These unseasonable hours meant, of course, very early rising indeed for would-be passengers, and not even that hardy generation endured the infliction without a very great deal of grumbling. But there was no remedy. It was only a choice of ills, whether you had to be called at a little after three o’clock on perhaps a winter’s morning for a day’s journey, or whether you elected to wait until the afternoon, and so, travelling through the night, were deposited at your journey’s end on the pavements of Bath or Birmingham, or some other strange place, at the inhospitable hours between midnight and six a.m.; in which latter case you would be in that extremely unpleasant position of wanting to go to bed when the rest of the world was considering the expediency of getting out of it.
Some, difficult to arouse in the early morn, adopted the heroic expedient of sitting up all night. Others, like Leigh Hunt and James Payn, taught by long experience, engaged a bedroom overnight at the inn whence the coach started, so that they might be on the spot and lie two hours longer. Even then, as Payn confessed, he often slept too long, and so, without breakfast, often carrying his boots in his hand, and in other ways not completely dressed, would dash into the coach at the very moment of its moving away.
“We have often wondered,” wrote Dickens, “how many months’ incessant travelling in a post-chaise it would take to kill a man; and, wondering by analogy, we should very much like to know how many months of constant travelling in a succession of early coaches an unfortunate mortal could endure. Breaking a man alive upon the wheel would be nothing to breaking his rest, his peace, his heart--everything but his fast--upon four; and the punishment of Ixion (the only practical person, by-the-by, who has discovered the secret of the perpetual motion) would sink into utter insignificance before the one we have suggested. If we had been a powerful churchman in those good times when blood was shed as freely as water, and men were mowed down like grass in the sacred cause of religion, we would have lain by very quietly till we got hold of some especially obstinate miscreant, who positively refused to be converted to our faith, and then we would have booked him for an inside place in a small coach, which travelled day and night; and, securing the remainder of the places for stout men with a slight tendency to coughing and spitting, we would have started him forth on his last travels--leaving him mercilessly to all the tortures which the waiters, landlords, coachmen, guards, boots, chambermaids, and other familiars on his line of road might think proper to inflict.