (Rzepka, Sacramental, 47).

(14) Grevel Lindop has noted the extensive use of explicitly theatrical settings and conventions in De Quincey's Gothic novel, Klosterheim, which ends with the sudden raising of a curtain in a vast chapel--"capable of containing with ease from seven to eight thousand spectators"--in order to reveal to the assembled townsfolk of Klosterheim the armies of their deliverance ("Innocence," 229-30).

(15) There is some confusion in the records as to whether or not Palmer retained his connection to the Bath theater after taking on the direction of the mail-coach service. It appears that he may have retained ownership of the theater while relinquishing proprietorship of the company. According to DNB (Stephen, XV, 142), "Palmer had given up the management of the Bath Theatre in 1785, appointing others to carry on that business." Since Palmer's son, Charles, is said to have become "upon his father's death, the proprietor of the Bath theatre," we may assume that John Palmer retained "proprietorship" until his death in 1818. Hartnoll (87), Lowndes (31), and Hare (ix) seem to use the term "Proprietor" to mean theater manager, not owner of the premises. In any case, Palmer's previous and ongoing connection with the Bath Theatre Royal was probably known to De Quincey, who attended Bath Grammar School from November 1796 to January 1799 and continued living in Bath until late summer of that year. At this time Palmer was Mayor of the town and De Quincey's mother was frequenting Bath society in the company of Hannah More (Lindop, Opium, 23-30).

(16) On the arrival in England of Paul de Philipsthal's magic lantern show, Phantasmagoria, in 1802, and its impact on London's theaters, see Altick, 217-19, and George, VIII, pp. 129-30, engraving 9962.

(17) According to David Mayer, the Harlequin role required "an extraordinarily agile dancer and tumbler," capable of "quick quasi-balletic turns, leaps, and gymnastic tricks" (38) as he pursued his beloved Columbine while evading capture by Clown and Pantaloon.

(18) Atone point in "The Glory of Motion," De Quincey positively aligns himself with a particular version of the rival lover that often substituted for the role of Clown, i.e., "Dandy Lover," when he says, "The aristocratic distinctions in my favour might easily with Miss Fanny have compensated my physical deficiencies" (196). As Mayer notes, the "Dandy Lover" or "Rival Lover" is often an "aristocratic booby" (28).