Transport And Courting

Having heard the good news of your approaching marriage I have the pleasure of offering you my services in setting your teeth in complete order as per annexed schedule of prices. This operation, which is useful in all ordinary events of life, is indispensable under the present circumstances. The first impressions of married life are ineffaceable and their consequences of the greatest gravity. I therefore cannot too strongly
advise you to have your teeth cleaned by a skilfully conscientious practitioner.

It would be difficult to overrate the influence, on late Victorian courtship, of two forms of locomotion: the hansom cab and the bicycle. The hansom had a reputation for romance, and the mere act of entering its dark intimate interior put romantic ideas into couples' heads. On a foggy night the passengers were as free from external observations as if they were in a Black Maria. True, the driver had the means of watching what went on inside, through a little opening in the roof (which is more than a taxi-driver can do with the aid of his mirror), but he was not the man to intervene unless the appearance of the couple was such as to arouse misgivings. 'He knew without telling if you wanted to go fast or slow,' says W. MacQueen-Pope in his Twenty Shillings in the Pound, 'and
he would linger along the darker parts of the drive.' There was one weakness about the design of a hansom which could disrupt the sentimental mood-the proximity of the rear of the horse. 'But Londoners were used to this,' says MacQueen-Pope. Oddly enough, the compilers of etiquette books, who were still warning young women not to walk at night with any man other than father or brother, never issued warnings about riding a deux in hansom cabs. Possibly they regarded the driver as adequate chaperon.

The bicycle boom came in the 'nineties. The young Woman of a generation before would have been too modest, too frail and too unenterprising to venture out on two wheels, even if she had dared to suggest it to her parents. By contrast, the young woman of the 'nineties was the nearest thing to an athlete the nineteenth century (or any earlier century) had produced. She saw and recognized the one instrument
necessary to complete her emancipation. 'When the day arrives on which woman shall call herself absolutely free,' says Richard Le Gallienne in Vanishing Roads, 'let the monument ,. .take the form of an enthroned and laurelled bicycle.' Now a young woman could go where she wished and with whom she wished. If she did not set out with a young man, she could meet him at a pre-arranged point. Or, as a blind, she could start off with a girl companion. Mr John Boyd Dunlop's new pneumatic tyre, prone to puncture as it then was, afforded welcome opportunities for gallantry to young men anxious to succour damsels in distress. The redoubtable Mrs Humphry ('Madge'of Truth) complained that young men on bicycles were so anxious to study the comfort of the girls they escorted that they indulged in bad manners towards other road users.

Fathers of bicycling girls could sometimes be disarmed on the plea that the machine afforded healthy open-air exercise, and if they suspected that it was not fresh air alone which accounted for red cheeks and sparkling eyes in their daughters, they held their peace. Or perhaps they found consolation in Samuel Butler's assurance that the greater freedom between the sexes was unlikely to lead to universal debauchery; 'this might perhaps have been true once, but the world is grown older and can be trusted'.

Anyway, a girl could always defend herself with a hatpin.

Inventors were incorrigible, and soon they produced attractive versions of the tandem. It was a more decorous vehicle than its latter-day counterpart; the lady sat upright instead of crouching low with her chin on her partner's rump. Though often unsuitably dressed for the occasion, she did look sweet upon the seat of her bicycle built for two.