Frank Churchill's haircut was more expensive than you think.

When Frank Churchill rides off to town to buy Miss Fairfax a piano, he claims to have gone for a haircut. Emma consequently thinks Frank very frivolous. I propose that this is not simply because of the long ride in the summer heat, but because the road between Highbury and London would have contained numerous tolls, resulting in frivolous expense as well.

Tolls were one of the factors that made travel so expensive. The tolls were collected and used by Turnpike Trusts who were created by legislation and who maintained the roads.

You had to pay the toll regardless of whether you were walking or riding a horse or driving a carriage, though various fees applied. It cost more to drive a carriage with narrow wheels, for example, because this caused more damage to the roads. I am not sure if walkers in the countryside had to pay at all turnpikes, but I have been told that they did in town.

The idea of the toll road, or turnpike, came into being around the mid 1700s when traffic on highways started increasing and it became too difficult for parishes to maintain them. The word turnpike describes the spikes that could be erected at the toll gate by turning a wheel, to prevent people from crossing. Turnpike trusts had to erect signs, often in the form of a painted or engraved rock, indicating how far it was to the next town, which I think might have been the beginning of this practice on highways today, and is the origin of the term "milestone."

At first, the system wasn't too bad. The expenses were covered, and some trusts even leased out the right to collect tolls. This way, the trust had a steady income and less managing to do, and a privateer could make a bit of money. But as trade and traffic increased, the whole system became insupportable.

In isolated areas where there were not many roads, the introduction of tolls became a real hardship. The local residents who had used the roads for centuries could no longer afford to use them.

Most of the roads in London were toll roads, making it very expensive to get from one end to the other. This became a serious problem for the working class, who lived on one side of the city and worked on the other. Even though they walked to work, the better part of their wages was eaten up by the tolls. And it was the city. It wasn't like they could get where they were going without using the streets, so they really had no choice.

This, among other things, led to the Open Roads Movement. In the 1830s there were riots against the tolls, and the leaders of the uprising were transported to Australia.

It seems logical to us that the government should build and maintain the roads; in fact, I would say it is the one thing we can all agree on about the role of government - somebody's got to take care of the roads. But it was not so clear in pre-Victorian times. It was really the advent of the railway that did away with the turnpike trusts, which came to be seen as a barrier to free trade. Consequently, by 1888, the expense of roads was turned over to the local councils. And the government became justified in the eyes of the people ... sort of.

Melanie Kerr is the author of Follies Past: a Prequel to Pride and Prejudice

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What the Victorians thought of the Regency

I came across this excerpt in a 1978 Jane Austen coffee-table book that someone bought me at a garage sale. I thought it was wonderful. The writer of it, Rev. Sydney Smith, would have been about the same age as Jane Austen, four years older. This passage is him describing, from the vantage point of the mid-nineteenth Century, what life was really like in Jane Austen's time. I love this, because it is so practical, so devoid of the romaticism with which the passage of 200 years has painted the period. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

"It is of some importance at what period a man is born. A young man, alive at this period, hardly knows to what improvements of human life he has been introduced; and I would bring before his notice the following eighteen changes which have taken place in England since I first began to breathe in it the breath of life.

Gas was unknown: I groped about the streets of London in all but the utter darkness of a twinkling oil lamp, under the protection of watchmen in their grand climacteric, and exposed to every species of depredation and insult.

I have been nine hours in sailing from Dover to Calais before the invention of steam. It took me nine hours to go from Taunton to Bath, before the invention of railroads, and I now go in six hours from Taunton to London! In going from Taunton to Bath, I suffered between 10,000 and 12,000 severe contusions, before stone-breaking Macadam was born.

I paid £15 in a single year for repairs of carriage-springs on the pavement of London; and I now glide without noise or fracture, on wooden pavements.

I can walk, by the assistance of the police, from one end of London to the other, without molestation; or, if tired, get into a cheap and active cab, instead of those cottages on wheels, which the hackney coaches were at the beginning of my life.

I had no umbrella! They were little used, and very dear. There were no waterproof hats, and my hat has often been reduced by rains into its primitive pulp.

I could not keep my smallclothes in their proper place, for braces were unknown. If I had the gout, there was no colchicum. If I was bilious, there was no calomel. If I was attacked by ague, there was no quinine. There were filthy coffee-houses instead of elegant clubs. Game could not be bought. Quarrels about uncommuted tithes were endless. The corruptions of Parliament, before Reform, infamous. There were no banks to receive the savings of the poor. The Poor Laws were gradually sapping the vitals of the country; and, whatever miseries I suffered, I had no post to whisk my complaints for a single penny to the remotest corners of the empire; and yet, in spite of all these privations, I lived on quietly, and am now ashamed that I was not more discontented, and utterly surprised that all these changes and inventions did not occur two centuries ago.

I forgot to add that, as the basket of stage-coaches, in which luggage was then carried, had no springs, your clothes were rubbed all to pieces; and that even in the best society one third of the gentlemen at least were always drunk."

Melanie Kerr is the author of Follies Past: a Prequel to Pride and Prejudice

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Austin hanged in Park Lane!

If you are a spelling geek like me, you will instantly have noticed that I could not be talking about the novelist, Jane Austen, and you would be correct. I could not help myself. The last man to be publicly hanged in London was a Mr. John Austin, in 1783. I came to this knowledge whilst looking for information about Georgian London, specifically Mayfair. I was confused by John Rocque's historic map which did not contain any Park Lane. Hyde Park was there, just at the edge of the city, but the road along its easterly border was called Tiburn Lane. What is this all about? I thought. I found the answer quite shocking; I thought others might be interested.
Tiburn, or Tyburn as it is more commonly spelled, was the name of the village that played unfortunate host to London's public executions for several centuries.Prisoners from Newgate Prison were taken there to be hanged at the Tyburn Tree, which was a triple gallows, with three posts, connected at the top by beams from which were suspended three nooses. In the late 18th century, public executions ceased, and prisoners were hanged within the prison instead.
It is not known precisely where the Tyburn Tree stood, though I am, no doubt, stretching the truth to suggest anyone was actually hanged in what is now Park Lane. Many believe it was in what is now Connaught Square, another highly desirable address. There is a memorial of the Tyburn Tree in a traffic circle in modern day Edgware Road, with three little cones to mark the three legs of the gallows.
Tiburn Lane was called such, rather obviously, because it led to Tiburn, pretty well right to the gallows. I find it highly amusing to think of all those posh people living in London's once notorious West End, where Newgate's hapless prisoners were carted to their doom.
I suspect these posh people were the motivation for the name change. Nobody wanted to talk about Tyburn any more, and those living in what had come to be, and remains, the most prestigious address in London would tolerate the association. It could be that by the time the gallows went, they were the only remnant of the village of Tyburn, and so the name did not hold any meaning any more, but I doubt it. London is full of names that refer to things that are not there any more. Consider Mayfair itself. No May Fair going on there for ages.
In any event, the name of the road was changed at some point to Park Lane. John Rocque's map was done in 1746, so I know it hadn't changed at that point, which makes sense because the gallows were still there. Another ordnance survey map in 1806 shows it as Park Lane, so by the time of Pride and Prejudice, I believe it would have been known as such. I like to think that there were still some people around calling it Tiburn Lane for a while after it had changed though, as sometimes happens when road names change. And I like to think of the posh people emphatically correcting them."You mean Park Lane. It is called Park Lane now, you know, because of the park. Such an excellent park, do not you think?"
We tend to think that public executions happened all the time in the olden days; that is how it seems in film and television. But the truth is that they were actually quite rare. Most people were transported if anything, and infinitely more frequently were recorded as having died of "teeth."

(Follies Past: A Prequel to Pride and Prejudice, is a novel by Melanie Kerr. Expected publication date is October 31, 2013. Until then, I will be posting things I learned in the course of my research and of my life so far as a geek. Follow me on twitter @FolliesPast.)