by Judy Jones
BROUGHAM: The discreet, black, coachman-driven affair used by nervous peers in old Jack-the-Ripper movies. Simple, practical, and dignified, the brougham (pronounced “broom” or “BROO-em”) was named after its originator, Lord Brougham, the lord chancellor of England. It was the one major innovation in coach-making under Queen Victoria, reflecting the shift to a more sober, moralistic mood, and it remained England’s most popular closed carriage throughout the Victorian era.
Brougham
VICTORIA: A French import, known on the other side of the Channel as a “milord.” This was another very popular, coachman-driven town carriage but, being open, or at most equipped with a folding hood, it was used mainly in summer. A great favorite with Victorian ladies, it was light, low, elegant, roomy, and easy to climb into, and it came with sweeping mudguards to protect voluminous skirts.
Victoria
LANDAU: The nineteenth-century equivalent of a limo, the landau (pronounced “LAN-dow”) was second in formality to the closed town coach (the nineteenth-century equivalent of a stretch limo). A large four-horse carriage used for longdistance travel and formal-dress occasions, it held four passengers seated opposite each other (which led to its sometimes being called a “sociable-landau”) and had a jointed hood that could be raised or lowered, as with a hard-topped convertible. At its most elaborate, the landau was led by two postillions and accompanied by two liveried outriders; all six horses were perfectly matched, of course.
Landau
BAROUCHE: Like a landau in structure and status but, because its folding hood covered only one of its seats, used almost exclusively as a summer carriage. The fact that owners usually liked to drive their barouches themselves also made them a little less formal than landaus. But the barouche is the one you’ll find most often referred to in novels, marking ceremonial occasions, family outings, and sporting events. The snobbish Mrs. Elton, in Jane Austen’s Emma, never misses a chance to tell everybody that her brother owns one, and Mr. Pickwick first meets amiable old Mr. Wardle while the latter is climbing out of his for a family picnic.
Barouche
GIG: The Volkswagen of the Victorian era; a light, open, one-horse carriage that carried one or two passengers perched directly above the two wheels. Not particularly elegant but compact, economical, and maneuverable, gigs became increasingly popular as the century wore on. The country doctor, for one, nearly always drove up in his gig. Not acceptable for town use.
Gig
DOGCART: As popular as a suburban station wagon, and used in much the same way. Originally built to hold a sportsman’s dogs in a ventilated storage boot beneath the seat, the dogcart had a fold-up footboard that could double as a seat, thereby accommodating four passengers back to back. Since practicality, not fashion, was what counted in country vehicles, most landowners kept at least one dogcart on the estate.
WAGONETTE: A big, plain, open wagon of a thing, with bench seats inside, made specifically for family excursions in the country. Although not elegant, wagonettes were very much in vogue for a while; Queen Victoria and the earl of Chesterfield didn’t mind owning them, and King Louis Philippe once sent Victoria the French version, called a char-à-bancs, as a gift.
POST CHAISE: The gentlemanly alternative to sharing legroom in a large mail or passenger coach. One hired the post chaise in stages, from inn to inn. They were always painted yellow and were traditionally driven by an elderly postillion dressed in a yellow jacket and a beaver hat. Although this was considered the first-class way to travel long distances, anyone looking for the equivalent of flying the Concorde had to own the private version of the post chaise, called a traveling chariot, emblazoned with the family crest.
HANSOM CAB: The “Gondola of London”; the vehicle hired taxi-style by Sherlock Holmes and any other gentleman who couldn’t afford, or didn’t want, to keep a private carriage. For a long time, hansoms were considered quite dashing; no respectable lady would be caught dead riding alone in one, or with any man other than her husband.
Hansom cab THE MONEY: A GUIDE FOR
PICKPOCKETS, WASTRELS, AND
FORTUNE HUNTERS
As some of you no doubt remember, David Copperfield was born with a caul, that is, with a portion of fetal membrane encasing his infant head, believed in those days to be a sign of good luck and a safeguard against drowning. David’s mother having just been widowed (and financially reduced), the caul “was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas.” A solitary bidder “offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry,” and subsequently the caul “was put up in a raffle … to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend five shillings.” It was won by “an old lady with a handbasket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence halfpenny short.”
Now, how much money did the raffle realize—more than the desired fifteen guineas or less? And how much did the old lady pay? And what’s a guinea anyway? We’re glad you asked. Herewith, a guide to the intricacies of the English monetary system, back when England was calling the shots.
POUND: Or, more formally, the pound sterling, for over nine hundred years a symbol and index of Britain’s power, wealth, and determination to get her way in the world. Originally equivalent to a pound-weight of silver pennies, called sterlings (or “little stars,” after the mark each was stamped with), later simply the basic unit of English currency—currency that was not foreign, not colonial, not debased, but “sterling,” or lawful. It came in the form of a pound note (paper) or a sovereign (gold coin). The slang term is “quid,” always in the singular, and the sign, equivalent to our $, is a crossed L, £, from the first letter of librum, the Latin word for pound. Divided, prior to 1971’s shift to decimals, into shillings and pence.
SHILLING: Twenty of them used to make up a pound, before they were discontinued in 1971. In its mood, not unlike our quarter: Lots of routine daily business was done in them; books, lunches, shoeshines, magazines, and gloves bought. Abbreviated s., as in 12s., or symbolized by a slash, as in 12/-, “twelve shillings even.” The slang term is “bob.”
PENNY: In the plural, “pence,” twelve of which used to make up a shilling (and 240 a pound). Now the pound comprises one hundred new pence (or one hundred p, pronounced “pee”). Used to be available in several denominations, among them the ha’penny (or halfpenny), tuppence (or twopence), thrippence (or threepence), fourpence (also called a groat), and sixpence (also called a tanner, also a teston). Abbreviated d., from the Latin denarius, an old Roman coin. Thus £8 3s. 8d.— or, alternatively, £8/3/8—is eight pounds, three shillings, and eight pence.
There you have the basic units, simple enough provided you can remember there are twenty shillings in a pound and twelve pence in a shilling and not the other way around. But, as you know, the English don’t like things to be too simple. So we have:
GUINEA: A little bigger than a pound—one shilling bigger, to be precise. At first a coin, made from gold from Guinea, with a little elephant stamped on it and meant to be employed specifically in the Africa trade. Since 1813, simply a unit—£1 1s.—traditionally used to state such quantities as professional fees, subscription amounts, and the value of pictures, horses, and estates. A “prestige” way of stating the cost of something, as well as a way of understating, psychologically—à la $9.98—that cost.
FLORIN: A silver coin, with a flower on it, worth two shillings.
CROWN: Likewise silver, with a you-know-what stamped on it. Worth five shillings. (A half crown is, obviously, 2½ shillings.)
FARTHING: A quarter of a penny.
MITE: Still less worth having: an eighth of a penny.
So Mrs. Copperfield advertised the caul for £15 15s. She received a £2-plus-sherry offer (not alluring, given that her own sherry was already on the market). At the raffle, fifty people paid 2½ shillings (or a half crown) each, £6 5s. altogether. The old lady came up with an additional 5s., less 2½d. Total: £6 9s. 9½d., or
considerably less than half the amount that had at first been asked. On the other hand, those were the days when a pound sterling really was a pound sterling.
Talking about what money will buy is tricky enough in one’s own country on the day one is actually considering spending some of it. Arriving at exact equivalences over the decades and across national boundaries is almost impossible. Still, certain generalizations can be made. Among them:
Inflation is not the inexorable force recent history—and especially recent British history—would lead us to believe it is. Since 1661, prices in Britain have alternately risen and fallen, fallen and risen, and only in the last generation gone haywire. While there was considerable inflation during the early part of the nineteenth century (what with the Napoleonic Wars), by the 1820s, things had pretty much leveled off. In fact, in 1911, on the eve of World War I, a pound would buy more than it did on the eve of the Great Plague of 1665.
International events gravely affect how many francs or dollars or quetzals the pound—or any other unit of currency—is worth. Around the time of the American Revolution, a pound brought between $4.50 and $5.00; that figure shot up to $12.00 during the American Civil War, returning to “normal” during 1880, not falling to a new “normal” level of about $2.50 until after World War II. Today it’s worth well under $2.00.
Not only does the perceived “formal” value of the pound fluctuate, so does the living standard of the society it serves, not to mention the degree to which transfer of cash, as opposed to, say, barter, or the providing of room and board by an employer, accounts for how that society spends its money. Thus, as the nineteenth century drew to a close, though few people were making more than a couple of pounds a week, just one pound would buy six bottles of whiskey or thirty gallons of fresh milk or the rent of a shop or house for nearly a month or fifteen pairs of serviceable ladies’ shoes.
Not only do the perceived formal value of the pound and the living standard of the society fluctuate, so do buying habits, human needs, and customs of the country. For instance, money seems to go further in an agricultural society than in an industrial one, and in a part of the country—or of the century—that boasts a lot of gardens and pastures, where the price of tomatoes, milk, and brussels sprouts seldom packs much of a wallop, than it does in town. Then, too, if there are no music halls or gin mills within a twenty-mile radius of your house, you don’t allow for many evenings out in your entertainment budget.
All that said, let’s look a little more closely at Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, who, in 1832, the year the First Reform Bill was passed by Parliament, can be overheard describing herself to a distraught Lydgate (who’s just lost four or five pounds at the billiard table) as having “seven hundred a-year of my own fortune, and nineteen hundred a-year that Mr. Casaubon left me, and between three and four thousand of ready money in the bank.” Keeping in mind that a few years before, it has been estimated by a journal of the day, a family could live on a minimum income of one guinea a week, provided they didn’t drink or “seek entertainment,” you can see that this makes Dorothea—while no Barbara Hutton—a very wealthy woman. Moreover, not only was an 1832 pound worth at least fifteen of today’s pounds, it went further, and living standards were lower, especially in Dorothea and Lydgate’s small, not-yet-industrialized, north-of-England town. Given all of this, our Miss Brooke had an annual income that was the equivalent of at least $75,000 a year, with another $115,000 in her savings account, which, since she owned her own home and didn’t care about jewels or parties, was more than enough to endow hospitals, found a village, and bail Lydgate out. As to where her income came from— that is, what it meant to have “seven hundred a-year” in the first place—you should know that rents on the land he owned were the major source of every aristocrat’s income (as they still are for, say, Prince Charles). Of course, there were such things as a commercial class (relegated to London and other big cities), as profit, interest, and investment, but most country folk didn’t get embroiled to any great extent. Better to “live on” one’s own estate, in both senses of the phrase. THE NAMES: ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
So we say Lord Tomato and they say Lord Tomahto; what’s the big deal? We all speak the same language, right? Wrong. It turns out that they speak English and we just translate, more or less successfully, as you’ll see from the following list of well-known names.
Bolingbroke (as in Henry IV’s surname): BOLL-in-brook
Pepys (as in Samuel, the diarist): PEEPS
Cowper (as in William, the poet): COOP-er
Crichton (as in James, the Scottish Renaissance man known as “the Admirable Crichton,” as well as all British families named Chrichton or Chreighton, and even the American novelist, Michael): CRY-ten
Cockburn (as in Alicia, the eighteenth-century wit; Sir Alexander, the nineteenth-century lord chief justice of England; plain old Alexander, the expatriate journalist; plus Cockburn Harbour and Cockburn Sound): CO-burn
Two Scottish cities:
Edinburgh: ED-in-burra
Glasgow: GLAZ-ko or GLAZ-go
Two place names that are easier to pronounce correctly if you don’t smoke:
Marlborough: MARL-burra or MAR-burra
Pall Mall: PELL-MELL
One whose correct pronunciation may sound like an affectation, but isn’t:
Queensberry (as in the marquess of): QUEENS-bry (and that’s MAR-kwis)
One case of the language doing a double take:
Magdalen and Magdalene (the college at Oxford and the college at Cambridge): pronounced like “maudlin,” which derives from the name Magdalen
And a few that follow rules:
The county names ending in cester—drop the c and the letter preceding it: Gloucester, Worcester, Leicester: GLOSS-ter, WOOS-ter, LESS-ter, also, their alternative names: Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Leicestershire: GLOSS-te-sher, WOOS-te-sher, LESS-te-sher
The wiches—drop the w: Norwich, Woolwich, and the tip-off, Greenwich: NOR-ich, WOOL-ich, GREN-ich
The wicks—ditto: Northwick, Southwick, Warwick, Smithwick: NORTH-ick, SOUTH-ick, WAR-ick, SMITH-ick
A London wark that can get you coming and going: Southwark: SUTH-erk
The ers—say “ar” (but stay on your toes; the rule doesn’t always apply): Berkeley (as in George, the Irish philosopher; Sir William, the colonial governor of Virginia; also, the former earldom and the square), Berkshire (the county), Derby (the borough, the earldom, and the English horse race): BARK-lee, BARK-sher, DAR-by And a tricky one: Hertford: HAR-ferd
Finally, a couple of instances in which they insist on speaking English when they should be speaking French:
Beauchamp (as in Guy de, Richard de, Thomas de; London’s Beau-champ Place, and Beauchamp Tower in the Tower of London): BEECH-em
Beaulieu (the town and the abbey): BYOO-lee
And, the ultimate in inscrutable British English:
Cholmondeley (a common last name): CHUM-lee
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?
Literature does have its practical applications. For instance, suppose you’re at a dinner party and you overhear your hostess describing you to the person on your left as “a real Baron de Charlus.” What do you say to your new acquaintance? And how should you feel about your hostess? Or yourself? See below.
Baron de Charlus (from Proust’s Rememberance of Things Past): A closet case. An aristocrat who travels in the best society, the Baron cultivates his image as a woman chaser while dating an eclectic assortment of boys on the sly. French aristocrats do this all the time, of course, but the Baron suffers from such a virulent strain of depravity that it not only leads him into scandal, it makes him prematurely senile.
Cousin Bette (from Balzac’s Cousin Bette): An aging spinster consumed by hatred. An ugly duckling who, for various reasons, never metamorphosed into a swan, Bette is dependent on her relatives and is, therefore, forced to hide her envy and bitterness behind a facade of goodwill. She’s nobody�
��s fool, however; secretly, she’s dedicated her life to ruining other people’s.
Father Zossima (from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov): A famous church elder, holy and ascetic, who teaches a doctrine of love and forbearance. When he dies, a miracle is expected, but instead, his body begins to decompose almost immediately. Cynics point to this as a sign that his teachings were false. Ask yourself (a) if your hostess is a cynic, and (b) if you’ve had a checkup recently.
Isabel Archer (from James’ The Portrait of a Lady): An intelligent, vivacious, high-minded American girl who’s off to Europe in search of her Destiny. Which is to say she’s headed for trouble. Isabel has her faults: She’s naïve and a little presumptuous, she gets huffy when criticized, and she could do with a lesson or two in picking her friends. Still, you can’t blame her for wanting to get out of Albany.
Julien Sorel (from Stendhal’s The Red and the Black): A brilliant, hypocritical young parvenu. A misfit determined to make it in a society he despises, Sorel uses his love affairs to get ahead and almost manages to become a successful cad. He is both too smart and too sentimental for his own good, however; ultimately, he self-destructs.
Dorothea Brooke (from Eliot’s Middlemarch): A young woman of great intelligence and integrity who longs to devote herself to a worthy cause. Her idealism gets her into a disastrous marriage with Mr. Casaubon, an arid scholar who can’t see the forest for the trees. Dorothea’s a sweet kid, but she really ought to lighten up a bit.
