The Omnibus: A Cultural History of Urban Transportation 3031187075, 9783031187070

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The Omnibus A Cultural History of Urban Transportation

Elizabeth Amann

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Editor

Joseph Bristow Department of English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a monograph series that aims to represent innovative and interdisciplinary research on literary and cultural works that were produced from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siècle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series features studies that assist in reassessing the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of different types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects a broad shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the 1800-1900 period but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era.

Elizabeth Amann

The Omnibus A Cultural History of Urban Transportation

Elizabeth Amann Department of Literary Studies Ghent University Ghent, Belgium

ISSN 2634-6494     ISSN 2634-6508 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ISBN 978-3-031-18707-0    ISBN 978-3-031-18708-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of Chapter 7 was published as ‘The Omnibus as Social Observatory: Class encounters in Nineteenth-century Literature of Urban Transportation’ in Orbis Litterarum 73:6 (2018), 520-535 (Print ISSN: 0105-7510; Online ISSN: 1600-0730). Earlier versions of several other passages of this book were published in the following articles: ‘Reading (on) the Tram: Benito Pérez Galdós’s “La novela en el tranvía”’, Orbis Litterarum 69:3 (June 2014), 193-214 (Print ISSN: 0105-7510; Online ISSN: 1600-0730); ‘Tram Flânerie: Streetcar Impressions of Nineteenth-Century Madrid’, Confluencia: Revista Hispanica de Cultura y Literatura, 32:2 (2017), 167-177 (Print ISSN: 0888-6091; Online ISSN: 2328-6962); ‘The Devil in the Omnibus: From Le Charivari to Blackwood’s Magazine’, 39:1 (2017), 1-13 (Print ISSN: 0890-5495; Online ISSN: 1477-2663); ‘En tranvía: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Collective Transportation in Madrid’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, XCV:8 (2018), 983–98 (Print ISSN: 1475-3820; Online ISSN: 1478-3428). I am grateful to the editors of all these journals for permission to reprint. I would like to thank the Flemish Research Council (FWO) and the Special Research Fund (BOF) of Ghent University for awarding me sabbaticals to complete research for this project. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Literary Studies and in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy at Ghent University for their support. I am also indebted to the doctoral and post-doctoral researchers who have lightened my load and buoyed my spirits over the years: Nettah Yoeli Rimmer, María José González Dávila, Marieta Navarrete, Christina Bézari, Jules De Doncker, and Maxim Rigaux. v

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the peer reviewers of this manuscript for their helpful suggestions and to Molly Beck, Marika Lysandrou and the series editor, Professor Joseph Bristow, for their support of the project. Many thanks as well to the Palgrave production team. I have had many fruitful conversations over the years with Michael Boyden, Marius Hantea, Max Kramer, Mihaela Bacou, Frederick de Armas, Jim Mandrell, Tamar Herzog, Ken Moure, Andrew Ginger, and Aurélie Van de Peer, who offered useful suggestions. Special thanks go to Valérie Stiénon for her constant encouragement and friendship, for her insight into nineteenth-century French culture and for many delightful museum outings. I would also like to thank my friend and colleague Diana Arbaiza who read several sections of the manuscript and offered invaluable advice along the way. As always, I am grateful to my parents, Ross and Marguerite Amann, for their love and support. My greatest debt is to my husband, Gerardo Bracho Carpizo, whose encouragement, wisdom and love make everything possible. Paris, 2022

Contents

1 Introduction: Snails on the Omnibus  1 2 Between Modernity and Regression 19 3 Comic Commonplaces 45 4 The Social Experience of the Omnibus 75 5 The Omnibus as Political Metaphor113 6 Streetcars of Desire175 7 An Observatory of Poverty251 8 Winged Coursers of the Mind279 9 Epilogue: The Omnibus and Its Others323 Index355

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3

Fig. 5.4

John Leech, ‘Awful Occurrence’. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark René Georges Hermann-Paul, ‘Escargots d’omnibus’. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France Henry Emy, ‘L’Infusion des omnibus’. Ville de Paris / Bibliothèque historique (2-BRO-300470) William Maw Egley, ‘Omnibus Life in London’. Photo: Tate Adrien Marie, ‘Types et Physionomies de Paris—L’Intérieur d’un omnibus’. Private Collection Grandville, Les Métamorphoses du jour, planche LX. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France ‘New Omnibus Regulation’. Courtesy of The University of Chicago Library John Leighton, ‘Turning the Tables’. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library Sahib, ‘L’Intérieur d’un omnibus’. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France William Heath, ‘The Omni-buss’. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University ‘The Collision’. © The Trustees of the British Museum John Doyle, ‘New State Omnibus, or the Man wot is Cad to the man wot was Cad to the Man wot drove the Sovereign’. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection. The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 2014. Metropolitan Museum of Art John Doyle, ‘The Hopposition Buses!’ © The Trustees of the British Museum

2 5 48 53 55 79 87 89 99 115 116

118 119

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Fig. 5.5 Fig. 5.6 Fig. 5.7 Fig. 5.8 Fig. 5.9 Fig. 5.10

Fig. 5.11

Fig. 5.12 Fig. 5.13 Fig. 5.14 Fig. 5.15 Fig. 5.16 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 8.1

Fig. 8.2

C. J. Grant, ‘The Rival Omnibusses’. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University John Doyle, ‘Omnibus Race’. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art John Doyle, ‘Breaking up for the Vacation’. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art John Doyle, ‘New Omnibus’. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark Alfred Morgan, ‘One of the People (Gladstone in an Omnibus)’. Artefact / Alamy Stock Photo Grandville, ‘Voyage de la pensée immuable à travers les populations empressées’ (left panel). Courtesy of The Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. Northwestern University Grandville, ‘Voyage de la pensée immuable à travers les populations empressées’ (centre panel). Courtesy of The Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. Northwestern University Grandville, ‘Voyage de la pensée immuable à travers les populations empressées’ (right panel). Private Collection  Benjamin, ‘N’oubliez-vous pas le postillon, bourgeois! c’est juste, tiens, voici... une poignée de main’. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France Charles Joseph Traviès de Villers, ‘Le Char de l’état’. Courtesy of The Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. Northwestern University Paul Hadol, ‘L’Omnibus de Versailles: La Députation parisienne du 2 juillet’. CCØ Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet-Histoire de Paris Henry Bacon, ‘Égalité’. Brooklyn Museum. The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo Sahib (drawing) and Kitt (captions), ‘Voyages dans Paris— L’Amour vu d’un omnibus’. Private Collection Alfred Le Petit, ‘Les Victimes de l’amour’. Gallica, BnF. Public Domain Adolphe Willette, ‘Parce Domine’. CCØ Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris Sidney Starr, ‘The City Atlas’, c. 1888-1889. Oil on canvas, 60.9 x 50.6 cm. Gift of the Massey Collection of English Painting, 1946. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC ‘Heads from the Omnibus’. Courtesy of The University of Chicago Library

121 123 125 126 128

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131 132 136 138 141 153 177 181 182

285 300

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Snails on the Omnibus

It is raining (omnibus stories almost always start in times of rain). A ‘nondescript’ man, without an umbrella, runs after an omnibus. In his arms, he holds a large grey paper bag. The conductor pretends not to see him (‘Omnibus conductors are farceurs in times of rain’). When he finally does get on, dripping wet, the other passengers are annoyed. A woman complains that he is ruining her silk dress and asks him to put his wet bag on the floor. Not long after, a lady observes a snail climbing up her skirt. Another appears on a male passenger’s boot. (In times of rain, snails emerge from their shells.) The passengers wonder who has introduced the snails on board: ‘Fourteen “not I” are heard. Only one passenger has said nothing’. It is the man with the paper bag. When they examine the suspect article, they find that it is pierced all over: ‘Two hundred of those corniform beings had broken their chains and were regaining, their sacks on their backs, the land of freedom’. With the other passengers’ aid, the man begins to collect the snails in his hat, but the beasts, who have now tasted freedom, continue to escape. Soon the passengers are laughing hysterically, and the driver, who has no idea what is going on, wonders whether he should be taking them to Charenton (an insane asylum). The only passenger who is not amused is the lady in the silk dress who pulls the cord to stop the omnibus. She does so, however, with such force that the driver falls from his seat, jerking the omnibus to a sudden halt and jolting the woman onto © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7_1

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the hat, which she crushes along with all the snails. The story ends with a legal battle, the woman suing for damages to her silk dress and the man reclaiming his hat and snails. This anecdote, which first appeared in the legal journal Le Droit in 1837, had a surprising afterlife.1 Not only was it reprinted in newspapers from England and France to Switzerland, the United States and Algeria, but it was also reworked in very different ways and with a surprising variety of animals.2 In 1850, the caricaturist John Leech, perhaps playing on his own last name, published in Punch an image of an omnibus full of women in distress (Fig.  1.1). The caption reads: ‘Chorus of Unprotected Females. Conductor! Stop! Conductor! Omnibus-Man! Here’s a Gentleman had an Accident and broke a jar of Leeches and they’re all over the Omnibus!’3 In an 1856 novel by Paul de Kock, the offending item is a bag of maggots brought on board by an angler.4 In yet another version, the beast is a live lobster, who pinches a female passenger’s dress. As in the original

Fig. 1.1  John Leech, ‘Awful Occurrence’.  Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark

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anecdote, the tale ends at the commissariat, the man reclaiming his supper and the woman refusing to sacrifice her skirt.5 The story served not only as a comic tale but also as an erotic vignette. In Gustave Cane’s ‘Le Tramway de Charenton’ (1893), a young man is flirting with an attractive brunette on a tram when a neighbour points out an enormous snail climbing up her skirt with ‘its horns all out’. Taking inspiration from the creature, the young man escorts her to a private room in a restaurant, where they hunt ‘the interesting beast’ together.6 Years later, the poet François Coppée, in an elegy for the last horse-­ drawn omnibus, would shrug off the anecdote as the type of ‘innocent bawdiness [that] made our parents laugh’.7 Its persistence, however, suggests that its subject was not entirely trivial. The introduction of omnibus services in Paris in 1828 and in London the following year radically expanded access to horse-drawn transportation, making it affordable for a much wider range of residents. As rival companies emerged in both cities, the omnibuses quickly developed into a system that comprehended the entire metropolis. By 1829, according to one estimate, 80 per cent of Paris lay within half a kilometre of an omnibus line.8 Just as the snails on the omnibus are liberated from their narrow confines, the new services, which represent the origins of urban transit, allowed many city dwellers, particularly less affluent ones, to travel for the first time beyond their immediate neighbourhoods and to explore the rest of the city. As an article in Paris, ou le Livre des cent et un (1834) points out, ‘Before the omnibus, every neighbourhood of Paris was a city; the Omnibus has made a city of all of Paris’.9 As a result, the population began to mix in unprecedented ways. Suddenly, a French writer joked, the ‘rive droite [was] invading the rive gauche, it’s the Madeleine rushing toward the Bastille, it is the North hurling itself on the South’.10 Observers of the early tram would similarly point to its unifying effect, its ability to ‘create a mysterious link among a thousand families, who until now, each parked in its respective neighbourhood, neither saw nor knew one another’.11 Omnibus and tram services expanded not only access to capitals such as Paris, London, and Madrid but also the cities themselves. As lines and routes multiplied, new neighbourhoods developed on the periphery, which were often healthier and less congested. It was no longer necessary for labourers, artisans, and employees to live in the city centre near their workplaces. Nor was it necessary for entrepreneurs to concentrate their operations in a single location: a ‘master’, observed one French writer, could now ‘jump over spaces, overlook tasks at any moment; he is

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everywhere; one thinks he is far away; he is there; thanks to the Omnibus, Paris has become an immense workshop where one can wander through all the rooms, urge on the work [and] monitor distribution, without, as it were, leaving one’s home’.12 As an observer of the first urban transit service in Madrid put it, ‘the centre is everywhere’.13 Many nineteenth-century commentators welcomed this decentralisation, which increased the supply of affordable housing, reduced mortality rates, improved hygiene and served as a ‘guarantee of public order’, depriving ‘the spirit of agitation’ of ‘easy ears’.14 This new mobility and contact, however, often resulted in uncomfortable social interactions among passengers of different ranks, who suddenly found themselves rubbing shoulders in stifling and claustrophobic carriages, which were as Jennifer Terni notes among ‘the most socially mixed spaces’ in Paris.15 The contrast between the ‘nondescript’ man with his humble bag of snails and the woman in the silk dress—described as ventre de biche, a delicate shade of light pink—points to the tensions between social classes that could develop on the omnibus. The story captures not only the freedom and mobility but also the awkward confinement of the experience. Although the passengers like the snails find new liberty through the omnibus, they do so only by climbing into its cramped carapace and frequenting the multitudes. The similarity between the tightly packed omnibus and the bag of snails would be illustrated years later in René Georges Hermann-Paul’s 1893 lithograph ‘Escargots d’omnibus’ in which passengers with snail-like hats and chignons climb a snail-like staircase to the roof of an overcrowded omnibus (Fig. 1.2).16 In both story and image, the passengers are uncomfortably close. This proximity was not only socially awkward but also raised anxieties about theft and contagion. The image of a slimy creature crawling up a leg evokes the fear of infection associated with public spaces. In nineteenth-century Paris, London, and Madrid, writers and artists often represent urban transit as a space that blurs the divide between public and private. In early depictions, passengers frequently violate one another’s personal boundaries, taking up too much room or engaging in inappropriate liberties. In our story, the drenched man with his snails encroaches on others’ space and comfort. It is noteworthy that the anecdote first appeared in a legal journal and ends with a lawsuit in which characters defend their property. This tension between the public and private is particularly clear in an 1866 rewriting of the story. When the man enters the omnibus in this version, all the other passengers make room for

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Fig. 1.2  René Georges Hermann-Paul, ‘Escargots d’omnibus’. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

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him except one, an egoist, who does not move his legs. After the snails’ escape, the passengers initially seek only to shield themselves, the ladies ‘closing their dresses hermetically around their legs, despite their enormous crinolines’ and the men ‘tucking their pants into their boots’, but soon they begin laughing uncontrollably and later help the man to collect his snails. The incident, thus, breaks down the invisible walls that separate city dwellers and creates a common joke and a community of sorts. Like the snails, the passengers come out of their shells. The only one who does not help out is the egoist who instead crushes the beasts with his shoes: ‘He alone, locked within himself, did not want to get involved, to play along or to make the slightest movement’. The vignette ends citing Antoine-Vincent Arnault’s fable ‘Le Colimaçon’ (1812) in which the snail becomes a metaphor for a person without friends or family who hides in his own shell and emerges only ‘to make horns at his neighbour’ (faire les cornes in French means ‘to trick’).17 The rewriting points to the ambiguity of the omnibus as a social space: what was for some a collective and communal experience was for others one of alienating restraint. As is clear in the iterations of the story, the hat of snails became a nineteenth-century meme. The omnibus would also become a kind of cliché over the course of the century: in an 1890 story by Adolphe Chenevière, the narrator observes that ‘since the world is the world’, the vehicle has been ‘the subject of thousands of French compositions, and there is perhaps no one among us for whom that fortuitous gathering of human beings in a rolling cage does not recall an assignment or extra homework from the good old times’.18 The omnibus is not only a common place—a shared environment—but also a symbol of the commonplace or the cliché, the tedious assignment we have all handed in. Just as the public conveyances are a space through which anyone can pass, a commonplace is a figure, discourse, or story that anyone can fill (the term topos comes from the Greek word for ‘place’; it is a ‘place’ in language that all speakers can occupy).19 Indeed, it is not accidental that Raymond Queneau, in his Exercices de style (1947), takes an ordinary encounter on a Parisian bus as the subject for his 99 experiments in styles and modes. Urban transit is a common place ideal for commonplaces, one that can accommodate heterogeneous discourses. The goal of this book is to trace the commonplaces of nineteenth-­ century urban transit and the manifold ways in which writers, artists and commentators filled and occupied them. The omnibus and tram gave rise to a vast body of cultural representations that took many forms—stories,

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songs, plays, poems, novels, satires, newspaper articles, treatises, etiquette manuals, vaudevilles, pamphlets, caricatures and paintings—and include works by many well-known artists (Bonnard, Cassatt, Cruikshank, Daumier, Degas, Delondre, Egley, Grandville, Picasso, Pissarro, Zorn, etc.) and authors (Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, François Coppée, E. M. Forster, the Goncourt brothers, J.-K. Huysmans, Amy Levy, Guy de Maupassant, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Benito Pérez Galdós, Arthur Rimbaud, Émile Zola, etc.). Unlike cultural representations of the railroad, however, these texts and images remain largely unexplored. Based on the consideration of over three thousand visual and literary representations, this book reconstructs and analyses this understudied corpus in order to understand how the omnibus and horse-drawn tram function in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century. This study focuses mainly on three cities—Paris, London, and Madrid— which illustrate different patterns in the development of public transportation. Early in the Second Empire, the Paris omnibus lines were consolidated into a single monopoly, the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus, which dominated urban transit for the rest of the century and resisted the introduction of competing services such as the tram and metro. In London, in contrast, the omnibus companies vied with one another throughout the century. Thanks to this competition, other forms of transportation were introduced relatively early (whereas the London Underground was inaugurated in 1863, Paris would have to wait until 1900 for its Métropolitain). Finally, Madrid is an example of the late and uneven modernisation in peripheral cities. Its first system of urban transportation, introduced in 1871, was not the omnibus but the tram. In the nineteenth century, the omnibus and tram differed very little: both relied mostly on animal traction (horses or mules), and the carriages were quite similar. The only real difference with the tram was the introduction of rails, which by reducing friction, allowed horses to carry over twice as much weight. In this book, therefore, I examine representations of both the omnibus and horse-­ drawn tram (horsecar). The study ends at the beginning of the twentieth century when the tram lines were electrified and omnibuses were replaced by motor buses. While the Underground became an important form of urban transit in London, it differed from the omnibus and tram in that it segregated its passengers into classes. As the interest of this study is the experience of social mixing on collective transport, the cultural representations of the Underground will not be a central focus. As I argue in the epilogue, the early literature of the Metropolitan Railway is best considered, as its original name suggests, as an extension of that of the train.

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This study complements a growing body of scholarship that examines the history of modern social spaces. In recent years, very important work has been done on the restaurant, the beach-side resort, the retail centre, and the apartment building among others.20 More specifically, this book contributes to the burgeoning areas of mobility and transport studies, which explore the practices and infrastructure of travel and movement, as well as their cultural representations.21 Within this field, a number of studies have addressed the cultural history of the train and railway station.22 More recently, several studies have explored literary representations of the Underground.23 Horse-drawn transportation has generally received less attention, though the stagecoach has been the object of several recent works.24 While the omnibus and horsecar have been examined from the perspective of economic, urban, and transportation history, the impact of these new social spaces on the cultural imagination remains underexplored.25 With the exception of a few essays, the impact of the early tram in Madrid has been almost entirely unstudied.26 In the past two decades, several studies of the omnibus in literature have appeared in the French and British contexts, but they tend to focus on small subsets of texts. Ana Parejo Vadillo and Lorna Shelley have examined the representation of the omnibus by fin-de-siècle women writers.27 Jennifer Terni has explored the sociological impact of the early omnibus in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, drawing on literary texts, and a recent article by Nicole Vilkner analyses the relation between music and the early omnibus in France.28 An insightful 2019 study by Masha Belenky focuses primarily on a subgenre of French texts that capture the heterogeneity of the omnibus, offering a series of ‘micronarratives organised around the flow of passengers on and off the vehicle’, which are often narrated by sort of ‘omnibus flâneur’, a voyeuristic passenger who is an experienced observer of the space.29 Belenky refers to these works as ‘omnibus literature’, but it is important to note that this is but one variant of the vast repertoire of nineteenth-­century representations of the omnibus in literature. As will become clear in the next section, urban transit is depicted in a wide variety of ways in texts and images of the period. Adopting a comparative perspective, this study seeks to give a sense of this heterogeneity and the ways in which representations differ from one context to another. It addresses the following questions: How did the omnibus and tram function in the cultural imagination of the nineteenth century? What sorts of stories, anecdotes, and episodes are set in this

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space? How do literary and cultural representations of these vehicles differ from those of other forms of transportation? And how does the omnibus function as a metaphor or symbol in the period?

Cultural Representations of Urban Transit: Metaphors and Variants To give a sense of the literature of urban transit, it will be useful to consider briefly several recurrent metaphors in nineteenth-century discussions of the space. One of the most common is that of the museum or exhibit. In Wilkie Collins’ novel Basil (1852), the narrator-protagonist describes the omnibus as a ‘perambulatory exhibition-room of the eccentricities of human nature’; Louis Ulbach, in his Guide sentimental de l’étranger à Paris (1878), represents it as a ‘living museum’ where one sees ‘varied types, originals and caricatures that chance brings together’; and the Spanish writer Carlos Frontaura compares the tram to ‘an exhibit of very curious figures’.30 Other writers evoke a more hallucinatory experience, describing the omnibus as ‘a kaleidoscope, albeit painted in somewhat dingy hues’ or as a ‘true rolling magic lantern, in which so many and such good grotesque figures pass successively’.31 The focus in all these passages is the variety, eccentricity, and singularity of the passengers’ appearances. Like the paintings in a museum, the omnibus is perceived here as a series of silent images. A related metaphor is that of the panorama, a type of circular painting that gave the spectator the feeling of being at the centre of a scene. This metaphor usually appears in descriptions of the impériale (the rooftop seats of the omnibus), which was introduced in the middle of the century. Ulbach describes it as a ‘moving panorama’, and Samuel-Henry Berthoud praises it for unfolding before passengers’ eyes a ‘double panorama of the streets’.32 Whereas the museum metaphor is usually applied to the interior of the vehicle, the image of the panorama evokes the urban space as it is perceived by outside passengers. As with the image of the exhibit, however, the emphasis lies on the perception of particularities, of unique features of the cityscape. Another common metaphor for the omnibus is the theatre, which suggests a more auditory experience. In an 1829 letter, the German prince Hermann von Pückler-Muskau compared the Parisian omnibus to a ‘representation at the Variétés [a popular theatre]’ and its passengers to vaudeville characters.33 The analogy, however, is perhaps most developed in an 1831 sketch by Ernest Fouinet:

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A profound comedy, a drama of powerful interest, a malicious vaudeville […] Oh ambulatory theatre, rolling comedy, you need no prompters, Nature plays this role for your actors! They have no make-up, no disguise: they are spectators of one another, they play their roles while seeing themselves play, always as in the world, and they all pay thirty cents to amuse the public and to amuse themselves. What better dramatic school than the omnibus? There, simple and natural language, unexpected twists and turns, sudden catastrophes.34

Whereas the museum metaphor suggests a division between the viewer and the object viewed, the passengers in the theatre metaphor are at once actors and spectators. Notably, both Pückler-Muskau and Fouinet associate the omnibus with vaudeville and with the comic types associated with this genre. Indeed, unlike the museum metaphor, which underscores eccentricity and singularity, the theatre analogy tends to focus on social types, figures encountered elsewhere. Jules Lovy, for example, describes the omnibus as ‘a rolling theatre where types are abundant’, and a British article from 1891 observes that ‘one need hardly go beyond a London omnibus for all types. One will see the comedy-drama of life pretty fully represented in a day’s omnibus’.35 Finally, the theatre metaphor differs from the museum analogy in its emphasis on behaviour, action, and speech. In an 1897 children’s story, a girl at the back of an omnibus observes with delight the humorous interactions among passengers: a struggle for space between two fat people, a boy who wipes his dirty shoes on an old woman’s dress, a well-dressed lady who recoils at a fish merchant and a man who asks how far it is to his daughter’s house but does not know the address. The omnibus, she concludes, is a guignol, a puppet show.36 Still other writers compared urban transit to a book, an image that combines the silent observation of the museum metaphor with the narrative impulse of the theatre analogy. The French journalist Lucien Griveau, for example, likens the experience of the omnibus to that of being surrounded by ‘closed books’ which he longs to open, stories he will never read.37 In this instance, the metaphor suggests the illegibility of appearances; the narrator wishes to understand his fellow passengers but is unable to do so. Other writers, however, represent the omnibus as an open book that can be deciphered. In an 1884 article in a French women’s journal, readers are encouraged to read not just newspapers and books but also their fellow omnibus passengers: ‘What a book human physiognomy is when one knows how to decipher it!’38 Unlike a traditional book, however, the omnibus must be read quickly, for just as one is on ‘the first line of a page that is becoming interesting’, the subject may get off.39

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Museum, panorama, theatre, book… These metaphors suggest some of the main differences among omnibus texts. In my research, I have identified a series of variables that can be used to analyse representations of urban transit as well as transportation literature more generally: 1. Interior versus exterior focus: Whereas the book, museum, and theatre comparisons focus on the inside of the vehicle—passengers’ awkward interactions and peculiar physiognomies—the panorama analogy evokes their observation of the outside world. The impériale made possible a sedentary form of flânerie that allowed riders to discover new neighbourhoods and to see the city from a different (and often defamiliarising) vantage point. 2. ‘Sound off’ versus ‘sound on’: The distinction between the museum and the theatre entails an opposition between silent and auditory experiences of urban transit. Some authors depict the omnibus as a community in which passengers of various classes share cigarettes, advice, and small talk. Sometimes, it serves as a frame for storytelling or is a place in which conversations are overheard. In other works, in contrast, the omnibus is an uncomfortably mute space and becomes a text of sorts—a series of visual signs devoid of voice—that the passenger seeks to read. 3. Legible versus illegible space: ‘Sound off’ descriptions of the omnibus may in turn be divided into legible and illegible visions of the space (the opposition between the open and closed book). Some nineteenth-­century works seek to help readers to decipher the omnibus by analysing the physiognomies of common passenger types. Belenky has pointed to the figure of the ‘omnibus flâneur’, a voyeuristic narrator-­passenger who purports to be ‘an excellent interpreter of social clues’.40 Other texts, however, emphasize the unknowability of the space and its occupants and underscore the gap between appearance and reality. 4. Fleeting versus recurrent: Marie Bersier warns that one must read the ‘book’ of the omnibus quickly before the ‘interesting page’ descends. As in this description, omnibus texts often focus on fleeting encounters, glimpses of people who will never be encountered again. Urban transit, however, could also be represented as a more predictable and familiar space. As city residents moved away from the centre and began to use omnibuses and trams as part of their daily commute, they started to recognise fellow ‘regulars’ and to observe them over time.

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5. Small world versus large world: Texts that evoke ‘regulars’ and a steady community of commuters suggest a vision of the omnibus as a ‘small world’. Some works (particularly early ones) depict the space as one in which coincidences—felicitous or otherwise—abound. Passengers come across long-lost friends; debtors find themselves sitting next to their creditors; and a young man escorting a grisette runs into his disapproving father. Such texts reduce the vastness of the city, representing it as a familiar and recognisable space. Other texts, however, portray the omnibus as a random slice of a massive metropolis where passengers encounter individuals whom they will never meet again and whose lives and stories they can only guess at. Often the ‘large world’ vision evokes the melancholy and alienation of modern urban life. 6. Disengaged observation versus direct participation: Whereas the museum analogy suggests a distance between the observer and the object of observation, Fouinet’s use of the theatre metaphor confuses the opposition between spectator and spectacle: all the passengers are at once actors and audience. The observer in omnibus texts is sometimes an aloof and detached figure but at other times participates or attempts to intervene in the story. 7. Zooming in versus zooming out: Finally, representations differ in the scope of their focus. As mentioned before, Belenky has drawn attention to a series of texts in which the object of observation shifts from one passenger to another.41 In many other works, however, the narrative zooms in on a single passenger who stands out from the group. We can thus distinguish between  texts that adopt a more panoramic approach—zooming out and surveying the diversity of vehicle—and others that are more focused in scope and evoke a specific interaction or individual. The pages that follow will examine the different ways in which these characteristics manifest themselves and are combined in cultural representations of the omnibus and tram in the nineteenth century. The examples analysed are generally selected either because they are representative of the most common memes surrounding these spaces or because they offer noteworthy or intriguing literary or artistic appropriations of these commonplaces.

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The initial chapters have a contextual function. Chapter 2 gives an overview of the history of nineteenth-century urban transit and of the various attempts to introduce (and resist) innovation in the face of competition. It also traces how the perception of the service in both life and literature changed over the course of the century, as the vehicles, initially associated with modernity and romanticism, came to be seen as a force of stagnation and a symbol of more prosaic or realist literary forms. The third chapter surveys the commonplaces and recurrent jokes around urban transit in the comic literature of the period. In the process, it gives a sense of the practicalities and physical experience of the vehicles for early passengers and analyses the anxieties about modernity implicit in these humorous motifs. Chapter 4 then turns to the sociability of the space as it is represented in nineteenth-century literature and visual culture. Specifically, it considers the social composition of early omnibuses, the experience of female passengers, the etiquette of the space and its impact on mœurs, and the extent to which urban transit was considered a public or a private domain. Chapters 5, 6, 7, and 8 examine how the space functioned in the cultural and literary imagination of the period. Chapter 5 explores the use of the omnibus and tram as a political metaphor. Curiously, the omnibus became in the nineteenth century a symbol of both the government and its overthrow. Numerous early images offer allegorical representations of the ‘omnibus of state’, drawing on the tradition of the char de l’état, but the vehicles, which were sometimes tipped over to build barricades, also became a symbol of revolution and the struggle for freedom and equality. Chapter 6 then considers urban transit as a site of desire. Though sometimes dismissed as prosaic or unromantic, the omnibus was often represented as an erotically charged space in popular texts and images. This chapter explores a series of bawdy motifs about urban transit and offers a taxonomy of six types of love stories set on omnibuses and trams: the fleeting, the illegible, the iterative, the double, the transactional and the inverted. Chapter 7 turns to the omnibus as a space of social observation. Many nineteenth-century texts evoke awkward encounters between rich and poor passengers. This chapter explores the different ways in which the social other is evoked in these works and how class difference is interpreted. Chapter 8 considers urban transit as a space of knowledge and exploration. Almost as soon as the omnibuses were introduced, they began to be used not simply as a means of transportation but also as a way to discover both the city and oneself. On the vehicles, passengers engaged in

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tourism, flânerie, character observation, eavesdropping, voyeurism, and literary creation. This chapter examines the different forms of insight and inspiration that passengers draw from the space in nineteenth-century representations. The epilogue of the book contrasts the literature of the omnibus and tram with those of other forms of transportation that co-existed with them—the stagecoach or diligence, the cab or fiacre, the train, the Underground and the riverboat—and attempts to define the distinguishing characteristics of the literature of the omnibus and tram.

Notes 1. Le Droit: journal des tribunaux, 15–16 May 1837, 2015. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2. The story appears in the Gazette de France, 17 May 1837; Le Constitutionnel, 18 May 1837; Supplément au Journal de Saint-Quentin, 28 May 1837; Bulletin colonial, 12 June 1837; Feuille d’avis de Neufchâtel, 17 August 1837; ‘A Paris Omnibus on a Wet Day’, Spirit of the Times, 30 September 1837, 257; Charles Charbonnier, Les Petites Causes peu célèbres (Paris: Librairie classique de Périsse frères, 1847), 64–71; Anecdotes instructives et amusantes: le volontaire, le chapeau d’escargots et la robe ventre de biche, le pont du diable (Bordeaux: Maison des Orphelins, 1850), 18–24; L’Industrie, 10 April 1859; ‘Chronique’, Petit journal, 6 March 1866, 2–3; ‘Une scène en omnibus’ in Les Soirées amusantes (Paris: C.  Dillet, 1874), 49–54; M.L.  Veuillot, ‘Les Escargots’, L’École de la famille, 1 October 1880, 226–27; and ‘An Adventure in a French Omnibus’, The Leisure Hour, April 1884, 249. 3. ‘Awful Occurrence’, Punch, 23 March 1850, 120. 4. Paul de Kock, M. Choublanc à la recherche de sa femme (Paris: V. Benoist, [1878]), 4–5. 5. Charles Leroy, ‘L’Homard cru’, La Gaudriole, 12 March 1899, 166–68. 6. Gustave Cane, ‘Le Tramway de Charenton’, La Gaudriole, 8 October 1893, 226–27. 7. François Coppée, ‘Croquis parisiens: L’Omnibus’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 7 September 1902, 147. 8. Jennifer Terni, ‘The Omnibus and the Shaping of the Urban Quotidian: Paris, 1828–60’, Cultural and Social History 11:2 (2014): 240, fn. 103. 9. Jules Sandeau, ‘Chaillot’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris: Lavocat, 1834), XIV, 370. 10. J. Lovy, ‘D’où viennent les rhumatismes?: C’est la faute des omnibus’, Le Journal pour rire, 26 March 1853, 5.

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11. Alfred Séverin, ‘Une promenade en tramway’, Le Figaro, 24 September 1870, 164. 12. ‘De l’influence des omnibus sur les habitans de Paris’, Le Voleur, 20 October 1829, n.p. 13. Manuel Fernández y González, ‘El tranvía’, La Academia, 23 January 1879, 42. 14. ‘Honeycomb’, The Ladies’ Cabinet, 1 August 1854, 110; Fernández y González, ‘El tranvía’, 42. 15. Terni, ‘Omnibus and the Shaping’, 221. 16. René Georges Hermann-Paul, ‘Escargots d’omnibus’, L’Escarmouche, 24 December 1893, n.p. 17. ‘Chronique’, Petit journal, 4 March 1866, 2–3. 18. Adolphe Chenevière, Contes d’amour (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1890), 286. 19. As Roland Barthes explains, the topos tends to be ‘somewhat empty […] half coded, half projective’; each of us ‘can fill in this code according to his own history’. The Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994), 5. 20. See, for example, Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge: Harvard, 2000); Alain Corbin, Le Territoire du vide: l’Occident et le désir du rivage (1750–1840) (Paris: Aubier, 1988); Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000); Sharon Marcus, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: U of California P, 1998). 21. See, for example, the Palgrave series ‘Studies in Mobilities, Literature and Culture’ and the journal Mobilities. Recent work in this area within the field of nineteenth-century literary studies includes Larry Duffy, Le Grand Transit Moderne: Mobility, Modernity and French Naturalist Fiction (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994); Moving Forward, Holding Fast: The Dynamics of Nineteenth-Century French Culture, eds. Barbara T. Cooper and Mary Donaldson-Evans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997); Charlotte Mathieson, Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and Transport in British Fiction: Technologies of Movement, 1840–1940, eds. Adrienne E.  Gavin and Andrew F. Humphries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). In By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (New York: Oxford UP, 2015), Paul Fyfe deals with the representation in Sketches by Boz of the chaos on London streets as omnibuses and hired coaches proliferated in the 1830s, but his focus is more the changing urban experience than the omnibus and its literature. 22. See, for example, Marc Baroli, Le Train dans la littérature française (Paris: Éditions N. M., 1964); The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space and the

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Machine Ensemble, eds. Matthew Beaumont and Michael Freeman (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007); Ian Carter, Railways and Culture in Britain: The Epitome of Modernity (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001); Remo Cesarini, Treni di carta: l’immaginario in ferrovia, l’irruzione del treno nella letteratura moderna (Genova: Marietti, 1993); Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999); Anne Green, Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (New York: Anthem Press, 2011), 35–64; Lily Litvak, El tiempo de los trenes: el paisaje español en el arte y la literatura del realismo (1849–1918) (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, 1991); Juan Carlos Ponce, Literatura y ferrocarril en España (Madrid: Fundación de los Ferrocarriles Españoles, 1996); Jeffrey Richards and John M. Mackenzie, The Railway Station: A Social History (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986), 340–83; Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railroad Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986); and Paul A.  Youngman, Black Devil and Iron Angel: The Railway in NineteenthCentury German Realism (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America, 2005). 23. See David Ashford, London Underground: A Cultural Geography (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013); David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005) and Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007); and David Welsh, Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011). 24. On the mail coach and stagecoach, which transported people and goods between cities, see Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016); Carsten Meiner, La Carrosse littéraire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008); and Jonathan H. Grossman, Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012). 25. The classic histories of the Paris and London omnibus are Nicholas Papayanis’ Horse-drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996) and T.C.  Barker and Michael Robbin’s A History of London Transport: Passenger Travel and the Development of the Metropolis, Volume I. The Nineteenth Century (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1963). On the Madrid tram, see Antonio López Gómez’s Los transportes urbanos de Madrid (Madrid: CSIC, 1983). 26. See my ‘Reading (on) the Tram: Benito Pérez Galdós’s “La novela en el tranvía”’, Orbis Litterarum, 69:3 (2014): 193–214; ‘Plotlifting: The Transposition of French Stories in the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Press’,

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Forum for Modern Language Studies, 52:3 (2016): 293–310; ‘Tram Flânerie: Streetcar Impressions of Nineteenth-Century Madrid’, Confluencia, 32:2 (2017): 167–77; ‘En tranvía: Nineteenth-Century Representations of Collective Transportation in Madrid’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 95:8 (2018): 983–98; and ‘Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera’s “La novela del tranvía” (1882) and the Literature of Urban Collective Transportation’, Symposium 72:4 (2018): 185–97. See also Vanesa Rodríguez-Galindo, ‘On and off the Tram: Contemporary Types and Customs in Madrid’s Illustrated and Comical Press (1874–1898)’ in Visual Typologies from the Early Modern to the Contemporary: Local Contexts and Global Practices, eds. Lynda Klynch and Tara Zanardi (New York: Routledge, 2018); and Madrid on the Move: Feeling Modern and Visually Aware in the Nineteenth Century (Manchester UP, 2021). 27. Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Lorna Shelley, ‘“Buses should … inspire writers”: Omnibuses in fin-de-siècle Short Stories and Journalism’ in Transport in British Fiction, 136–50. 28. Terni, ‘Omnibus and the Shaping’, 217–42; Nicole Vilkner, ‘The Opera and the Omnibus: Material Culture, Urbanism and Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche’, Cambridge Opera Journal 32:1 (2020): 90–114. 29. Masha Belenky, Engines of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019), 47, 63. See also her articles ‘Transitory Tales: Writing the Omnibus in Nineteenth-­ Century Paris’, Dix-Neuf, 16:3 (November 2012): 283–303; and ‘From Transit to Transitoire: The Omnibus and Modernity’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 35:2 (2007): 408–21. 30. Wilkie Collins, Basil: A Story of Modern Life (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), I, 96; Louis Ulbach, Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1878), 57; Carlos Frontaura, ‘El tranvía’, La Risa, 22 January 1888, 10. 31. George Augustus Sala, ‘Inside London’, The London Journal, 9 July 1859, 411; L. M., ‘L’Intérieur d’un omnibus’, The Court Magazine and Monthly Critic, 1 August 1838, 31. 32. Ulbach, Guide sentimental, 58; Samuel-Henry Berthoud, Fantaisies scientifiques de Sam: Reptiles, Mammifères, Oiseaux, Physique, Chimie, Industrie (Paris: Garnier, 1867), 248. 33. Hermann von Pückler-Muskau, Mémoires et Voyages du prince Pückler-­ Muskau (Paris: H. Fournier jeune, 1832–33), 213. 34. Ernest Fouinet, ‘Voyage en omnibus, de la barrière du Trône à la barrière de l’Étoile’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris: Ladvocat, 1831), II, 61–62.

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35. Jules Lovy, ‘Les Types d’omnibus: croquis à la course’, Journal pour rire, 22 April 1854, 6; ‘Society in an Omnibus’, Hearth and Home, 1 October 1891, 637. 36. Livre des petites filles, recueil de monologues (Paris: Librairie théâtrale, 1897), 109–14. 37. Lucien Griveau, ‘En omnibus’, Journal des demoiselles, February 1883, 48. 38. C. R., ‘Intérieurs d’omnibus’, La Femme, 1 July 1884, 100. 39. Mme Eugène Bersier [Marie Bersier], ‘Compagnons de route: de Paris à Paris’, La Femme, 1 April 1895, 55. 40. Belenky, Engines of Modernity, 76. 41. Belenky, Engines of Modernity, 47.

CHAPTER 2

Between Modernity and Regression

Historians and critics often represent the omnibus as a symbol of modernisation: as the ‘emblem of the accelerated movement of progress’, as ‘the icon of the modern imagination’ and as  one of the ‘engines of modernity’.1 This view is echoed in some nineteenth-century texts: Edmond About, for example, called the omnibus a ‘chariot of progress’, and Eugène Sue, in Les Mystères du peuple (1849–1856), contrasted the ‘time of the red monks’ with the ‘time of the omnibus’.2 Such rhetoric, however, was generally more common in discussions of the train than in those of the omnibus. As the novelty of the conveyances wore off, indeed, nineteenth-­ century writers tended to emphasise their backwardness and inertia. By the early twentieth century, omnibuses were considered ‘antediluvian phenomena’, mocked as ‘primitive, archaic, barbarous’, ‘obsolete and almost ridiculous’, ‘a souvenir of the ancient ages of the Earth’, and ‘the stubbornness of a past that did not want to die’.3 This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of the omnibus and tram in the nineteenth century and the ways in which they were perceived in both literature and life. As will become clear in the first section, the fledgling transportation services, much like the omnibuses themselves, moved forward but in a halting way: their introduction revolutionised the urban experience but companies often resisted innovation and improvements, engaging in in-fighting and obstructionism and sacrificing comfort

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7_2

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and convenience to profit. The second section examines how the perception of urban transit changed over time as the public began to take it for granted, and the vehicles became part of the ‘body’ of the city. The final section explores how this evolution is reflected in the shifting use of the omnibus as an aesthetic metaphor. Whereas the earliest coaches were identified with a swaggering and disruptive romanticism, the service gradually became associated with humbler and more prosaic literary currents.

Innovation, Competition, and Monopoly The first omnibuses were introduced in Nantes in 1826 by Stanislas Baudry, an entrepreneur who ran a flour mill powered by steam on the outskirts of the city. As one of the by-products of the mill was hot water, Baudry decided to open thermal baths and offered a coach service to transport Nantais from the city centre to his establishment. As the legend goes, the vehicles picked up passengers in front of a store run by one Monsieur Omnès, which was playfully named Omnes Omnibus (something for everyone), whence the name omnibus. Nantes residents soon began to use the service not only to go to the baths but also to travel to other points along its route, which gave Baudry the idea of using his omnibuses as a form of transportation within the city. A year later, he would create a similar service in Bordeaux.4 From the outset, Baudry also had his eye on Paris, but his 1826 application to establish an omnibus company in the capital was refused by the prefect of police, Guy Delavau, who feared the vehicles would block traffic. Delavau may also have seen ‘a political danger’ in coaches open ‘to all classes of society’.5 When Delavau was replaced by the more liberal Louis Marie Debelleyme, however, Baudry received authorisation to operate up to a hundred coaches, which led to the inauguration of the first omnibus service in Paris, the Entreprise Générale des Omnibus (EGO), which ran between Bastille and Madeleine with vehicles pulled by 3 horses and seating 14 passengers.6 Baudry’s idea was quickly imitated by a rival company, the Dames Blanches, which began to operate in 1828 and adopted the same trajectory from Madeleine to Bastille. The dames blanches drew their name and inspiration from an 1825 opera by François-Adrien Boieldieu based on several novels by Walter Scott. Painted a ‘dazzling white’ with ornate gold lettering and drawn by white horses with blue and gold crests, the vehicles featured panels representing scenes from Scott’s novels, mirrors in which

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women could ‘repair the disorder of their attire’, a ceiling covered with Scottish fabric and an instrument under the driver’s feet, which played tunes from the opera.7 In the years that followed, a number of other companies developed similar services with different routes, and like the dames blanches, many attempted to draw clients through picturesque packaging, often tapping into romantic tropes of the era. By 1838, Parisians could also ride favorites, parisiennes, hirondelles, orléanaises, citadines, diligentes, béarnaises, dames françaises, constantines, batignollaises, petites parisiennes, écossaises, and gazelles.8 Baudry’s service was also imitated abroad, most notably in London where George Shillibeer, who had worked in France as a coach-builder, initiated a similar enterprise on 4 July 1829.9 Unlike the Parisian omnibus, which ran through the heart of the city, Shillibeer’s vehicles were initially limited to the periphery as the hackney coaches had a monopoly on transport in the city centre. When this monopoly came to an end in January 1832, however, the omnibuses began to serve central London as well and were gradually reduced in size to be able to pass through its narrower streets.10 As they became popular, a number of competing services appeared which, as in France, took on colourful names and themes: ‘the “Favorites”, the “Eagles”, the “Wellingtons”, the “King Williams”, the “Napoleons”, the “Victorias”, the “Nelsons”, the “Marlboroughs”, the “Hopes”, “Les Dames Blanches”, the “Citizens”, the “Emperors”, the “Venuses” and the “Marquess of Westminsters”’.11 Sadly, neither Baudry nor Shillibeer enjoyed for long the fruits of his labour. Overwhelmed by competition and rising feed costs during the harsh winter of 1830, Baudry committed suicide, and Shillibeer, deep in debt, escaped to Boulogne in 1836 and spent several months in Fleet prison on his return. Their innovations, however, would prosper. In the years following Baudry’s death, the EGO raised the fare from 25 to 30 cents, reduced capacity from 18 to 15 passengers, suppressed the third horse and introduced the concept of the correspondance or free transfer. With these changes, the company began to thrive (earning 10% for its investors) and eventually came to dominate the market.12 In the 1830s, the Parisian omnibus companies were generally considered a lucrative investment. A character in an 1836 vaudeville is congratulated for holding omnibus stock: ‘They contain fifteen people, / Which makes fifteen times six sous. / And from six sous to six sous, that adds up’.13 Given these returns, it is not surprising that similar services quickly developed abroad. By the 1830s, omnibuses were running in New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Washington, D.C., Boston, Lyon, and Dresden.14

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The competition among the companies led to innovation and experimentation in the first few decades. In 1829, a three-wheeled version known as a tricycle was introduced in Paris in an attempt to circumvent taxes on four-wheeled coaches (the ploy seems to have failed, as tax collectors ‘did not understand such subtleties’).15 Other entrepreneurs experimented with new forms of traction. In the 1830s, Walter Hancock made several attempts to introduce steam omnibuses in London (the ‘Era’ and the ‘Autopsy’ in 1833 and the ‘Automaton’ in 1835), but frequent break-­ downs, heavy tolls, and sabotage by owners of horse-drawn omnibuses quickly led to their discontinuation.16 In the 1840s, a new model was introduced in Paris with more elastic springs to prevent jolting, banquettes with dividers between seats, higher ceilings, and space for passengers weighing more than 150 kilograms.17 In 1852, a London service would place passengers in isolated compartments similar to first-class railway carriages, an innovation a French writer compared to ‘cages’ in a zoo.18 These experiments were generally short-lived but testify to the dynamism of the industry in its early years. Two innovations, however, would prove more lasting: the correspondance and the impériale. In the first years of the Parisian omnibus service, passengers who changed from one vehicle to another were charged two fares. In 1834, however, the EGO began to offer its passengers the possibility of transferring for free within its network with a correspondance ticket, and from 1840 on, they could do so from one company to another.19 This was revolutionary in that it turned the omnibuses into a comprehensive urban transit system, offering Parisians an unprecedented mobility. ‘You go all round the world for six sous’, observed John Sanderson,  an American visitor, and an 1849 German guidebook compared the system to a net so tightly meshed that one could travel for six sous ‘from all points to all points’.20 In an 1836 vaudeville, the correspondance appears as a character on stage and boasts that it will soon link Paris to Italy, Spain, and Russia; ‘The correspondance will one day lead to everything… unless balloons enter into competition’.21 The transfer system, however, did not take off abroad. Although an attempt was made to introduce it in London in the late 1850s, it was soon discontinued.22 As Barker and Robbins note, the system made less sense in a city with routes ‘radiating […] in all directions from the main thoroughfares’.23 The second innovation was the introduction of rooftop seats, which seem to have first emerged informally in London in 1847 when a clerestory was added above the aisle to make more room for people’s heads as

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they walked to their seats. Soon passengers began climbing to the roof and leaning their backs against the protrusion formed by the clerestory.24 The idea quickly took hold, and by the Great Exhibition of 1851, omnibuses were equipped with a knife-board (so named, according to one source, because it was frequented by witty youths known as ‘blades’) with nine outside seats (five more were added in 1857).25 In 1853, the innovation was introduced in Paris where it was known as the impériale, though conductors often referred to these seats as en l’air (in the air), and the people called them l’étagère (the shelf).26 In Paris, the outside seats were half-­ price: 15 cents instead of 30. As a result, the innovation made omnibuses more accessible to poorer Parisians, though for the first decades, the impériale was restricted to male passengers. Although competition led to innovations, it also had negative consequences. Early texts from both Paris and London describe brawls between drivers or cads of rival firms. A French print from around 1830 depicts conductors of the EGO and dames blanches fighting over passengers, and a comic poem from same period stages a quarrel in which the omnibuses tell the dames blanches to go back to Scotland where they came from, while the latter denounce the former’s lack of gallantry.27 In London, such disputes became a common motif in satirical literature and images, which often represent tugs-of-war between cads in which a prospective passenger serves as the rope.28 In Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836), an old bachelor finds himself accosted by rival drivers and then thrown into an over-full omnibus that ‘thundered, like a fire-engine at full gallop, with the kidnapped customer inside’.29 An 1847 satire went so far as to represent a ‘civil war’ between cads in the suburb of Camden Town; ‘the war in Mexico [was] not conducted with greater violence’.30 Even in 1869, when the competition had diminished, George Augustus Sala would recount a nightmare in which ‘Monstrous vistas of cads with brass badges for eyes and damp straw peeping from holes in their flesh, fought and raved, while they pulled me contrary ways’.31 In Paris, the omnibus fare remained relatively stable: after rising from 25 to 30 cents in 1830, the cost of an inside seat remained the same for the rest of the century with the impériale at half price. In London, fares were subject to greater fluctuation. When competition was intense, they were at times reduced dramatically, if unevenly, through price wars. Sala recalls how a sixpence ride was gradually whittled down to a half penny, while on other lines, the fare remained at threepence.32 Sometimes, however, prices rose sharply as during the grain shortages caused by Crimean

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War.33 Unlike in Paris, no distinction was made in London between inside and outside seats but prices did vary according to the distance travelled, a source of much confusion for passengers. Another negative consequence of the competition in London was the practice of ‘racing’ in which rival omnibuses attempted to beat one another to a new client. A comic poem from 1849, for example, represents a ‘wild ’bus man’ who enjoys racing and poking the staff on the front of his omnibus into the rear of a rival vehicle: ‘There’s joy when one’s pole in a rival one feels […] But, chiefest of joys—from one’s foeman a fare, / By dint of strong arm, and sheer slanging to bear’.34 A related phenomenon was the practice of ‘nursing’ rival omnibuses off the road. An 1857 article defines ‘nursing’ as ‘driving one vehicle close before, and another close behind, the objectionable omnibus, so as to prevent its getting custom, or should it have secured a rider, to present to his alighting the mild obstacle of a pole and a couple of horses’.35 In Sketches by Boz, Dickens describes how nursing omnibuses drive their poles into their target’s door or ‘through the body of any lady or gentleman who may make an attempt to get into it’.36 The omnibus behind the nursed omnibus would sometimes ride so close to it that its horses stuck their heads into its rear door; in the slang of the period, an omnibus ‘nursed’ in this way was said to be ‘sucking the mop’.37 Generally, neither the nursing nor the nursed vehicle made any profit, but larger enterprises were willing to take a temporary loss in order to run competing companies out of business. The practice led to numerous accidents and lawsuits and was criticised for putting passengers’ health and even lives in danger. One author anticipated that women would soon be ‘torn to pieces by Wild Busmen’ or kidnapped by ‘a band of these ’bus brigands’.38 The ‘objectionable’ vehicles that London companies most desired to ‘nurse’ off the streets were ‘pirate ’busses’, coaches with unlicensed staff and panels painted to resemble those of approved companies. Counterfeit omnibuses seem to have appeared quite early: in the 1830s, Shillibeer repainted his vehicles ‘Shillibeer’s Original Omnibus’ to distinguish them from imitators (the latter promptly adopted the same name, placing the word ‘not’ in small letters before it).39 The term ‘pirate ’bus’, however, came into general use in the 1880s and 1890s when passengers often made the mistake of entering rogue vehicles practically indistinguishable from authorised omnibuses. One ‘pirate’ enterprise imitated the London General Omnibus Company by painting ‘London General’ in large letters across the side of the vehicle with ‘Post Office’ underneath in small print.40

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Others paid women to ride the upper deck to make their coaches seem respectable.41 The victims of such ruses were subject to various forms of abuse. The pirate busses followed irregular routes, which were not announced on the outside of the vehicle, charged ‘exorbitant fares’, and generally did not enforce codes of behaviour (passengers could smoke or ride with animals).42 At times, they even enlisted bullies to help extort money from passengers.43 In popular texts and images, the pirate omnibus is often represented as a ship with skull and crossbones or depicted with a ‘Jolly Roger’.44 An 1886 song, for example, features a driver who is ‘the skipper of the Pirate Bus / What sails from Mile End Bay’ and whose ‘fust mate Conductor is, / The dread of the Queen’s highway’; on his coach, passengers are forced to pay a crown.45 Whereas London suffered from an excess of competition, Paris would have the opposite problem. In the 1840s, the French capital became the hub of the nation’s burgeoning railroad network, which created greater concentrations of people, particularly near stations, and increased congestion in the city centre. Administrators began to seek ways to alleviate the crowding and traffic. During the Second Empire, Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann redesigned Paris, destroying many medieval neighbourhoods with narrow streets and introducing wide boulevards that criss-crossed the city. Urban planners such as Haussmann generally viewed the free movement of vehicles and people as vital to hygiene and productivity.46 The omnibus companies, however, were failing to provide adequate circulation and were slow to react to variations in demand. Whereas London boasted some 1300 vehicles in 1850, Paris had a mere 400, many of which were outdated.47 To remedy this situation, the prefect of police, Pierre Marie Pietri, began to pressure the omnibus companies to consolidate into a single enterprise (modelled on the fusion of the railroad companies in the 1840s) in order to ensure more comprehensive and efficient service. Although the companies at first resisted the idea, they gradually saw the writing on the wall and made an offer to the city on their own terms, which was accepted. According to this agreement, the companies would merge into a single Compagnie Générale des Omnibus (CGO), which would be granted the exclusive right to run the Parisian omnibus service for 30 years. In return, they committed to pay a yearly fee for the concession, to maintain a uniform fare of 30 cents for inside seats and 15 for the impériale and to seek government approval before adding or dropping lines.48 In 1860, when Paris was expanded to include 11 suburbs, the CGO successfully

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renegotiated its contract obtaining a 50-year monopoly (until 1910) in exchange for a commitment to serve the new neighbourhoods and increase the number of vehicles in circulation.49 From the shareholders’ perspective, the new company was a great success. From 1855 to 1867, the number of passengers the CGO served rose threefold, and its stocks yielded a 6 per cent return.50 For clients, however, the merger was a mixed blessing. The CGO extended service to many previously inaccessible areas and made some innovations such as the bitricycle, a slightly wider omnibus introduced in the 1860s with 6 wheels and 3 horses, which accommodated over 50 passengers.51 But Parisians complained that its directors focused more on increasing profits through real estate investments than on modernising its rickety fleet.52 In nineteenth-­ century texts, the CGO is described as ‘The Crusher, otherwise known as mother Monopoly’, as a ‘Nero on four wheels’, as ‘a great egoist […] sleeping tranquilly’ or as similar to ‘kings of the Orient, who crush under their triumphant feet the victims that the adoration of the peoples offered them’.53 Secure in its monopoly—observers grumbled—the company treated its passengers as if they were ‘dogs’, ‘packages’ or ‘a vile gaggle of taxpayers’.54 By the early twentieth century, the company was described as ‘needing reform from bottom to top’ and ‘unworthy of a great public service’.55 Its corruption, moreover, was notorious. The cover image of an issue of L’Assiette au beurre shows an omnibus with a bevy of bribed politicians on board. In the foreground, the company greases the wheels with coins: ‘Go on!’, its conductor boasts, ‘once it’s well oiled, my jalopy can roll [rouler] the whole Municipal Council’ (the caricature plays on the double sense of rouler in French, which can mean both ‘to roll’ and ‘to dupe’).56 In 1855, just a few years after the fusion of the Parisian lines, a French enterprise, the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus de Londres, attempted to buy out the London companies and to establish a monopoly similar to the CGO. But although it managed to acquire two-thirds of the existing vehicles, becoming the dominant force in the market, many British proprietors resisted the takeover, which was sometimes represented as a French invasion. One writer playfully compared the project to the French Revolution: the company had a ‘committee of public safety sitting at four hundred and fifty-four, West Strand’ and ‘an army of upwards of one thousand men’.57 In their advertising, the independent British companies often appealed to patriotic sentiment. The London Road Car Company, for example, adopted the Union Jack as an emblem, posted ‘No Monopoly’

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signs in its vehicles and derided its opponents as ‘foreign gee-gees’.58 To mask its non-native origins, the French company became in 1859 a British corporation, renamed the London General Omnibus Company (LGOC). The French invasion was followed not long after by an American one: attempts to launch a horse-drawn tram. Though innovated elsewhere, this form of transportation had taken off first in the United States—introduced in New  York and New Orleans as early as the 1830s—in part because the rails compensated for the poor quality of the roads in American cities. The tram, however, had other advantages as well. By reducing the friction of uneven streets, the rails allowed horses to carry more than twice as many passengers as an omnibus; the horsecar also offered a quicker, quieter, and less jolting experience.59 In 1853, the French engineer Alphonse Loubat, who had introduced in New York the first tram with rails that lay flush with the street, received permission to bring his innovation to Paris, where it was called the chemin de fer américain. When the omnibus companies were fused in 1855, however, the CGO took over the tram concession as well and until 1873, made little effort to develop the service as the omnibuses already generated large profits.60 The tram also faced resistance in London, where it was feared that the rails could cause horses or other vehicles to trip or become stuck and that the service could negatively affect property values in affluent neighbourhoods.61 Although entrepreneurs eventually obtained permission to develop lines on the outskirts of London, the companies were not allowed to penetrate the city centre.62 As their operating costs were lower, however, they could offer cheaper fares and tap a new clientele of working-­ class passengers unable to afford the omnibus.63 Although London resisted the tram, it would be more forward-looking in its embrace of the Underground: the Metropolitan Railway, inaugurated in 1863, was the first in the world. Though initially intended to give trains access to the centre of London, the service would increasingly cater to local traffic and compete directly with the omnibuses.64 In Paris and London, omnibus services preceded the tram by several decades and to a certain extent represented an obstacle to the latter’s growth. In peripheral cities, where urban expansion took off later in the century, however, the tram was sometimes introduced before the omnibus. This was the case of Madrid. Although a concession for an omnibus company was granted in 1865, the enterprise went bankrupt and never completed the project.65 Small-scale coach services, connecting the centre to railroad stations or transporting passengers to fairs and bullfights, did

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exist, but Madrid would not develop a system of collective transportation until the introduction of the tram service in 1871. Adolfo de Foresta, an Italian visitor to Madrid in 1877, would remark upon this singular leap into modernity: ‘What an odd thing! In Madrid, there is no and has never been an omnibus for the service of the city, and it has passed directly from the total absence of these popular means of transportation to their latest form, that is, the tram’.66 When omnibuses, known as ripperts (sometimes written Ripert or riper), were finally introduced in 1883, tension quickly developed between the two services. As the ripperts had the same dimensions as tram coaches, their drivers often took advantage of the rails. As one ditty put it: ‘The tram is the husband / and the lover is the riper / which puts himself into the tracks / if the husband doesn’t see him’.67 The conflict led to a lawsuit, which the ripperts lost, but the competition eventually helped to reduce the price of the tram ticket.68 The story of the omnibus is one of innovation but also of resistance to change. As competing services sought to assert themselves in the market, existing companies often lobbied to restrict them. And while the Parisian monopoly improved the overall coverage of the system, it tended to sacrifice comfort and convenience to profit. As we will see in the next section, this tension between progress and inertia would also characterise the perception of the omnibus in the nineteenth century.

‘Chariots of Progress’ or ‘Antediluvian Phenomena’? In a pivotal moment of Émile Zola’s novel Au bonheur des dames (1883), a traditional shopkeeper who has been run out of business by a new department store jumps in front of an oncoming omnibus, which breaks his leg. He later recounts that just before his suicidal act, he was ruminating on how ‘that great harlot of a house [i.e. the department store] was crushing me’.69 As Masha Belenky argues, Zola’s omnibus is a ‘symbol of the dangerous and ruthless modern world’ as well as a ‘stand-in for the modern capitalist commerce’.70 In identifying the omnibus with modernity, scholars have often emphasised its impact on the rhythm of daily life. Belenky describes the omnibus as an experience of ‘unparalleled speed’, and Jennifer Terni underscores its role in ‘transform[ing] the pace of city life’.71 This might seem surprising when we consider that Parisian omnibuses averaged seven kilometres per hour.72 Early observers, however, were struck by their velocity. Texts from the late 1820s represent them as ‘Leviathans… criss-crossing the city at

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lightning speed’, as a means of ‘accelerated circulation’ and as ideal for Parisians ‘who needed celerity in their relations’.73 In an early sketch, Ernest Fouinet revels in the omnibus’ rapidity: ‘it’s good to go fast!’74 The service seemed to have accelerated the rhythm of life itself: ‘nowadays’, observed Louis Huart in an 1834 essay on public coaches, ‘one lives more quickly than in the past’.75 This sense of acceleration is clear as well in an early musical response to the service, Charles-Valentin Alkan’s piano variations ‘Les Omnibus’ (1829), which gradually speeds up its rhythm from allegro moderato to alegretto to allegro to allegro vivace.76 In the late 1820s and 1830s, omnibuses were often represented as a disruptive force, a disorienting and dangerous transformation of urban life. Louisa Stuart Costello, an Irish writer visiting Paris in 1829, evoked the chaos and confusion introduced by the racing vehicles: omnibus—dame blanche—batignolle—tresicle [sic]—with their prancing steeds, come helter skelter down the centre of the street—carts, wagons, cabriolets, hurry forward with indiscriminate fury, casting on every side incessant showers. To escape by means of one of the above-mentioned conveyances is the only safety of the unlucky wight who, with staring eyes and despairing movements, leaps and darts, now into a shop, now on to a step, now behind a post, to avoid being crushed at once by the ponderous machines that whirl by him, happy to find temporary security, though splashed from head to foot, and his nerves shaken beyond endurance.77

For Delphine de Girardin, similarly, the omnibuses were a ‘death sentence for the flâneur’. The pedestrian now seemed ‘to have the avenging Eumenides behind him’ at all times; it was impossible to stroll peacefully.78 Texts from the 1830s often evoke the recklessness of omnibus drivers. A poem addressed to the préfet de police advises Parisians to avoid: Those rolling colossi, abhorred by pedestrians, Which from dawn to midnight released from all reins Shake the subterranean vaults, Squeezing against the wall, thanks to their drunk drivers, Anyone who does not want to travel for six sous.

The vehicles, claims the poet, ‘have mutilated more men than war’.79 To make matters worse, drivers in both Paris and London did not stay to one side of the street but often crossed chaotically back and forth, even letting passengers on or off in the middle of a boulevard (right-hand traffic was

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introduced in Paris only in 1851).80 A comic text from 1836 warns against hailing omnibuses from the wrong side of the street in London, for the driver might cross two lines of vehicles ‘to the great danger of life and limb’.81 Early omnibuses also choked the normal flow of traffic and left little room for other vehicles. According to Édouard Gourdon, the 350 omnibuses in circulation in 1841 ‘occupied more or less the space of 700 ordinary coaches’.82 In London, moreover, they often loitered, obstructing the movement of vehicles in narrow streets. The police regularly ordered omnibuses to move along (‘Higher up’ was the typical cry), but drivers routinely ignored them.83 Shopkeepers protested that the omnibuses blocked the entrances to their establishments.84 An 1846 Punch caricature imagined a system of ‘elastic’ staircases that could be deployed to allow passengers to ‘escape from an omnibus blockade in Fleet Street’ into the second-story windows of neighbouring buildings.85 Even as late as 1872, a French writer would complain about the omnibuses’ chaotic impact on the city: what uproar, what confusion, what collisions! what shouts, what vociferations! a driver here, a driver there, whistle blasts; horses that fall down; conductors who swear, passengers who curse; grisettes, cocottes, great and small ladies; bourgeois and artists, abbots and soldiers: all of this gets agitated, thrashed about, criss-crossed, bumps into the omnibus, around it, inside, on top of and sometimes… underneath!86

As for Costello and Madame de Girardin, the omnibuses were a source of pandemonium in the metropolis, the emblem of a confusing, threatening modernity. This impression of the omnibus as novelty, speed, and disruption, however, coexisted with and eventually gave way to a vision of the omnibus as regression. When the Parisian service was established, writers almost immediately pointed out its similarity to the carrosses à cinq sols of the seventeenth century, a system of collective transport generally attributed to Blaise Pascal that existed for the use of middle- and upper-class Parisians between 1662 and 1677.87 The omnibus, indeed, involved no feats of technology and differed very little from the diligences and stagecoaches of old.88 The idea was so simple that one author wondered why such a service had not been invented before.89

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As the century advanced, writers—particularly French ones—would increasingly describe the omnibus as a throwback or an impediment to forward movement. In the Goncourt brothers’ novel Manette Salomon (1867), it is defined as ‘a mechanism that pretends to go forward and that is always stopping’, and in a comic text by Alphonse Allais, a Norwegian man drinks himself silly contemplating the ‘harrowing spectacle’ of an omnibus leaving the Place de Pigalle, which he finds ‘little worthy of our age of progress’.90 In its final years, the omnibus seemed almost a metaphor for antiquity. In Pierre de Querlon’s novel Les Joues d’Hélène (1903), two lovers return from a tryst in ‘the antique and jolting omnibus that every fifteen minutes comes to fill the street with the ringing of its trembling window panes and the jerky noise of its wheels on the disjointed cobblestones’ and contemplate an old woman, whose wrinkles contrast with their youth and beauty; they promise to love one another when they are as old as she is.91 Like the old woman, the omnibus is an emblem of age and decay; it is, in Octave Uzanne’s words, ‘backward, old-fashioned, very papa if not very grandpa’.92 As the novelty of the service wore off, and passenger trains emerged that travelled at a much faster clip, passengers’ perception of the omnibus’ speed also shifted. For Marie de Lauréal writing in 1861, the omnibus ‘dates from an era that one could describe as very remote, because now we live so quickly that the years […] disappear with the rapidity of lightning, carried away as we are by the impetuous current of progress’.93 The pace of the vehicles had not changed, observed another French writer, but ‘time no longer had the same measure’.94 Omnibuses now seemed too slow for the accelerated pace of modernity. Nineteenth-century texts, indeed, complain much more often about their sluggishness than their speed. When a character in a French vaudeville mentions that his journey has taken 15 days, his interlocutor immediately suspects he came by omnibus.95 British omnibus texts similarly associate the vehicle with ‘the speed of the caterpillar’ or ‘the snail’s pace’.96 And toward the end of the century, a French caricature would represent the wheel of the omnibus with a tortoise at its centre.97 The slowness of the omnibus led many to question its utility. In an 1840 French vaudeville, a character advises a friend in a hurry to walk to his destination; ‘the omnibus is for when one wants to flâner’.98 British texts similarly mock the idea ‘[t]hat you can save time by taking an omnibus’.99 In the comic poem ‘Legs Against Omnibus’ (1849), a man on a slow omnibus observes a pedestrian who keeps catching up with it and

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who ultimately arrives before he does; the passenger resolves to walk in the future to save time and sixpence.100 A related comic motif was the omnibus or tram ride that lasted a lifetime. In a French song, a passenger gets on as a youth and gets off an old man, having lost his hair and teeth along the way, and a Madrid caricature imagines a 20-year tram ride in which the passengers grow old and die on board.101 As people’s sense of the omnibus’ pace changed, so too did their perception of its effect on the city. The vehicles came to be seen not as disruptive but as a source of order and control. In 1843, a French writer observed that the omnibus, because of its heft, ‘exercises on the public route that sort of policing, if not legal, at least real, that is the role of people with muscles, broad necks and high shoulders’. Its conductors intervened in disputes between drivers and were respected for their ‘uniform’, their ‘impartial sang-froid’, and their ‘in some way public character’, which gave them an air of ‘authority’.102 If Paris streets had become less chaotic, observed another journalist in 1862, it was largely through their influence.103 Gradually, urban transit came to be seen an indispensable part of the ‘body’ of the city, ‘one of the essential organs for life in Paris’.104 Often it was assimilated to the circulatory system: the omnibus, wrote  Marie de Lauréal, allows residents ‘to circulate in all the arteries and vessels of the gigantic body that is called Paris’.105 Similarly, the last tram that leaves Madrid’s Puerta del Sol is compared to ‘the last surge of blood thrown by the heart to the periphery’.106 Far from destructive leviathans, the conveyances were a vital organ upon which the city depended for its very existence.

Omnibus Aesthetics Just as the public perception of the omnibuses shifted over time, so too did the aesthetic vision of the vehicles. In early French texts, the conveyances were commonly associated with romanticism, the dominant literary movement of the period. An 1829 vaudeville, for example, represents a ‘battle of the ancients and the moderns’ in which a young woman finds herself torn between a ‘classical’ father fittingly named Vieux-Vers (old verses) and a romantic mother called Smarra (the title of a fantastical work by Charles Nodier). Smarra longs to move from the left to the right bank to enjoy innovations such as sidewalks, passages (arcades) and omnibuses, which she identifies with romanticism: ‘Citadines, cabriolets, / Tricycles, Écossaises, / Omnibus, Wiskis, Bogheis, / Fiacres and Béarnaises, /

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Carolines, etcetera, / It’s romantic!’107 Texts from this period often refer to the ‘romantic omnibus’: ‘The romantic omnibus passed like lightening’; ‘They saw advancing like an avalanche / The romantic omnibus with the Dame Blanche’.108 In their power, speed and momentum, the vehicles captured the spirit of the aesthetic. As we have seen, many early omnibus companies tried to take advantage of this trend giving their coaches a romantic aura. The Dames Blanches took inspiration from the fictional world of Sir Walter Scott, and other companies such as the Écossaises, Algériennes and Gazelles offered Parisians similar escapes into far-off, romantic worlds. As the omnibus became part of people’s daily commutes, however, it began to lose its exotic appeal. Gradually, it became associated not with the excesses of romanticism but with a plain, straightforward, and accessible style—particularly in the British context. In an 1847 text, Leigh Hunt imagines a conversation in which James Boswell asks Samuel Johnson which vehicle he would prefer to be if he were transformed into a mode of conveyance. Johnson rejects the cart as ‘too low’, the ‘curricle’ as ‘coxcombical’ and the ‘steam-carriage’ as ‘too violent, perturbed, and migratory’ and opts instead for the omnibus, which is ‘common to all’ and ‘decent, deliberate and unpretending’.109 The vehicle epitomises Johnson’s own direct and accessible style and his common-sense vision of the world. Later in the century, the omnibus would become a symbol of the excesses of realism and naturalism and of a distasteful focus on low and commonplace aspects of life. John Ruskin contrasts the idealised, romantic literature of George Sand with the work of George Eliot whose secondary characters are simply the sweepings-out of a Pentonville omnibus. And it is very necessary that we should distinguish this essentially Cockney literature, developed only in the London suburbs, and feeding the demand of the rows of similar brick houses, which branch in devouring cancer round every manufacturing town,—from the really romantic literature of France.110

The common vehicle here becomes a metaphor of commonness, a symbol not only of the degraded urban sprawl to which the Pentonville omnibus transported its passengers but also of the banality of their lives, represented in the endless iterations of vulgar row houses. The reality portrayed is not only low but also a cliché. Drawing on Ruskin’s metaphor, another writer would reject the ‘new school’ of American fiction on similar grounds:

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What would [Ruskin] have to say of a literature which, if the expression be allowed us, occupies itself so largely with the Pentonville omnibus of the soul? Nothing is too trivial, too sordid, or too far-fetched to engage the attention of these ‘fine art’ writers.111

In 1911, H.G. Wells would make a similar point. ‘The novelist’, he observes, ‘undertakes to present you people and things as real as any that you can meet in an omnibus’, but this is not enough: the novel also has ‘inseparable moral consequences. It leaves impressions, not simply of things seen, but of acts judged and made attractive or unattractive’.112 In all these texts, the omnibus represents a degraded and soulless form of realism. In the French context, however, the omnibus could also function more positively as a symbol of a vigorous style that eschewed academicism. In a sonnet by the Parnassian poet Ernest d’Hervilly, the clatter of a passing omnibus disturbs the members of the Académie Française: Garde à vous ! — L’omnibus, l’arche de terre à roues, Va passer. — Le sol tremble. Et chaque monsieur mûr, Pour éviter la mort, se plaque contre un mur. Oui, mais son habit noir semble un congrès de boues. L’omnibus passe et rend tout à fait enragés, Avec son grand fracas de ressorts et de vitres, Les gens de l’Institut, dans leurs logis rangés, Qui font des vers d’amour devant d’affreux pupitres. Trois percherons trapus aux crins échevelés, Ménage à trois de bais ou de gris pommelés, Enlèvent l’omnibus comme une simple plume; Ces futurs trotteurs ont l’air (sculpteur, ne dis pas non !) Avec leur cou superbe et leur pied dont s’allume Le pavé,—des chevaux guerriers du Parthénon.113 [Beware! The omnibus, an earthly ark with wheels, Is going to pass. The ground trembles. And each mature gentleman, To avoid death, plasters himself against a wall. Yes, but his black suit seems a congress of mud. The omnibus passes and utterly infuriates, With its huge roar of springs and window panes, The people of the Institute, in their tidy spaces, Who write love lyrics at frightful reading desks. Three stocky Percherons with dishevelled manes,

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A ménage à trois of bay or dappled grey Carry the omnibus like a simple plume; Those future trotters have the air (sculptor, do not deny it!) With their superb neck and their foot which lights up The cobblestone,—of the warrior horses of the Parthenon.]

The ‘simple plume’ in these verses underscores the grace of the horses transporting a tremendous load as if it were weightless. ‘Plume’, however, refers not only to a feather but also to a quill or pen. The ‘writing’ of the omnibus horses represents grandeur in simplicity, a powerful, natural, and seemingly effortless style that contrasts with the academicians’ belaboured verse. A similar opposition appears in Jean Richepin’s ‘Fleurs de boisson’ (1881) in which a drunkard celebrates his own drunkenness: Je veux que mon haleine Suffise pour soûler ceux qui n’auront pas bu. [I want my breath to be able to inebriate those who will not have drunk.]

The use of the word haleine suggests the idea of poetic inspiration. Like a poet, the lyric voice seeks to transmit feelings and experiences to others who have not experienced them. As the poem continues, the drunkard takes an omnibus on which, like Apollo on his chariot, he lights up the world around him: Je veux qu’en me voyant le Panthéon recule, Craignant d’être écrasé par mon choc, et je veux Faire ce soir le jour après le crépuscule, Grâce au soleil dont les rayons sont mes cheveux. Tiens ! prenons l’omnibus, tout couvert de gens ternes Qui par mon flamboiement vont être illuminés. Le vieux cocher, prenant mes yeux pour ses lanternes, Allumera sa pipe aux braises de mon nez. De l’Odéon pensif aux tristes Batignolles Nous irons. Telle que va la comète qui luit ! [I want the Pantheon to draw back on seeing me, Fearing to be crushed by my shock, and I want To make this night day after dusk,

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Thanks to the sun whose rays are my hair. Wait! Let’s take the omnibus, all covered with dull people Who will be illuminated by my blaze. The old driver, taking my eyes as his lanterns, Will light his pipe on the embers of my nose. From the pensive Odéon to sad Batignolles We will go. Like a comet that glows!]

As in d’Hervilly’s poem, the omnibus—the site of this poetic apotheosis— is contrasted with more high-brow institutions. It leaves behind the Odéon, a symbol of the literary establishment, and the Panthéon, which draws away in horror, and makes its way towards the working-class neighbourhood of the Batignolles. In the end, the drunkard’s production takes a new form: Chez le mastroquet gras qui vend des attignoles Nous boirons du vin doux qui fait pisser la nuit. Nous pisserons, très beaux, très heureux et très dignes, Nous appuyant du front au mur éclaboussé, Et les Batignollais verront un jour des vignes Fleurir le long du mur où nous aurons pissé. [At the fat wine merchant’s, where sausage meatballs are sold, We will drink sweet wine that makes the night piss. We will piss, very beautiful, very happy, and very dignified, Resting our foreheads on the splattered wall, and the Batignollais will one day see vines flowering along the wall where we will have pissed.]

The lyric voice not only illuminates the night but is also a source of drunkenness and beauty in the future—flowering vines that will produce wine for future generations. The reference to the mastroquet (a popular term for wine merchant) who sells attignoles (sausage meatballs) underscores the humble nature of this creation.114 The aesthetic identified with the omnibus in this work is the poetry of the people. D’Hervilly’s and Richepin’s poems draw a distinction between high and low culture and associate the omnibus with the latter. As the vehicle of the humbler classes, indeed, the conveyances were often identified with popular genres. The 1828 vaudeville Les Omnibus ou la Revue en voiture, for example, begins with the complaints of the cabriolet and fiacre drivers who fear that the new omnibus service will lure away their clientele and

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ends with a legal battle between the opera and the smaller theatres of Paris. As Masha Belenky notes, these conflicts between high and low create a parallelism between the opera and the hired coaches, on the one hand, and between the omnibus and vaudeville, on the other.115 A similar association appears in a more negative context in an 1837 chronicle by Delphine de Girardin: ‘there are no longer passers-by (passants), there are travellers (voyageurs). People who take the omnibus to go from Madeleine to the Porte Saint-Denis are called travellers, just as the people who write a fourth of a vaudeville are called authors: this is because there is no longer any sense of distance’.116 For Madame de Girardin, the omnibus and vaudeville are low phenomena that have been inappropriately aggrandised through language. The identification between vaudeville and the omnibus is particularly clear in Charlotte Riddell’s 1883 novel A Struggle for Fame, in which two Irish youths, the aspiring writer Glenarva Westley and the brash Bernard Kelly, travel to London to make their way in the literary world. As Linda Peterson observes, Glenarva represents ‘Romantic, Brontëan authorship’, a ‘paradigm of genius, inspiration, and high vocation’, while Kelly stands for ‘a market-driven, Bohemian model’.117 The key moment in Kelly’s development takes place on an omnibus, where, to amuse his companion, he addresses an elderly gentleman as if he were an old friend and asks questions such as ‘How’s Maria?’ and ‘Where is Tom now?’ As the old man turns ‘purple with indignation’, the other passengers burst into laughter.118 With this prank, Kelly burns his bridges: the old man, it turns out, is the uncle he was counting on to find a job. Sometime later, a stranger greets Kelly as if he were an acquaintance. Kelly is astonished until the man begins to mimic his own questions on the omnibus (‘How’s Maria?’, etc.). The stranger is an actor named Dawnton who happened to be a passenger that day and was impressed by Kelly’s performance. Dawnton describes the omnibus incident as one of those ‘little accidents, which turn a man off one set of rails and shunt him on to another’.119 In Kelly’s case, the episode ‘shunts’ him toward ‘market-driven’ literature. With Dawnton, he produces and acts in a comic play entitled How’s Maria? (based on the omnibus incident) and later goes on to pen ‘gutter fictions’ but he never succeeds in writing ‘high’ literature.120 The choice of the omnibus in this episode is pointed: Kelly will be a writer who amuses the masses, the omnibus riders of the world. Although the omnibus offered little new in the way of technology, it was revolutionary in its introduction of an urban transit system permitting

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mobility between any two points through transfers. The omnibus expanded not only residents’ horizons but also the city itself, leading to the construction of peripheral and suburban neighbourhoods, which reduced overcrowding in the centre and improved the quality of life. From the perspective of urban planning, the service was radically transformative. For everyday users faced with its delays, detours, and discomforts, however, the omnibus quickly became perceived as backward and archaic. The inertia of the monopoly in Paris and the advent of alternate, more modern forms of transportation in London (most notably, the Underground) contributed to the increasing perception of the omnibus as a fusty institution. This evolution is reflected in the shifting literary uses of the vehicles. Perceived at first as ‘romantic’, the omnibus gradually became identified with more sordid forms of realism or with popular, market-driven literature, though at times it was the symbol of a vigorous aesthetic that subverted the literary establishment.

Notes 1. Karlheinz Stierle, La Capitale des signes: Paris et son discours (Paris: Éd. de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2001), 125; Raffaella Antinucci, ‘“Omnibus Trips”: The Victorians and the New Culture’ in La letteratura vittoriana e i mezzi di trasporto: dalla nave all’astronave, eds. Mariaconcetta Constantini, Renzo D’Agnillo and Francesco Marroni (Aracne, 2006), 290; Masha Belenky, Engines of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019). 2. Edmond About, Le Progrès (Paris: L. Hachette, 1864), 86; Eugène Sue, Les Mystères du peuple (Paris: Administration de librairie, 1849), I, 1. 3. Saint-Sénac, ‘Un voyage en tramway’, Revue de la France moderne, February 1890, 106; Edmond Frank, ‘Nos bons omnibus’, L’Illustration, 21 February 1903, 118; Paul Ginisty, ‘La Semaine parisienne’, Petit Parisien, 13 January 1913, 1; Louis Marsolleau, ‘L’Omnibus’ in Bertrand Millanvoye, Anthologie des poètes de Montmartre (Paris: Ollendorff, [1909]), 254; ‘Chronique parisienne’, Bibliothèque universelle et Revue suisse, July 1912, 173. 4. Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996), 59–60. The detail about Monsieur Omnès’ shop is likely apocryphal. A number of alternate explanations of the name have been proposed over the years. See the Fonds Stanislas Baudry (Archives

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Municipales de Nantes) for the account of Baudry’s accountant’s son. See also André Péron, Nantes au temps des omnibus (Quimper: Ressac, 1986); André Rigaud, ‘Qui était M.  Omnès?’, Vie et Langage 175 (October 1966): 596–97, and ‘Omnès-Omnibus’, Vie et Langage 211 (October 1969): 592–95; and Steven Winick, ‘The Legend of Monsieur Omnès’, The Carriage Journal 58:3 (May 2020): 144–49. 5. Maxime du Camp, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: L. Hachette, 1869), I, 257. 6. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 62. 7. V. L. de Cotignac, Les Dames blanches ou le Tribut de la scène et des beaux-­ arts (Paris: Le Roi, 1829), 26–30. See also Nicole Vilkner, ‘The Opera and the Omnibus: Material Culture, Urbanism and Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche’, Cambridge Opera Journal 32:1 (2020): 90–114. 8. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 67. 9. Several similar services had been introduced in London in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century but without much success in part due to the monopoly of the hackney coaches. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 78. On these antecedents, see also ‘The ’Bus’, Cornhill Magazine, March 1890, 298;  and George Augustus Sala, London Up to Date (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1894), 130. 10. T.  C. Barker and M.  Robbins, History of London Transport (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), I, 25–27. 11. Henry Charles Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs: Their Origin and History (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), 47. 12. ‘Les Panoramas—Les Omnibus—Les Vidanges de Paris’, Petites chroniques de la science, September 1861, 292. 13. Nicolas Brazier and Gabriel de Lurieu, Le Diable à Paris: folie fantastique en un acte (Paris: Nobis, 1836), 11. 14. Howard P.  Chudacoff, Judith E.  Smith and Peter C.  Baldwin, The Evolution of American Urban History (New York: Routledge, 2015), 42; John P. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976), 11. 15. Pierre Larousse, Le Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1874), XI, 1338. 16. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 36–45. 17. ‘Omnibus nouveau modèle’, L’Illustration, 22 April 1843, 128. 18. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 66; ‘The New Omnibus’, The Lady’s Newspaper, 14 February 1852, 92; U.  D’Andravy, ‘Les Omnibus’, L’Univers illustré, 15 May 1862, 192. 19. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 65. 20. John Sanderson, The American in Paris (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), I, 169; Eduard Kolloff, Paris. Reisehandbuch von E. Kolloff (Paris: A. Franck, 1849), 125.

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21. Brazier et al., Le Diable à Paris, 12–13. 22. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 85. 23. Barker et al., History of London Transport, I, 87. 24. Michael Paterson, A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain: A Social History of Queen Victoria’s Reign (London: Constable & Robinson, 2008), 134. Passengers seem to have ridden on top of the omnibus even before this. A painting by James Pollard from 17 March 1845 (Museum of London) titled ‘A Street Scene with Two Omnibuses’ represents a group of men riding on top of a Favorite omnibus. 25. ‘The Bystander’, The Graphic, 16 May 1891, n.p.; Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 64, 84. 26. Xavier Montépin, Le Marchand de diamants (Paris: F. Roy, 1889), 138. 27. Jean Victor Adam, ‘Omnibus et Dames blanches’ (Paris: C.  Motte, 1830); P. C., Les Omnibus et les Dames blanches: almanach chantant pour la présent année (Paris: Stahl, [1829]), 3–4. 28. See, for example, ‘The Rule of the Road’, Punch, 5 August 1882, 59; ‘Good Holiday Bus-iness’, Funny Folks, 19 April 1884, 123; and ‘The Rival Buses’, Judy, 17 July 1867, 146. 29. Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz (London: Chapman & Hall, 1895), 359. 30. ‘Civil War in the Suburbs’, Punch, 4 December 1847, 217. 31. George Augustus Sala, ‘Inside London’, London Journal, 9 July 1859, 409. 32. Sala, London Up to Date, 134. 33. Barker et al., History of London Transport, I, 70. 34. ‘The War-Song of the Wild ’Bus-Man’, Punch, 13 October 1849, 145. A detailed account of this practice appears in G.  E. Mitton’s novel A Bachelor Girl in London (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1898) in which an omnibus driver races with a colleague seeking not only to arrive first to their destination but also to deprive his rival of any passengers along the way (III, 267–78). For visual representations of omnibus racing, see ‘The Chelsea Autumn Meeting’, Fun, 16 November 1881, 202; and ‘An Omnibus Race’, Moonshine, 14 June 1890, 279. 35. ‘Omnibusters’, Punch, 28 November 1857, 217. 36. Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 110. 37. John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary (London: Chatto and Windus, 1913), 314. 38. ‘The Bus Brigands of London’, Punch, 27 November 1858, 220. 39. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 165. 40. ‘A Modern Pirate’, Aberdeen Weekly Journal, 21 October 1891, n.p. 41. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 175.

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42. See, for example, the caricature ‘The Pirate ’Bus!’, Funny Folks, 25 September 1886, 309. 43. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 174. 44. ‘The Pirate ’Bus’, Funny Folks, 11 August 1888, 250. 45. J.  Crook and F.  Bowyer, ‘The Pirate ’Bus’ (London: Francis Bros and Day, [1886]), 5. 46. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 93–95. 47. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 96. 48. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 100–1. 49. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 105. 50. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys, 12; Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 123. 51. C.S., Les Omnibus de Paris, pièce curieuse & utile à l’usage des voyageurs dans Paris (Paris: Impr. de Cordier, 1863), 10; E. Borde, ‘Le Bitricycle’, L’Innovateur, 30 October 1862, 1–2. 52. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 107, 123. 53. C. Léandre, ‘Fable’, Le Rire, 11 May 1895, 12; Jean Sincère, ‘La Foire aux abus: S.  M. L’Omnibus’, Le Charivari, 23 December 1884, n.p.; Edmond Auguste Texier, Taxile Delord, and Arnould Frémy, Paris-en-­ omnibus (Paris: A.  Taride, 1854), 87; J.  Saint-Martin, ‘L’Omnibus’, Revue artistique, 16 May 1872, n.p. 54. Sincère, ‘La Foire aux abus’, n.p.; G. Vitali, ‘Les Omnibus’, Le Journal monstre, May 1857, 62; Touchatout, ‘Nos omnibus’, Tintamarre, 22 January 1899, n.p. 55. Frank, ‘Nos bons omnibus’, 118. 56. ‘L’Omnibus à deux sous?!’, L’Assiette au beurre, 7 March 1908, 789. 57. ‘The Omnibus Revolution’, Household Words, 28 June 1856, 561. 58. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 105, 126, 127. 59. McKay, Tramways and Trolleys, 14–15; Barker et al., History of London Transport, I, 178. 60. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 104. 61. Paterson, Brief History, 136; Barker et  al., History of London Transport, I, 179. 62. Barker et al., History of London Transport, I, 187, 195. 63. Barker et al., History of London Transport, I, 196; McKay, Tramways and Trolleys, 22. 64. Barker et al., History of London Transport, I, 99, 122. 65. Santiago López Navia, ‘Coches de alquiler, ómnibus, tramwías’, Semanario de las familias, 27 March 1882, 186–87. 66. Cited in Madrid en la prosa de viaje III (siglo XIX), ed. Juan Antonio Santos (Madrid: Comunidad de Madrid, 1994), 341. 67. Cited in Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Elucidario de Madrid (Madrid: Renacimiento, 1931), 69.

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68. ‘Los tranvías de Madrid: cómo nacieron’, Alrededor del mundo, 8 December 1899, 21. 69. Émile Zola, Au bonheur des dames (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1883), 458. 70. Masha Belenky, ‘From Transit to Transitoire: Omnibus and Modernity’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies 35:2 (Winter 2007): 409, 413; Engines of Modernity, 167. 71. Masha Belenky, ‘Transitory Tales: Writing the Omnibus in Nineteenth-­ Century Paris’, Dix-Neuf 16:3 (November  2012): 283; Jennifer Terni, ‘The Omnibus and the Shaping of the Urban Quotidian: Paris, 1828–60’, Cultural and Social History 11:2 (2014): 217. 72. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 116. McKay estimates a speed of five miles per hour. Tramways and Trolleys, 11. 73. Théophile Gautier, preface to Édouard Fournier, Pari démoli: mosaïque de ruines (Paris: Auguste Aubry, 1855), iv; Panorama parisien ou Indicateur général de toutes les voitures anciennes et nouvelles (Paris: Chez l’éditeur, rue Mazarine, n° 49, 1829), 4; Indicateur des dames-blanches et des omnibus (Paris: Demonville, [1828]), 4. 74. Ernest Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus, de la barrière du Trône à la barrière de l’Étoile’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris: Ladvocat, 1831), II, 64. 75. Louis Huart, ‘Les Voitures publiques’, Nouveau tableau de Paris au XIXme siècle (Paris: Mme Charles-Béchet, 1834) IV, 164. 76. Charles-Valentin Alkan, ‘Les Omnibus, variations pour le piano forte dédiées aux dames blanches. Op. 2’ (Paris: Maurice Schlesinger, n.d.). On this work and other musical responses to the omnibus, see Vilkner, ‘The Opera and the Omnibus’. 77. Louisa Stuart Costello, ‘Notes and Sketches of Paris—No. 1’, La Belle Assemblée, 1 April 1829, 150. 78. Delphine de Girardin, Lettres parisiennes (Paris: Charpentier, 1843), 147. 79. ‘Épitre à M. le préfet de police’, La Presse, 19 April 1838, n.p. 80. Paterson, Brief History, 133; Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 30. On the chaotic impact of the omnibus on London streets, see Paul Fyfe, By Accident or Design: Writing the Victorian Metropolis (New York: Oxford UP, 2015), 67–99. 81. ‘Omnibus-ology—or a little advice’, Caledonian Mercury, 21 July 1836, n.p. 82. Édouard Gourdon, La Physiologie de l’omnibus (Paris: Terry, [1841–42]), 49. 83. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 25. 84. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 26. 85. ‘New Omnibus Escape’, Punch, 12 November 1846, 217. 86. J. Saint-Martin, ‘L’Omnibus’, n.p.

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87. On the carrosses à cinq sols, see Louis Jean Nicolas Monmerqué, Les Carrosses à cinq sols, ou les Omnibus du dix-septième siècle (Paris: F. Didot, 1828); Édouard Fournier, Le Vieux-Neuf (Paris: E. Dentu, 1859), 49–56; Jean Mesnard, Pascal et les Roannez (Bruges: De Brower, 1965), II, 755–813; Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 16–21; and Eric Lundwall, Les Carrosses à cinq sols: Pascal entrepreneur (Paris: Science infuse, 2000). Though short-lived, the carrosse à cinq sols served as a source of literary inspiration, most notably in Jean Chevalier’s 1662 play L’Intrigue des carrosses à cinq sols (Paris: Lécluse, 1828). 88. As Terni observes, it ‘does not seem like much of a technological departure’. ‘Omnibus and the Shaping’, 221. The London omnibus was described on its introduction as ‘only a revival of the long stage-coach’. Cited in Barker et al., History of London Transport, I, 16. 89. ‘L’Éteignoir’, Le Charivari, 22 November 1844, 1. 90. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Salomon (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1868), I, 250–51; Alphonse Allais, Pas de bile! (Paris: E. Flammarion, 1893), 11, 13. 91. Pierre de Querlon, Les Joues d’Hélène (Paris: Mercure de France, 1903), 37–38. 92. Octave Uzanne, ‘Omnibus de Paris’, Le Monde moderne, January-June 1900, 494. 93. Marie A. de Lauréal, ‘Voyage en omnibus’, Revue pour tous illustrée, 28 July 1861, 187. 94. Ginisty, ‘La Semaine parisienne’, 1. 95. Nicolas Brazier, Pierre-Frédéric-Adolphe Carmouche, and Frédéric de Courcy, Les Bêtises de l’année ou le Confiseur dramatique, revue-vaudeville en un acte (Paris: J.-N. Barba, 1829), 11. 96. ‘Omnibusters’, Punch, 28 November 1857, 217; ‘A Handbook of Knowledge: No. VI.—The British ’Bus. 2. Chiefly concerning its Exterior’, Punch, 22 July 1882, 33. 97. ‘Les Omnibus’, L’Assiette au beurre, 6 January 1903, 1557. 98. Michel Delaporte and Cogniard frères, Job l’afficheur (Paris: Marchant, 1840), 5. 99. ‘Popular Mistakes’, Fun, 5 July 1862, 15. 100. ‘Legs against Omnibus’, Punch, 10 November 1849, 184. 101. Déroueville, Paul Briollet, and Georges Arnould, ‘Voyage en omnibus’ (Paris: 1, passage de l’Industrie, [1901]); ‘De Chamberí al Oriental, o veinte años en tranvía’, Madrid cómico, 22 June 1884, n.p. 102. ‘Quelques remarques sur les omnibus’, Le Magasin pittoresque, April 1843, 103. 103. D’Andravy, ‘Les Omnibus’, 191. 104. J. Saint-Martin, ‘L’Omnibus’, n.p.

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105. M. de Lauréal, ‘Voyage en omnibus’, 187. 106. José de Roure, ‘El último tranvía’, El Liberal, 23 January 1891, n.p. 107. Antoine Jean-Baptiste Simonnin and Émile Vanderburch, Le Doge et le Dernier Jour d’un condamné, ou le Canon d’alarme, vaudeville en trois tableau (Paris: Quoy, 1829), 7. 108. Léon Gozlan, Le Triomphe des omnibus: poème héroï-comique (Paris: Ambroise Dupont, 1828), 15; H., ‘L’Oncle et le Neveu’, Diogène, 5 November 1828, 2. 109. Leigh Hunt, Men, Women and Books (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), 17–18. 110. John Ruskin, ‘Fiction—Fair and Foul’, The Nineteenth Century, October 1881, 521. 111. ‘The New School of American Fiction’, Temple Bar, March 1884, 383–84. 112. H. G. Wells, ‘The Contemporary Novel’, Fortnightly Review, November 1911, 866. 113. E. d’Hervilly,  ‘Les Chevaux d’omnibus’, Les Bêtes à Paris (Paris: H. Launette et Cie éditeurs, 1885), n.p. 114. Jean Richepin, La Chanson des gueux (Paris: Maurice Dreyfous, 1881), 210–11. 115. Belenky, Engines of Modernity, 40. 116. D. de Girardin, Lettres parisiennes, 151–52. 117. Linda H. Peterson, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2009), 160. 118. Charlotte Riddell, A Struggle for Fame (London: Richard Bentley, 1883), I, 81–82. 119. Riddell, Struggle, I, 152. 120. Riddell, Struggle, III, 101.

CHAPTER 3

Comic Commonplaces

John Sanderson, an American who visited Paris in the 1830s, recommended the omnibus as a cure for melancholy: ‘Whether it is the queer shaking over the rough pavement I cannot say, but you have always an irresistible inclination to laugh. It is so laughable to see your face bobbing into the face of somebody else’.1 Nineteenth-century writers often observed the ‘comic effect’ of the omnibus, its tendency ‘to bring out the humorous rather than the pathetic traits of the passengers’.2 For Édouard Gourdon, the author of La Physiologie de l’omnibus (1841–1842), the very word called up ‘farcical scenes’.3 Throughout the century, the omnibus would prove an inexhaustible source of vaudeville, caricatures, and comic vignettes.4 The comedy perhaps most evoked in omnibus literature is the Divina Commedia. For nineteenth-century observers, the words inscribed on the gates of Hell—‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’intrate’ (give up all hope, you who enter)—aptly summarised the omnibus experience. Dante, wrote a French journalist in 1855, ‘had anticipated the omnibus stations’ by several centuries: as passing coaches were invariably full, to enter the station was to renounce all hope of leaving it.5 In an 1844 Punch satire, the inscription captured the snail-like speed of the omnibus: ‘Such is the sauntering pace of the “splendid cattle” employed in dragging the genteel, but desolate bus’ that Dante’s words might be translated: ‘All ye who enter,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7_3

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may at once despair, / (If, for the Bank)—of ever getting there’.6 In still other works, it is the unbearable conditions of the coaches that recall Dante’s Hell: LIFE IN AN OMNIBUS with twelve insides, two babies, a birdcage, a dog, and a washerwoman smelling strongly of rum and yellow soap! If DANTE had been alive in the present day, (and we can only regret that he is not), he would certainly have placed his “Inferno” inside a Penny Omnibus!7

This chapter explores some of the commonplaces of visual and literary evocations of this comic Hell and, in the process, seeks to give a sense of the logistics and physical experience of the omnibus for nineteenth-­century passengers. Its first sections take the reader through the various stages of a ride, from hailing to alighting, while the final ones explore the physical and sensory impact of the omnibus as it is represented in the satirical literature of the period. Through this discussion, we will see that this comic repertoire, though seemingly frivolous, captures many of the anxieties and preoccupations of nineteenth-century urban life: the feeling of being displaced or crowded out by the multitudes, the fear of being declassed or dispossessed through proximity with social others, and the sense of disorientation and danger provoked by an ever larger and more chaotic metropolis.

From Alphabet Soup to ‘Assault’ The first step in taking an omnibus—identifying one’s route—was not particularly challenging with the early Parisian omnibus. The service initially followed a single trajectory (from Bastille to Madeleine and vice versa), and coaches were equipped with a musical instrument (described variously as a foot organ or trumpet) that announced their arrival with ‘lugubrious fanfares’.8 As one observer put it, ‘The drivers, new Amphions in polished hats, lacking a lyre, played the Barbary organ; they executed the waltz of Robin Hood with a harmonic sole’.9 As additional omnibus companies appeared offering new routes, they were relatively easy to distinguish thanks to their colourful themes: Dames Blanches, Hirondelles, Batignollaises, Écossaises, Béarnaises, etc.10 With the merger of the Parisian omnibus companies and the reorganization of the lines in 1855, however, the vehicles adopted a uniform external appearance, and routes were identified not by company names but by

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letters. This new system required Parisians to master a complex and sometimes confusing code. Texts from the 1850s and 1860s often capture the bewilderment of passengers trying to find their way in an alphabet soup of omnibuses. Learning the new system, observed a British author, was like studying Euclid—‘The line AB corresponds with the lines C and D, and is intersected at the point H by the lines F, G and I’—but more frustrating as ‘parallel lines are perpetually meeting’.11 A French song from 1856, the year after the formation of the CGO, features on its cover a plump, illiterate woman who looks out, befuddled, at tiny omnibuses decorated with letters (Fig.  3.1). Whereas earlier coaches were clearly distinguished by colours or images, she complains, the new system is a ‘rebus’ that requires passengers to have ‘a transcendent inducation [sic]’. The song offers a series of suggestions for clarifying the system, such as making the O line run along the Seine (the letter ‘o’ in French coincides phonetically with the word eau, water) or having the Latin Quarter served by the P.Y., letters pronounced the same as pays grec (Greek country).12 Another poem from the period proposed clever mnemonics to help readers to remember the routes. The lines that passed by the Palais-Royal, for example, were summarised in the phrase ‘Ah! chère Ixie, Grècque, j’ai assez d’écus’, pronounced H, R, X, Y, G, A, C, D, Q.13 London omnibuses could also be bewildering as the early vehicles did not post their destinations; conductors simply shouted their routes, at times confusing passengers with their garbled or abbreviated diction. British texts often poke fun at the cads’ unclear pronunciation of toponyms: ‘Emmersmith’ instead of ‘Hammersmith’, ‘Roil Hoax’ instead of ‘Royal Oaks’, ‘’Nich’ and ‘’Wich’ instead of ‘Greenwich’ and ‘Woolwich’, ‘Ins-la’ instead of ‘Kingsland’.14 The omnibus routes, moreover, could be indirect and counterintuitive. An 1843 Punch piece entitled ‘Road-Book for Omnibus and Cab Drivers’ includes a contorted map satirising the absurdly circuitous route from Bond Street to the Bank.15 On the earliest omnibus lines, passengers often had to hail vehicles along the route, which involved, in the words of a Punch writer, ‘prolonged shouting, delirious waving of umbrella or walking-stick, and [a] breathless chase through mud and muck’.16 In both Paris and London, observers claimed that conductors routinely looked the wrong way, failing to notice the prospective passengers desperately flagging them from the street: as a British writer put it, the cad is ‘blind on one side, and that side always your side’.17 Others complained of conductors sleeping on their seats or ‘dreaming on the running board’.18 Cads seem to have been

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Fig. 3.1  Henry Emy, ‘L’Infusion des omnibus’. Ville de Paris / Bibliothèque historique (2-BRO-300470)

particularly oblivious when passengers requested stops. In early British texts, travellers bawl at conductors, pull their coat-tails, and even poke them with their canes to get them to halt the vehicle. ‘Not more than nine sticks, parasols, rolls or music, warming-pans or other usual companions of travellers’, advised one satirist, ‘should be thrust out of the door at the

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same moment for the purpose of beating the conductor until he stops the omnibus’.19 When unsuccessful, passengers were often carried far beyond their destination: ‘No omnibus ever stopped where you desired’.20 With the introduction of bureaux d’omnibus in Paris, it was no longer necessary to hail a coach; passengers could wait instead at the nearest omnibus station where a buraliste or chef de station—a bureaucrat as ‘impartial and inflexible as Minos’—distributed numbered tickets.21 Some of the bureaux were rooms where passengers could take shelter from the rain and warm themselves next to a wood burner. The atmosphere, however, was often described as unpleasant and ‘asphyxiating, exuding a nauseating odour of wet dog’.22 A French ditty from 1898 represents the station as a ‘stable’ that smells of ‘dung, old umbrella, / wet dog, the cat that has had an accident’ and as a space where one is exposed to typhus, spiders, and bugs.23 As the CGO expanded, moreover, it built flimsier constructions—‘light boxes made of yellow wood’—that protected passengers neither from the elements nor from ‘the obscenities of the first passer-by’.24 Parisians, however, seem to have waited at these stations with remarkable fortitude: ‘If patience were banished from the rest of the earth’, reads a Daumier caption, ‘one could find it again in Paris at an omnibus station office’.25 In a caricature in L’Assiette au beurre, a woman spends 20 years waiting for an omnibus, transforming from young girl into fat matron.26 From the outset, the scarcity of the vehicles was a common complaint in French and Spanish omnibus texts. A novel from 1830 compares the Parisian omnibus to a ministry in which ‘All the places were taken, and many applications and applicants had already been refused’, and a number of texts cite the Gospel of Matthew: ‘many are called but few are chosen’.27 Omnibuses and trams were particularly difficult to find in inclement weather when they served not just as a means of transportation but also as the ‘umbrella of the pedestrian’, a ‘Noah’s ark’ that saved him from a second deluge.28 As demand increased, passengers waiting for inside seats often despaired as they watched as one full omnibus after another pass by. An 1896 satire by Octave Mirbeau follows the train of thought of a man waiting for an omnibus in the rain with the number 364,998; when he asks when his turn will come, the contrôleur replies ‘by Easter or Trinity’.29 Numerous satirical images from the period represent rainy scenes in which pedestrians hail omnibuses that turn out to be complet.30 The scarcity of vehicles would remain a constant complaint throughout the century. When in 1900 companies began to pay hommes-sandwich

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(men sandwiched between signboards) to ride the impériales of Parisian omnibuses, each bearing a single letter of a brand name, passengers were outraged: the wandering advertisements only aggravated the shortage of seats.31 The crowds at Parisian omnibus stations could be large and unruly. Although the CGO used a system of numbered tickets, passengers often swarmed chaotically around arriving omnibuses, hurling themselves against the ‘large stomachs of the gentlemen or against the enormous bustles of the ladies’.32 One observer compared them to the ‘band[s] of brigands’ that used to attack diligences.33 An 1898 caricature, Fernand Fau’s ‘Une station d’omnibus’, captures the pandemonium of an omnibus station as passengers stampede to enter an incoming vehicle: an ‘outside’ vomits on the crowd below, a dog bites a mother’s skirt, a pick-pocket filches a wallet, and a pedestrian is run over, all of which goes unnoticed by the contrôleur tranquilly reading the newspaper in the foreground.34 In London and Madrid, where tickets were not used, passengers are often represented elbowing or fighting their way onto public conveyances. In a comic British text, a struggle to get on an omnibus leads to broken legs, nose bleeds, and the loss of teeth and eyes.35 Spanish writers commonly refer to the asalto del tranvía (assault of the tram), which is a ‘symbol of the struggle for existence’: ‘large and small, dignity or riffraff, […] push, rub against, step on and hang onto one another, entering as they can’.36 Even women seem to have participated ‘with a bravery worthy of a nobler cause’.37 Many observers noted male passengers’ lack of gallantry in such situations. In Georges du Maurier’s ironically titled caricature ‘Chivalry in the London Streets’, men push their way ahead of women waiting for an omnibus.38 Observing that women were often ‘left standing’ as men took the tram ‘by assault’, a Spanish critic called for the company to adopt the numbered tickets of the Parisian omnibus, replacing ‘force’ with ‘law’.39

Acrobatics and Compression In the very first Parisian omnibuses, which had no conductors, passengers entered and left through a rear door that the driver opened and closed through a spring mechanism (they requested stops by pulling a string attached to his arm).40 Early observers often complained that drivers started up again too quickly after receiving new passengers, jolting them into their neighbours’ laps. Even when conductors assisted, their timing left much to be desired. The cads, observed a British writer, considered it a

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great art […] to place their hand lightly on your back […] with an air of kindly protection, and slightly propelling you forward, to close the door with pantomimic rapidity, and start the omnibus suddenly—so as to lurch you violently amongst the laps and legs of your fellow-passengers—and then looking in with calm delight at the confusion they have created; gloat over the shin-wiping, apologizing and scowling that usually ensues.41

Descending passengers were treated with similar disregard, ‘shot out of [the omnibus] like a coffin from a plague-cart’.42 In a caricature by Daumier, titled ‘What conductors… refer to as letting passengers off’, a man lands on his rear after disembarking.43 Climbing to the knife-board or impériale was even more perilous. In the first London and Paris buses with rooftop seats, passengers had to scramble up several rungs and then hoist themselves onto the roof—a feat that clarified, for Pierre Véron, ‘the classification that places man in the family of the monkey’.44 In comic texts, the manoeuvre is described as ‘a tour de force of acrobatics’, ‘a grotesque and perilous gymnastics’, and an exploit similar to those ‘performed at Astley’s’ (a circus) or by members of the ‘Alpine Club’.45 As drivers sometimes started before passengers had ascended, the latter could be left hanging from the bars for dear life.46 Little, moreover, prevented ‘outsides’ from being thrown off the roof. As a British writer observed, ‘you find yourself suspended precariously, your legs dangling in mid-air over the wheels, nearly shaken out of your seat at every oscillation, with nothing between you and destruction but a small rail and a little leather strap’.47 Rooftop passengers also had to take care not to break the omnibus windows, which were dangerously close to their swaying legs. Climbing down required similar caution: Véron evokes a descending passenger’s ‘feet trac[ing] senseless parabolas’ as ‘sweat beads on [his] brow’, and a Daumier caricature shows a man stepping on a woman’s head, which he mistakes for the next rung of the ladder.48 The introduction of a spiral staircase and the replacement of the knife-board format—two parallel rows looking out to either side of the road (as in Fig. 6.1)—with ‘garden seats’ facing the front of the vehicle (as in Fig. 4.3)— made the roof accessible to the nervous or unacrobatic.49 Finding and reaching a seat was another challenge. Early omnibus coaches in both Paris and London were between 4 and 5 feet wide, which left little room for a centre aisle.50 In English texts, passengers often have to make their way through an ‘intractable Leg Alley’, ‘stumbling over the resolutely protruded knees of one, the doggedly planted umbrella of

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another, and the ingeniously ambushed bag, bale or bundle of a third’, sometimes leaning on others’ arms or knees to steady themselves.51 One British writer called for an end to ‘all the corn-crushing, rib-bruising, boot-soiling, skirt-tearing, eye-(by umbrella ferule) endangering, temper-­ exacerbating and grumbling, to which the entrance and exits of an omnibus passenger ordinarily [gave] rise’.52 Early omnibuses carried 14 passengers in Paris53 and 12 to 15  in London54 but omnibus cads routinely disregarded these rules to increase their intake.55 In a caricature from 1829, a Parisian conductor uses erroneous math to justify letting an additional passenger into a clearly overcrowded omnibus: ‘Three, six and three… eight, still a seat! make room, Ladies and Gentlemen’.56 Similar complaints were lodged against London cads. A Punch article defines the omnibus as ‘A lumbering vehicle, licensed to carry a fixed number of passengers, and to torture as many as can be crammed in it’ and the conductor’s task as getting ‘the greatest bulk into the smallest space’; the result is ‘a condition of utter breathlessness and absolute immobility both of body and limb’.57 Visual representations such as William Maw Egley’s 1859 painting ‘Omnibus Life in London’ (Fig. 3.2) often underscore the overcrowding of the space in which passengers were ‘packed in as in a chicken cage’.58 To make matters worse, conductors almost never took into account their clients’ size. Although an early British regulation mandated that each passenger have at least 16 inches of space, the allowance was insufficient for many stout Londoners.59 Numerous texts evoke the plight of passengers suffocated by obese neighbours. In a French ditty, a man sandwiched between overweight women complains that ‘it is too stifling to carry at once Notre Dame and the Fountain of the Elephant’.60 In another French text, a narrator who finds himself trapped ‘like a pair of tweezers caught between two bags of flour’, feels inspired by ‘Sparticus, the Charte, Lafayette, and the independence of the two worlds’ to liberate himself from these ‘fleshy walls’, but his neighbours move aside only to confine him more firmly. Ultimately, he is a ‘prisoner guarded by the worst jailor: politeness’.61 At times, observers argued that larger passengers should pay a higher fare: An excellent suggestion—for the thin— For all the fat “a double debt to pay.” Let adiposity spend more than skin And bone, is what mere skin and bone would say.62

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Fig. 3.2  William Maw Egley, ‘Omnibus Life in London’. Photo: Tate

Adiposity opined otherwise: if such a rule were put into effect, observes a fat passenger in another text, cads would no longer stop for thin men.63 The omnibus may seem a ‘sanctuary of equality’, quipped Ernest Fouinet, but it is actually the image of society, a space in which ‘six fat bodies crush twelve small ones’.64 The result of this overcrowding was an extreme compression, which reduced passengers to ‘a sort of porridge or dough’ or ‘a ream of double foolscap hot press’d’ (foolscap was a type of long writing paper); they

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emerge ‘as flat as a water bug’ or ‘like that clown at Drury-lane that goes into something in a substantial comely form, and comes out like a pancake’.65 John Sanderson recounts how a Parisian lady who took an omnibus with seven fat men emerged so ‘compressed’ that she needed ‘a whole day of the enlarging and tightening capacities of Madame Palmyre’ (a well-known dress-maker) to regain her figure.66 Another writer accused the Madrid tram company of shrinking its passengers by ‘the procedure of Dr Liebig’ (a chemist who invented a condenser).67 In Paris and Madrid, tram platforms seem to have been particularly prone to overcrowding: Parisian outsides are ‘forced to stand, bent over, leaning, crushed, and to pay for these clownish and dangerous positions, as much as if they were sheltered from the rain, snow and wind’,68 and Spanish texts compare the platform to a basket of sardines; passengers are reduced to ‘the category of sole fish’ or travel ‘in a cage’ in the manner of ‘quails’.69 Comic texts, particularly British ones, often satirise passengers’ attempts to prevent newcomers from taking a seat on their side of the aisle. Each new arrival, observes a Punch writer, is seen as ‘an impertinent intruder, and the common enemy of those already seated’; the latter ‘[spread] themselves over the whole available space, […] “glowering” at the unhappy incomer with looks of dark disfavour’.70 Resorting to a political metaphor, another wit represents the entrance of a new passenger as a struggle in which the ‘left’ and ‘right’ (the two sides of the omnibus) compete to have the ‘minority’ (the least number of occupants).71 To avoid making room, passengers often adopted a ‘sudden look of blank abstraction and unconsciousness of any emergency having arisen’ (e.g. see Fig. 3.2).72 Once installed in his seat, however, the newcomer quickly forgot his difficulty and treated new fares in the same way.73 This empty gaze is well illustrated in a Punch caricature entitled ‘A Study of Omnibus Life’ in which an ‘affable person’ gets on the omnibus only to encounter the ‘Stolid determination on either side to let the other side have the benefit of Affable Person. Complete unconsciousness of Affable Person’s existence. Omnibus goes on. Embarrassing situation of Affable Person’.74 To claim a place, Affable Person often found himself obliged to imitate ‘the action of the wedge’.75 Although the omnibus was often seen as an egalitarian space, not all seats were equal. The luckiest passengers—described in a French text as the élus (the chosen ones)—sat on the two parallel banquettes.76 A more dubious position was the strapontin, a ‘circular board of about six inches in diameter’ at the end of the aisle whose occupant was called the

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président.77 For some writers, this was an ideal position for observation as it presided over the rest of the vehicle: Fouinet boasts that, as président, he is like the ‘director of an orchestra, the stage manager of the dramatic troop of the omnibus […] no flawed gesture escapes me’.78 Many visual representations of the omnibus, indeed, take the viewpoint of the strapontin (for example, Figs. 3.2 and 3.3). Most passengers, however, avoided the seat: the président was compared to Saint Lawrence on his gridiron and represented as ‘a sort of supernumerary perched on a narrow stool and open to the sarcasm of the entire coach’.79 An English writer describes the seat as ‘that awful position […] where, in a Mahomet’s coffin-like attitude, you rested on nothing, and had to contemplate your own legs calmly floating before you, very little below the faces of your right and left hand neighbours’.80 This last quotation suggests the defamiliarising and disorienting nature of urban transit for nineteenth-century city dwellers. In omnibuses, they found themselves impinged upon and compressed, reduced to zero by

Fig. 3.3  Adrien Marie, ‘Types et Physionomies de Paris—L’Intérieur d’un omnibus’. Private Collection

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deliberately miscalculating cads, and treated as hostile parties by fellow passengers. The elaborate jokes in the satirical literature of the period about finding a seat, keeping one’s balance, defending one’s space and manoeuvring in cramped compartments suggest a deep anxiety about being displaced or crowded out. The omnibus is a comic Hell in which the one is suffocated by the many.

Fares and Filous Another source of comic fodder in the literature of urban transit was the payment of the fare. In Paris and London, coins were usually handed from one passenger to another to the conductor at the front of the vehicle. A common figure in early humorous texts is the filou (petty thief) who pockets six sous in the process and then when caught denies it or claims to have done so by accident.81 To prevent filching, conventions arose: when passing the fares, observed a British writer, ‘every hand must be open’.82 Conductors were tasked with verifying not only the quantity but also the quality of the coins, which they sometimes tested between their teeth and often rejected. In an image by the French caricaturist Cham, an empty omnibus is surrounded by bicyclists who mock its conductor who, having refused their fares, has lost all his clients to this new form of transportation.83 A frequent comic motif in Spanish texts is the conductor who refuses a peseta that a passenger has been given as change in another tram.84 Conductors kept track of fares in a variety of ways. In Paris, vehicles were equipped with a dial (cadran) on the platform on which the conductor registered each new passenger. British omnibuses experimented with different systems, including tickets and boxes in which passengers deposited coins.85 Most commonly, however, conductors marked each fare on a way-bill. In Madrid, conductors gave out tickets, which inspectors periodically checked. Comic texts often represent travellers misunderstanding or actively sabotaging these systems: mistaking the cadran for a clock, a compass or a musical instrument; throwing away their tickets too soon; or marking extra passengers on the way-bill to vex the conductor.86 The price of the fare was another comic motif. Whereas in Paris the fee remained relatively stable throughout the century, in London it varied considerably from one company to another and also according to the distance travelled, a source of much confusion. In a caricature by John Leech ironically titled ‘A Lucid Explanation’ (1849), a conductor informs a befuddled passenger that the fare is

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threppunse when you don’t get in between Charing Cross and the Bank, or from Tuesdays to Mile End down to the Gate by Ungerfod, or Edger Road to Black Lion Lane or Rathbone Place and Blackwall Railway—or else you must get out at St. Pauls Churchyard, or you can go to Pimlico all the way if you like—beyond that distance—it’s sixpunse.87

At times, cads are represented taking advantage of this variability to increase their profit. In one caricature, a conductor stands in front of a sign at Charing Cross in such a way as to make a threepence fare look like twopence. Charing Cross was the site of many such disputes: ‘In defining its longitude, the conductors allow themselves the utmost latitude’.88 Another writer demanded ‘an Act of Parliament to determine the exact boundary line of Charing Cross’.89 Still others called for a fixed price to avoid time-consuming disputes and arbitrary decisions by conductors: ‘At present the Fare is 6d. and a fancied imposition, or else 3d. and a row thrown in. We should like to see it fixed at the latter sum, without the usual appendage’.90 Passengers were fleeced not only by dishonest cads but also by professional thieves. In his memoirs, Louis Canler, a Parisian police inspector, observes that theft on omnibuses took off after the Revolution of 1830 when various new companies were authorised.91 Nineteenth-century observers describe the omnibus (like the train) as an ‘excellent hunting ground’ for pickpockets who rummage in others’ pockets ‘as ducks do in a stream’.92 (As we will see in later chapters, many fictional texts represent passengers’ chagrin on discovering that their wallets have gone missing.) A colourful vocabulary evolved to describe omnibus thieves and their activities. In Parisian argot, the omnibus was known as a bonbonnière à filous (petty thieves’ candy box) or an omnicroche—a place where one could crocher (hook) anything.93 In England, stealing on an omnibus was known as ‘chariot-buzzing’ (‘buzzer’ was slang for a pickpocket) and, when the thief was female, as ‘maltooling’ (a combination of ‘moll’ and ‘tool’, to pick pockets).94 In Madrid, tram pickpockets commonly stole timepieces by pulling on their chains, a process known as ahorcar (to execute by hanging).95 A number of comic texts evoke omnibus thieves’ techniques. A French song, for example, describes the ‘false snoozer’ who pretends to doze off and then slips a hand into a fellow passenger’s pocket.96 Another strategy, known in London as the ‘dummy daddle dodge’, was to use a false hand, distracting attention from the real one as it stole a purse.97 Yet another

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trick was to insert an iron ball attached to string into a neighbour’s wallet when he paid; later when the omnibus jolted, the thief pulled on the string to extract it.98 Female pickpockets resort to the art of seduction or take advantage of their abundant crinoline skirts to slide their hands into passengers’ purses unobserved.99 While theft was undoubtedly a reality of omnibus travel, the countless stories of rejected coins, dishonest fares, and stolen wallets suggest an uneasiness about the commonness of the common vehicles—the unavoidable proximity with strangers and social inferiors. In the cultural imagination of the period, this anxiety was expressed through situations of economic impotence—an inability to pay or an experience of being robbed or fleeced—which represent a symbolic declassing. In these comic texts, the omnibus is a communal space but one that is populated by dubious characters and approached with distrust.

Sights, Sounds, and Smells Other comic motifs revolve around the physical experience of urban transit, which is often represented as one of claustrophobia or sensory overload. As passengers usually sat facing one another, their view of the outside world was largely obstructed. In a British story ‘Mrs R.’s Adventure’ (1865), the title character—a first-time passenger—complains that she cannot ‘look out of the window (except at the legs of the driver), by reason of intervening opaque bodies’.100 Inside passengers, observed Leigh Hunt, made ‘intense acquaintance’ with ‘the heel of an outside passenger’s boot’ and the sign stating the omnibus regulations.101 In London, this visual occlusion, which increased the claustrophobia of the space, was only aggravated when advertisements began to be posted on the omnibus walls, exteriors, roofs, and windows (see Fig. 4.4).102 British observers at times protested against this ubiquitous publicity, which blocked the view of inside passengers leading them to miss their stops or promoted products embarrassing for mothers to explain to their children.103 The auditory experience could be even more oppressive. As the omnibus rode over cobblestone streets, its wheels and vibrating window panes produced a deafening noise, which the French writer Paul Margueritte compared to the experience of having all one’s teeth pulled out or being hit on the head repeatedly with a hammer.104 In British texts, the clatter is described as ‘confus[ing] the intelligence of the most collected’ and ‘enough to deaden [ideas] completely’.105 To communicate, passengers

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often had to raise their voices, adopting a ‘top-of-the-voice dialogue jolted into falsetto’, which only aggravated the din.106 In such an atmosphere, it was difficult to nap and ‘impossible to dream’.107 ‘There is no instance on record’, claimed Dickens, ‘of man’s having gone to sleep in one of these vehicles’.108 (The only type regularly represented asleep on an omnibus is the drunkard who dozes off on the shoulder of a neighbour, a situation illustrated toward the right in Fig.  3.3.)109 The macadamisation of the streets and the introduction of rails improved the auditory experience but even tram texts complain of the ‘snapping of wood’ and ‘grating of iron’.110 A Spanish writer describes the horsecar as ‘a shrill, motley and disagreeable ensemble’ that ‘shocks the ear’ with its whistles, bells, and vibrations.111 Passengers’ ears were offended not only by the clatter but also by the loud, vulgar speech of drivers and cads, whose language, a French song claimed, ‘would make the horses blush’.112 A Spanish tram conductor uses ‘a series of dirty words that were Spanish though not admitted by the Academy (which proved definitively that they were purely Spanish)’.113 Many texts drew humour from the employees’ plebeian speech (and spelling). In a facetious letter to the editor, an omnibus driver, who ‘manages to pick up hinformashun from the reglar gents as rides outside’, complains of the use of ‘Hi Park’ for ‘another Reform Demonstration of what thay call the “pepel”’.114 The text comically combines the driver’s lower-class diction with the conservative views he has picked up from the City-bound ‘gents’ who ride alongside him on the knife-board. Still other texts poke fun at the omnibus employees’ ‘humorous phraseology’.115 A Punch article, for example, offers a glossary of the ‘lingua Cadda’, which translates the conductors’ many euphemisms: ‘Plenty of room, ma’am’ indicates that there are 16 passengers inside, while ‘Going on directly’ means that the omnibus will depart in 10 to 30 minutes.116 The most victimised organ, however, was undoubtedly the nose. The close quarters and compression made for a stuffy and suffocating atmosphere described as ‘a sort of damper’, emitting ‘an all-pervading odour of steaming umbrellas, boots, fusty stuff gowns and mouldy straw’.117 The omnibus lamps gave off a smell ‘akin to an Esquimaux kraal in blubber-­ boiling time’, and its passengers reeked of sweat, garlic, onions, liquor, or the ‘perfumes of a flatulist’.118 The heroine of Maupassant’s story ‘La Dot’ (1884) is repulsed by the odour of ‘a fat gentleman who reeked of pipe’, ‘an old woman who smelled of dog’, two nuns ‘emitting an insipid odour of old skirts’, a cook with a strong scent of dishwater, ‘a driver who smelled of the stable’, and an ‘agent whose feet exhaled the perfume of his running

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about’.119 Only a ‘mithridatised’ nose, joked a French author, could withstand such attacks.120 In visual representations, characters at times hold perfumed handkerchiefs to their noses in an attempt to avoid the smell (see Fig. 3.3).121 The conveyances were particularly unbearable in extreme weather. ‘When Fahrenheit / Reads ninety’, groaned a Punch poet, the omnibus is ‘a box on wheels, whence draughts are carefully excluded’.122 As temperatures rose, tempers flared: ‘We were all hot, and we all hated one another. When a fellow-creature is visibly radiating the caloric one already has in excess, hatred for him, or even her, follows in logical sequence’.123 In rainy weather, the interior often seemed wetter than the exterior. As George Augustus Sala observed, a wet day […] will always be productive of a little cloud of steam that dims the windows, that gathers in little muddy drops on the oil-clothed roof, steals down the sides, insinuates itself between your coat collar and the nape of your neck, damps your knees, moistens your fingers, renders your linen limp and flaccid, irritates your nose, dulls your watch guard, lights on the brim of your hat like swallows on the eaves of a house, and continually does drip. Of how many catarrhs have the foundation been laid on wet days in omnibuses.124

A Spanish text compares sitting down on a tram in rainy weather to falling into a well.125 In such circumstances, social relations were inevitably strained: Politeness, I have observed, like many other things that are more for ornament than use, is very much damaged by moisture […] when the water is dropping from people’s clothes, conversation drops too; and as for a joke, it isn’t always safe to venture upon one in the wet, because when folks are dripping, they won’t stand roasting.126

In the spring and summer, the companies sometimes used open vehicles without window panes, which left passengers exposed to the elements. In mild weather, note the authors of Paris-en-omnibus, the omnibus d’été might be a ‘veritable basket on four wheels, full of women instead of flowers’, but in a storm, it left its passengers ‘completely lost, wilted, crumpled’ for Providence gives thorns to roses and ‘rain showers to open omnibuses’.127 Outside passengers were particularly vulnerable: ‘In winter one freezes there, in summer, one melts; in autumn it snows, in spring it rains, and in

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all seasons people smoke directly into your face’.128 These inconveniences were a favourite motif of French caricatures in the 1850s—the early days of the impériale. A Cham image depicts an omnibus roof full of men frozen solid whom the conductor must remove on his shoulder.129 In a similar vein, Albert Robida illustrates the dropping temperatures during a Paris winter with a thermometer measuring not degrees but the rising neckwear of outside passengers on the Madeleine–Bastille line.130 Perhaps the most frequent source of humour, however, was the impériale in the rain, which nineteenth-century writers referred to variously as a bain complet (complete bath), a bain de siège (seated bath) or ‘an ideal hydrotherapy establishment’, complete with a ‘system of mutually dripping umbrellas’.131 In a wistful drawing, Victor Hugo represented himself on an omnibus roof on a rainy day; the caption reads, ‘Monsieur va au soleil’ (Monsieur is going to the sun).132 In the 1850s, a number of proposals were made for an omnibus à parapluie or an omnibus à tente instantanée with a cover for the impériale that could be unfolded in wet weather, but these reforms were never implemented.133 At the end of the century, conductors still shouted ironically on rainy days, ‘Complet en bas, en l’air à volonté’ (‘Full inside but as much as you like on the roof’).134

‘An Eighth of Permanent Cholera’ Though a bain (and bane) for passengers, such conditions were a boon for physicians. Édouard Gourdon jokingly claimed that most shareholders in the omnibus company were doctors for whom it generated not only dividends but also patients: trampled pedestrians and passengers infected by its stuffy, cramped air. ‘Three hundred six-sous coaches’, he reckoned, ‘are the equivalent of almost an eighth of permanent cholera’.135 A Punch article, facetiously attributed to a sporting surgeon, similarly observed that omnibuses benefited physicians by causing a ‘jolly lot of casualties’ and ‘broken bones’.136 ‘What an eloquent chapter of statistics’, remarked the authors of Paris-en-omnibus, ‘could be written on this subject: On the Influence of the Omnibus on the Duration of Human Life’.137 From the outset, comic writers insisted on the deleterious health effects of the new service such as the risk of contagion due to the proximity among passengers, the wet straw on the floor, or the lack of ventilation and protection from the elements.138 For a Charivari author, the omnibus was ‘a permanent hotbed of bacilli’, which exposed passengers to ‘all the illnesses enumerated by Thomas Diafoirus’ (the quack doctor in Molière’s

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Le Malade imaginaire).139 Another French text described the vehicles as ‘fetid enemies of public health […] The omnibus abolished distance. It is fever, it is kidney stone gravel, it is rheumatism, it is migraines, vertigo, cerebral congestion’.140 A Spanish author claimed that the jardineras— open trams used in the summer—were responsible for an increase in pneumonia cases; the fares collected on those vehicles bore a ‘stain of blood’.141 Still other writers complained of the fleas and vermin the unwashed masses brought on board.142 As the French humourist Henri Second put it, ‘omnibuses, big and small, are veritable nests of microbes where one avoids typhoid fever only to catch diphtheria, and where one falls from Charybdis into Scylla, that is, from simple bronchitis into tubercular consumption’.143 Other comic writers complained that the conveyances led people to stop walking. As a result, ‘muscles weaken, fibres lose their elasticity, the blood clots and the circulation ceases to deliver’, leading to many cases of rheumatism.144 By this logic, the Paris omnibus strike of 1891 seemed likely to have a positive impact on public health. Employees who had grown too used to carriages, argued a Le Monde article, would now ‘decongest their brain, weighted down by the bureaucratic atmosphere and the obligatory immobility’ of their jobs with a ‘violent promenade’.145 The London omnibus strike of the same year, anticipated a British poet, ‘To health will lead—and save us the fare’.146 Perhaps the most common health complaint, however, concerned the jolting of the omnibuses, which, tellingly, were known as ‘shakers’ in Victorian slang.147 When the omnibus was full, the jerking was less noticeable but when ‘insufficiently freighted’, it seemed ‘to lose all its springs and to take its course over a ploughed field’.148 This jolting was believed to have a negative impact on passengers’ joints and nervous systems. A British writer whose ‘bones [are] sore with the repeated shakings’ resolves in jest never to ride an omnibus again unless he needs to be galvanised.149 The joke reflects the medical notions of the period. An 1840 essay by the doctor William Gibbons entitled ‘Omnibuses, Their Injurious Effects upon the Public Health’ identified various dangers including draughts, stuffiness, and the ‘admixture of other persons’ breath’. His main preoccupation, however, was the poor quality of the springs, which over time compromised passengers’ internal organs: shock succeeds shock with the greatest rapidity, inducing the body to assume an infinite variety of forms and inflexions, and inevitably calling into action

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a corresponding and infinite complexity of muscular contractions and relaxations, until at length the fibers, being thoroughly jaded, lose their contractile energy, and giving way, are no longer able to perform their functions in protecting the internal parts from injury.

Gibbons attributes many deaths by apoplexy to this ‘pernicious stimulus’ (similar concerns about shocks would later be voiced about trains).150 The jolting was also believed to affect the mind. John Sanderson and Ernest Fouinet observed that the lurching of the vehicles ‘[gave] agitation to the blood and brains’, conjuring up strange thoughts and remembrances.151 Gibbons’ treatise represents this effect as a mental disorder: a rapid flow of ideas rush across the mind; in some the imagination is morbidly at work, and all kinds of fanciful creations are engendered; a quick succession of thoughts upon a variety of subjects pass before the mind with very little connection, and are too transient to be retained by the memory afterwards.

For Gibbons, the condition is comparable to ‘the state which is produced by drinking any highly stimulating liquor’.152 The authors of the facetious Paris-en-omnibus similarly represent the omnibus as dangerous for those ‘susceptible to black humours, vapours, blue devils [a French term for spleen]’.153 Like trains, omnibuses were also prone to accidents, which made for dark humour. At times, passengers were thrown off the roof, resulting in injuries and even death.154 A French caricature titled ‘Outside: Voyage en l’air entre la Madeleine et la Bastille’ (1853) represents an omnibus overturning and throwing the ‘outsides’ off the impériale: ‘Absolutely like the railway’, reads the caption, ‘except that it goes less fast and one falls from higher up’.155 In this image, voyager en l’air, the conductors’ term for riding the impériale, is taken literally: passengers fly through the air. A French ditty evokes the drama of such a scene: ‘what emotions! what a surprise! the crowd that gathers, the cries of the passengers, the women who look for their husbands, the husbands who don’t look for their wives, and your name in the newspaper, and the indemnity that one reclaims—and one does not obtain! and above all the chance that your mother-in-­law has been crushed’.156 As Maxime du Camp notes, however, omnibus accidents were relatively rare thanks in part to the heft of the vehicles: ‘mole sua stat’.157

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Generally, omnibuses proved more dangerous to people on the street than to those on board—a subject that lent itself less to comedy. Occasionally, the vehicles ran over pedestrians as in the dénouement of Maupassant’s Fort comme la mort (1889).158 A poem by Gustave Le Vavasseur offers a gruesome account of a drunkard who meets his death in this way: Iron grates over bone grinding the cheek, The ear is torn off and the temple is stripped; The eye palpitates distraught, held by a tendon Over a mortar of flesh, red blood and mud.

The work ends with a voyou observing, ‘How fortunate he’s drunk! He does not feel his pain!’159 Throwing oneself in front of the massive vehicles became a new form of suicide. As we saw in Chap. 2, a shopkeeper in Zola’s Au bonheur des dames tries to kill himself by jumping in front of an oncoming omnibus, a symbol of the forces of capitalism and modernity (the department store) that have run his traditional shop out of business.160 The horsecar was seen as particularly dangerous because of its greater velocity and heft. As an old man in a French saynète observes, the trams ‘ap[e] the speed’ of trains but are more likely to ‘derail, crush, demolish, cut in two and reduce to bits the coach that they come upon or the unfortunate deaf or blind pedestrian’; he expresses nostalgia for the ‘coucou of our fathers that took four hours to go from Paris to Saint-Denis but that was incapable of killing or crushing a fly’ (the coucou was a stagecoach that served the towns around Paris).161 Various French songs of the period evoke the danger of derailment and the violence of the tram, which crushed pedestrians and broke legs and necks.162 Spanish writers also complained of the ‘continual trampling’ and ‘murders’ of the Madrid tram, which served only ‘to obstruct streets and run people over’.163 The electrification of the rails toward the end of the century, moreover, raised fears of electrocution.164 In a French song about the tramway à plots, a single misstep leads to a shock that feels ‘like thunder’.165 Whereas the mule is ‘a very considerate and caring animal’, observed a Spanish writer, ‘electricity has no heart’.166 The comic literature of the omnibus may seem at first glance frivolous and inconsequential. Its commonplaces, however, reflect many of the anxieties produced by the transformation of urban life in the nineteenth century. One of the recurrent themes in these tropes is the experience of not finding a place or of being displaced in an increasingly large and crowded metropolis: the long waits to find an omnibus with a vacant seat, the

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chaotic ‘assault’ of incoming vehicles, the overcrowding and extreme compression of the interiors, and passengers’ reluctance to make room for one another all suggest a sense of being de trop, of occupying too much space in the world. In many instances, the experience is represented as dehumanising: visually cut off from the external world, confined to a jolting box, unable to hear neighbours, and thrown in and out by hurried, indifferent conductors, passengers found themselves reduced to parcels or ciphers on a way-bill. A number of motifs, moreover, suggest an anxiety about contact with the masses or of being declassed or dispossessed: this is clear in the anxieties about contagion or theft and in the representations of the asphyxiating and malodorous stations and vehicles and of the uncouth language and dishonest practices of drivers and conductors. The comic repertoire also conveys a sense of being lost in an impossibly confusing and vast world: the unclear directions, indirect routes, and alphabet soup of the omnibus lines all suggest the labyrinthine, unfamiliar nature of the modern metropolis. Finally, the commonplaces of the omnibus evoke the precariousness of modern city life: the perilous equilibrium required to reach or remain on the impériale, the lack of protection from the elements, the dangers of derailments, accidents or being run over by an omnibus. In the comic imagination of the period, the omnibus is indeed reminiscent of Dante’s hell, a space where passengers lose not only their patience and their wallets but also their sense of safety, of humanity, and of having a place in the world.

Notes 1. John Sanderson, The American in Paris (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), I, 169. 2. Sanderson, American in Paris, I, 170; ‘Society in an Omnibus’, Hearth and Home, 1 October 1891, 637. 3. Édouard Gourdon, La Physiologie de l’omnibus (Paris: Terry, 1841–1842), 9. 4. Tellingly, the space was often associated with Paul de Kock, a comic writer whose works evoke many omnibus contretemps. For Louis Ulbach, the omnibus is ‘the prologue in action of a novel by Paul de Kock’. Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1878), 57. See also François Coppée, ‘Croquis parisiens: L’Omnibus’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 7 September 1902, 147. For examples of de Kock’s treatment of the omnibus, see Un bon enfant (Paris: Gustave Barba, 1833), 1–37; ‘Le Pensionnat en voiture’ in Sans cravate (Paris: Charlieu, [1857]), 94–96; and M. Choublanc à la recherche de sa femme (Paris: V. Benoist, [1878]), 1–5.

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5. J. Lovy, ‘Métamorphose de Paris’, Le Journal pour rire, 14 July 1855, 5. 6. ‘Lives of Remarkable Men: The Passenger in Wimbush’s Omnibus’, Punch, 17 February 1844, 83. 7. ‘Life in an Omnibus’, Punch, 3 April 1852, 144. 8. Maxime du Camp, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1875), I, 258. 9. Maurice Alhoy, ‘Tribulations des omnibus: la voiture au passage’ in Le Musée pour rire, ed. Maurice Alhoy, Louis Huart and Charles Philipon, (1839), I, no. 39, n.p. 10. A series of prints by Denis-Auguste-Marie Raffet colourfully illustrates the differences among the lines (Gihaut frères, 1828–1829). 11. ‘Paris Omnibuses’, Chambers’s Journal, 12 May 1866, 303. 12. E. Bourget, ‘L’Infusion des omnibus’ (Paris: Désiré Ikelmer, [1856]). 13. Les Omnibus de Paris et leur alphabet par un conducteur lettré de cette administration (Paris: E. Thunot, 1858), 7–8. For other examples of word play based on the names of the omnibus stations or lines, see ‘Vagissements d’un conducteur d’omnibus’, Le Tintamarre, 29 July 1855, n.p.; Les Omnibus de Paris, pièce curieuse & utile à l’usage des voyageurs dans Paris (Paris: P. Cordier, 1863), 7; Gabriel Bunel, Muffat, and Arnould, ‘Les Omnibus pour rire’ (Paris: Maurel, 1899); and Del-Poncin, Maader, and Moncorgé, ‘Omnibus et Tramways! Chansonnette’ (Paris: [s.n.], [1895]). 14. ‘’Bus Conductor’, Punch, 4 July 1896, 11; ‘More Miseries of the ’Bus Conductor’, Punch, 13 January 1849, 21; David W. Bartlett, London by Day and Night (New York: Hurst & Co., [1852]), 80. 15. ‘Road-Book for Omnibus and Cab Drivers’, Punch, 22 August 1846, 83. 16. ‘A Handbook of Knowledge: No. VI.—The British ’Bus. 1. Chiefly concerning the Interior thereof’, Punch, 8 July 1882, 10. 17. ‘Of Omnibuses’, Examiner, 8 November 1856,  707. See also Maret, Le Tour du monde parisien (Paris: Hetzel, 1862), 11. 18. J.-J. Grandville, ‘Les Plaisirs de l’omnibus’ in Musée ou Magasin comique de Philipon (Paris: Aubert, 1842–1843), I, 83; Edmond Auguste Texier, Taxile Delord, and Arnould Frémy, Paris-en-­omnibus (Paris: A. Taride, 1854), 36. 19. ‘Hints for Travellers in London’, The Man in the Moon, 1847, IV, 145–46. 20. ‘Of Omnibuses’, 707. 21. René, ‘Un bureau d’omnibus’, La Semaine des familles, 10 December 1864, 161. 22. Edmond Frank, ‘Nos bons omnibus’, L’Illustration, 21 February 1903, 118. 23. Xanrof, ‘Bureaux d’omnibus’, Journal amusant, 27 August 1898, 5. 24. Fabrice Carré, Rimes sans raison (Paris: A. Ghio, 1882), 97; ‘Chronique du jour’, Le Charivari, 11 April 1884, n.p.; ‘Chronique du jour’, Le Charivari 3 April 1885, n.p.; Jean Sincère, ‘La Foire aux abus’, Le Charivari, 23 December 1884, n.p.

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25. Honoré Daumier, ‘Croquis parisiens’, Journal amusant, 4 February 1865, 4. 26. ‘L’Omnibus à deux sous’, L’Assiette au beurre, 7 March 1908, 795. 27. Abbé Tiberge (pseudonym of Hippolyte Regnier d’Estourbet), Louisa ou les Douleurs d’une fille de joie (Paris: Delangle, 1830), 29; Emmeline Raymond, ‘L’Omnibus’, La Mode illustrée, 27 October 1862, 351. 28. P. P. Gil, ‘Solfa: Los tranvías’, La monarquía, 19 April 1888, n.p.; Enrique Fernández Iturralde, ‘Impresiones de viaje’, La Guirnalda, 6 June 1882, 94. 29. Octave Mirbeau, La Vache tachetée (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1921), 194. 30. See, for example,  Charles Joseph  Traviès de Villers, ‘Les Rues de Paris— Sapristi quelle averse!’, La Caricature, 5 October 1841, n.p. 31. For a reaction to this practice, see, for example, ‘La Réclame-­omnibus’, L’Illustration, 10 November 1900, 291; ‘Échos & Nouvelles’, Le Radical, 3 October 1900, 2; Jean Reyval, ‘La Rage de la réclame’, La Lanterne, 4 October 1900, 1; ‘Au jour le jour’, Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, 2 October 1900, 1. 32. ‘Paris vivant. À l’impériale à volonté’, Le Monde illustré, 22 December 1888, 403. 33. Frank, ‘Nos bons omnibus’, 118. 34. Fernand Fau, ‘Une station d’omnibus’, Le Rire, 29 January 1898, n.p. 35. ‘The Perils of the Omnibus’, Funny Folks, 17 May 1879, 155. 36. Manuel Mesonero Romanos, ‘Esperando al tranvía’, La Correspondencia de España, 11–15 July 1894, n.p. 37. Carlos Peñaranda, Prosa (Madrid-Manila, 1886–1892) (Manila: Chofré, 1893), 188. 38. Georges du Maurier, ‘Chivalry in the London Street’, Punch’s Almanack for 1876, 16 December 1875, n.p. 39. ‘Vida práctica’, La Correspondencia de España, 24 January 1876, n.p. 40. ‘Nos gravures’, Le Journal illustré, 24 January 1892, 27. 41. William Wilson, Such is Life (London: Samuel Eyre, 1857), 130. 42. ‘The Omnibus Revolution’, Household Words, 28 June 1856, 563. 43. Louis Huart (text) and Honoré Daumier (illustrations), ‘Un voyage d’agrément à Paris’  in Musée ou Magasin comique de Philipon, I, 172. In another Daumier print, a conductor tells a descending passenger who has fallen on his face, ‘But I told you to be careful… imbecile!’. ‘Les Supplices de la civilisation’, Le Charivari, 19 February 1853, n.p. 44. Pierre Véron, Comédie du voyage (Paris: E. Dentu, 1863), 47. 45. Paul Ginisty, ‘La Semaine parisienne’, Le Petit Parisien, 13 January 1913, 1; Frank, ‘Nos bons omnibus’, 118; ‘The Fine Old English Omnibus’, Punch, 22 November 1856, 203; ‘A Handbook of Knowledge: No. VI.—The British ’Bus. 2. Chiefly concerning its Exterior’, Punch, 22 July 1882, 33. 46. See, for example, the caricature ‘Outside: Voyages en l’air entre la Madeleine et la Bastille’, L’Illustration, 12 November 1853, 317.

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47. ‘A Handbook of Knowledge: No. VI.—The British ’Bus. 2. Chiefly concerning its Exterior’, 33. 48. Véron, Comédie du voyage, 48; Honoré Daumier, ‘Croquis parisiens no. 13: Le Mauvais Côté des nouveaux omnibus’, Le Charivari, 4 September 1856, n.p. ‘[T]he descent from a ’Bus in Cheapside’, a Punch writer claimed, was as challenging as ‘the ascent of a precipice in Chamounix’. ‘A Handbook of Knowledge: No. VI.—The British ’Bus. 2. Chiefly concerning its Exterior’, 33. 49. ‘A Rambler in London: XIII.  On a ’Bus’, The Speaker, 18 October 1890, 433. 50. Gourdon describes the early vehicles as 20 feet long, 10 feet high and 5 feet wide. Physiologie de l’omnibus, 51. The dames blanches were even smaller: 10 to 12 feet long and 4 feet wide. V. L. de Cotignac, Les Dames blanches ou le Tribut de la scène et des beaux-arts (Paris: Le Roi: 1829), 63. Early London omnibuses were four-and-­ a-half feet wide and high. Vukan R.  Vuchic, Urban Transit: Systems and Technology (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2007), 9. 51. ‘Life in an Omnibus’, Punch, 3 April 1852, 144; ‘A Handbook of Knowledge: No. VI.—The British ’Bus. 1. Chiefly concerning the Interior thereof’, 10. 52. ‘The Omnibus Revolution’, 562. 53. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996), 62. 54. T. C. Barker and M. Robbins, History of London Transport (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), I, 27. 55. See, for example, P. Flamen, Paris ou Nouvelle mission de Belphégor: satire suivie de notes critiques et anecdotiques (Paris: Delaunay, 1838), 27–28. 56. Fournier, ‘Un banc d’omnibus’ (Paris: Chez Delessert, 1829). 57. ‘A Handbook of Knowledge: No. VI.—The British ’Bus. 1. Chiefly concerning the Interior thereof’, 10. 58. U. d’Andravy, ‘Les Omnibus’, L’Univers illustré, 15 May 1862, 192. For similar critiques, see the caricatures ‘The Cheap Fares’, Punch, 3 May 1890, 207; and A. T., ‘The Twopenny ’Bus’, Fun, 29 August 1888, 95. 59. Henry Charles Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs: Their Origin and History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1902), 73. 60. Ch. Plantade and Th. Muret, ‘Une course d’omnibus’ (Paris: Pacini, s.d.), 3. The man’s plight is illustrated in a lithograph by Grandville that accompanies the score. 61. Antonio Watripon, ‘Les Gras et les Maigres’, Journal amusant, 20 July 1861, 6–7. 62. ‘Omnibus Sed Non Obsesissimis’, Punch, 27 January 1894, 41. Similar suggestions are put forward in Enrique Fernández Iturralde, ‘Impresiones de

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viaje’, La Guirnalda, 5 July 1882, 102; and ‘Chronique du jour’, Le Charivari, 16 November 1893, n.p. 63. ‘In the Omnibus’, Chums, 24 June 1896, 694. 64. Ernest Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus, de la barrière du Trône à la barrière de l’Étoile’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris: Ladvocat, Paris, 1831), II, 80–81. 65. ‘Physionomie des différens quartiers de Londres (Suite)’, L’Indépendant, 14 August 1836, 1; Samuel Gödbe, ‘The Miseries of an Omnibus. A Comic Song’ (London: T.  E. Purday, [c. 1835]), 4; Achille Bloch and Paul Courtois, ‘Les Omnibus: chanson’ (Paris: G.  Ondet, [1893]), n.p.; ‘A Morning in an Omnibus’, The Lady’s Newspaper, 9 June 1860, 438. 66. Sanderson, American in Paris, I, 170–71. 67. Antonio Aguilar, ‘La tranvía’, Día de moda, 31 May 1880, 3. 68. Henry Buguet, Au bureau des omnibus, saynète pour tous (Paris: Tresse, 1882), 6. 69. ‘Madrid’, El Liberal, 28 July 1879, n.p.; Eduardo Palacio, ‘Viaje de recreo’, El Liberal, 1 March 1890, n.p. For a visual illustration, see C. Pla, ‘El tranvía’, La Risa, 22 January 1888, 9. 70. ‘A Handbook of Knowledge: No. VI.—The British ’Bus. 1. Chiefly concerning the Interior thereof’, 10. 71. Thersites, ‘About Town’, The Sporting Times, 22 November 1873, 372. 72. ‘De Omnibus Rebus’, The Examiner, 14 October 1876, 1159. 73. Annie E. Lane, ‘The London Bus’, Fortnightly Review, January 1906, 123. 74. ‘A Study of Omnibus Life’, Punch 28 October 1871, 176. See also the image in Paul de Kock’s M.  Choublanc, 1; and Daumier’s ‘La Difficulté d’arriver à une place’ in ‘Les Supplices de la civilisation’, Le Charivari, 19 February 1853, n.p. 75. ‘Seats for Twelve’, Church’s Bizarre, 18 September 1852, 357. 76. ‘Physiologie des omnibus’, Le Siècle, 28 November 1836, n.p. 77. Sanderson, American in Paris, I, 170. 78. Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus’, II, 69. Another poem similarly celebrates the position: ‘I am the président at the end of the coach: / Let us observe our neighbours!’ St-Gauvé, L’Omnibus (s.l.: Impr. de Bénard, [1856]), n.p. 79. Maurice Dancourt, ‘Le Monsieur assis dans le fond du tramway’, Le Charivari, 7 February 1885, n.p.; ‘Physiologie des omnibus’, n.p. 80. ‘In and On an Omnibus’, All the Year Round, 21 January 1865, 567. 81. Plantade, ‘Une course d’omnibus’, 4; Félix-Auguste Duvert and Augustin Théodore de Lauzanne de Vauroussel, Les Étrennes de ma barbe, à propos vaudeville en un acte (Paris, Marchant, 1838), 8. 82. ‘The Manners of the Omnibus’, The Saturday Review, 20 August 1881, 231. 83. Cham  (pseudonym of Amédée de Noé), Une once de bon sang (Paris: Arnauld de Vresse, 1856), n.p.

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84. Carlos Frontaura, ‘En el tranvía’, El imparcial, 7 November 1881, n.p.; Dionisio Pérez, ‘Viajes en tranvía’, La Iberia, 4 July 1893, n.p.; Aguilar, ‘La tranvía’, 3. 85. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 86, 108. 86. Pierre Véron, Les Araignées de mon plafond (Paris: E. Dentu, 1880), 250; Gourdon, Physiologie de l’omnibus, 58–59; Jules Dorsay, Tétunébo, le roi nègre (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1892), 269–74; M. de Larra y Ossorio, ‘Viaje de placer’, La Ilustración artística, 8 August 1887, 299–300; E. de Palacio, ‘Viaje de recreo’, n.p.; Frederick Talbot, ‘An Ill-Conducted Conductor’, Belgravia, April 1876, 243–49. 87. John Leech, ‘A Lucid Explanation’ in John Leech’s Pictures of Life and Character from the Collection of ‘Mr. Punch’ (London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1886), 262. 88. ‘The ’Bus Conductor’s Guide’, Punch, 25 August 1849, 76. 89. ‘Omnibus Ingenuity’, Punch, 17 June 1848, 25. 90. ‘More Omnibus Reform’, Punch, 4 August, 1849, 50. 91. Louis Canler, Mémoires de Canler, ancien chef du service de Sûreté (Paris: F. Roy, 1882), 327. 92. M. du Camp, Paris, ses organes, I, 270; Lucien Rigaud, Dictionnaire du jargon parisien (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1878), 26. 93. Rigaud, Dictionnaire du jargon parisien, 43, 239. Thieves also developed a playful argot: Canler recalls a thief instructing an accomplice to ‘pécille[r] l’orient avec [sa] fourchette’ (‘steal the East with [his] fork’, i.e. steal the gold with his fingers). Canler, Mémoires, 329. 94. John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary (London: John Camden Hotten, Picadilly, 1864), 97; John Stephen Farmer, A Dictionary of Slang and Colloquial English (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1905), 281; Green’s Dictionary of Slang, https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/ ueorxpa, consulted 6 April 2020. 95. ‘Madrid’, El Liberal, 28 July 1879, n.p. 96. Eugène Bastin and Victor Meusy, ‘L’Impériale et l’Intérieur’ (Paris: A. Manuel, [1892]). 97. Albert Barrère and Charles G.  Leland, A Dictionary of Slang, Jargon & Cant ([London]: The Ballantyne Press, 1889), I, 339. For an image, see A. Grévin, ‘English is spoken here’, Journal amusant, 16 July 1864, 6. 98. M. du Camp, Paris, ses organes, I, 270–71; Olga Flinch, Paris of To-­Day, trans. Richard Kaufmann (New York: Cassell, 1891), 98. 99. René, ‘Un bureau d’omnibus’, 162. 100. ‘Mrs R.’s Adventure’, Chambers’s Journal, 28 January 1865, 50. 101. Leigh Hunt, Men, Women, and Books (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), I, 20.

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102. As a Punch writer put it, ‘the commercial genius’ of Britain ‘[clung] to the roof of a ’bus like a bat to the roof of a church’. ‘The Omnibus Committee’, Punch, 15 December 1855, 241. Paintings from the period such as George William Joy’s ‘Bayswater Omnibus’ (1895) and Maria Matilda Brooks’ ‘Down Picadilly: Returning from Covent Garden Market One June Morning’ (1882) often represent this advertising, which made for a colourful but visually cluttered space. 103. Moore, Omnibuses and Cabs, 113–14; ‘Character Sketch in a London Omnibus’, Illustrated London News, 20 June 1896, 797; Pierre Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Paris: Administration du Grand Dictionnaire Universel, 1874), XI, 1338. 104. Paul Margueritte, La Mouche: nouvelles (Paris: Lecène, Oudin et Cie, 1893), 137–38. 105. ‘Mrs R.’s Adventure’, 50; ‘Morning in an Omnibus’, 436. 106. ‘A Love Tale by an Old Fogey’, Once a Week, 26 November 1864, 632. 107. Texier et al., Paris-en-omnibus, 60. 108. Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895), 102. 109. The most famous visual depiction of this type is Daumier’s ‘Intérieur d’un omnibus. Entre un homme ivre et un charcutier’, Le Charivari, 13 November 1841, n.p. For another example of sleeping omnibus passengers in Daumier, see his ‘Dans un omnibus qui vient d’une barrière.—Sommeil bachique’ in ‘Paris qui dort’, Le Charivari, 25 April 1852, n.p. For literary representations of the dozing drunkard, see Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus’, II, 74–76; ‘Notes and Sketches: The Omnibus’, The Morning Post, 15 March 1852, 6; and J. Petit-Senn, ‘L’Omnibus’, La Tribune lyrique populaire, 16 March 1862, 34. Rare examples of dreams on public conveyances appear in Breloque, ‘Une attaque en omnibus’, L’Éclipse, 27 February 1879, 268; Alphonse Daudet, Le Nabab: mœurs parisiennes (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1877), 87–88; and Benito Pérez Galdós’ 1871 story ‘La novela en el tranvía’ in Cuentos fantásticos, ed. A.  E. Smith (Madrid: Cátedra, 1996), 76. 110. George Bastard, Paris qui roule (Paris: Georges Chamerot, 1889), 252. 111. Peñaranda, Prosa (Madrid-Manila, 1886–1892), 189. 112. Bloch and Courtois, ‘Les Omnibus: chanson’, n.p. Similarly, a French poet wrote, ‘Then what abuse of the language! […] In those bad-mouthing omnibuses, / Virtue must be deaf’. Petit-Senn, ‘L’Omnibus’, 34. 113. M. de Larra y Ossorio, ‘Viaje de placer’, 298. 114. ‘A “’Bus” Driver on Reform Demonstrations’, John Bull, 27 April 1867, 290. 115. Conscience: A Tale of Life (London: W. H. Elkins, 1851), 6. 116. ‘The Omnibus and Cad’s Vocabulary; Or, the Idioms of Conductors, Done Into English’, Punch, 22 January 1842, 35. For another parody, see ‘Drilling

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the Drivers’, Punch, 12 April 1856, 150. Such representations of the conductors’ speech may have been exaggerated. Henry Charles Moore criticised the tendency in novels and newspapers to attribute to omnibus employees ‘a dialect which they do not speak’. Omnibuses and Cabs, 149. 117. Jules Couplet and Léon Quentin, ‘Le Bureau des omnibus: un jour de pluie: scène comique’ (Paris: L. Vieillot, [1863]), 2. 118. Thersites, ‘About Town’, 372; ‘The Omnibus Revolution’, 563; Bloch and Courtois, ‘Les Omnibus: chanson’, n.p. 119. Guy de Maupassant, Toine (Paris: C.  Marpon and E.  Flammarion, 1886), 46–48. 120. Émile Bergerat, ‘Rothschild en omnibus’, Gil Blas, 17 February 1889, n.p. 121. Adrien Marie, ‘Types et Physionomies de Paris—L’Intérieur d’un omnibus’, L’Illustration: journal universel, 18 July 1874, 41. 122. ‘Patriotics’, Punch, 9 August 1899, 69. 123. ‘The Omnibus–A Sketch’, Illawarra Mercury, 10 February 1865, 4. 124. George Augustus Sala, ‘Inside an Omnibus’, The London Journal, 9 July 1859, 409. Similarly, Maurice Alhoy describes ‘a deluge that goes from the bottom to the top and that begins with the feet of the passengers. Each passage is a gutter that increases its torrent with the rain of the bourgeois umbrellas’. ‘Tribulations des omnibus: Complet!!!’ in Le Musée pour rire, II, no. 71, n.p. 125. Gil, ‘Solfa’, n.p. 126. ‘Views of Life from a Fixed Stand-Point’, Chambers’s Journal, 9 December 1854, 381. 127. Texier et al., Paris-en-omnibus, 48–50. 128. Baronne de Fresne, De l’usage et de la politesse dans le monde (Paris: Taride, 1858), 70. See also Pierre Véron, ‘Chronique parisienne’, Le Journal amusant, 21 March 1874, 2. 129. ‘Actualités no. 81: Les Nouveaux Omnibus du boulevard pendant l’hiver’, Le Charivari, 10 December 1853, n.p. In another image, Cham represents a conductor brushing the snow off his impériale passengers with a duster in order to count them. Les  Folies parisiennes: Quinze annés comiques (1864–1879) (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1883), 337. 130. Albert Robida, ‘Les Plaisirs de l’hiver’, Journal amusant, 30 January 1869, 3. 131. Honoré Daumier, ‘Croquis parisiens no. 12: Quinze centimes un bain complet’, Le Charivari, 30 August 1856, n.p.; ‘Scène parisienne: Un omnibus par la pluie’, Le Petit Moniteur illustré, 22 February 1885, 122; Frank, ‘Nos bons omnibus’, 118. 132. Maison de Victor Hugo—Hauteville House, inventory no. 147. 133. ‘L’Omnibus à parapluie’, La Science pour tous, 29 April 1858, 164; ‘L’Omnibus à tente instantanée’, La Science pour tous, 13 May 1858, 182. 134. ‘Nos bons omnibus parisiens’, L’Illustration, 21 February 1903, 116.

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135. Gourdon, Physiologie de l’omnibus, 51. 136. ‘The Advantages of ’Bus Racing. As Summed up by a Sporting Surgeon’, Punch, 19 September 1863, 124. 137. Texier et al., Paris-en-omnibus, 37–38. 138. ‘The Patent Omnibus’, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, 25 April 1840, 277. 139. ‘Chronique du jour’, Le Charivari, 7 July 1893, n.p. 140. Docteur Balanciel aîné, ‘Sciences: La Santé du corps’, Jean Diable, 11 April 1863, 317. 141. ‘Los escándalos del tranvía’, El heraldo de Madrid, 29 May 1891, n.p. 142. Petit-Senn, ‘L’Omnibus’, 33; Edmond L’Huillier, ‘Ah qu’j’aime donc les omnibus. Chansonnette’ (Paris: Petit, [n.d.]), 3; Gustave Goublier, H. Crucker, and A. Ménard, ‘Histoire d’omnibus: démangeaison en 5 couplets’ (Paris: L. Eveillard, [1909]), n.p. 143. Henri Second, ‘Le Microbe omnibus’, Journal amusant, 21 March 1891, 3. In a French caricature, a conductor announces that there is still a ‘bronchitis’ to be had on the impériale and ‘two choleras in the interior’. ‘Les Omnibus’, L’Assiette au beurre, 6 January 1903, 1563. 144. J.  Lovy, ‘D’où viennent les rhumatismes?’, Le Journal pour rire, 26 March 1853, 6. 145. ‘La Grève des omnibus’, Le Monde illustré, 30 May 1891, 418. 146. ‘Walking Up’, Funny Folks, 20 June 1891, 210. 147. Farmer, Dictionary of Slang, 401. 148. ‘Bargaining’, Chambers’s Journal, 30 June 1866, 401. Fouinet describes the experience as a ‘faint ringing that vibrates for a long time in one’s limbs’. ‘Un voyage en omnibus’, II, 61. 149. ‘The Comforts of an Omnibus’, The Morning Post, 8 April 1836, n.p. 150. William Gibbons, ‘Omnibuses: Their Injurious Effects upon the Public Health’, The Monthly Chronicle, July 1840, 75, 76. By the end of the century, however, doctors seem to have reversed course and sometimes even prescribed omnibus rides to their patients. For Henri de Parville, the ‘continual trepidations’ of the omnibus increased circulation and vitality by massaging the organs and tissues. ‘Une cure en omnibus’, Revue d’hygiène thérapeutique, July 1894, 211–13. On the shocks of the train, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railroad Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986), 116–17. 151. Sanderson, American in Paris, I, 170; Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus’, II, 64–65. See also Joseph Ashby Sterry, Nutshell Novels (London: Hutchinson & Co.), 225. 152. Gibbons, ‘Omnibuses’, 76. A striking literary evocation of this sort of mental disturbance is the gothic tale ‘Green Tea’ (1869) by the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu in which a clergyman takes an omnibus alone at night

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where he begins to notice ‘two small circular reflections’ in the opposite corner. Upon closer inspection, he sees that his fellow passenger is a small monkey who mimicks him. The protagonist immediately gets off the omnibus but the monkey continues to haunt him. In the end, a doctor attributes his fantasy to the green tea of the title. The monkey, however, could also be seen as the embodiment of Gibbons’ ‘fanciful creations’ whose effects resemble those of ‘any stimulating liquor’. Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Green Tea’, All the Year Round, 6 November 1869, 501–4, 525–28, 548–52, 572–76. 153. Texier et al., Paris-en-omnibus, 60. 154. Larousse, Grand Dictionnaire, XI, 1338. 155. ‘Outside: Voyages en l’air’, 317. 156. Edmond L’Huillier, ‘Sur l’impériale: grande scène comique avec parlé’ (Paris: L. Bathlot, [1875]), n.p. 157. M. du Camp, Paris, ses organes, I, 275. 158. Guy de Maupassant, Fort comme la mort (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1889). 159. Gustave Le Vavasseur, Poésies complètes (Paris: Lemerre, 1889), III, 50. 160. For another example, see Abel Hermant’s play La Belle Madame Héber ([s.l.], 1905). 161. Buguet, Au bureau des omnibus, 6–7. 162. Paul Briollet and Gabriel Bunel, ‘Les Tramways continuent’ (Paris: Ghidone, [1901]); Alphonse Lafitte and Édouart Deransart, ‘Les Tramways: chanson à fond de train’ (Paris: Le Bailly, 1875); Tac-­Coen, Armand Ben, and René d’Herville, ‘Serrez la mécanique! Chansonnette…’ ([Paris]: E.  Benoit, [1880]), n.p. 163. ‘Los escándalos del tranvía’, n.p.; Gil, ‘Solfa’, n.p. 164. Dr. Alegre, ‘Conferencias del doctor: Los tranvías eléctricos’, La última moda, 18 November 1900, 7. 165. Léon Garnier-Jeunil and Achille Flament, ‘Tramways à plots’ (Paris: Delormel, [1901]), n.p. 166. Luis Taboada, ‘Madrid alegre’, Nuevo mundo, 9 November 1898, n.p.

CHAPTER 4

The Social Experience of the Omnibus

The etymology of the word omnibus—‘for everyone’ in Latin—encouraged a view of the vehicle as an inclusive space frequented by all classes and walks of life. Nineteenth-century writers evoked this heterogeneity in various ways. Sometimes the omnibus was described as ‘mankind’s epitome’, a ‘world in miniature’, ‘humanity abridged’, and ‘Mankind’s whole image, merry, grave, and mad’.1 In other texts, it is a bazaar or pell-mell.2 And still others represent the omnibus as a Noah’s ark, an analogy reinforced by the association of the vehicles with rainy days. For Emmeline Raymond, the ‘Parisian omnibus is the modern ark’ in which one can observe ‘most human types. All the races of the globe, all classes of society’.3 Many nineteenth-century observers revelled in the heterogeneity and odd juxtapositions of the space, amused to find themselves sandwiched ‘between a grisette with a bandbox and a knight with a decoration’ or to observe ‘a lady with a mannered voice and white fingers […] next to a beef merchant’.4 The omnibus brought together not only different classes but also different morals (‘next to an honest woman a common one’), religions (‘A Jew next to a Christian, and then two Huguenots’), professions (‘A clerk, an officer, a ragseller’),5 politics (‘moderates, Carlists, Bouzingots, royalists, / French legitimists’),6 attire and languages (‘It is a bazaar of all things, [… ] Where thousands of costumes are displayed, / Where thousands of languages are spoken’).7 One writer even described it as a rainbow

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7_4

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of faces: ‘there are visages of all colours, there are whites, there are greens, there are yellows, there are crimson, there are even tricolours’.8 This chapter will consider the social experience of this heterogeneous space through an examination of its representation in the visual and literary culture of the period. To what extent did the myth of the omnibus as microcosm, pell-mell, or bazaar correspond to reality? Who actually rode the omnibus in the nineteenth century? How did early passengers react to its inclusiveness? And what sorts of sociability developed there? As we will see, the omnibus was initially less inclusive than its name suggested: in its early years, it was primarily a petit-bourgeois conveyance. Over the course of the century, however, urban transit became accessible to a larger swath of the population, though the demographics often varied from one line to another and in some cities between the omnibus and tram. From the outset, the vehicle was a space frequented by both men and women, the latter often riding unaccompanied. This led to a greater freedom for women but the close contact between classes and genders could also make for an awkward sociability. The understanding of the omnibus as a social space, moreover, varied considerably by class. Many writers, however, believed that this diversity, by bringing classes closer together, could have a civilising function in society.

Non Licet Omnibus In the earliest Parisian omnibuses and dames blanches, passengers were segregated, as in the diligence, into three separate compartments with different prices.9 Quickly, however, this system of ‘classes’ was abandoned for a single cabin and uniform fare. With this change, the omnibus came closer to the egalitarian spirit of its name, but it was still far from being accessible ‘for everyone’. Its price—at first 25 cents and then (from 1830 on) 30 cents—was too steep for many working-class Parisians for whom it was the equivalent of an hour of salary.10 Early ordinances, moreover, instructed conductors not to admit individuals ‘dressed in a manner noxious or disturbing to the passengers’, which often led to the exclusion of the lower classes.11 An 1828 poem observed that the omnibus was not really ‘for everyone’: ‘As for the unfortunate class / That does not have such beautiful clothing  / The labourer, the mending woman  / Those people are not admitted’.12 Even government employees were sometimes too poor to pay the fare. Alphonse Karr recalls an impoverished official who, when his friends took an omnibus, claimed that he had to do an

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errand and would catch up in a cabriolet and then ran ‘like a deer’ along a parallel route, arriving ‘drenched in sweat and covered in mud’.13 As Jennifer Terni notes, this exclusion limited the lowest ranks geographically and temporally; while other classes rode into modernity, the poor had access to less of the city space and remained ‘stuck in the pedestrian time that had characterized the 1820s’.14 Many texts, indeed, would play on the Horatian non licet omnibus adire Corinthum; just as not all Romans could go to Corinth (a place of luxury), not everyone could ride an omnibus. Initially, the population most served by the Parisian conveyances seems to have been the petite bourgeoisie. An early French text describes the omnibus clientele as an ‘intermediary class, a numerous and respectable class, composed of the small property owner, the rentier, the boutique owner, the assistant, the employee, the businessman; a class that does not have a coach of its own and which nevertheless does not walk’.15 While the ‘bourgeois and small property owners’ hired fiacres, observed Louis Huart, the ‘petits rentiers, students and grisettes’ favoured the omnibus.16 In an instalment of Les Français peints par eux-mêmes, Balzac drew a similar connection between the omnibus and the rentier: ‘Nature, attentive to the conservation of frail species has provided [the rentier] with the omnibus’.17 Other texts refer to the omnibus or dame blanche as the carriage of the petite propriété.18 As Nicholas Papayanis has pointed out, it was this class that most benefited from the first lines, which generally privileged the ‘Right Bank center’.19 Early British omnibuses served a similar public. Shillibeer promoted his project as useful ‘to the middling class of trades-people’ who, unable to afford a hackney coach, wasted valuable time walking.20 The sixpence fare, however, was too steep for a lower order of passengers. An 1837 article describes the omnibuses as serving ‘an immense number of individuals whose incomes vary from 150l. to 400l. or 600l.’ including merchants, clerks, ‘subordinate official functionaries’, and ‘persons with limited independent means of living, such as legacies or life-rents, or small amounts of property’.21 The association of the omnibus with this rank became so conventional that an 1855 Punch article would advise Lord Palmerston to ride the omnibus to understand the ‘feeling of the middle class on passing political events’. The author is careful to distinguish these passengers from a lower level: ‘Remember I don’t go below the omnibusses. What may be seething and surging in a lower class of conveyances—among those who do not ride even in omnibusses—I leave others to tell you. I speak for the omnibusses—and the omnibusses have votes’.22

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As the century progressed, omnibuses became somewhat more inclusive in Paris with the introduction of the impériale at half price (15 cents instead of 30) and in London as competition among rival companies significantly reduced fares. Tellingly, the omnibus would become known in popular French argot as the roulotte à trèpe, the coach of the masses, and in the theatrical version of the Goncourt brothers’ novel Germinie Lacerteux (1865), Adèle refers to it as a ‘boîte à canaille’, a box for the dregs of society.23 An article reacting against Adèle’s expression would defend the passengers identifying them as ‘the good commoners [le bon peuple] who work, who struggle, who toil’.24 An 1860 English text similarly represents the omnibus as ‘the people’s conveyance’ in which ‘you encounter the many-headed monster in all its multiform variety’.25 As these texts suggest, the omnibus was often dismissed out of snobbery. According to Maurice Alhoy, Parisians initially looked askance at the conveyances, which reminded them of the public banquets of the French Revolution: There were many fearful spirits who saw in that creation a disguised adherence to the principles of equality that the century had rejected. One found that the double parallel row of citizens travelling together had some analogy to those civic repasts, popular picnics, where all appetites were found pell-mell.26

A character in Maximilien Perrin’s novel L’Amant de ma femme (1838) dismisses the omnibus as ‘the coach of the indigent’, and a figure in an 1829 vaudeville is annoyed when a dame blanche conductor does not let him hire the vehicle for himself alone: ‘it’s not very flattering to find oneself confused with all classes of society’.27 Early representations often capture the awkwardness of encounters with other classes. A Grandville caricature, echoing the motif of the omnibus as Noah’s ark, shows a couple with bird-like features (creatures of the sky and hence of a more elevated rank) turning up their noses at two modestly dressed newcomers with simian or rodent features; the accompanying text tells them that ‘It is […] in vain that you call the conductor and that your noses become indefinitely long, Monsieur and Madame; those people there will get on as you do and will take a seat next to you’ (Fig. 4.1).28 (The image plays on the French expression avoir le nez long, which meant ‘to feel or show disappointment’.29)

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Fig. 4.1  Grandville, Les Métamorphoses du jour, planche LX.  Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Similarly, one of the earliest representations of the omnibus in a novel— Louisa ou les Douleurs d’une fille de joie (1830) by Hippolyte Regnier d’Estourbet—evokes the passengers’ chagrin at the entrance of a pretty but flashy prostitute. She reacts proudly to their dismay: ‘one could read these words written very distinctly on the air of her figure: “Hold on, I pay six sous just as you do”’.30 In London, the snobbery could be particularly acute. In Thackeray’s Pendennis (1848–1850), Mr. Wenham prefers starvation to arriving ‘to dinner in an omnibus’.31 London ‘swells’ also considered the conveyances ‘infra.dig.’: ‘Amongst the various tests of gentility which a perverse and artificial generation has set up for itself’, observes a Sphinx writer, ‘there is, perhaps not one which so articulates the supreme snob as the test which ordains that you should not ride in an omnibus’.32 Being seen on a knifeboard was particularly degrading. In a Punch caricature, a footman resigns from his post when he hears that ‘Master were seen last week on the top of a Homnibus’; it is beneath his dignity (if not his grammar) to serve such a family.33 Tellingly, an etiquette guide instructs readers not to ‘cut a gentleman, even if he be on the top of an omnibus’.34 The negative connotations surrounding the omnibus are clear in a secondary meaning of the

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word. By the 1880s, ‘bus’ also referred to a ‘dowdy dress’ that is ‘not fitted to any sort of vehicle higher in character than the once popular one named’.35 Although omnibuses were an object of snobbery, the general attitude towards them in London seems to have become more accepting over time. An 1837 English conduct manual observes that the vehicles are ‘now in such general use, that there is scarce a man, who does not feel and occasionally avail himself of the accommodation;—the undignified omnibus or steam-vessel—is now reconciled to the feelings of the most aristocratic’.36 This shift in attitude was also attributed to the reforms introduced by the French omnibus company that established itself in London in the 1850s. According to The Spectator, the ‘genteel classes’, which initially viewed the conveyances as ‘a receptacle as common as the house of Death—“Mors omnibus communis”’, began to use them after these improvements.37 The social status of the tram is a somewhat more complex matter, as it varied considerably from one city to another. In Paris, horsecars tended to operate on large avenues and boulevards while the omnibus continued to serve faraway neighbourhoods.38 The clientele of the two services, however, seems to have been relatively similar.39 In the British context, in contrast, the trams operated not in the city centre but on the periphery where they catered primarily to the proletariat.40 As an 1890 essay observes, ‘the working man is rarely seen on the upholstered cushions [of the omnibus], he feels himself uncomfortable and de trop. The tram-car is his familiar vehicle’.41 Whereas omnibus passengers ‘wear gloves’—writes another British observer in 1887—the tram, which ‘runs for the most part along side streets, and those removed from the great thoroughfares, as if it had nothing to do with the world of fashion’, attracts ‘those classes which, as yet, have not put in any claim to gentility’.42 In Madrid, where the tram was initially the only system of public transport, a greater range of classes seems to have frequented it. When snobbery is expressed in Spanish texts, it is more often directed at the riperts, the scrappy omnibuses introduced shortly after the tram, which served a poorer clientele. In one vignette, a woman flatly rejects her husband’s suggestion that they take a ripert: ‘And our dignity?’43 Although the omnibus system as a whole was identified with the middle classes, writers often pointed to variations among the passengers on different routes. In his novel Marianne de Sevignies (1845), Samuel-Henry Berthoud contrasts an omnibus line populated by ‘fat men who speak of wine and transportation’ with another with a wealthier clientele, which

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resembles ‘a salon where people recognise one another, where they speak to one another’.44 Similarly, Octave Uzanne distinguishes between an ‘omnibus popolo’, which serves the working class, and the Batignolles-­ Clichy-­Odéon line, frequented by the crème de la crème of Parisian society.45 Contrasts between lines were also observed on the early tram. Emilia Pardo Bazán’s story ‘En tranvía’ (1890) opposes the ‘foul smell’ of the workers on the Pacífico and Hipódromo horsecars to the ‘emanations of flowers, fragrance of clean bodies and iris breezes of white clothing’ that characterise the Salamanca tram, which at times seems even ‘aristocratic’.46 Similarly, an 1882 caricature ‘En tramway’ contrasts the typical passengers of the ‘grands boulevards’, which include a man of letters and ‘foreign noblemen’, with those of the ‘exterior boulevards’ frequented by servant girls, a kitchen aid, and a man travelling to the slaughterhouse.47 In such texts and images, omnibus lines become a taxonomical tool for distinguishing among different classes and social types. As is common in panoramic literature from the period, writers often focus on the physical and facial features that distinguish the lines. ‘The physiognomy of the regulars’, notes one French sketch, ‘varies naturally according to the lines’.48 Similarly, Samuel-Henry Berthoud observes that ‘each thirty-cent carriage presents a particular and characteristic physiognomy’.49 In these examples, class difference is naturalised, imprinted on the passengers’ features and legible for the experienced observer. Other writers—particularly French ones—trace changes along a single line as the omnibus passes from one neighbourhood to another. Berthoud, for example, observes how the omnibus from the Barrière du Roule to the Bastille is populated first by artists, then by fashionable people and finally by the workers of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, and Octave Uzanne points to the existence of ‘demi-chic’ omnibus lines, which are occupied by commoners at their origin but become ‘worldly and bourgeois on arriving at the centre of Paris’.50 As Victor Fournel, writing under the pseudonym Bernadille,  observes, the omnibus population shifts ‘like a current that is modified according to the rivers that it receives and the countries that it crosses’.51 Changes in clientele could be so dramatic, he claimed, that a dozing passenger might think on waking up further down the line that someone had waved a magic wand over the vehicle.52 These descriptions point to class differences but social groups generally remain segregated: one class gets off and then another gets on. Sometimes, however, writers point to the juxtapositions that result from the accumulation of passengers from socially diverse neighbourhoods. In his popular novel,

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Le Coup de pouce (1874), Fortuné de Boisgobey distinguishes between ‘aristocratic lines’ and ‘plebeian’ ones but also points to the existence of split lines, half serious, half frolicking, where demoiselles armed for war rub shoulders with mothers of families,—that of Odéon, for example, which leaves from Batignolles, that capital of small rentiers, follows the raucous rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and passes through the noble Faubourg Saint-­ Germain to end up in the joyous and dishevelled Latin quarter.53

In this case, social (and moral) opposites do coincide. Still other texts draw attention to the changing composition of an omnibus over the course of a day.54 In an 1890 essay, the Batignolles-­ Clichy-­Odéon omnibus, populated in the morning by ‘errand boys, cooks, a somewhat mixed public and not always odourless’, becomes in the afternoon ‘a very refined omnibus, an omnibus of masters’.55 Similarly, a British essay contrasts early morning passengers—shopkeepers who discuss politics advocating ‘sweeping measures’ and working girls who ‘narrate their own wrongs with […] wonderful dramatic force’—with the cold City men of the late morning omnibuses and the female shoppers who speculate on the price of one another’s dresses in the afternoon.56 In emphasising the diversity of the passengers across lines, neighbourhoods, and times of day, nineteenth-century writers move away from the idea of the omnibus as pell-mell. But though classes do not necessarily frequent the same lines at the same time, it is the common space of the omnibus that brings these differences to the fore.

‘Inside Out’ The omnibus was not only a socially heterogeneous space but also, as Masha Belenky observes, one of the ‘first public places where men and women could legitimately share close quarters without violating rules of propriety’.57 As a French article from 1829 pointed out, the vehicles eliminated obstacles that might otherwise keep women from visiting one another such as ‘the dirtiness of the streets, long distances, the rigour of the seasons [or] the lack of a guide to protect them’.58 Moreover, observed Marie de Monjot, the ‘cold, reserved and dignified indifference’ of the space protected them from uninvited advances.59 Women, indeed, quickly took to omnibus—dubbed by a French writer ‘the woman’s coach’—and often travelled unaccompanied.60 In 1890, a British observer would attribute to the vehicle

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the independence of women, for girls and single ladies may travel safely under its sacred aegis. They enjoy an almost vestal sanctity; and though we read of strange familiar acquaintances formed at street crossings, or “picked up” at exhibitions, shops, &c., we never hear of such irregularities in the ’bus. There reigns an almost frozen reserve.61

In Spain, similarly, the tram, unlike the café, theatre, or promenade, was considered a space in which young women did not need a chaperone.62 Literary texts, however, at times represent the omnibus as a jarring and uncomfortable space for women. In Antonin Rondelet’s story ‘Un drame dans un omnibus’ (1864), for example, a poor girl named Jeanne takes an omnibus to meet a suitor to whom her parents object. The story is set in 1835, not long after the inauguration of the Favorites service, which connected the Latin Quarter, where Jeanne lives, to the rive droite. Jeanne, who is riding the omnibus for the first time, has never been so far from home and feels increasingly disorientated as she passes through unfamiliar neighbourhoods. At first, her impressions shock her: she sees revellers who have spent the night dancing and drinking; then a soldier makes a remark about her looks, which makes her feel unprotected. Rondelet’s tale, thus, initially creates an opposition between the ‘small world’ of Jeanne’s family and the dangerous ‘large world’ of the omnibus. As the story continues, however, Jeanne also observes more touching scenes, which remind her of her family. An elderly couple bidding their grown daughters farewell as they depart for a long trip make her think of her mother’s despair on returning to an empty home. Later, she observes the wedding of a man who (she learns from other passengers) has lost his parents in the cholera epidemic but who has been embraced as a son by his in-laws. Jeanne knows that her parents would never welcome her suitor in this way. Because of the traffic caused by the wedding, the elderly couple realise they will miss their diligence and decide to postpone their trip to the next day. The conductor informs them that another omnibus will soon depart in the opposite direction. When they alight, Jeanne follows them onto the other vehicle and returns home: ‘She was saved’.63 Rondelet’s story is interesting in its combination of a jarring and unfamiliar ‘large world’ with elements of domesticity and community, which serve as a mirror for Jeanne as she reflects on her own actions.64 Jeanne ultimately learns from the omnibus but as a woman riding alone, she is clearly confused and uncomfortable in it.

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In other literary representations, the omnibus is a hostile space for women who are subjected to insolence and staring. In both Adrien Paul’s feuilleton ‘Nicette’ (1868–1869) and Maupassant’s story ‘Le Père’ (1883), male passengers fix their eyes so intently on the heroines that they blush or look away.65 In each case, the intrusive gaze is a first sign of the unreliability or selfishness of the male character who takes advantage of a young woman’s innocence. In Andrés Pérez de la Greda’s Cabeza de mujer (1893), a Spanish psychological novel, an upper-class woman jumps onto a tram to avoid catcalling on the street only to find herself leered at by the man across from her. Even when she looks away, she can feel ‘the insolence of those eyes’. Later, a ‘libidinous old man’ sitting next to her begins to give her thigh a ‘daring massage’; each time she tries to shy away from him, he moves closer.66 As on trains, unaccompanied female passengers could be victims of harassment.67 To avoid such situations, women were often advised to eschew eye contact and dress modestly: in an early text, Ernest Fouinet observes that as a ‘general rule […] a young woman who finds herself face to face on an omnibus with a young man, should lower her veil or her eyes’.68 Even at the end of the century, an etiquette manual would advise young bourgeois women to wear simple black dresses on the omnibus so as not to draw attention.69 Travelling by night, moreover, could be interpreted as equivocal. In Fortuné de Boisgobey’s Le Crime de l’omnibus (1881), the hero, an experienced Parisian, does not believe in ‘the virtue of demoiselles who get on omnibuses by themselves at a quarter to midnight’ headed for the ‘exterior boulevards’.70 The question of how women should be treated on the omnibus was often a subject of debate. In London, conductors frequently asked whether a male ‘inside’ would ‘oblige a lady’ by giving her his seat and riding on the knife-board. The request was not always well received, particularly in rainy weather. ‘To make another sixpence’, grumbled one British writer, ‘you’d send us to take our death outside’.71 In later decades, as women entered the workforce and demanded traditionally male rights, their claim to special treatment was increasingly questioned. A French article from 1893 argued that if women wanted equality in other spheres of life, they should not expect special privileges in the omnibus.72 In an 1896 Punch caricature, a man sitting on an omnibus asks an entering passenger in ‘New Woman’ attire whether she believes in women’s rights. When she replies in the affirmative, he tells her to ‘stand up for ’em’.73 By the end of the century, indeed, the ‘Inside out’ (i.e. the expectation that ‘a gentleman will get out to oblige a lady’) was ‘rapidly falling into disuse’.74

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Its decline led some writers to lament the death of gallantry. In a French poem, none of the 14 male passengers on an omnibus will get off for a beautiful woman on a rainy day, despite the ‘exquisite ankle’ her skirts reveal. The title sums up the situation: ‘French gallantry?… An empty word!’.75 In a 1906 article, Annie Lane wonders whether ‘those Englishmen, who cannot be prodded out of their seats’ could really be ‘descendants of King Arthur and all his gallant knights, who simply ached to fight dragons and things in honour of their lady loves’.76 Not only did the ‘Inside out’ disappear but many writers criticised women who insisted on it.77 In Isidro Fernández Flores’ story ‘La dama del tranvía’ (1885), a flâneur refuses to cede his seat to a beautiful but imperious woman, leading to a conflict that takes place in melodramatic silence: The first thing that that splendid beauty did was to direct a look of intense disdain at the young man; the young man received it, his eyes fully open, without blinking, with the most profound indifference: a new insult […] Then the lady turned her head with affectation toward the other side. The young man quickly imitated the movement… But both looked at one another every now and then out of the side of their eye. Thus passed five fatal minutes… The coach rolled on without interruption and without incidents, carrying in its belly the elements of a drama. A drama unexpected for everyone, as the faces revealed nothing, and the spite, and the hatred, and the disdain, and the ‘who do you think you are?’ made no noise.

In the end, the young man gives his seat to a poor woman prompting the elegant lady to slap him and offer her card. Ultimately, the story is a rejection not of gallantry but of the woman’s sense of entitlement.78 The card suggests that the woman has taken on a male role: that of challenging a man to a duel. The inversion of traditional gender roles is now complete. As with other forms of public transport, many nineteenth-century texts express an anxiety about the presence of women on the omnibus. Masha Belenky, for example, has pointed to the many representations of nursing mothers or wet-nurses, who seemed to confuse the boundary between the public and the private domain.79 Another nineteenth-century obsession that reflects this anxiety is the crinoline dress of the 1850s and 1860s, which was described as the ‘enemy of the omnibus par excellence’ and a force designed to produce ‘discord among the two halves of humankind’.80 With their billowing skirts, women seemed to take up excessive space, crowding out male passengers. A French comic poem claimed that an

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omnibus became full with only six crinolines, and in a British text, it took just ‘four ladies, with their gowns and petticoats overflowing the seats, and foaming out at the window’.81 Caricatures such as Charles Vernier’s ‘Entrée dans un omnibus, rue Notre-Dame de Lorette’ (1856) depict the difficulties of finding a seat or even walking down the aisle in an omnibus full of skirts.82 Not only did the crinolines take up space but they also transferred dirt and mud from the streets onto others’ attire, and in the summer they were stifling for male passengers who found themselves covered by their neighbours’ dresses.83 Finally, they were a source of social awkwardness: ‘How to dispose of your hands in an omnibus, where the muslin of your female neighbours extends over your stomach, however convex, is a hard matter’, a Punch writer complains, ‘Crinoline makes it necessary for you to guard yourself against imputations which may be cast upon you by an officious observer or malevolent woman’.84 Such texts suggest a male anxiety about the presence of women in the public space and a fear of being gradually displaced by them. When the fad faded away in the mid-1860s, a poem in Punch titled ‘Rhymes to Decreasing Crinoline’ anticipated gleefully: ‘There will soon be room for us  / In the public omnibus’.85 The voluminous skirts not only concealed—a ‘sea of crinoline’ hides all but ‘the hats and heads of six gentlemen’—but also revealed: when women in crinolines sat down in the omnibus, a French writer observed, they exposed ‘a lot more than the lower part of the leg’, and much of it was not a pretty sight.86 A Parisian ditty warned: Crinoline is a traitress, A woman in a hurry Getting on an omnibus To more than one Olibrius [i.e. ridiculous person] Shows everything.87

Various caricatures and stereoscopic photographs from the period represent women involuntarily exposing themselves as they try to enter or leave an omnibus.88 An 1858 Punch caricature proposed a ‘New Omnibus Regulation’ that would oblige female passengers to hang their hoops on the outside of the vehicle (Fig. 4.2).89 As women in the nineteenth century were associated with the domestic space, their presence in the omnibus represented the intrusion of the private on the public sphere. In the Punch caricature, the inside garment literally takes over the outside of the vehicle, a powerful symbol of the

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Fig. 4.2 ‘New Omnibus Regulation’. Courtesy of The University of Chicago Library

ambiguous nature of the space, which confused distinctions between interior and exterior and between public and private. This sense of a role reversal is particularly clear in representations of women on the impériale. In the first omnibuses with upper decks, female passengers were not admitted on the roof. Not only was the ladder difficult to climb but it also risked indecent exposure. With the introduction of the spiral staircase (and of the garden seat in London), however, the roof became more accessible, and in the late 1870s and early 1880s, women were finally allowed on roof.90 As female passengers began to exercise this right, the ‘garden seats’ became metaphorical gardens. Gustave Kahn evokes the impériales of summer omnibuses as ‘bedecked in flowers,

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fluttering with plumes and feathers’.91 Not all observers, however, welcomed the advent of women on the roof. In one song, a man complains: Through the summer see the girls display their curls On top o’ the bus; They fill up every outside seat, While we poor men may curse the heat And suffer inside of the ’bus. But during winter see them swarm Inside for shelter, snug and warm; Then up the steps they drive us men To catch the awful in-flu-en.92

Another writer poked fun at ‘’bus lady limpets’, women who attached themselves like clinging molluscs to the upper deck and did not let go.93 The presence of female passengers on the roof was sometimes represented as an overturning of gender roles. When women were finally allowed on the tram impériale, the actress Élise Faure performed a song celebrating the new ascendancy of her sex: From now on, woman will be able To elevate herself as high as man And if she likes, in sum, Man himself will descend.94

Male observers were less enthusiastic. Before, a French author noted, women were reminded on a daily basis of ‘their inferiority’; the new policy, however, was eliminating the ‘distinction between the sexes’.95 A similar commentary is clear in a British caricature by John Leighton (Fig.  4.3) depicting the upper deck of an omnibus filled with women above an ad for a play titled Turning the Tables. In the caption, the conductor asks whether one of them would ‘oblige a gentleman’ by riding inside.96 Other texts represent the impériale as the space of masculinised women. In a French poem, when a man offers a candy to a woman on the impériale, she replies that she prefers absinthe and a tobacco pipe.97 Another caricature shows a woman smoking on a garden seat above an advertisement for ‘The Prude’s Progress’.98 The image pokes fun at the ‘New Women’, who adopted male roles and who often rode on the omnibus roof (see Chap. 6). As these examples suggest, women were frequently represented as either intruding on a male domain or becoming less feminine when they ventured forth on the omnibus.

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Fig. 4.3  John Leighton, ‘Turning the Tables’. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library

Large World or Small? The omnibus served as a force not only of social union—bringing together people of different classes, professions, ages, and sexes—but also of dispersion. As the conveyances facilitated access to remote areas, people began to move away from crowded city centres to residential neighbourhoods developed on the periphery.99 In Paris, these areas were eventually annexed to the city and converted into new arrondissements. A Second Empire caricature entitled ‘Arrivée à destination de l’omnibus qui traverse Paris nouveau’ represents an omnibus with a driver prostrate on the roof, one of the horses lying on its back and the passengers collapsed with their arms hanging out the window. The ‘new Paris’ of the title was so large that crossing it was exhausting.100

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The new neighbourhoods that developed on the outskirts were generally cheaper, less congested, and healthier. A British text from 1854 praises the omnibuses for reducing the mortality rate in London by allowing more people to ‘live out of town’.101 Urban transit also made it possible for bourgeois residents to retreat from the bustle of urban life into rural but accessible areas: ‘Paying less in rent and finding fresh air and well-­ being, [Parisians] distanced themselves from a noisy centre that exhausted them’.102 The benefits, however, were not unalloyed. A popular farce produced several years after the introduction of the service, Isaac Pocock’s The Omnibus (1831), features a father who has moved with his marriageable daughter to a suburb at a ‘convenient distance’ from London. In the end, however, it is too convenient for comfort: relatives keep dropping by uninvited and take the liberty of inviting friends, who arrive by hordes on the omnibus.103 With the expansion of the city, representations of urban transit began to shift. In early texts, the omnibus is often portrayed as a ‘small world’ in which passengers run into acquaintances with awkward and comic results. In Alexandre Tardif’s Scènes de Paris (1829), a clerk and a grisette rapidly exit an omnibus when they see his father getting on but then board another in which her mother is a passenger.104 Another common motif in early texts is the chance encounter of debtor and creditor, illustrated in Daumier’s ‘Une rencontre désagréable’ (1843) in which a passenger, finding himself next to a tailor to whom he owes 900 francs, regrets not having taken a cabriolet.105 To avoid such embarrassments, one writer proposed that passengers sit back to back, facing the landscape rather than their creditors.106 As the service grew and its social composition became more mixed, however, writers began to emphasise the unfamiliarity of the space and the alienating experience of sitting among strangers ‘brought together for the first and the last time in this world’.107 Louis Huart points to the oddity of a situation in which ‘fourteen people, who, most of the time, do not know one another, find themselves face to face in the same coach, become acquainted during twenty-five minutes, arrive at the same destination, then leave one another probably never to meet again’.108 In some cases, writers express wistfulness about passengers who spark an interest and then vanish into the vast expanse of the city. For the American John Sanderson, who visited Paris in the 1830s, one of the disadvantages of the omnibus was that ‘you often take an interest in a fellow-traveller, from whom you are in a few minutes to be separated, perhaps for ever’.109

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Observers also complain of the indifference, coldness, and isolation of the space. Fouinet describes the omnibus as ‘the image of the world; people come, people go: who pays any attention?’110 Resorting to the same metaphor, Huart evokes the brutishness and selfishness of the passengers: in the omnibus as in the world, we step on one another’s feet, because the rows are tightly packed, and because we seek to make our way without thinking about our fellow passengers; then at last, the omnibus having arrived at its station, at the end point of its trajectory, each of these passengers who came from who knows where, disperse and disappear to go who knows where.111

Huart’s words suggest the immensity and unknowability of the city as well as the isolating nature of the omnibus experience. In a fin-de-siècle French vignette, the passengers, ‘each one isolated from the others, seem to meditate gravely’ but ‘are in reality very annoyed by their solitude’.112 The presence of others only intensifies the sense of being alone in the large world of the metropolis. Many commentators remarked upon the awkwardness of eye contact in urban transit. In Sketches by Boz, Dickens evokes the uneasiness of a situation in which ‘each person gazes vacantly through the window in front of him, and everybody thinks that his opposite neighbour is staring at him’.113 The uncomfortableness derived not only from feeling oneself observed but also from being observed observing. An essay entitled ‘Seats for Twelve’ (1852) describes the omnibus as ‘an admirable school […] to discipline the eyes’: Like a double file of musketeers, two rows of visual organs dart their cross-­ lights to and fro with remorseless continuance. If you are inclined to be modest you are most unquestionably in a dilemma. […] You hate exceedingly to look hard at that old gentleman with the green shade over his eye, for he might entertain the conviction that you were peeping below the shade a little to see whether you could detect any black-and-blue indications of a recent pugilistic encounter. You cannot certainly give anything but a quick and hurried glance at that young married lady, for her liege lord darts javelins from his peepers the moment you attempt a straight-forward gaze. What are you to do?

The author ultimately advises readers ‘to rake the whole side of the omnibus fore and aft with a full fixed gaze’ and to let people think the worst:

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‘You are the best judge of the innocence of your motives’.114 Even toward the end of the century, observers would complain about the experience: ‘Do you know anything more horrifying,’ wonders Eugène Michel in 1896, ‘than that jolting face-à-face in the deafening racket of public conveyances, the fixation of all those gazes, as unsettling as they are themselves unsettled, which cross and look away by turns, full of boredom or curious without interest, because you have to look somewhere, unless you close your eyes?’115 Alphonse Allais would poke fun at this awkwardness in a comic text about two omnibuses that happen to stop alongside each other: Nothing is more ridiculous in such a circumstance than the respective situation of the impériale passengers of each carriage, who, without ever having been introduced to one another, find themselves suddenly directly face-to-­ face and have no other option than staring with a certain embarrassment, which, when prolonged, is transformed into pure chiendefaïencerie.116

Inventing a noun based on the French expression se regarder en chiens de faïence (to look at one another as do china dogs, i.e. hostilely), Allais captures the impassive, stony, and almost aggressive gaze with which omnibus passengers contemplate one another. Perhaps the most well-known reflection on this awkwardness is a passage by the sociologist Georg Simmel which distinguishes between auditory and visual stimuli. Whereas the information we receive about others through the ear tends to be temporally limited—an utterance in the moment—the visual perception of a face confronts us with ‘characteristic traits’ that are ‘traces’ of a person’s history. For Simmel, these vestiges of the past render strangers not only enigmatic but also troubling: The person who sees without hearing is much more confused, more at a loss, more disquieted than the person who hears without seeing. […] Going about in [the metropolis], compared with the small city, manifests an immeasurable predominance of seeing over the hearing of others; and certainly not only because the chance meetings on the street in the small city concern a relatively large quota of acquaintances with whom one exchanges a word or whose sight reproduces for us the entire personality rather than just the visible—but above all through the means of public transportation. Before the development of buses, trains, and streetcars in the nineteenth century, people were not at all in a position to be able to or to have to view one another for minutes or hours at a time without speaking to one another.

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This alienating experience leads to a ‘feeling of disorientation in collective living’, a sense ‘that one is surrounded on all sides by closed doors’.117 Simmel’s representation of the experience of public transport is clearly informed by a sense of the city as a ‘large world’ bereft of the familiar and humanising chatter that characterises small towns. As a predominantly visual experience, the omnibus confronts us with a series of signs and traces that point to a past and a personality that are ultimately a mystery to us; in Simmel’s account, urban transit is similar to a film without a sound track.

Public or Private? In ‘small world’ narratives, passengers run into acquaintances on the omnibus, and in ‘large world’ ones, they are surrounded by unfamiliar faces, but nineteenth-century texts also represent a third possibility: the encounter with the familiar stranger, someone one recognises from previous trips but with whom one is not formally acquainted. As one almost always rides with the same people, observe the authors of Paris-en-­ omnibus, one might expect to get to know them, but people just ‘sit next to one another without saying anything; the women lower their veils and the men place their hats over their eyes’.118 A British observer similarly complains that you may travel from week’s end to week’s end with the same man in the same omnibus, you may both occupy the same seat and be bound to the same destination, and, with the exception, perhaps, of passing your fare to the conductor, or a solitary remark on the weather, he will not exchange another word with you, but retreat behind the fastness of a damp Times, and survey you, ever and anon, with that injured look of respectability that the well-to-do Briton assumes, as much as to say “Yes, here I am; have as perfect a right to travel in this ’bus as you have, and pay my way.”119

What exactly was the nature of one’s relationship with such an individual? A Spanish text published shortly after the introduction of the tram system in Madrid asked, ‘Do the people who travel in a tram constitute a society?’120 The question reflects the ambiguity of the space, which, as Jennifer Terni and Masha Belenky observe, hovered between the public and the private.121

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A clear example of this ambiguity is the crime at the heart of Boisgobey’s mystery novel Le Crime de l’omnibus in which a young woman travelling home at night by omnibus is murdered by a passenger who pricks her with a poisoned pin. Upon injection, her head droops onto the shoulder of the woman next to her, leading the other passengers to assume that she has fallen asleep. Sometime later, the neighbour gets off and asks the protagonist, Paul, to replace her as the victim’s headrest. When Paul arrives at his destination and discovers that she is dead, he is amazed by the audacity of the crime. Why, he wonders, would the murderer choose to kill her in ‘front of fifteen people’ rather than on the street or at her home? A friend explains that the street is too public during the day, and the young woman probably did not walk alone at night. The home, in contrast, is too close to her acquaintances: the killer might be recognised by a concierge or a neighbour.122 The anonymity of the omnibus, from which passengers vanish into the large world of the city, combined with its seeming intimacy, created the ideal setting, an intermediate zone that avoided both the openness of a public space (the street) and the danger of recognition in a private one (the home). The ambiguous nature of the omnibus confused many first-time passengers. Could one strike up a conversation with strangers? Could one engage a friend or family member in a private discussion in the presence of other passengers? And if so, what topics were acceptable? Did the passengers form part of a community or should they behave as if separated by invisible walls? This confusion is clear in the opening episode of Paul de Kock’s novel Un bon enfant (1833) in which two friends who have not seen each for years strike up a conversation across an omnibus interior ‘as if they were at home’. When a third party attempts to join the discussion, however, he is rebuffed.123 Etiquette manuals generally encouraged readers to maintain a reserve on public conveyances and warned against engaging in conversation. ‘If a male or female neighbour asks you the meaning of the word omnibus, pretend you don’t know it’, advised Auguste Romieu’s Code de la conversation (1829), and if someone else says it comes from the Greek, ‘forget in that moment your Latin’. For Romieu, the omnibus was ‘a public place’.124 The Baronne de Fresne advised young women to reply ‘only with a “Yes” or a “No, sir”’ to avoid being mistaken for ‘question marks’ (i.e. women of dubious character).125 A later French conduct manual would declare it in ‘bad taste’ to speak at all.126 Those who broke these rules were dismissed as ‘novices of the omnibus’ or lacking in ‘tact and upbringing’.127

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If passengers did engage in conversation, they were advised to avoid ‘inflammatory subjects’ and to moderate their expressions, particularly when speaking of religion or politics.128 The omnibus experience was an odd combination of intimacy and restraint, as passengers came to know one another visually but generally did not break the ice: an ironic British text observes that if a neighbour begins to read a letter, ‘you are justified (by custom) in also reading it—over his shoulder; but not in founding any remarks on the information so obtained’.129 Early passengers often experienced this reserve as alienating. An 1836 British essay evokes ‘the dense fog of a sullen silence’—a ‘silence of suspicion and unsociableness’—in which each passenger is ‘indeed “the island” cut off from his fellow-men’.130 Utterances were greeted with ‘a stony stare, modified now and then into a cold and colourless half smile so peculiar to Britons’.131 A turn-of-the-century Spanish observer similarly draws attention to the artificial rigidity of tram passengers: In all their gestures, in all their pupils, one discerns a little bit of effort, a little bit of posing. […] All the chests are raised, immobile, as if obeying a rigorous mandate. All the faces are grave, almost sad, as if clouded by a memory or the anticipation of some misfortune. Their lips are sealed. But, nevertheless, it occurs to us that among these eighteen or twenty people who do not move, who do not laugh, who do not speak, there are probably some who are usually restless, fidgety; others are happy, with an incorrigible, loud mirth. There must be two or three chatterboxes of the kind that cannot stay quiet. On the other hand, there will be few, perhaps none, who love sadness and silence.132

It is noteworthy that the opposition between the superficial sameness of the postures and the real differences among the passengers is aligned in this passage with the distinction between silence and speech. Their true identity is identified with the speech that is repressed. The tram may bring together a pell-mell of characters, but its homogenising sociability reduces them to a common silence, rigidity, and reserve. Many texts from the period complain of passengers who failed to respect the shared nature of the omnibus treating it instead as a private space. An article entitled ‘L’Omnibus-foyer’ (1874), for example, laments that Parisians act in the vehicles as if they were at home, eating, drinking, and chatting.133 As another French author puts it, the omnibus is ‘a little world in which everyone thinks he is chez soi’.134 A British text offering

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mock advice encourages passengers to ‘consider an omnibus as a carriage, a bed, a public-house, a place of amusement, or a boxing-ring, where you may ride, sleep, smoke, chaff, or quarrel, as it may suit you’.135 A common figure in such narratives is the garrulous passenger who is too free with personal information. Romieu cautions readers against overly familiar people ‘who believe that, for the sum of five sous, they can fraternise with all the passengers’.136 Similarly, Vere Dudley complains of ‘unsophisticated specimens who are ready to pour out their whole history, past, present, and to come, for the benefit of anyone who will listen; and all, maybe, in language that Dickens would have loved to seize and incorporate’.137 Visitors from the country were particularly problematic. A British text warns of the ‘good-natured person from the agricultural districts’ who tries ‘to ingratiate himself… with jocose remarks’.138 In Renée Allard’s vignette ‘Le Tramway: Note sur Paris’ (1899), a woman from the provinces reveals her life story to her fellow tram passengers who react ‘with the egoism of Parisian ridicule’. In her naïveté, she projects the intimacy of village relations onto the collective urban space.139 City-dwellers, however, also violated these conventions ‘initiat[ing] you into their projects […] as if they were in a restaurant’ and discussing ‘things which are absolutely grotesque in their family character; things tacenda, say about Cousin Jane’s baby’s last complaint’.140 In a comic British text, the ‘majority of the inside passengers, as usual, sit in solemn silence, and gaze past their opposite neighbours into vacancy’, while a few individuals engage in private conversations, forcing the others to ‘dissemble a frantic desire to know’ more about the situation. At one point, a ‘Chatty Old Gentleman’ regales ‘the one person who hates to be talked to in an omnibus’ with stories of his children’s mésalliances. When the latter asks whether he has told the story to a policeman, the former replies indignantly, ‘I am not in the habit—whatever you may be—of discussing my private affairs with strangers’.141 The joke suggests the illusion of intimacy and familiarity the confined space of the omnibus could create. Another example of such oversharing is Georges Courteline’s dialogue ‘Godefroy’ (1897) in which a mother shouts a series of embarrassing questions at her 19-year-old son who sits across the omnibus pretending not to hear her. The other passengers, identified in the script as ‘public opinion’, serve as a sort of Greek chorus, which silently comments upon the filial relationship, recycling clichés about the ‘wise experience’ of the ‘august old woman’ and the virtue of the young man’s ‘chaste soul’.142 In entering the

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common place of the omnibus, the son finds his private life exposed and becomes the victim of the commonplaces projected upon him by the public. Perhaps the most interesting literary example of this type of transgression, however, is Benito Pérez Galdós’ short story ‘La novela en el tranvía’ (1871), which appeared just months after the inauguration of the first tram line in Madrid. On entering a horsecar, the narrator collides with a fashionable but indiscreet doctor named Dionisio, who begins to gossip about one of his patients, a countess whom he assumes to be a mutual acquaintance. Like the mother in ‘Godefroy’, the chatty Dionisio violates not only the silence of the space but also his patient’s privacy, freely disclosing her secrets in public. Though at first indifferent, the narrator is gradually intrigued by the countess’ predicament. The story, thus, begins with a ‘small world’ vision of the horsecar: a conversation with an acquaintance about someone who belongs to the same social circle. Dionisio gets off before finishing his tale, and the narrator immediately reverts to a ‘large world’ and ‘sound off’ view of the tram that recalls Simmel’s account: ‘there is nothing more annoying than being in the company of a dozen or so people all gazing at each other in silence and counting each other’s wrinkles and moles and any other imperfections on face or clothing’.143 To assuage his boredom, he begins to read a fragment of a serial novel, which seems to continue Dionisio’s gossip about the countess. The similarity between the ‘real’ and fictional stories leads the narrator to lose sight of the distinction between literature and life. Like Don Quixote, he comes to believe that the people around him are the characters in the story. The narrator, thus, goes from reading a text—a series of silent signs—to ‘reading’ the silent visages around him, seeking to connect the dots of the story. At one point, he even attempts to enter into the fiction himself, engaging in conversation with another passenger whom he mistakes for a figure in the feuilleton. Interestingly, this act of transgressing the boundary between fiction and reality is aligned with the transgression of the silence of the space, of the invisible walls that separate strangers on the tram. Galdós’ tale captures well the awkward sociability of the horsecar in which passengers are ‘texts’ to one another: soundless, visual signs that they struggle to interpret. In ‘La novela en el tranvía’, silence is the norm, and speech, the transgression. Other accounts, however, suggest a greater variety of behaviours. A French sketch from 1884, for example, contrasts the ‘monotonous comme-il-faut and inalienable decorum’ of the Ternes-Saint Honoré line with the Plaisance-Hôtel de Ville conveyances frequented by workers who

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share ‘personal stories: the Parisian is a born chatterbox, he reveals himself without distrust or reticence’.144 The sound is ‘on’ in the lower-class omnibus and ‘off’ in the well-to-do one. Similar distinctions were observed in London where omnibus companies charged different fares and catered to different sectors of the public. ‘Fun is in an inverse ratio to the fare’, observed a British wag: where passengers on eighteen-pence omnibuses generally assume ‘an air of respectability’, penny fares ‘sacrifice everything to humour’.145 A similar contrast appears in Carlos Frontaura’s ‘El amigo del tranvía’ (1887) in which a wealthy man frequents the Madrid tram to observe its passengers. On the 8:30 a.m. tram, he listens in as working girls gossip about their employers but later in the day he observes an elegant and mysterious woman travelling to an amorous rendez-vous with a soldier. Unlike the early-morning ride, this encounter is narrated with the sound off.146 In these examples, the groups contrasted occupy different vehicles but in other texts they co-exist in the same space. In François Coppée’s vignette ‘La Médaille’ (1883), a sister of charity from an aristocratic family gives a medal to a poor woman whose child is returning from the hospital. Whereas the plight of the femme du peuple is related through a conversation she has with the conductor, the backstory of the nun is told with the ‘sound off’ through third-person narration, a form that reflects the discretion of the upper-class passenger (for more on this work, see Chap. 7).147 A similar logic informs Pedro Bofill’s sketch ‘El filósofo del tranvía’ (1893), which observes the silent gestures of all the tram passengers except the poor ones, who actually speak.148 A drawing by Sahib of the inside of an omnibus from 1874 captures these distinctions: the elegant, wealthier passengers silently look down or into space while a lower-class traveller engages in conversation, gesticulating with his hands (Fig. 4.4).149 Social relations varied not only among classes but also between the interior and impériale. An 1885 French ditty contrasts the two levels of the omnibus: whereas ‘One hears more than one banal sentence / On the impériale […] one is not chatty / In the interior’.150 By many accounts, the rooftop seems to have been the more convivial space. It is interesting to contrast two stories set on the omnibus by Maupassant: ‘Avant la fête’ (1880) and ‘La Dot’ (1884). In the latter, a provincial bride rides inside the omnibus and feels increasingly ill at ease among its ‘mute’ passengers who seem a ‘collection of caricatures’ and a ‘museum of grotesques’.151 The story represents the city and omnibus interior as an alienating ‘large world’ with the sound off. In ‘Avant la fête’, in contrast, impériale

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Fig. 4.4  Sahib, ‘L’Intérieur d’un omnibus’. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

passengers engage in collective conversation on a civic topic: how to celebrate an upcoming public holiday.152 The community that forms on the omnibus roof is ultimately a microcosm of the nation as a whole, and the exercise in joint problem-solving allows the outside passengers to experience a solidarity with their fellow citizens. A similar sense of fellowship pervades an instalment of Samuel-Henry Berthoud’s Fantaisies scientifiques de Sam (1861–1862), a collection of popularising narratives about science. In one chapter, impériale passengers, following the ‘democratic’ custom of the space, share cigarettes and a light and, in the process, establish ‘a sort of intimacy’.153 This camaraderie develops into a conversation when a man gets on with a rare songbird and explains how such birds are trained. In this pedagogical text, the impériale is a space of sharing and open exchange in which passengers learn from one another. A similar solidarity and community could also develop in the interior. Although the omnibus is often described as an alienating space, texts sometimes evoke friendships and social bonds among passengers as well as collective conversations and acts of kindness. In a nostalgic 1881 essay, a

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British writer recalls how distinctions of rank were set aside on the conveyances, if only momentarily: ‘the chief clerk of the Audit Office every morning exchanged political views with his hatter. Once arrived at the journey’s end, however, rank resumed its rights; outside the omnibus all were strangers and each went separately to his own place’. In contrast to Simmel’s description, the omnibus here is an open and familiar space where passengers drop their reserve: ‘Many a life-long friendship was formed in an omnibus and cemented by daily talks during long years of driving up and down the road’.154 Other writers compare the omnibus to a salon, suggesting a communal and intimate ethos.155 Some would even use the metaphor of the family: a French essay recalls nostalgically the omnibuses of old so inconvenient, so narrow, so little comfortable, but where the community in the absence of well-being created very quickly mutual sympathies. Everything happened as if in a family. People were not strangers to one another. When one passed two stations without getting off, one became intimate.156

The Madrid tram was also seen at times as a space of conviviality: Manuel Fernández y González describes it in 1879 as ‘a gathering spot, a place of implicit meetings, frequentation, contacts and dealings among people’, and the novelist Emilia Pardo Bazán calls it the poor man’s ‘Casino’ or ‘Stock Exchange’ where ‘alms are received, letters are passed, newspapers are read and commented upon, flowers are given, friendships are made, contracts are verbally drawn, people dispute, pry, laugh and enjoy the rowdy expansion and intemperate frankness typical of our humour and our democratic tradition’.157 In such evocations, the sound is ‘on’, and the passengers are not separated by invisible walls but rather engage actively in a collective exchange. This more sociable vision of public transport is perhaps clearest in George Cruikshank’s Omnibus (1841–1842), a monthly magazine featuring a column titled ‘Omnibus Chat’ in which fictional passengers recite poems, tell stories, and discuss literature and life.158 Still other representations combine the reserve of ‘sound off’ narratives with the communal ethos of ‘sound on’ ones. In the story ‘Omnibus— “For All”’ (1896) by Mrs Percy Leake, a poor girl named Mary enters an omnibus feeling depressed. As her alcoholic father squanders her earnings, she has no means to do good in the world. The ‘warmth of the omnibus’, however, lifts her spirits prompting her to hum the popular song ‘Annie

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Laurie’. After she gets off, the conductor continues humming the tune, and an affluent woman who is plotting to take revenge on her lover or husband hears it and begins to have second thoughts: ‘The song had stopped a law-suit’.159 Later a sub-editor begins to hum along and, on getting off, treats a woman writer with greater kindness. The song continues to spread conveying a spirit of optimism and kindness to all who hear it. It even prevents a suicide. Mary, however, never realises the good she has done in the world. The frame of the story attributes the effect of her song to the omnibus. The opening lines remind the reader of the etymology of the word, ‘which suggests something comfortable and inclusive—a place for everybody’, and the ending relates ‘the power of association’ illustrated in the anecdote to the space in which it takes place: ‘Show in your own life that the sunshine is pouring in, and it will radiate all around, and affect lives that you have never heard of, but in order to do this you must take your place in the world that is for all. There must be no exclusive feelings, no keeping all for self’.160 Although the omnibus is a ‘large world’ in this story—the passengers do not know or speak to one another—it encourages solidarity, subliminally transmitting benevolence to those who are open to its influence.

‘An Element of Civilisation’ The question of the impact of the omnibus on morals and manners was often raised in nineteenth-century texts. Many considered urban transit to be a negative and de-civilising force in society. In his Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (1878), Louis Ulbach warned readers against the omnibus where ‘you will deform your hat, your odour and perhaps your principles’.161 The omnibus, observed Paris-en-omnibus, made people ‘mistrustful and misanthropic’.162 It encouraged what a British writer dubbed a ‘touch-me-not boorishness’.163 Early in the twentieth century, Gabrielle Miraben would compare the ‘bad humour’ instilled on the omnibus to that of crowds during riots when ‘men who are peaceful separately’ become ‘a horde of incendiaries or assassins’.164 British writers sometimes represented this attitude as a regression to an earlier and more savage stage of civilisation: Human nature has ugly fits of recurrence toward primeval conditions, and it is not well for those who are to make us better by thinking the best of us, to be brought too often into close contact with the old Adam. A surly, selfish,

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suspicious fellow is the old Adam, and there is no doubt that he affects travelling by omnibus. What is the pernicious moral influence which pervades this narrow box upon wheels, awakening pugnacity in the meekest breasts, and impelling the most magnanimous to yield no inch of what he esteems his rights?165

Another text represents the omnibus passenger as ‘man in his primitive state, not of nudity, of course, but of incivility’.166 The de-civilising force of the vehicles is often attributed to the alienation and awkward proximity of the space. The inside passengers are ‘fractious, dull, dyspeptic or cynical’ for ‘having to stare at the same person all the way from Trafalgar Square to Kensington is enough to make you hate that person very much’.167 Other commentators, however, took a more sanguine view of the new conveyances attributing to them a ‘civilising mission’.168 A French writer contrasts newspapers, which spread divisive ideas and create dissension among relatives, with omnibuses, which ‘favour the coming together of families, re-establish social relations,  [and] fight against anarchy’, and another text attributes to the Parisian omnibus a ‘softening of manners and lowering of social barriers’.169 Spanish writers would similarly welcome the tram as ‘a great civilising element’ and as ‘a vehicle worthy of civilisation, correct, orderly, peaceful, antinational and genuinely gringo’.170 Some observers considered omnibuses to have a socialising function. In nineteenth-century texts, they are described as ‘migratory schools of sociability’, ‘a school of politeness’ or ‘a free course […] in respect, politeness and civility’.171 The conveyances taught passengers to maintain a correct posture, to help women and children, to pass fares courteously, and not to occupy too much space.172 Provincials looking out from the impériale into the open windows of the Rue Montmartre learned ‘good manners’ such the correct lay-out of a dinner table.173 Thanks to the omnibus, another writer claimed, the French hamlets were abandoning their ‘narrow customs’ and taking on ‘the airs of a city’; in 20 years, the small village would exist in France only in Picard’s comedies.174 The omnibus also socialised by exposing the lower to the upper classes. In his Économie sociale (1836), Constantin Pecqueur argued that affordable omnibuses would ‘allow the inferior classes to improve themselves, in their language, taste, politeness, and good manners’ and would ‘permit an amazing coming together of diverse classes: rich, poor, well-to-do; because their ordinary, complete separation is the main obstacle to there being

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fewer differences among their ways of doing and saying things and to the man of the people’s losing his rustic character or his exterior coarseness’.175 A British essay written 50 years later—‘The Omnibus as a School of Manners’—would echo this theory claiming that the conveyances had improved the conduct of the lower ranks by bringing them into contact with the ‘well-bred’.176 Fernández y González similarly anticipates that the contact among classes on the tram will have the effect of ‘elevating culture, and softening, rounding, and improving manners’.177 Nineteenth-century urban transit brought different classes, professions, and sexes into an unusual and often uncomfortable proximity. The awkwardness of the space was in part a consequence of its ambiguity: omnibuses and trams felt intimate but were generally full of strangers; they hovered between the private and the public domain. Moreover, they tended to blur social distinctions, throwing all ranks together pell-mell, and sometimes seemed to undermine the gender hierarchy. Motifs such as the crinoline skirt or the woman on the impériale suggest an anxiety of displacement as women began to enter the public space and workforce taking on male roles. As we have seen, evocations of the social experience of urban transit are far from uniform. While some writers emphasise the alienating silence and reserve of  the omnibus and attribute to it a de-­ civilising influence, others portray it as a space of conviviality, collective problem-solving, and learning.

Notes 1. Wm. Clayton, ‘Going by ’bus’, Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 13 March 1886, n.p.; Pedro Bofill, ‘El filósofo del tranvía’, El Día, 1 January 1893, 3; Lucien Descaves, ‘En tramway’, Gils Blas, 12 December 1893, 1; ‘The Omnibus: A Satire’ (London: Trubner, 1865), 13. 2. J.  Espagnolle, Les Feuilles et les Fruits (Paris: Didier, 1880), 274; ‘À l’ombre ou au coin du feu’, L’École et la Famille, 15 April 1881, 383. 3. Emmeline Raymond, ‘L’Omnibus’, La Mode illustrée, 27 October 1862, 351. 4. John Sanderson, The American in Paris (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), I, 169; ‘À l’ombre’, 383. 5. François-Félix Nogaret, Réflexions d’un patriarche sur les voitures dites omnibus (Paris: Leclerc, 1828), 4. 6. Auguste Thévenau  and Éduoard R***, ‘Le Trompette d’omnibus!’ (Marseille: G. Weber, [s.d.]), 3. 7. Espagnolle, Feuilles, 274.

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8. Baronne de Fresne, De l’usage et de la politesse dans le monde (Paris: Taride, 1858), 71. 9. Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transport (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State UP, 1996), 63. 10. Roger-Henri Guerrand, Mœurs citadines: histoire de la culture urbaine XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1992), 116; Jennifer Terni, ‘The Omnibus and the Shaping of the Urban Quotidian: Paris, 1828-60’, Cultural and Social History, 11:2 (2014): 220. As John P. McKay points out, the vehicles were ‘at most within the financial reach of the betterpaid clerk or artisan’. Tramways and Trolleys: The Rise of Urban Mass Transport in Europe (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976), 13. 11. Cited in Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs, 64. 12. Nogaret, Réflexions, 5. A novel from 1830 similarly pointed out that many ragmen in Paris were not wealthy enough to ride the omnibus. Abbé Tiberge (pseudonym of Hippolyte Regnier d’Estourbet), Louisa ou les Douleurs d’une fille de joie (Paris: Librairie Centrale, 1865), 41. 13. Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes (Paris: Levy, 1869), 52. 14. Terni, ‘Omnibus and the Shaping’, 223. 15. Édouard Monnais, ‘Promenades extérieures et Banlieue’ in Nouveau tableau de Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Mme Charles-Béchet, 1835), V, 165. 16. Louis Huart, ‘Les Voitures publiques’ in Nouveau tableau de Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Mme Charles-Béchet, 1834) IV, 164. 17. Honoré de Balzac, ‘Monographie du rentier’ in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris: L. Curmer, 1841), III, 1. 18. René, ‘Un bureau d’omnibus’, La Semaine des familles, 10 December 1864, 161; Eugène Roche, Le Bal de l’avoué, ou les Quadrilles historiques, comédie-vaudeville en 2 actes (Paris: R. Riga, 1830), 6; Charles Dupeuty, Frédéric De Courcy, and Espérance Hippolyte Lassange, Les Omnibus ou la Revue en voiture, vaudeville en quatre tableaux (Paris: J.-N.  Barba, 1828), 4. 19. Papayanis, Horse-Drawn Cabs, 63. 20. Cited in T.  C. Barker and M.  Robbins, History of London Transport (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), I, 23. 21. ‘A Looking-Glass for London.—No. VIII.  External and Internal Communication’, Penny Magazine, 31 March 1837, 116. 22. ‘The Voice of the Omnibus’, Punch, 5 May 1855, 179. 23. Lucien Rigaud, Dictionnaire du jargon parisien (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1878), 302; Edmond de Goncourt, Germinie Lacerteux: pièce en dix tableaux (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1888), 32. 24. ‘Boîte à canaille’, Le Journal quotidien, littéraire, artistique et politique, 14 April 1894, 1. 25. ‘Omnibuses’, Chambers’s Journal, 14 April 1860, 228.

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26. Maurice Alhoy, ‘Tribulations des omnibus: la voiture au passage’ in Le Musée pour rire, eds. Maurice Alhoy, Louis Huart and Charles Philipon (Paris: Aubert 1839), I, no. 39. 27. Maximilien Perrin, L’Amant de ma femme (Paris: C. Lachapelle, 1838), 359; Roche, Le Bal de l’avoué, 6. 28. Grandville et  al., Les Métamorphoses du jour (Paris: Gustave Havard, 1854), plate LX. 29. Grand Larousse de la langue française (Paris: Larousse, 1989), IV, 3534. 30. Regnier d’Estourbet, Louisa, 31. 31. William M. Thackeray, The History of Pendennis (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1856), 289. 32. ‘The Omnibus’, The Sphinx, 21 January 1871, 21. 33. ‘Flunkeiana’, Punch, 14 May 1859, 194. 34. Adam Blenkinsop, A Shilling’s Worth of Advice on Manners, Behaviour & Dress, etc. (London, 1850), 26. 35. J.  Redding Ware, Passing English of the Victorian Era: A Dictionary of Heterodox English, Slang and Phrase (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1909), 57. 36. John Henry Skelton, My Book; or The Anatomy of Conduct (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1837), 134. 37. ‘Omnibus Reform’, The Spectator, 3 January 1852, 17. 38. Robert Caze, Paris vivant (Paris: E. Giraud, 1885), 279. 39. Descaves, ‘En tramway’, 1. 40. Michael Paterson, A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain (London: Robinson, 2008), 136. 41. ‘The ’Bus’, The Cornhill Magazine, March 1890, 304. 42. ‘The Manners of the Tram’, The Saturday Review, 8 January 1887, 48. 43. ‘De sobremesa’, La Época, 16 June 1900, n.p. 44. Samuel-Henry Berthoud, Marianne de Selvignies (Paris: L. de Potter, 1845), I, 74–75. 45. Octave Uzanne, ‘Omnibus de Paris’, Le Monde moderne, January-June 1900, 486. 46. Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘En tranvía’, El Imparcial, 24 February 1890, 3. 47. Negro, ‘En tramway’, La Caricature, 24 June 1882, 202–3. For other caricatures that distinguish types from various lines or stations, see E.  Ladreyt, ‘Lignes d’omnibus’, La Chronique illustrée, 10 October 1869, n.p.; and M. de Penne, ‘Le Public des omnibus dans les bureaux de correspondance’, L’Illustration, 31 July 1858, 77. 48. Bernadille (pseudonym of Victor Fournel), Esquisses et Croquis parisiens (Paris: E. Plon, 1879), 24. 49. Berthoud, Marianne de Selvignies, I, 74.

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50. Samuel-Henry Berthoud, ‘Huard et Verduron’, Musée des familles, February 1837, IV, 129; Uzanne, ‘Omnibus de Paris’, 486. 51. Fournel, Esquisses, 24. 52. Fournel, Esquisses, 25. 53. Fortuné du Boisgobey, Le Coup de pouce (Paris: E. Dentu, 1876), 2. 54. See, for example, L’Omnibus complet’ in Grandville et  al., Les Métamorphoses du jour (Paris: Garnier frères, 1869), 400. 55. M.  Champimont, ‘Batignolles-Clichy-Odéon’, Revue illustrée, 15 June 1890, n.p. 56. ‘The Manners of the Omnibus’, Saturday Review, 20 August 1881, 231. 57. Masha Belenky, Engines of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019), 27. 58. ‘De l’influence des omnibus sur les habitans de Paris’, Le Voleur, 20 October 1829, n.p. 59. Marie de Monjot, ‘Un drame en omnibus: mœurs parisiennes’, La Couronne, 15 September 1836, 2. 60. Terni, ‘Omnibus and the Shaping’, 227; Lionnette, ‘Le Carnet de Lionnette’, Le Supplément du Grand Journal littéraire illustré, 17 August 1895, n.p. 61. ‘The ’Bus’, Cornhill Magazine, 300. 62. Manuel Fernández y González, ‘El tranvía’, La Academia, 23 January 1879, 42. 63. Antonin Rondelet, Un drame dans un omnibus (Paris: Adrien Le Clère, 1864), 30. 64. Sentimental stories often represent the omnibus and tram as spaces of learning. See, for example, Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘El Belén (cuento de Navidad)’, La Ilustración artística, 19 December 1898, 810; José Zahonero, ‘La muñeca’, La Ilustración artística, 23 February, 1885, 59, 62; Florence Hodgkinson, ‘My Companions in an Omnibus’, The Treasury of Literature and The Ladies’ Treasury, 1 September 1873, 113; and T.S.A., ‘It was the kind word that saved him’, The London Journal, 8 February 1862, 91–92. 65. Adrien Paul, ‘Nicette’, L’Écho des feuilletons, October 1868–September 1869, 316; Guy de Maupassant, ‘Le Père’, Gils Blas, 20 November 1883, 1–2. 66. Andrés Pérez de la Greda, Cabeza de mujer (boceto a pluma) (Madrid: Tipografía Franco-Española, 1893), 125, 128–29. 67. On the vulnerability of women in public transport and specifically trains, see Robin J. Barrow, ‘Rape on the Railway: Women, Safety, and Moral Panic in Victorian Newspapers’, Journal of Victorian Culture 20:3 (2015): 341–56.

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68. ‘Un vieux paradox’, Le Charivari, 5 March 1850, n.p.; Ernest Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus, de la barrière du Trône à la barrière de l’Étoile’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris, Ladvocat, 1831), II, 63. 69. Catherine Parr, L’Usage et le Bon Ton de nos jours (Paris: Rueff, 1892), 167–68. 70. Fortuné de Boisgobey, Le Crime de l’omnibus: 1881 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2005), 18. 71. ‘Notes and Sketches: The Omnibus’, Morning Post, 15 March 1852, 6. 72. Yamina, ‘Scrupule de parisien’, Le Figaro, 3 June 1893, 87. For a reply to this argument, see ‘Par-ci par-là’, La Joie de la maison, 6 July 1893, 346–47. 73. ‘Passenger (rising politely)’, Punch, 9 May 1896, 221. 74. ‘De Omnibus Rebus’, Fun, 25 September 1878, 127. 75. Beausapin, ‘La Galanterie française?… Un vain mot!’, Le Tintamarre, 19 March 1876, 6. 76. Annie E. Lane, ‘The London Bus’, Fortnightly Review, January 1906, 126. 77. Raymond, ‘L’Omnibus’, 352; Mario Lara, ‘Vida práctica’, La última moda, 1 February 1900, 7; Luis Taboada, ‘De todo un poco’, Madrid cómico, 3 November 1888, 2, and 30 November 1889, 2. 78. Isidro Fernández Flores, ‘La dama del tranvía’, La Gran Vía, 17 March 1895, n.p. 79. Belenky, Engines of Modernity, 142–48. 80. Paul Jarry, ‘A propos des omnibus’, Le Vieux Papier, 1 May 1910, 357; Marie A. de Lauréal, ‘Voyage en omnibus’, Revue pour tous illustrée, 28 July 1861, 187. 81. Norbert Bonafous, La Crinoline (Aix: impr. de Illy, 1858), 7; ‘’Bus “Full”’, Punch, 6 December 1856, 229. Similarly, a caricature titled ‘Les Robes à queues en omnibus’ by Cham (the pseudonym of the artist Amedée de Noë) represents an omnibus from the outside with women’s skirts hanging out the windows. La Comédie de l’exposition (Paris: Arnauld de Vresse, [1867]), n.p. 82. Masha Belenky has argued that the reference to Notre-Dame de Lorette identifies these women as prostitutes. Engines of Modernity, 27. 83. ‘The Elegant Omnibus’, Punch, 17 May 1862, 202; ‘A Great Bore in an Omnibus’, Punch, 14 December 1861, 243; ‘Les Misérables’, Punch, 18 April 1863, 164; Jules de Renard, A. de Jallais, and Kriesel, ‘Asseyez-vous d’ssus! Cantilène comique’ ([Paris]: imp. de Bollot, [1861]). 84. ‘Petticoats and Pickpockets’, Punch, 26 July 1862, 37. 85. ‘Rhymes to Decreasing Crinoline’, Punch, 25 March 1865, 124. 86. ‘Mrs R.’s Adventure’, Chambers’s Journal, 28 January 1865, 50; M. de Lauréal, ‘Voyage en omnibus’, 187. 87. ‘Montretout: rondeau’ in Album chantant ou la Chanson de tous et pour tous (Paris: Le Bailly, [1858–1864]), V, 140.

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88. See Michael Burr, ‘Crinoline Difficulties’ (1863, Brian May collection); ‘Paris grotesque: Madame Crinoliska faisant son entrée dans un omnibus’ (Gadola, 1859) (Musée Carnavalet G.35826); Honoré Daumier, ‘Madeleine-Bastille: Un zeste, un rien… et l’omnibus se trouve complet’, Le Boulevard, 16 March 1862; the stereoscopic photograph ‘Now Ma’am, Say When!’ (1866); and ‘He felt like it’, Fun, 24 November 1896, 200. 89. ‘New Omnibus Regulation’, Punch, 2 October 1858, 133. This caricature was acted out in the stereoscopic photograph titled ‘Werry Sorry Mam, But Yer’l Av To Leave Your Krinerline Outside’. Another comic proposal was to redesign the omnibus door in the form of a crinoline skirt. Marcelin Comba and Nadar, ‘Nouvelle coupe des omnibus en rapport avec celle des robes à la mode’, Petit journal pour rire, no. 2, 1856, 1. 90. For reactions to this policy, see Émile Villemot, ‘Les Dames à l’impériale’, Le Gaulois, 3 August 1879, 1; and Alfred Delilia, ‘Échos de la semaine’, L’Éclipse, 15 May 1879, 353–54. 91. Gustave Kahn, Badauderies parisiennes (Paris: H. Floury, 1896), 6. 92. Fred Gilbert, ‘Top o’ the ’Bus’ (London: Francis, Day & Hunter, [1897]), n.p. See also ‘The Omnibus and the Ladies—No Need to Give Them Their Rights, They Take Them’, Moonshine, 30 July 1892, 52. 93. ‘The ’Bus Lady Limpet’, Funny Folks, 26 August 1893, 142. 94. Cited in Alphonse Lafitte, ‘Choses et Autres’, Journal amusant, 2 October 1875, 7. 95. Fabrice, ‘Garde à nous’, L’Éclipse, no. 111, [July 1877], 35. 96. John Leighton, ‘Turning the Tables’, Fun, 17 October 1888, 170. 97. J.-E. Aubry, ‘V’là l’tramway qui roule’ (Paris: E. Vert, [1877]). 98. ‘The London ’Bus’, Fun, 16 July 1895, 23. 99. Alfred Séverin, ‘Une promenade en tramway’, Le Figaro, 24 September 1870, 164. 100. ‘Arrivée à destination de l’omnibus qui traverse Paris nouveau’,  Roger Viollet collection, 11189–22. 101. ‘Honeycomb’, Ladies’ Cabinet, 1 August 1854, 110. 102. Séverin, ‘Une promenade en tramway’, 164; McKay, Tramways and Trolleys, 12. 103. Isaac Pocock, The Omnibus or a Convenient Distance (London: Thomas Hailes Lacy, n.d.). 104. Alexandre Tardif, Scènes de Paris (Paris: Guéry, 1829), 71–79. 105. Honoré Daumier, ‘Une rencontre desagréable’, Le Charivari, 3 April 1843, n.p. 106. E. Simon, ‘Passe-temps’, La Revue-Programme, 26 December 1863, 3. 107. ‘Omnibus Sketches’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 18 December 1847, 395. 108. Huart, ‘Les Voitures publiques’, IV, 177. 109. Sanderson, The American in Paris, I, 128–29.

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110. Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus’, II, 74. 111. Huart, ‘Les Voitures publiques’, IV, 178. 112. Georges Delaqys, ‘La Lueur’, Le Journal pour tous, 18 October 1900, 2. 113. Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895), 104. 114. ‘Seats for Twelve’, Church’s Bizarre, 18 September 1852, 360. 115. Eugène  Michel, ‘L’Innocente Aventure’, Le Petit Parisien: Supplément littéraire illustré, 27 September 1896, 310. 116. Alphonse Allais, Œuvres posthumes, ed. François Caradec (Paris: La Table Ronde, 1964), IV, 114. 117. Georg Simmel, Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms, trans. and ed. Anthony J.  Blasi, Anton K.  Jacobs, and Mathew Kanjirathinkal (Leiden: Brill, 2009), I, 573–74. 118. Edmond Auguste Texier, Taxile Delord, and Arnould Frémy, Paris-en-­ omnibus (Paris: A. Taride, 1854), 55. 119. H.J.S., ‘The Philosopher in the Streets’, Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, Vol. 28, 1866, 137. 120. ‘Ecos de Madrid’, Correspondencia de España, 14 February 1876, n.p. 121. Terni, ‘Omnibus and the Shaping’, 225; Belenky, Engines of Modernity, 27. 122. Boisgobey, Le Crime de l’omnibus, 46–47. 123. Paul de Kock, Un bon enfant (Paris: Gustave Barba, 1833), 32. 124. Auguste Romieu, Code de la conversation, manuel complet du langage élégant et poli, contenant les lois, règles, applications et exemples de l’art de bien parler (Paris: J.-P. Roret, 1829), 187, 189. 125. Baronne de Fresne, De l’usage, 70. 126. Louise D’Alq, Le Nouveau Savoir-vivre universel (Paris: Bureaux des causeries familières, 1883), 52. 127. M. de Monjot, ‘Un drame en omnibus’, 2; Raymond, ‘L’Omnibus’, 352. 128. The Habits of Good Society: A Handbook for Ladies and Gentlemen (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1872), 253; ‘Omnibus Law’, The Times, 30 January 1836, 3. 129. ‘Hints for Travellers in London’, The Man in the Moon, 1847, IV, 145. 130. ‘Omnibuses’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1836, 336. 131. ‘Going by ’bus’, 12. 132. Adolfo Rubio, ‘En el tranvía: de oteo por Madrid’, Vida galante, 30 December 1904, n.p. 133. Ernest d’Hervilly, ‘L’Omnibus-foyer’, L’Éclipse, 24 May 1874, n.p. 134. P.L., ‘En omnibus’, L’Illustration, 18 July 1874, 41. 135. ‘Hints How to Enjoy an Omnibus’, The Odd Fellow, 18 December, 1841, 202. 136. Romieu, Code de la conversation, 189. 137. Vere Dudley, ‘A Chat on the Omnibuses’, The Ladies’ Treasury, 1 April 1893, 207. 138. ‘On the Knife-board’, Chambers’s Journal, 13 June 1863, 369.

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139. Renée Allard, ‘Le Tramway: Note sur Paris’, Journal du dimanche, 18 June 1899, 518. 140. Jules Lovy, ‘Les Types d’omnibus’, Le Journal pour rire, 22 April 1854, 6; ‘The Manners of the Omnibus’, 232. 141. ‘Voces populi’, Punch, 30 August 1890, 100. 142. Georges Courteline, Un client sérieux (Paris: E.  Flammarion, 1897), 75, 74. 143. Benito Pérez Galdós, ‘La novela en el tranvía’ in Cuentos fantásticos, ed. A. E. Smith (Madrid: Cátedra, 1996), 76–77. I cite Margaret Jull Costa’s translation in Madrid Tales, ed. Helen Constantine (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012), 21. For a more detailed analysis of this work, see my ‘Reading (on) the Tram: Benito Pérez Galdós’ “La novela en el tranvía”’, Orbis Litterarum, 69:3 (2014): 193–214. 144. C. R., ‘Intérieurs d’omnibus’, La Femme, 1 July 1884, 100. 145. ‘Omnibuses’, Chambers’s Journal, 228. 146. Carlos Frontaura, ‘El amigo del tranvía’, La Época, 12 July 1887, n.p. 147. François Coppée, Vingt contes nouveaux (Paris: A.  Lemerre, 1883), 234–45. 148. Bofill, ‘El filósofo del tranvía’, 3. 149. Sahib (pseudonym of Louis Ernest Lesage), ‘L’Intérieur d’un omnibus’, Le Monde illustré, 10 January 1874, 29. 150. Jules Jouy and Henri d’Arsay, ‘L’Impériale et l’Intérieur: scie-­locomotrice’ (Paris: Maillard, [1885]). 151. Guy de Maupassant, ‘La Dot’, Gil Blas, 9 September 1884, 1. 152. Guy de Maupassant, ‘Avant la fête’, Le Gaulois, 12 July 1880, 1. 153. Samuel-Henry Berthoud, Fantaisies scientifiques de Sam: Reptiles. Mammifères. Oiseaux. Physique. Chimie. Industrie (Paris: Garnier, 1867), 251. 154. ‘The Manners of the Omnibus’, 231. 155. Timothée Trimm, ‘Les Bitricycles’, Le Petit Journal, 12 September 1852, 1; Espagnolle, Feuilles, 274; ‘Le Dernier Omnibus’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 26 January 1913, 70. 156. Saint-Sénac, ‘Un voyage en tramway’, Revue de la France moderne, February 1890, 106. 157. Fernández y González, ‘El tranvía’, 42; Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘La vida contemporánea: Coches y ciencia’, La Ilustración artística, 14 June 1897, 386. 158. George Cruikshank’s Omnibus (London: Tilt and Bogue, 1842). 159. Mrs Percy Leake, ‘Omnibus—“For All”’, The Sunday at Home, 1 January 1896, 809. 160. Leake, ‘Omnibus—“For All”, 808, 810.

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161. Louis Ulbach, Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1878), 56. 162. Texier et al., Paris-en-omnibus, 54. 163. ‘In a City ’Bus’, Chambers’s Journal, 19 October 1867, 669. 164. Gabrielle Miraben, ‘Les Leçons de l’omnibus’, La Petite Gironde, 29 June 1912, 1. 165. ‘De Omnibus Rebus’, The Examiner, 14 October 1876, 1158. 166. ‘Omnibuses’, Chambers’s Journal, 228. 167. Joseph Ashby Sterry, Nutshell Novels (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1891), 229. 168. M. de Monjot, ‘Un drame en omnibus’, 2. 169. T., ‘Souvenirs, Impressions, Pensées et Paysages pendant un voyage en omnibus ou Notes d’un voyageur’, L’Athénée, 22 January-22 July 1835, 528; Préal, ‘Le Code de l’omnibus’,  L’Ami de la maison, 6 March 1856, 138. 170. Fernández y González, ‘El tranvía’, 42; ‘Madrid’, El Imparcial, 27 November 1876, n.p. 171. ‘Omnibuses’, Tait’s Edinburgh Journal, 336; ‘Quelques remarques sur les omnibus’, Le Magasin pittoresque, April 1843, 103; Charles Soullier, Les Omnibus de Paris: pièce curieuse et utile à l’usage des voyageurs dans Paris (Paris: Impr. de Cordier, 1863), 4. 172. ‘Quelques remarques’, 103. 173. Caze, Paris vivant, 281. 174. Texier et al., Paris-en-omnibus, 13. 175. Constantin Pecqueur, Économie sociale (Paris: Desessart, 1839), I, 344. 176. C. W., ‘Omnibuses as a School of Manners’, The Leisure Hour, February 1886, 135. 177. Fernández y González, ‘El tranvía’, 42.

CHAPTER 5

The Omnibus as Political Metaphor

‘In modern Athens’, observed Michel de Certeau, ‘vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. To go to work or come home, one takes a “metaphor”—a bus or a train’.1 Metaphor comes from the Greek word metapherein, ‘to transfer, carry over’. Both metaphors and buses transport us from one place to another, be it a conceptual realm or a geographical one. In the nineteenth century, omnibuses often served as metaphors, transporting not only people but also ideas. In Chap. 2, we observed the use of the omnibus as an aesthetic metaphor representing first romanticism and then the excesses of realism. The vehicle could also function as a philosophical metaphor standing for the world (‘All the world’s a buss, / And all the men and women passengers’), for life (‘For what else is our life but a trip in an omnibus?’) or for death (‘What is Charon’s boat? An Omnibus to the Champs Elysées’).2 Where the omnibus most served as a metaphor, however, was in the domain of politics. Almost immediately after its introduction, the vehicle became a staple of British and French caricatures in which it often served as a symbol of the state. This motif, however, coexisted with a very different tradition in France: as Parisian omnibuses were often overturned during uprisings and used to construct barricades, they came to be associated with revolution. This chapter analyses the different functions of and

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7_5

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variations on these tropes in the nineteenth century. What political values were projected onto the omnibus? And how did the use of the metaphor change over the course of the century? What will become apparent through this analysis are the many ambivalences of the metaphor. In the French context, the omnibus could represent both the thing overturned by revolution (the state) and the people who shielded themselves behind its mass (the revolutionaries). Moreover, although the omnibus often served as a positive symbol of equality, it was also identified in both Francophone and Anglophone texts with a dangerous loss of differentiation and nuance or with a senseless bureaucracy that reduced individuals to numbers. In the British context, finally, the omnibus passenger became a metaphor for a mediocre conventionality and averageness, for the commonplaceness of those who occupy the common place.

The Ministerial Omnibus One of the earliest metaphorical uses of the new service was the image of the omnibus of state, which continued the French tradition of the char de l’état and the British tradition of representing the government as a mail coach or a carriage.3 In both England and France, caricatures and satirical articles represented leading figures of the government as omnibus passengers, employees, or even horses. As parliamentary coalitions were rearranged in Britain, the passengers and the positions they occupied changed accordingly as did the direction of the vehicle: an omnibus moving to the right signalled a conservative shift in government, while one moving to the left indicated a liberal turn. The use of the humble omnibus instead of the traditional chariot was at times a way of belittling the governing party. The shift in vehicle, however, also reflected a change in emphasis. Whereas images with mail coaches or carriages tended to focus on the relation between the prime minister and the king, the omnibus satires generally commented on reform efforts and the relation between the government and the people. ‘The Omni-buss’ (Fig. 5.1), one of the first British caricatures of this kind, appeared on 15 October 1829, just a few months after the inauguration of Shillibeer’s service on 4 July 1829. Designed by William Heath and published by Thomas McLean (the Scottish printseller responsible for most of the English caricatures discussed below), the image depicts an

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Fig. 5.1  William Heath, ‘The Omni-buss’. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

omnibus driven to the right by the Duke of Wellington, the Tory Prime Minister, who is assisted by Sir Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, who serves as his cad. Inside the omnibus, George IV and his mistress Lady Conyngham appear kissing (the title plays on the word ‘buss’, an archaic term for a ‘kiss’). As M.  Dorothy George explains, the three animals, which are portrayed with human heads, represent the three kingdoms of the union.4 John Bull (England) appears in the centre with slightly taurine features. The horse to his left, which wears a tam-o’-shanter, stands for Scotland, while the horse to his right is probably ‘Pat’, a representation of Ireland. Pat and John Bull are held together by a yoke that reads ‘Emancipation’. In 1829, the Tory government, hoping to avoid unrest in Ireland, had passed the Catholic Relief Act, which removed restrictions on

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Roman Catholics and advanced the process of Catholic Emancipation; ‘Emancipation’ is what keeps the two peoples together. The swamp through which the animals wade bears the caption ‘National Debt’, a reference to the dire economic situation of the period. The decision to represent the peoples of the Union—John Bull, Pat, and the Scot—as the traction of the vehicle rather than its passengers suggests that the direction of the omnibus (i.e. the government’s policies) reflects their leaders’ desires more than their own. Their obligation to pull the nation through the marsh of debt represents the economic burden placed upon them. The ‘buss’ of the title, moreover, suggests that the king is oblivious to their condition. Distracted by his affair, he sees neither the perilous terrain that his omnibus/state traverses nor the animals’ difficulty in bearing their load. The situation was ultimately unsustainable. Although Wellington had compromised on the Catholic Relief Act, he consistently resisted other types of reform, and his government collapsed in November 1830. Another image of this type, ‘The Collision’ (Fig.  5.2), appeared in McLean’s Monthly Sheet of Caricatures in July 1833 during the Whig

Fig. 5.2  ‘The Collision’. © The Trustees of the British Museum

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ministry of the Earl Grey (1830–1834). The vehicle in the image is called the ‘Commons Steam Omnibus’, probably an allusion to the ‘Era’ or the ‘Autopsy’, short-lived experiments with steam propulsion introduced that year. Driving to the left with a flag that reads ‘Reform’ and in a direction labelled ‘To Revolution’, the omnibus represents the Whig government, which just a year earlier had pushed through the Reform Bill of 1832, which overhauled the selection of members for the House of Commons, reducing the number of seats allotted to so-called rotten boroughs and giving greater power to urban areas that had been underrepresented before. In this image, the driver of the omnibus is William IV, who is assisted by Henry Brougham, the Lord Chancellor under Grey. The omnibus collides with a horse-drawn carriage representing the Tory opposition, which moves to the right toward ‘Oldstyle’. The passengers of the latter include Queen Adelaide, a staunch Tory who opposed reform; Wellington and Newcastle hang onto the back of the coach. By contrasting steam and horse traction, the image underscores the forward- and backward-looking nature of the two parties. Significantly, the private coach is associated with the Tories (the aristocratic party) while the public one is identified with the Whigs, who espoused the interests of the common people and dominated the House of Commons. The image is a critique of the reckless speed of the reform—the vehicle has not only crashed but has also run over two pedestrians—and reflects the generally moderate position of McLean’s periodical.5 As a general rule, indeed, when the omnibus moves to the left, it goes too fast, whereas when it is driven to the right, it is painfully slow, as with the bogged down vehicle in ‘The Omni-buss’. Towards the end of 1834, the nation briefly reversed its course. The king, who generally favoured the conservatives and opposed reform, dismissed the Whig ministry, despite its Parliamentary majority, and invited Sir Robert Peel to form a new government. As Peel was on vacation at the time of his recall, the Duke of Wellington was obliged to serve as prime minister for several weeks. The next representation of the state omnibus, which was the work of the Irish caricaturist John Doyle (known by the initials HB), expresses the British public’s frustration with this delay. Published on 24 December 1834 and titled ‘New State Omnibus, or the Man wot is Cad to the Man wot was Cad to the Man wot drove the Sovereign’ (Fig. 5.3), the image refers back to several prints from 1831 that represented prominent politicians in the Emancipation debate as drivers or cads of the royal mail coach or of an opposition vehicle. In the 1831

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Fig. 5.3  John Doyle, ‘New State Omnibus, or the Man wot is Cad to the man wot was Cad to the Man wot drove the Sovereign’. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection. The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 2014. Metropolitan Museum of Art

images, Wellington, the prime minister at the time, had been ‘The Man Wot Drives the Sovereign’, while Peel, then the leader of the House of Commons, had been ‘The Cad to the Man Wot Drives the Sovereign’.6 In HB’s image from December 1834, however, these roles are reversed; Wellington is now the ‘cad’ to Peel, who used to be the ‘cad’ to Wellington, ‘the Man wot drove the Sovereign’. The omnibus, which has ‘Public Reform’ lettered on its side, moves to the right, reflecting the conservative shift in the government. The driver Peel asks the cad Wellington whether the Commons is in, to which Wellington replies that he can ‘go on’ (i.e. that he can now form a government). Notably, the king sits alone inside the omnibus while the nation, John Bull, stands outside it—significantly to its left—holding a stopwatch, indicating his frustration with the delay.

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Fig. 5.4  John Doyle, ‘The Hopposition Buses!’ © The Trustees of the British Museum

According to the discussion of the image in the conservative Times, ‘in the general opinion the time for starting a new coach has arrived’.7 Nevertheless, it is clear that the new omnibus/government lacks support. The explanation in An Illustrative Key to the Political Sketches of H.B. (1841)—a guide to Doyle’s work—underscores the emptiness of the vehicle: as Peel ‘does not have a single passenger’ other than the king, his ministry will depend on the ‘very arduous and useful office of his conductor’.8 HB’s next omnibus print (Fig.  5.4), published on 28 January 1835, again insists on this lack of support. Entitled ‘The Hopposition ’Buses!’, the image represents two omnibuses, which, as in ‘The Collision’, are distinguished by their form of traction. The government omnibus, driven by Peel to the right, is horse-drawn, while that of the opposition (on the left) is propelled by steam (again, a sign of the Whig’s modernity). Whereas the former seems to have no passengers, the latter includes a number of

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prominent politicians. In the foreground, two conductors—the radical Scottish MP Joseph Hume on the left and the conservative Wellington on the right—try to convince John Bull (at centre) to enter their respective vehicles (the title, with its h-insertion, reflects the language use of cads). As we saw in Chap. 2, comic literature about the British omnibus often represents conductors of rival companies engaging in tugs-of-war over passengers. Hume warns John Bull that if he takes Peel’s omnibus, he will never reach his destination. His own vehicle, he claims, is ‘constructed upon scientific and feelosophical principles—warranted to go at RaceHorse speed and no stopping’.9 Wellington, meanwhile, warns John Bull against ‘their newfangled machinery’, which moves only if ‘kept in constant hot water’ and which is ‘sure to blow up in the end’; they are in much safer hands with Peel, a ‘careful driver steady train’d’ whose omnibus is ‘going much faster than formerly’. A commentary on the image in The Spectator extends the metaphor of the competing parties as rival omnibuses: it is well known [that Peel] used to be so constantly looking right and left to catch stray passengers, with his smooth face, that he never drove straight-­ forward, and was for ever going down all manner of streets, narrow turnings, and back ways, to avoid the traffic of leading thorough-fares.

Once again, the right-moving omnibus is painfully slow. The Spectator commentator seems to prefer the opposition vehicle, which is ‘cheaper’ to ride and whose flaws ‘will be perfected as the engineers increase in skill’.10 Recalling this period in England under Seven Administrations (1837), Albany Fonblanque would resort to a similar metaphor to evoke the scepticism towards the conservative omnibus: [Wellington] says to the people—if you insist on going to the devil, for the love of heaven let me drive you, for I may as well have the half-crown as another, and I pledge myself to carry you on towards the bottomless pit at as good a pace as any other driver can promise you, taking care not to delay you by an upset in a journey to such a hopeful end. […] Such an Undertaker of reforms should appropriately drive a hearse as a national omnibus. But who will travel by him?—those who like the road (knowing the falseness of his character of it) don’t like his driving, nor

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believe that he will go to what he absurdly believes to be perdition; and those, on the other hand, who like his driving, think with him, that the road leads to ruin, and therefore will refuse to take the journey. The Tories abhor the direction, and the Reformers revolt against the whip.11

The double sense of ‘Undertaker’ and the image of the hearse suggest that Wellington will bury the reforms sooner than implement them.12 It is interesting to contrast HB’s image with a similar print entitled ‘The Rival Omnibusses’ (November 1835) by the radical caricaturist C.J. Grant, which forms part of his series ‘The Political Drama’, which chronicled the politics of the mid-1830s (Fig. 5.5). As in ‘The Hopposition ’Buses!’, two omnibuses—‘The Conservative’ and ‘The Liberal’—compete for the custom of John Bull.13 Both vehicles head to the left, suggesting promises of reform. The royal couple ride in ‘The Conservative’ but the king expresses reservations about the coach, which ‘has a bad name on

Fig. 5.5  C. J. Grant, ‘The Rival Omnibusses’. Courtesy of The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

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the road’. As in HB’s image, Wellington is the cad of the right-­wing vehicle and tries to prevent John Bull from stepping into the ‘hopposition tumbler’ by suggesting that it is unsafe: ‘you’ll have to tip two thrums for a shake in that ’ere rotten box,’ he warns, ‘vot’ll break down afore they gets half way’. John Bull, however, is unconvinced: when he has ridden ‘The Conservative’ in the past, he replies, he has been either pick-­pocketed or cheated. Now he is stepping into ‘The Liberal’ whose cad, the Irish MP Daniel O’Connell, represents the king as a henpecked husband who rides ‘The Conservative’ only because he is ‘kept in by his wife’. Whereas the HB caricature focuses on the pace of the  vehicle, C.J. Grant’s image emphasises the corruption of the conservatives. Although ‘The Liberal’ omnibus costs more (sixpence instead of threepence)—perhaps an allusion to higher taxes—it is less corrupt than ‘The Conservative’, whose driver, the Duke of Cumberland, instructs his cad to bribe John Bull (‘Tip plenty o’ gammon to get him into our Buss’) and whose employees robbed him in the past. Where HB’s passenger hesitates between the two options, Grant’s has made up his mind and enters the opposition ’bus, which already has more fares. In the elections of 1835, the British public made the same choice, ushering in the government of the Whig Viscount Melbourne. With this move to the left, the focus of the images shifts from the pace of the omnibus to the chaotic way in which it is conducted and driven. In an 1836 article in the Tory periodical The Age, Thomas Rice, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is accused of managing the nation’s accounts as an omnibus conductor does his fares: ‘The State Omnibus is at this present writing in any thing but safe condition. Tom Rice, the cad who has had the handling of the fares, is all wrong in his accounts, and by his carelessness near a bank, has all but upset the vehicle’. Obliged to seek the support of the incendiary Daniel O’Connell, moreover, the driver (Melbourne) does not fully control the horses: the head driver hardly knows whether he holds the reins or not—the whip, to all intents and purposes, being in the hands of Big DAN, his Irish helper! In addition to this, the crazy machine is moved along by a motley lot of hacks, who have but one notion in common, namely, a sharp nose for the Treasury manger.14

Whereas Peel’s omnibus is dawdling and indirect, the Whig’s vehicle is reckless and corrupt.

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Another omnibus caricature appeared two years into the Melbourne administration, shortly after the death of William IV in 1837. Entitled ‘The Rival Omnibuses’ and published in the radical journal The Penny Satirist, the image resembles HB’s ‘The Hopposition ’Buses!’ Here, however, it is not John Bull but the young Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, who must choose between competing cads: ‘Paddy Is’ who represents the Whig omnibus and ‘Paddy Was’ who represents the Tory one. In an accompanying text, Wellington (‘Paddy Was’) boasts of the ‘easy circumstances’ of his clientele and warns the royals that they risk ‘losing both purse and honour’ in his rival’s vehicle, while ‘Paddy Is’ dismisses ‘Paddy Was’ as one of the ‘privileged highwaymen of the Rob-art faction, returning home with their pockets full of the spiles of the people’. As in Grant’s print of the same title, the satire accuses the Tories of corruption. The text ends with Victoria riding the Whig omnibus.15 Unlike her uncle William IV, indeed, Victoria would gravitate towards the Whigs, influenced by the avuncular Lord Melbourne. Her omnibus of choice would prove chaotic. Although Melbourne remained in power for four more years, it was, as noted in the article just cited, the radical Daniel O’Connell who often seemed to hold the reins. In HB’s ‘Omnibus Race’ (Fig.  5.6), which appeared on 9 April 1840,

Fig. 5.6  John Doyle, ‘Omnibus Race’. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art

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O’Connell, who drives the Whig omnibus to the left carrying the king and queen inside, is overtaken by another coach, labelled Dilly Associates, driven by Lord Stanley whose passenger is John Bull. In 1834, during Earl Grey’s Whig ministry, Lord Stanley had resigned from office in a move designed in his words to upset ‘the ministerial coach’ and had formed a splinter group of moderate Whigs that would eventually merge with the Conservatives. In derision, Daniel O’Connell had begun to refer to this faction as the ‘Derby Dilly’, a reference to Lord Stanley’s title, Earl of Derby, and to a type of ‘diligence’ or stagecoach. The caricature is a commentary on the Irish Registration Bill put forward by Lord Stanley and his 16 ‘Associates’. The bill was intended to correct the electoral fraud and errors in voter registration that had become rampant in Ireland since the passage of the Irish Reform Act in 1832. O’Connell vehemently opposed the proposal, which he feared might reduce the franchise, and used all his influence to prevent its ratification. As the Illustrative Key points out, the presence of John Bull in the Derby Dilly indicates the British public’s support for the bill.16 Once again, the emphasis of the image lies on the recklessness of the Whig driver, who engages in the illegal practice of omnibus racing (see Chap. 2). Inside the government omnibus, Prince Albert, who had just married Victoria, is astonished at how ‘furiously’ O’Connell drives. In a commentary on the image, the conservative Morning Post would similarly call attention to the contrast in pace: whereas Lord Stanley ‘drives in the good old style, with the ribbons well in hand, and a perfect command of his nags’, O’Connell would offend a member of ‘the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals’: ‘of all the unmerciful whips that ever piloted a jaunting car, we never saw one who more ruthlessly laid it in to his miserable cattle […] a very few years ago, such break-neck driving would have been visited with the house of correction and the treadmill’.17 Daniel O’Connell is again the driver in HB’s next omnibus image, ‘Breaking up for the Vacation’ (Fig. 5.7), published after the prorogation of Parliament on 11 August 1840. His passengers are the cabinet members, who are represented as schoolboys leaving ‘Victoria’s establishment’. The Queen bids them farewell, advising them not to ‘get into any mischief’, while the Tory Duke of Wellington, depicted as a spinster, laments that they are ‘Giddy thoughtless creatures’. The emphasis of the image lies

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Fig. 5.7  John Doyle, ‘Breaking up for the Vacation’. Courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art

on the heedlessness of the Whigs in allowing themselves to be driven by the reckless O’Connell. Curiously, this is the only Whig omnibus in the series that moves to the right. The nation itself would soon move in the same direction. The elections of 1841 would bring in a conservative government after nine years of mostly Whig rule. The last of HB’s omnibus prints (Fig. 5.8), ‘New Omnibus’ (October 20, 1841), depicts the new Tory government. As in Fig. 5.3, Peel is represented as the driver, and Wellington, as his conductor. Seated next to Peel are Sir James Graham and Lord Stanley, who has now joined the conservatives. The image shows Wellington helping John Bull into the omnibus while a rival cad, the Whig politician Lord Russell, warns him that he is getting on the wrong vehicle. John Bull’s words caution the new government against the errors both of Peel’s administration of 1834–1835 (excessive delay) and of Melbourne’s government (omnibus racing): ‘Now

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Fig. 5.8  John Doyle, ‘New Omnibus’. Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark

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Mr Conductor, I hope you are not going to keep us long without starting, and mind no racing nor unnecessary stoppages on the way’. Inside the omnibus we see the face of Queen Victoria. For the first time in HB’s series, John Bull and the monarch occupy the same vehicle. In the Age of Reform in Britain, the omnibus became a symbol of successive governments’ attempts to come to terms with the people’s demand for change. The shift from the royal mail coach to the omnibus represents this focus on popular issues such as Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Act. The rivalries among cads, their miscalculation of fares and the practices of loitering and omnibus racing, moreover, allowed artists to contrast different political options. Whereas in the first image we saw, the nation is the animal that pulls the vehicle occupied by the king, at the end the people and the monarch ride together. This juxtaposition and John Bull’s words in the final print reflect the moderate position of HB who favoured a reform that was neither too fast nor too slow.18 Unlike the other prints in the series, the final omnibus moves neither to right nor to the left but rather stands in the centre with its backdoor open. It is the symbol of an inclusive middle ground. The metaphor of the omnibus of state would continue to appear in texts and images throughout the century. As time went on, however, the association would become less satirical. A fascinating later example of the motif is Alfred Morgan’s 1885 painting ‘An Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly Circus, Mr Gladstone Travelling with Ordinary Passengers’, also known as ‘One of the People  (Gladstone in an Omnibus)’ (Fig.  5.9). The image depicts the Prime Minister William Gladstone in a Piccadilly omnibus just a year after his government extended the franchise to working-class men with the Reform Act of 1884. What is a purely metaphorical slumming in the HB prints is represented as reality in this painting. The image is somewhat ambiguous. With the passage of the Reform Bills of 1867 and 1884, Conservatives and Liberals vied for the support of newly enfranchised voters.19 The image of Gladstone in an omnibus (a highly implausible situation for a prime minister in the period) suggests an attempt to woo the masses. Morgan seems to have had no connection with the politician, and little is known about his motives in choosing this theme.20 One account of the reception of the painting at the Crystal Palace

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Fig. 5.9  Alfred Morgan, ‘One of the People (Gladstone in an Omnibus)’. Artefact / Alamy Stock Photo

exhibit of 1887, however, suggests that it was interpreted as an appeal to the people: It shows Mr. Gladstone in an omnibus full of passengers, one of whom is amusingly represented with a Conservative newspaper displayed on his knee. As the groups of people passed, one or another would recognise the face of the right hon. gentleman, and would call his companions to look at it, so that Mr. Gladstone might be said to be holding a popular reception all through the day.21

It is important to point out, however, that his fellow passengers are clearly bourgeois: a doctor carrying his bag and two mothers, one with a sleeping baby and the other with a demure girl and a boy in a sailor suit. As Raffaella Antinucci points out, Morgan ‘leaves out […] the extremes of English society’.22 The vehicle is represented from the same perspective as Egley’s

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1859 ‘Omnibus Life in London’ (Fig. 3.2)—from the front of the omnibus looking back—but the claustrophobia and chaos of the earlier image are now gone. Gladstone is ‘one of the people’ but the artist does not go so far as to place him next to the poor or working classes or to confront him with the unruliness, dinginess, and disorder of such vehicles. The doctor’s newspaper may even invite an ironic reading. Gladstone has entered the omnibus to woo the masses, but the man to his left clutches the opposition periodical, the conservative Globe. This detail, along with Gladstone’s failure to engage his fellow passengers and their seeming disinterest, might suggest the insincerity or futility of his effort to connect to the ‘people’. As Ruth Clay Windscheffel observes, The opportunity exists both for conversation and also for prolonged study but neither are taking place, further calling into question the title’s intimations of Gladstone’s popularity and the reality of democracy, and exposing the difficult nature of communication between politician and people.23

Just as in the final image of HB’s series, the leader and the people sit together in an idealised omnibus, which serves as a symbol of the reformist government, but whether this is a political achievement or simply posturing is not clear.

The August Omnibus The metaphor of the omnibus of state appeared as well on the other side of the Channel in a series of caricatures and articles published in the opposition press during Louis-Philippe’s official visit to Normandy from 26 August to 12 September 1833. Following the Revolution of 1830, Louis-­ Philippe had ascended to the throne as the representative of its liberal values but had quickly encountered opposition on both right and left. Just a year before the Normandy trip, he had faced a royalist insurrection in the West of France and republican riots in Paris. The Normandy tour was an attempt to reassert the principles of his regime—his commitment to the Charter of 1830 and to the restoration of order and prosperity—in a region in which he still enjoyed considerable support. As the king moved from town to town, he was received with ceremonies, banquets, and admiring speeches, which were widely ridiculed in the opposition press. The constant pageantry and adulation seemed, in the words of the

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historian Alphonse Pépin, a ‘renewal of the banal flatteries of the era of servility and vassalage’.24 Moreover, some of the king’s speeches seemed to break the rule that ‘Le roi règne mais ne gouverne pas’ (the king reigns but does not govern). At times, he laid out projects and goals that went beyond the bounds of his mandate.25 While pro-government newspapers such as Le Constitutionnel, La France nouvelle and the Moniteur gave glowing reports of each stage of the journey, the left-wing Le Charivari offered a satirical version of the trip in two series of articles.26 The reestablishment of the freedom of the press after the Revolution of 1830 had given rise to a number of periodicals highly critical of the government. La Caricature (founded in 1830) and Le Charivari (founded in 1832), both run by Charles Philipon, were particularly merciless in their attacks on the July Monarchy. In the early 1830s, the two journals published countless satires and caricatures developing an elaborate code of symbols, nicknames, and puns. Louis-Philippe was mockingly referred to as ‘la pensée immuable’ (the immutable thought), ‘l’ordre des choses’ (the order of things), and ‘le juste milieu’ (the happy medium)—expressions that poked fun at his political rhetoric—and often represented as a pear (his face with its prominent jowls resembled the fruit). The attacks provoked various lawsuits against the newspapers, which only increased their animus against the government. Unlike HB’s prints, which are relatively restrained commentaries on the pace of reform and which rarely target the monarch, the articles in Le Charivari are a direct attack on the person, character, policies, and even the speech patterns of the king. A striking visual satire of the Normandy trip was the triptych of plates entitled ‘Voyage de la pensée immuable à travers les populations empressées’ (Voyage of the immutable thought through the eager populations, Figs.  5.10, 5.11, and 5.12), designed by the well-known caricaturist Grandville and published in La Caricature in late October and early November 1833 (a few weeks after Louis-Philippe’s return). The image, which echoes and condenses the Charivari articles, gives a sense of the symbolic density and virulence of these satires. The left panel (Fig. 5.10) represents the preparations for the king’s arrival.27 At the beginning of the Charivari articles, Louis-Philippe’s counsellors advise him against the journey, as enthusiasm is scarce and therefore expensive: he will pay a high price for this simulacrum of support. The king, however, insists on

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Fig. 5.10  Grandville, ‘Voyage de la pensée immuable à travers les populations empressées’ (left panel). Courtesy of The Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. Northwestern University

Fig. 5.11  Grandville, ‘Voyage de la pensée immuable à travers les populations empressées’ (centre panel). Courtesy of The Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. Northwestern University

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Fig. 5.12  Grandville, ‘Voyage de la pensée immuable à travers les populations empressées’ (right panel). Private Collection

travelling and sends the politician and poet Jean-Pons-Guillaume Viennet ahead of him to prepare each town for his arrival. The Charivari series represents Viennet riding on a donkey and decorating the triumphal arches set up in the towns along the route with clumsy poems (in the first, three lines have a syllable too many).28 In Fig.  5.10, he appears on a jackass wielding a lyre, the words ‘unpopularity’ and ‘contempt’ inscribed on the back of his coat. Behind Viennet is a triumphal arch (representing the towns of Evreux and Lisieux), decorated with symbols of France—a tricolour flag and cockade—and of Louis-Philippe—a pear and an umbrella (the latter part of his self-fashioning as a ‘bourgeois king’).29 According to the explanation in La Caricature, the steps leading up to the arch list ‘the glorious emblems of the present time’.30 The feats included, however, are actually the actions of the king that most threaten the values of the Revolution: the siege of Paris during the 1832 riots, the government’s lawsuits against newspapers, the destitution of the marquis de Lafayette and Louis-Philippe’s failure to support the Polish revolt against the

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Russian tsar. The pageantry is further undermined by the houses in the background, which are decorated only by the laundry hanging from the windows—a sign of the locals’ indifference. To the right of the arch, a motley group of ‘tamerlans’ (a joking term for members of a bourgeois militia who take on a military air) and bored-looking peasant women in toques give acclamations, which are mocked in the caption of the image: ‘Vive le rrroî! Vive le rouâ! vive le roâ! Vive l’roué! viv’ le roué!’ The deformation of the word ‘roi’, which is pronounced first as ‘roâ’ and then as ‘roué’ (scoundrel), suggests the illegitimacy of Louis-Philippe’s reign. Throughout the Charivari series, ‘roi’ and any other word containing that sequence of letters are written ‘roâ’; ‘enthusiasme croissant’ (increasing enthusiasm), for example, becomes ‘enthusiasme croâssant’. The degradation introduced by the bourgeois king manifests itself even at a linguistic level. The central panel (Fig.  5.11) represents the king (‘the immutable thought rendered visible’) mounted on a lame horse with an umbrella, a cockade, and a saddle bearing the words ‘truth’ and ‘Charter’.31 Several fawning local officials offer him the keys of the town on silver plates. The caption beneath the provincial officials evokes the repetitiveness and grandiosity of their welcoming speeches: ‘Just as Alexander the Great, on his entrance in Babylon, just as Alexander the Great, just as’. According to the explanation, the king ‘avenges himself’ with an equally bombastic oration full of subordinate clauses that begin with ‘que’ (that)—a feature of his speech regularly mocked in Le Charivari.32 Behind him, an attendant holds a roll representing the king’s abundant supply of relative pronouns (‘que’, ‘qui’, ‘dont’). The right panel (Fig. 5.12) represents the omnibus of state, which is pulled, as in the Charivari article, by ‘four lame mares, two of which are one-eyed’.33 Louis-Philippe was often identified with the omnibus and was said to have used the public conveyances himself before becoming king.34 The Charivari series takes advantage of this association to underscore the shabbiness and improvisatory nature of his regime. Over the course of the journey, the horses meet with a series of accidents: one of the one-eyed horses falls ill, needs to be carried in a separate carriage (reducing the number of horses available for the omnibus) and eventually dies, and later a horse that is lame in one leg becomes lame in three (the Charivari calls it a triboîteuse). At the end of the trip, a fireworks accident under a

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triumphal arch leaves the remaining one-eyed horse completely blind, converts the triboîteuse into a quatriboîteuse and destroys the back part of the omnibus, reducing its capacity from 34 to 16 people. The series closes with Louis-Philippe reprimanding Camille de Montalivet, his intendant de la liste civile (the minister who managed the king’s residences and property) for acquiring such inadequate horses.35 The lame, half-blind mares represent the cheapness and undignified nature of the monarch as well as the perceived vulnerability of his reign. In the image, the omnibus is driven by the Count d’Argout, the minister of the interior. The trumpet that the driver operates which his feet—a feature of early Parisian omnibuses—has been converted into a machine that produces cries of ‘vive le roâ’ to create ‘a satisfying volume of unanimous love’.36 Two weeks before the trip, the Charivari ran an article describing precisely such an invention, which could be put ‘like omnibus trumpets beneath the seat of the driver of the august carriage’.37 This would seem to be the origin of the idea of the ‘august omnibus’. On the side of the machine appears a pair of scissors, an allusion to d’Argout’s role as the chief censor (an association clear in an earlier print, ‘Résurrection de la censure’, in which d’Argout emerges from a tomb embracing a giant pair of shears).38 The explanation of the third panel identifies the men on the impériale as the baron de Fain (jokingly referred to in the opposition newspapers as M.  Faim, ‘hunger’), Camille de Montalivet, who as the manager of the king’s estates is represented here and in Le Charivari as a cook with a casserole, and Félix Barthe, the minister of Justice. On either side of the omnibus, obsequious local officials offer ‘artificial bouquets’ to the king’s sister, Madame Adélaïde, who rides inside. According to the explanation in La Caricature, the omnibus passes ‘three or four zealous populations’ who laugh at the ‘nags’ from the trees on which they are perched.39 These figures recall a passage in the Charivari series which corrects the Moniteur’s claim that ‘enthusiastic populations’ climbed the trees in order to see the ‘king of their choice’; the men in the trees were actually farmers collecting nuts.40 Throughout the series, Le Charivari deflates the pro-government newspapers by confronting their rhetoric with the everyday reality of country life and the locals’ indifference. At the far right of Fig.  5.12, the omnibus is followed by journalists from the main pro-government newspapers. The first, who represents the Journal des débats, sports a hat in the form of a pear (an allusion to

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Louis-­Philippe) with a weathervane on top, which suggests that the newspaper changes its views with the political winds. The next reporter, who works for Le Constitutionnel, carries a sack that reads ‘On se désabonne’ (One unsubscribes); Le Charivari regularly gave its readers instructions on how to cancel their subscriptions with the rival paper.41 The journalist is led by a spider, an allusion to an earlier joke in the Charivari about the ‘webs’ of lies that the Constitutionnel wove in its pages.42 The miniature tamerlan in the reporter’s pocket hints at the newspaper’s attempts to guide the ‘garde nationale’.43 Like the reporter from the Journal des débats, the journalist from the Moniteur wears a weathercock atop his pear-shaped hat. The ‘velocipède’ he rides, moreover, is adorned with two additional vanes: the first with a pear, on one side, and a fleur de lys, on the other (suggesting a vacillation between Orleanist and Legitimist agendas), and the second with a bonnet rouge and a Gallic rooster, a revolutionary symbol with which Louis-Philippe had particularly identified his reign (suggesting a vacillation between the values of 1789 and those of the July Monarchy). The final journalist represents the Journal de Paris, who, as the explanation clarifies, is ‘the only one who does not write for the excellent reason that he does not know how’.44 In the triptych in La Caricature, the omnibus moves to the left, reflecting Louis-Philippe’s revolutionary rhetoric, but unlike HB’s breakneck Whig conveyances, it moves at a plodding pace, pulled by lame animals. The image suggests the king’s reluctance to follow through on his promises with anything more than words. Whereas the omnibus in the British prints represents a reform agenda, here it symbolises the degradation of the monarchy: the vehicle that was once part of the king’s bourgeois self-­ fashioning has become an emblem of the dilapidation of his regime. Unlike HB’s prints, which draw on omnibus racing and rivalries between cads to portray ideological oppositions, the French image inscribes itself more in the ceremonial tradition of the char de l’état. Its focus is not a contest between political opponents but rather the overblown rhetoric of the monarchy, which it deflates through an elaborate symbolic code. It is interesting to contrast Grandville’s triptych with two other caricatures in Philipon publications that represent Louis-Philippe in a coach. The first (Fig.  5.13), which appeared on 15 September 1833  in Le Charivari (several weeks before the Caricature triptych) and is signed by the caricaturist Benjamin (the pseudonym of Joseph Germain Mathieu

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Fig. 5.13  Benjamin, ‘N’oubliez-vous pas le postillon, bourgeois! c’est juste, tiens, voici... une poignée de main’. Courtesy of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

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Roubaud), represents the king in a carriage adorned with symbols of his reign: the old umbrella, the top hat with a cockade and a basket full of croix d’honneur (Louis-Philippe distributed these distinctions so liberally that Le Charivari joked they had become an epidemic like the flu).45 The vehicle in the image is closer in form to a coucou or malle-poste than an omnibus (unlike the coach in Grandville’s triptych, it has only one compartment). Nevertheless, the explanation of the caricature clearly links it with the articles on the Normandy trip: Nothing is lacking in M. Benjamin’s sketch, neither the four lame horses, nor the eager populations, represented by that flock of ravens that make the air resound with their caws. Some might find that M. Benjamin has not reproduced that scene in all its grandeur. It seems to us, indeed, that he has greatly diminished that of the omnibus, 15-feet and 6-inches long.46

The reference to the ravens refers to an earlier Charivari article in which the ‘chief provoker of departmental enthusiasm’ used birds to create a simulacrum of enthusiasm for the king, as their caws (‘coâ’) resemble ‘cries of vive le roâ! ‘Coâ! coâ! roâ! roâ! coâ! roâ! coâ! etc.’47 Like Grandville’s triptych, Benjamin’s image pokes fun at the unpopularity of the regime and uses the humble vehicle to suggest the shabby and miserly nature of the king. When the driver asks him for a tip (‘Don’t forget the driver, bourgeois!’), Louis-Philippe offers only his hand (‘that’s right, hold on, here… a handshake’). Earlier in the year, Le Charivari had published a conundrum describing a visit by the king to the East during which he distributed Handshakes, crosses, eloquence, Everything, that is, except, in his munificence, Alms for the indigent And tips for drivers.48

Both Grandville’s and Benjamin’s images, thus, offer a critique of the cheapness and degradation of the monarchy. The caricatures, however, differ significantly in tone: where Grandville’s image presents a light-hearted panorama—a playful representation of the state visit as circus—Benjamin’s caricature offers a more sombre and menacing vision of the monarchy. Not only do ravens circle ominously

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Fig. 5.14  Charles Joseph Traviès de Villers, ‘Le Char de l’état’. Courtesy of The Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections. Northwestern University

overhead, but the vehicle’s trunk, deceptively labelled ‘mouchoirs de poche’ (pocket handkerchiefs) perhaps in an allusion to the false sentimentality of the king, actually contains a ‘mouchard de poche’ (pocket spy), a reference to the monarch’s reliance on police surveillance and espionage.49 Notably, moreover, the direction of the vehicle has changed. The omnibus in Grandville’s triptych moves from right to left: Louis-Philippe’s government represents a turn to the left, a shift away from Charles X’s authoritarian rule, but one that is largely empty rhetoric. Benjamin’s coach, in contrast, heads from left to right. Despite the cockade on the roof, Louis-­ Philippe’s government moves in the same direction as the Restoration and relies on similar strategies of surveillance. The second image is a caricature that appeared in La Caricature on 14 November 1833 in the issue following the triptych. Entitled ‘Le Char de l’état’ and designed by Charles Joseph Traviès de Villers (Fig. 5.14), the image also evokes the Normandy trip but this time replaces the omnibus with the traditional chariot of state, which takes a subtly pear-shaped

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form.50 The subtitle of the image, ‘expression of the stupid Constitutionnel’, explains the choice of vehicle; La Caricature is once again ridiculing the empty rhetoric of the Orleanist newspapers. With the shift from omnibus to chariot, the focus of the critique also changes. Whereas Grandville’s and Benjamin’s images emphasise the shabbiness of the king and his entourage, Traviès’ caricature condemns his betrayal of the republic and his exorbitant expenses. The chariot, filled with money bags representing his costly ‘liste civile’, has trampled a tricolour flag with the words ‘Honneur’ (Honour) and ‘Patrie’ (Fatherland). According to the explanation, the vehicle is so overloaded with ‘money, more money, always money and not one liberty, not one great and strong institution’ that its axle will soon break from the strain.51 The use of horses with human faces and the representation of the omnibus mired in a swamp suggest the influence of the British print ‘The Omni-buss’ (Fig. 5.1).52 In the French image, however, the horses’ faces represent not regions but ministers: Soult, Guizot, d’Argout, Barthe, and Thiers. Talleyrand, identifiable by his crutch, sits on the impériale. The king, represented at once as a man and as an enormous, pear-shaped sack of money, steps on the ‘beautiful promises of Nine August’ (the date of his accession to the throne), which have not been fulfilled: ‘Polish nationality’, ‘no more law suits against the press’, etc. The back of the carriage holds the propaganda and empty discourses of his reign. It is noteworthy that the public stands to the left of the chariot and turns its back to it. The building they face is the Hôtel-de-Ville where the king had committed to a republican programme in 1830. Duped by these promises, they do not see that the monarchy is moving farther and farther to the right in the image and in his politics. According to the explanation, the onlookers surrounding the vehicle represent ‘patriotic journals’ (i.e. the opposition press), which ‘tired of warning deaf people about the dangers of the route, limit themselves now to observing the progress of the chariot and predicting its definitive break-­ down’.53 One of these journalists is an archer with a bow whose quiver is full of caricatures from Philipon’s periodicals with pear-like images of the king’s head. The inclusion of the opposition press within the image distinguishes Traviès’ caricature from Grandville’s triptych. The latter ridicules the king by converting his carriage into a ramshackle omnibus and surrounding it with symbols of the emptiness of official discourse. Traviès’

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image, in contrast, represents literally the ‘chariot of state’ of Orleanist propaganda; as a result, it needs to incorporate a deflating force, the laughing journalists who surround the vehicle. The image of the ‘august omnibus’ would reappear again a year later when the king hosted royal dignitaries at Fontainebleau. An 1834 article in Le Charivari describes how the king uses his omnibus to show his guests around the estate. The essay begins by distinguishing between the royal carriages of old, with their elegant gilding and cushions that protected against the jolts of the journey, and modern coaches, which are ‘reformed omnibuses, wobbly, bumpy, rough’. As in Grandville’s caricature, the omnibus is a symbol of the degradation of the regime. The article, however, also distinguishes the ‘august omnibus’ from the Parisian ones in which the passengers are ‘amicably confused in the same sentiments and the same omnibus’. Far from a symbol of equality, the ‘august omnibus’ is a ‘thermometer of favor’ in which one’s position indicates one’s political weight. The least important visitors occupy the impériale, while the representatives of dominant European powers are seated inside according to their relative strength: ‘Russia occupies the first place; England, the second; Austria, the third; Prussia, the fourth; Turkey, the fifth; Spain, the sixth; Sweden, the seventh; and so forth’. Louis-Philippe sits on the strapontin, a sign of the diminished importance of France under his rule.54 The omnibus here points not only to the degraded nature of the July Monarchy but also to its perversion of the principle of equality represented by the vehicle. In the early 1830s, the motif of the ‘omnibus de l’état’ served to discredit Louis-Philippe’s reign, drawing attention to its shabbiness, weakness, and hypocrisy. As in the British context, however, the metaphor gradually took on more positive connotations as the century went on, becoming a symbol of republican ideals. An 1838 poem, for example, proclaims that ‘the Omnibus […] is a republic’, and a comic text from the Second Republic proposes that the phrase ‘char de l’état’ be replaced by ‘omnibus de l’état’ to reflect ‘the establishment of universal suffrage’.55 The end of Charles Soullier’s poem Paris-Neuf ou Rêve et Réalité (1861), published during the Second Empire, predicts that if Napoleon III ever threatened the rights of the people, they would shout not ‘Long live

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Fig. 5.15  Paul Hadol, ‘L’Omnibus de Versailles: La Députation parisienne du 2 juillet’. CCØ Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet-Histoire de Paris

equality! Long live the Republic!’ but ‘Omnibus! omnibus!’.56 Finally, an article from the Third Republic, which takes the form of an imaginary letter from the President of the Republic to the director of the Omnibus company, promises that the ‘monarchical cliché of Char de l’état will be replaced in all official discourses by the democratic locution L’omnibus de l’État’.57 This association between the omnibus and the republic is particularly clear in Paul Hadol’s caricature ‘L’Omnibus de Versailles: La Députation parisienne du 2 juillet’ (The Versailles Omnibus: the Parisian Delegation of 2 July), which appeared in Le Charivari on 1 August 1871 (Fig. 5.15).58 The image deals with the elections held on 2 July 1871, just several weeks after the suppression of the Paris Commune, to replace vacant seats in the Assemblée Nationale. As in earlier images, the caricature features an omnibus filled with politicians, who will form the new government. Unlike the

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‘august omnibus’, however, the image represents not the state as a whole but a small part of it: the 21 deputies elected to represent the Department of the Seine in Versailles, the new seat of the Assembly. Sixteen of them belong to the centrist Union parisienne de la presse, which had represented itself as the party of order. The vehicle, thus, is headed to the right, reflecting a more conservative orientation after the excesses of the Commune. The use of the omnibus may suggest the prosaic nature of this new coalition. In a Charivari article about the elections, Pierre Véron observed that Paris, which ‘had seen close up the demagogic saturnalias’ of the Commune, had rejected ‘chaos’ and chosen instead ‘colourless representatives’ who lacked ‘political importance and signified only a return to calm’. The omnibus, however, may also underscore the republican values that prevailed in the elections. As Véron observed, the Union parisienne candidates did not embrace the ‘monarchical flag’, and many ‘saluted the Republic in their professions of faith’. For Véron, the elections represent the triumph of an ‘honest, decent, sensible and loyal Republic’.59 The image of the omnibus conveys both the ‘colourless’ ordinariness of these candidates and their commitment to republican ideals. Though initially a symbol of a ramshackle and degraded monarchy, the omnibus gradually came to represent the values of the Republic.

Omnibus Revolutions This positive transformation may be partly attributed to the association that developed in France between the omnibus and revolution. On its introduction, the Parisian omnibus was quickly identified with progressive ideas and particularly with the liberal values of the Charte and commercial freedom. An early example of this association appears in the 1828 vaudeville Les Omnibus ou la Revue en voiture, which, as Théodore Muret observes, voiced the views of Jean-Baptiste de Martignac, whose brief stint as head of government (1828–1829) had represented a moderate interlude under Charles X.60 At the beginning of the play, the Wandering Jew returns to Paris after an absence of many years and praises the progress made in France since his last visit. Among the advances he observes are the omnibuses and the Charte, described as ‘the good deed of a good king, / who says: let us reign with law!’61 The main conflict of the play is the dispute between the omnibus and the cab drivers, who fear that the new

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service will take away their passengers. In the end, however, these fears are ungrounded, as the omnibus draws a different clientele. The omnibus is thus identified with the progressive values of the Charte and with a healthy form of economic competition. A similar association appears in an 1829 text celebrating the introduction of the dames blanches, a service that competed with the omnibuses: ‘Everything flourishes, everything prospers under the wings of liberty, under the happy influence of the Charte!!!’62 The work ends with a conversation between a youth and an old man about the value of competition. The latter argues that the dames blanches should be outlawed as they simply copy the idea of the omnibus; ‘each person’, he argues, ‘should be able to enjoy the fruits of his invention’.63 The young man, however, supports the new company citing the Charte, which guarantees freedom. The onlookers ultimately side with young man as does the narrator, who aligns freedom of competition—‘the conflict among enterprises’—with freedom of expression—‘the collision of ideas, from which sparks of truth always spring forth’.64 In both texts, the freedom defended is that of commercial competition. With the Revolution of 1830, however, the omnibus would come to represent not only economic but also political freedom. During the uprising, Parisian insurgents took advantage of the sheer mass of the vehicles, pushing them on their sides to construct barricades. According to one account, a child used the instrument under the driver’s foot to play a ‘song of combat and of victory’.65 An 1831 novel about the July Revolution represents the overturned omnibuses as resting ‘on their laurels’ after their triumph.66 In the wake of the Trois Glorieuses, the omnibus would be associated with the revolution and the government it had ushered in. A striking early example of this association is a series of 15 letters in the Gazette de France—a newspaper representing the conservative opposition to Louis-Philippe—which are attributed to a conductor whose omnibus had the ‘remarkable honour of serving as a barricade on the 28th of July of the year of grace 1830 on the Rue St.-Honoré’. The conductor proposes to give readers a view from the ‘street’, as it was the street that produced the insurrections that swept through Europe in 1830. ‘An omnibus’, he observes, ‘is, if not the street itself, at least a quasi-street, a piece of street that moves and whose banquettes are the sidewalks’.67 His articles record conversations supposedly overheard on his omnibus, in which passengers discuss the revolution and the July Monarchy. By setting the series

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on the omnibus, the newspaper represents its critical views on the government as those of the people at large. When the Orleanist newspaper Journal des débats dismisses as ‘barbarians’ those who do not pay 200 francs in taxes, for example, the conductor invites us to listen to the ‘barbarians’ in his omnibus ‘where one has not yet barred them from expressing their suffrage’.68 In another instalment, passengers ironically award prizes to the most absurd justifications of government policies.69 The omnibus becomes in a sense the peanut gallery of the July Monarchy, a forum for criticism and dissent. The series, however, draws not only on the association of the vehicle with revolution but also on the motif of the omnibus of state. When the omnibus in foggy weather bumps into people and seems to ‘go right, left, forward, backward, without knowing where’, a passenger compares it to ‘those who govern us’.70 In a later letter, the conductor recounts a dream in which he travels not in his ‘solid omnibus’, which was overturned only once when it served as a barricade in the July Revolution, but rather in a tricycle (an early three-wheel omnibus). The tricycle in the dream has seven conductors and a driver ‘who seemed to be on his seat just for appearance, as his hands did not hold the reins’. As it ‘goes right and left, bumping into and bumped into, jolting and jolted, going along at random, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, without direction during the day and without a lantern at night’, the passengers fear for their lives. Like the omnibus in the fog, the tricycle is a clear image of the French government, which similarly moved blindly, vacillating between left and right positions.71 The series ends abruptly in June 1832. In the 15th and final letter, the conductor recounts that his omnibus, which had served as a barricade against Charles X’s troops, has now done the same against Louis-Philippe’s during the Paris insurrection of 1832: But this time how everything has changed! The triumphant heroes in July have succumbed in June to the attacks of the very same people whose laurels founded the government two years ago! And the Omnibus, recently so honoured by the victorious that there was talk of decorating it with the glorious blue ribbon, has now been pierced by a brutal, and, I should say, ungrateful cannon ball!72

At this point, the metaphor has come full circle: the omnibus that once represented 1830 and the triumph of the July Monarchy has become a

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victim of it. It is now a symbol not of the government ushered in by revolution but of a revolution betrayed by the government. Years later, a similar scene from June 1832 would be evoked in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862), in which rebels overturn an omnibus to erect a barricade in front of the cabaret Corinthe. Playfully mistranslating Horace, one character jokes that ‘Omnibuses […] do not pass in front of Corinthe. Non licet omnibus adire Corinthum’.73 As a British commentator would observe decades later, the introduction of the omnibus ‘changed the whole science of revolutions. The overturn of the carriage was converted to the overturn of a monarchy’.74 This association with the barricade, however, introduced a certain ambiguity into the symbolic meaning of the vehicle, for the omnibus could represent either the thing overturned (as in the British observation just cited) or the rebels’ shield. We find an example of the negative meaning in an 1838 article that divides Paris into ‘two parties’, those who ride and those who walk, and warns that the latter could rise up at any moment. Far from revolutionary, the omnibus in this text represents a ‘lower-level aristocracy’.75 Later in the century, Louis Ulbach would echo this distinction between walkers and riders. It is when coaches begin to dirty pedestrians’ clothes that men cease to be equal. For Ulbach, the ‘symbolic meaning of the old barricades of Paris’ is the ‘overturning of a carriage’.76 In the popular imagination, however, the omnibus was generally seen in a more positive and heroic light. Édouard Gourdon’s La Physiologie de l’omnibus (1841–1842) celebrates the people’s devotion to the omnibus: ‘in times of peace, they allow themselves to be pulled by it; in days of riots, they pull it and turn it over’.77 A comic sketch from 1841 notes that the omnibus never received a medal although the ‘most beautiful barricades [of 1830] were made from its body’. As a result, it resents the government and ‘always sides with the rebels’.78 Writers not only celebrated the omnibus’ role in the revolution but also began to project progressive and utopian ideas onto it, identifying it with ‘Saint-Simonian doctrine’ and ‘phalansterian ideas’.79 The omnibus would once again feature prominently in the Revolution of 1848, during which the omnibus companies suffered considerable losses.80 In his ‘Notes sur les journées de février’, Victor Hugo recalls how on the night of 23–24 February 1848 forty insurgents forced their way into a gunsmith’s shop protected by a sheet-metal curtain by pushing an

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omnibus onto the storefront. The same omnibus was later reused for a barricade.81 The omnibus would also play an important role in the resistance to the coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte on 2 December 1851. In his Histoire d’un crime (written in 1851–1852 but published in 1877), Hugo recounts how the defenders of the Second Republic commandeered an omnibus to erect a barricade in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine on 3 December 1851. When Louis Bonaparte’s troops arrived, seven parliamentarians presented themselves unarmed in front of the barricade and appealed to the soldiers’ respect for the rule of law. Ordered to charge, the latter simply passed by the deputies, unwilling to harm defenceless representatives, but when fighting eventually broke out, they fired on the barricade, killing the deputy Alphonse Baudin who was standing precisely on top of the overturned omnibus.82 In the Second Empire, the omnibus would continue to be associated with progressive and utopian ideas. In Charles Soullier’s poem ‘Les Omnibus de Paris: pièce curieuse’ (1863), the vehicle represents ‘communism / Practised without insistence and preached without cynicism’.83 Similarly, Edmond About’s 1864 essay Le Progrès describes the omnibus as the chariot of progress, the symbol of peaceful association based on liberty. One enters when one wants; one gets off without asking anyone permission; all the travellers have the same rights, for their money, without distinctions of birth; the conductor, a model authority, politely obeys the public that feeds him.

As About is writing during the Second Empire, however, he is careful not to celebrate the revolutionary use of the vehicle: ‘Rioters, stupid and brutal people, always preface the overturning of laws with the tumbling of an omnibus’. If people seek a common undertaking, he argues, they would do better to ‘associate freely with one another in groups of twenty thousand or more, just as they associate with one another in groups of thirty to go from Madeleine to Bastille’.84 The omnibus here becomes a symbol of a constructive association rather than destructive revolt. As we move forward to the Franco-Prussian War, we come to one of the most fascinating and ambiguous uses of the omnibus as a political symbol: Arthur Rimbaud’s ten-line poem ‘État de siège?’, set during the siege of Paris (17 September 1870–28 January 1871) and included in the

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collective volume known as the Album zutique (a play on the French exclamation Zut!, ‘Damn!’). Written by an irreverent group of writers who regularly met on the Left Bank in the autumn of 1871 and who called themselves the ‘Cercle zutiste’, the anthology parodied the works of established poets of the period. The name of the writer ridiculed appears at the end of each poem (as if he were its author) and is followed by the initials of the real poet. In the case of ‘État de siège?’, Rimbaud’s target is François Coppée, a well-known writer whose work often expressed a fondness for the omnibus. At the end of his life, Coppée recalled having ‘scanned’ his first poems as an adolescent, ‘cradled [bercé] by [the] monotonous rolling’ of an omnibus.85 Rimbaud was not the only poet in the circle to take aim at Coppée’s obsession: another poem in the Album zutique ascribed to François Coppée (but written by Raoul Ponchon) is titled ‘Intérieur (d’omnibus)’ and (like Rimbaud’s poem) deals with the Odéon line (Coppée’s works often premiered at the Théâtre de l’Odéon). Rimbaud’s poem juxtaposes Coppée’s nostalgic and lyrical vision of the omnibus—its passengers watch the moon cradling (se bercer) in the green cotton of the sky—with a sexually suggestive evocation of an omnibus employee, who touches himself:       État de siège ? Le pauvre postillon, sous le dais de fer blanc, Chauffant une engelure énorme sous son gant, Suit son lourd omnibus parmi la rive gauche, Et de son aine en flamme écarte la sacoche. Et, tandis que, douce ombre où des gendarmes sont, L’honnête intérieur regarde au ciel profond La lune se bercer parmi la verte ouate, Malgré l’édit et l’heure encore délicate, Et que l’omnibus rentre à l’Odéon, impur Le débauché glapit au carrefour obscur!

      Under Siege? The poor driver, beneath the tin canopy, Nursing a large chilblain under his glove Following his heavy omnibus through the rive gauche, Shifts his sack of fares from his aching groin. And while the honest interior—the sweet shadow

—François Coppée A.R.

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Containing gendarmes—looks onto the deep sky Where the moon nestles in cottony green, And despite the edict, the delicate hour, The bus returning to the Odéon, a bedraggled Debaucher yaps away in the dark intersection!

—François Coppée A.R.86

The word postillon, a term for a mail coach driver, suggests the subject of the sentence is the omnibus driver. Strangely, however, he follows (suit) rather than drives (conduit) the omnibus. Some critics and translators have interpreted the figure as the conductor.87 Nevertheless, the play on words in the title suggests otherwise. At one level, the ‘état de siège’ refers to the Prussian encirclement of Paris (the ‘édit’ in line 8 refers to the curfew in place at the time). At another level, however, the title alludes to the ‘state’ of the employee’s ‘seat’ (siège), to the inflamed groin of the opening verses. Given that the driver tended to be seated, while the conductor usually stood, it seems more likely that the postillon refers to the former. The use of the verb suit then refers not to the position of the postillon but rather to his lack of agency; he does not drive the omnibus but rather passively follows its assigned route. The opening adjective ‘poor’ reinforces this sense of his oppression. As Steve Murphy has observed, the enormous chilblain and inflamed groin are veiled allusions to masturbation, evoked through a humorous combination of opposite terms (the heat of ‘inflamed’ and the chill of ‘chilblain’). The images in the first stanza form a sort of chiasmus. The postillon is at once warming (chauffant) the chilblain and removing his sack from the inflamed groin to expose it to cool air. The circularity of the image reflects the driver’s self-involvement and self-pleasuring. The obscene representation of the postillon contrasts with the lyrical evocation of the omnibus interior, which is associated with Coppée. Not only are the passengers going to the theatre with which he was identified but the expression ‘honnête intérieur’ (honest interior) also echoes a passage from his Promenades et Intérieurs (‘intérieur honnête’).88 The inside represents the complacency of the bourgeois passengers who ignore the bombardment and gaze up at the moon. The question mark at the end of the title, indeed, might be a commentary on their attitude, which makes one wonder whether Paris is really under siege. The prosaic image of the masturbating postillon clearly serves to deflate their romantic reverie. As Murphy cleverly notes, the

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driver’s act of uncovering his ‘aine en flamme’ (inflamed groin) is a defiance of the couvre-feu (curfew), which literally means cover-fire. His gesture, that is, could be read as a subversive detail, one which contrasts with the bourgeois apathy and flouts the couvre-feu.89 It should be noted, however, that the poem underscores the passivity, oppression, and self-involvement of the postillon. His covert act of masturbation, indeed, might be read as a reflection of the situation of Paris, which was similarly turned in upon itself during the siege. In their journal, the Goncourt brothers described the experience of being in Paris during this period as one of ‘living within oneself, having nothing other than the exchange of ideas—so utterly lacking in diversity—of one’s own thoughts turning over a fixed idea’.90 Ultimately, one’s interpretation of the postillon depends on one’s reading of the débauché in the final lines. Murphy considers the postillon and the débauché to be the same person, which reinforces his reading of the former as a subversive figure. Wyatt Mason, the author of the translation cited above, in contrast, considers them to be two separate characters, as is clear in his use of the indefinite article (‘a bedraggled / Debaucher’). Indeed, it is hard to reconcile the oppression of the ‘poor driver’ of the initial verse with the loud debauchery of the final lines. I would argue that the poem defines three possible positions towards the siege: the oblivion of the passengers; the open but ultimately pointless defiance of the debaucher; and a middle ground represented by the driver, who conforms to his situation (following his route) but privately protests (through his obscene but unobserved gesture). Far from a revolutionary symbol, the omnibus in this text stands for the apathy of the bourgeoisie as the new republic struggles to defend itself. During the Paris Commune, however, the omnibus would again occupy a place of honour. In his Notes et Souvenirs, 1871–1872, Ludovic Halévy evokes the arrival in Versailles of an unusual ‘prisoner’: It was the omnibus no. 470, belonging to the line from Pont de l’Alma to the Château d’Eau. It had been captured by the troops on the Neuilly barricade; literally riddled with bullets, the windows all smashed, the upper-­ deck framework bent. On the inside, the cushions burst, pierced, sliced by bayonet thrusts, the woodwork slashed, crumbling, all the small advertising notices hanging in shreds. The crowd pushed forward to have a look at a large pool of the most beautiful red blood between the two benches in the omnibus. This vehicle ought to be placed at the Petit-Trianon among the

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old vehicles of the sovereigns. It would be perfectly in its place there. Today the omnibus is the carriage of the sovereign.91

This text draws on the image of the char de l’état, but in this case, the ‘sovereign’ is the people, whom the vehicle has defended during the Commune. The use of the omnibus to create barricades sometimes met with resistance.92 In La Part du hasard (1888), a novel about the Paris Commune based in part on his own experience, Albert Robida evokes a chase in which an omnibus driver, to his female passengers’ dismay, attempts (unsuccessfully) to escape a group of insurgents who seek to commandeer his vehicle for a barricade.93 Caricatures from the period similarly represent passengers’ shock on being thrown out of vehicles. One image depicts a soldier handing a rifle to a bourgeois passenger, who replies in astonishment: ‘My goodness… then this is not the Madeleine omnibus’.94 Nevertheless, the omnibus would continue to serve as a positive symbol of republican values. A powerful example from the Third Republic is Maupassant’s story ‘Avant la fête’ (1880), whose protagonist, a government employee, struggles to come up with a unique way to mark an official holiday. While riding the impériale, he mentions the upcoming festivities to a fellow passenger who expresses little enthusiasm: although he has seen various kings in France, he has never seen either the Republic or its president. ‘A government,’ he argues, ‘should show itself’. This comment sparks a discussion among the passengers who put forward various solutions. One proposes a public procession in which the president and deputies parade through Paris for all to see or a simulacrum of the storming of the Bastille culminating in an apparition of the ‘genius of Liberty’. Another suggests that actors recite Henri Auguste Barbier’s Iambes, poems inspired by the July Revolution of 1830. As they are exchanging these ideas, the omnibus passes a street organ playing the Marseillaise, which inspires them to sing along enthusiastically.95 The ending, however, is anti-climactic. When the bureaucrat consults his initial interlocutor about the problem of decorating his home for the holiday, the latter can offer no new ideas. The protagonist half-heartedly buys a few flags and lanterns. The irony of the story is that the bureaucrat has found the solution but does not recognise it: the true celebration of the republic occurs not in the private but in the collective space. It is expressed not through abstract symbols or grandiose spectacle but rather through a

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coming together of the voices and hearts of citizens, accompanied by the humble music of the people. The omnibus here becomes a miniature of the republic, which translates the abstract political structure into a sentimental bond among citizens. Towards the end of the century, however, as the inefficiency and backwardness of the omnibus monopoly became increasingly apparent, the vehicle and particularly the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus were often viewed more negatively as a symbol of tyranny and abuse. An 1884 article in Le Charivari represents the omnibus as a ‘Nero on four wheels’ and its conductors and controllers as ‘hundreds of proconsuls with tasselled headgear’. Although France loves to kick out its tyrants, the author laments, ‘His Majesty the Omnibus’ reigns uncontested.96 This sense of tyranny is particularly clear in Octave Mirbeau’s story ‘En attendant l’omnibus’ (1896) whose narrator defines himself as an upright French citizen, a ‘courageous elector and honest French tax-payer’: I waited, very respectful of all the administrative regulations, very submissive to all forms of authority, trying to refrain my impatience and to silence those clearly atavistic revolts, which, for the hour I had been waiting, were beginning to rumble inside me again and the barbarous vestiges of which—I blush—neither republican civilisation nor the constant practice of universal suffrage has yet abolished.97

The narrator’s impatience is understandable: his ticket is number 364,998, and the next one to be called is 66. As it is raining, moreover, the omnibuses that arrive every 10 minutes are always full. As time passes and the crowd of waiting passengers grows, he begins to hear grumbling around him. When the next omnibus arrives, a young man climbs to the impériale, despite its ‘complet’ sign, and proclaims that the omnibus company, in accepting its monopoly, has made a commitment to provide a service and that therefore he has a right to ride. Calling him an anarchist, the conductor throws him off with the assistance of the waiting passengers, who applaud the ‘triumph of the regulations over revolutionary principles’.98 The narrator now waits for the omnibus as a ‘protest’ against the young man’s revolt. The story ends citing a line from Georges Auriol: ‘The French took the Bastille, that is possible… But they are not capable of taking the Madeleine-Bastille omnibus’.99 Though once an emblem of revolution, the omnibus has become a place of submission, ‘a triumphant affirmation of hierarchy’.100

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The Omnibus as Leveller Mirbeau’s conclusion is striking because it goes against the most basic myth about the omnibus: namely, the association with equality implicit in its Latin name. As we saw in Chap. 4, many early observers similarly questioned its egalitarian pretensions: the fare was initially beyond the means of the working class, and omnibus employees did not admit people who looked like paupers. The lower classes were not only excluded but also badly treated. An 1836 text recounts the reaction of several soi-disant démocrates on an omnibus to the entrance of a worker so fatigued from his labour that he has decided to sacrifice six sous of his wages: instead of making room for him, ‘five égalités’ tell him to use the strapontin and yell at him when he steps on a foot.101 The anecdote deflates the egalitarian rhetoric surrounding the omnibus. As Anne Greene has noted, the vehicles often drew attention to ‘the growing economic, social and psychological distances’ among classes.102 Visually, Ernest Fouinet observed, the omnibus might seem the ‘sanctuary of equality’ but once the passengers began to speak, vast differences in class and education became all too apparent.103 Nevertheless, the omnibus quickly became identified with egalitarianism. An 1829 text on the influence of the omnibus on society describes it as ‘a Jacobin tendency’, ‘pure maratisme; one whiffs democracy from a league away’.104 For Charles Friès writing in 1841, the cadran, the dial on which the conductor registered each new passenger, was a ‘shining symbol of equality’ for it counted rich and poor in exactly the same way.105 ‘If equality must one day reign on earth’, observed Paul de Kock in 1845, ‘it is in the Omnibuses that she will be born’.106 A number of texts contrasted the omnibus, which admitted all ranks, with predecessors such as the carrosses à cinq sols, which excluded the lower classes, or the diligence, which divided passengers into three compartments, reflecting the three estates of the ancien régime.107 The association of the omnibus with equality was also clear in visual representations: Henry Bacon’s painting of the heterogeneous Panthéon-Courcelles omnibus (ca. 1889) is titled simply ‘Égalité’ (Fig. 5.16): on the impériale working-class men ride alongside an elegant man sporting a top hat and the gants jaunes of Parisian dandies. For some writers, the omnibus not only symbolised but also created equality: ‘the homme du peuple rubs against the homme du monde,

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Fig. 5.16  Henry Bacon, ‘Égalité’. Brooklyn Museum. The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo

fraternising by necessity’, observes the 1829 text cited above, and in the process, ‘the homme du peuple is lifted little by little to the level of the homme du monde’.108 In his Économie sociale (1836), the socialist economist Constantin Pecqueur anticipates that the vehicles will combat ‘the prejudice that mentally separates individuals’ and introduce ‘the spirit of equality’.109 And in Paris-en-omnibus (1854), the omnibus is described as ‘an agent of democratic progress’ because it ‘brings closer distances, confuses all classes of society, mixes all ranks’.110 Similar arguments would later be made about the tram, which a British essay from 1887 called ‘a democratic vehicle […] a leveller, and perhaps a republican’.111 In a comic French song from the same year, a municipal council resolves to put a ‘symbolic tramway’ on a chic Avenue du Bois de Boulogne; its goal is to demonstrate that ‘we are in a republic’ and to ‘prove to the aristos / that the Bois is for everyone’.112 The Madrid tram, which was inaugurated during the period known as the ‘revolutionary

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sexennium’ (1868–1874), was particularly associated with democracy and equality.113 In an 1871 sketch, it is described not only as a space in which to ‘savour the delights of democracy’ but also as a ‘complete course in revolutionary philosophy’.114 For Manuel Ossorio y Bernard, it was a symbol of ‘the union of social categories, the overwhelming and absorbing tendency of the middle class’, and Emilia Pardo Bazán would describe it as the expression ‘of our democratic tradition’.115 Not all writers, however, welcomed this levelling of hierarchies. Many felt that the omnibus reflected a dangerously homogenising tendency in society that resulted in a loss of distinction and particularity. An 1835 sketch text reacting to the introduction of the omnibus in Lyon, for example, complained that the service led regions to ‘lose [their] special colour’, blurring the distinction between city and country dwellers.116 Similarly, two ditties of the singing society Le Caveau use the omnibus as a metaphor for situations in which distinctions are no longer made. The first, de Calonne’s ‘Omnibus’ (1841), compares the omnibus to the literary world, which no longer distinguishes good from bad works, to prostitutes, who accept any client with money, and to politics where ‘anyone can aspire to anything’.117 The second song, Hector de Cuzieu’s ‘L’Omnibus’ (1843), identifies the vehicle with the Académie and the Louvre, which now admit even mediocre writers and artists.118 In a letter to Louise Colet from January 1854, Gustave Flaubert would even claim that the omnibus had erased class difference: ‘since the invention of the omnibuses, the bourgeoisie is dead’; it is ‘now just like the  dregs of society in its soul, its appearance and even its dress’.119 A particularly striking expression of this indifferentiation appears in Paul Zéro’s vaudeville Le Voyage au Panthéon, revue de 1843 (1844), which parodies the main theatrical works of 1843 using as an organising motif an omnibus that travels to the Pantheon with Apollo as its driver and Mercury as its conductor. At first, the main works of the year, represented by their protagonists, vie with one another for seats in the glory-bound omnibus. In the end, however, the coach arrives to its destination empty. Along the route, the passengers have decamped either for the Bourse (stock market) or the Institut de France, preferring ‘money or somnolence’ to eternal fame.120 In the final scene, the swindler Robert Macaire comments on the mediocrity of his age:

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I see in three thousand years two monuments still standing Advertising, and the omnibus!— The omnibus is the emblem Of our equality, poor, bourgeois and drab, An equality of ennui, of nuisance and of ugliness, An equality of cabbages in a garden without flowers! Omnibus! Everything for everyone! misery, pettiness; No more protecting mountain! No more insolent highness! All the world has rights! Anyone, for six sous, Can shout that; —but Anyone is the victim of Everyone! Every crushed member thinks, speaks, reasons: Omnibus, everything for everyone, —that is to say, for nobody!121

The egalitarianism of modern culture, embodied by the omnibus, has reduced everyone to the lowest common denominator: boredom and banality. Perhaps the most extended reflection on the levelling force of the omnibus, however, is the 1834 essay ‘The Philosophy of the Omnibus’ by William Gilmore Simms, a writer from the American South. Simms’ attitude toward the ‘era of the omnibus’ is ambivalent. Initially, he contrasts the modern omnibus with the Greek or Roman chariot, which, driven by one or two warriors or racers, reflected the ambition and individualism of antiquity.122 ‘Destruction’, he writes, ‘was the striking organ of such a period’. The omnibus, in contrast, is born of a more ‘social’ era.123 Simms celebrates it as ‘levelling and democratic’, as ‘the creature—not of general equality in the people—but of a general passion for equality—of a time of increasing accommodativeness in the popular spirit’ and as a force that ‘lifts the peasant into hope’.124 Simms, however, also warns about the dangers of the ‘omnibus principle’. The levelling of the omnibus is useful for society but perilous for the individual, who is ‘merged completely in the mountainous and mixing masses which surround him. The fine features have no command, no eminence, among the mob—the fine shades and colors soon undergo obscuration’. As in the Lyon text, the omnibus leads to a loss of colour, but here it is not local difference but the recognition of talent, merit, and refinement that is threatened. The ‘evil of the Omnibus’ is that it lacks ‘discrimination’; it takes up men who are not prepared for elevation, ‘who have not yet freed their shoes from the mud’.125 Like the Caveau songs, Simms

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converts the omnibus into a metaphor for a general failure to differentiate, which is exemplified by the drunk, ‘unkempt’ members of Congress, the banker who talks of business at the theatre, and the sad state of the dramatic arts on both sides of the Atlantic.126 The omnibus is ultimately a force that ‘knows not how to think’ and which must therefore be restrained. Whereas initially the chariot is associated with destruction, in the end it is the omnibus that threatens to ‘crush all things in its progress’.127 Simms approves of levelling when it is a matter of overcoming social ranks but rejects it when it erases distinctions of merit, manners, and taste.

The Man on the Clapham Omnibus The association of the omnibus with equality and revolution was primarily a French phenomenon. A British article from 1876 contrasts the Parisian custom of turning omnibuses into barricades with their more peaceful use in England where they raised property values in the suburbs and reduced the mortality rate in London.128 In her essay ‘The London Bus’ (1906), Annie E. Lane would even describe the omnibus as an antidote to revolution. Although she recognises that the vehicle ‘represents as nothing else does liberty, fraternity and equality’ and that it has a ‘levelling influence’ in society, she ultimately sees it as a civilising rather than subversive force: There was that culmination of chaos, the French Revolution. Had a bus line started at the Louvre bound for the Bastille, through that hot-bed of terror, the Faubourg St-Antoine, who can tell the possible effects? Why the exercise of the minor courtesies, such as making room for a stout and garlic-­perfumed citizeness, or poking the conductor in the back when he wouldn’t look, for a lovely aristocrat, with the consequent soothing influence of a smile of gratitude, might have had results not to be overestimated. Politeness, after all, is only the oil which makes that complex machinery, society, turn smoothly. And a little politeness, judiciously applied, may even check a revolution.129

For Lane, the co-existence of different ranks leads not to class struggle but rather to greater mutual understanding. Nineteenth-century British travellers are often represented as repulsed or surprised by the egalitarian ethos of French omnibuses. Stendhal cites the ironic quip of a British companion when confronted with the

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nauseating odour of Parisian passengers: ‘Bravo! French equality!’130 Similarly, an English colonel in Grace Ramsay’s novel Iza’s Story (1869) is astonished when ‘a real, live Marquis, with picturesque cambric ruffles down his shirt front, and bona fide essence of Versailles about his whole person’ returns home on an omnibus.131 In England, a French writer observed in 1864, ‘one could not imagine the high chamber in an omnibus’.132 In the British context, indeed, the omnibus took on a somewhat different political significance in the latter part of the century. In 1855, during the Crimean War, Punch published a letter to Prime Minister Lord Palmerston advising him to ride the omnibus in order to gauge public opinion and particularly the ‘feelings’ of the middle classes. What he would discover is the deep ‘disgust’ of those ‘business-like’ citizens for ‘the incredible imbecility, incompetence, and mismanagement’ of the government. Punch distinguishes the omnibus regulars from the disgruntled masses: although the passengers critique the ministry, they are not ‘revolutionary or democratic, or subversive or socialist’.133 The omnibus does not represent the overturning of hierarchy or a levelling of social difference but rather the common-sense consensus of the commercial middle class. The article anticipates the scenario illustrated in Alfred Morgan’s painting (Fig. 5.9)—the prime minister riding the omnibus—and offers a similarly bourgeois representation of its passengers. Perhaps the most famous evocations of this vision come from William Bagehot. In an 1856 essay entitled ‘Average Government’, he defines public opinion as ‘the opinion of the bald-headed man at the end of the omnibus’ and observes that English leaders have always been ruled by ‘what Mr. Disraeli has termed “Arch-Mediocrities”’, ‘common men […] who never said anything which any one in an omnibus could not understand—men who were never visited by the far-reaching thoughts or exciting aspirations of ardent genius, but who possessed the usual faculties of mankind in an unusual degree’.134 In his English Constitution (1865–1867), Bagehot would return to this idea: The middle-classes—the ordinary majority of educated men—are in the present day the despotic power in England. ‘Public opinion’ nowadays ‘is the opinion of the bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus.’ It is not the opinion of the aristocratical classes as such; or of the most educated or refined classes as such; it is simply the opinion of the ordinary mass of edu-

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cated, but still commonplace mankind. If you look at the mass of the constituencies, you will see that they are not very interesting people; and perhaps if you look behind the scenes and see the people who manipulate and work the constituencies, you will find that these are yet more uninteresting. The English Constitution in its palpable form is this—the mass of the people yield obedience to a select few; and when you see this select few you perceive that though not of the lowest class, nor of an unrespectable class, they are yet of a heavy sensible class—the last people in the world to whom, if they were drawn up in a row, an immense nation would ever give an exclusive preference.135

The common place of the omnibus, in these texts, becomes a space of commonplace views, of an average middle-class mentality. As James Thompson observes, in choosing the omnibus as a setting, Bagehot identifies ‘public opinion’ with an urban rather than a country perspective.136 The ‘bald-headed man at the back of the omnibus’ evokes the dreary daily commute of a conventional City clerk. This stereotype of the upstanding, sensible but deeply boring regular was particularly associated with the omnibus to Clapham, a neighbourhood inhabited in the early nineteenth century by a group of reformist merchants and clergymen.137 An evocation of the Clapham passenger in The Calcutta Review in 1850 contrasts the sober habits of the English businessman with the more relaxed customs of India: Look at a man, who takes the Clapham omnibus to Grace Church-street, every day at ½ past 9 in the morning, and takes it again, in Grace Church-­ street at 5. He returns home to dinner, tired, care-worn; his mind in his ledger and his banker’s book; brooding over £: s : d;—very bad company for his wife; perhaps cross; perhaps sleepy. His ‘recreation’ is an after-dinner nap. He has no holiday, except on Sunday. He does not know what amusement is. His life is an ‘eternal grind’: but he gets used to it in time, as the horse does to turning the mill-stone. […] Business in England clings to a man, like the poisoned shirt of the centaur. Here [in India] it sits lightly upon him, and flutters in the evening breeze. Its corroding anxieties do not eat into us like venom at morning and evening prayer—do not make young men old, and do not turn the healthy into wretched hypochondriacs.138

The man on the Clapham omnibus here represents the drudgery and Stoicism of the middle-class office worker. The submissiveness of this

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figure is again highlighted in an 1857 text in which the ‘dog-collar’d occupant of the knife-board of a Clapham omnibus will stick on Londonbridge for half-an-hour with scarcely a murmur’  about the traffic.139 Similarly, in an 1891 essay, the Clapham passenger represents the discipline and self-­sacrifice required by the civil service: The system produces in its perfection of artificial virtues that strangest flower of civilised life—the man who for two-and-thirty years has never failed to catch the Clapham omnibus at 9.15. This man must know how to fight down the headache and the heartache, and how, in every crisis of love, hate, or bereavement, never to fail to cross his t’s.140

The Clapham passenger embodies the uncomplaining, plodding, and resigned life of a middling Londoner. The character was often associated with commonplace forms of thought. An 1861 review of a French play observes that the ‘average Briton’ would approve of its plot as it respected both the aristocracy of the ancien régime and the new money of the post-revolutionary period: ‘Honour to the “old nobility”—honour likewise to Lombard-street—is an exclamation that might find a response in the bosom of the most bigoted Plutocrat that ever rolled along in a Clapham omnibus or patronized a Low Church minister’.141 In Edmund Yates’ 1866 novel Land at Last (also attributed to Mrs Cashel Hoey), a Bohemian character rejects ‘the respectable conventionalities of society’, which he identifies with ‘the City-clerk going to business on the Clapham omnibus’.142 Similarly, in 1877, the Paris correspondent to the Leeds Mercury evokes the Clapham passenger as the embodiment of public opinion: ‘I will not trouble you with a recital of the many commonplaces on this head, after the fashion of the habitués of the Clapham omnibus’.143 This perspective, however, seems to be a uniquely British phenomenon. In Paris, the correspondent observes, There is no sort of public opinion here like that represented by the outside of the Clapham ’bus. Dwellers in suburban districts of Paris do not think it worthwhile to agitate themselves while repairing to their daily work by discussing the Egyptian question, or breaking a lance for or against M. de Freycinet.144

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In these passages, the opinions of the Clapham passengers are generally represented disdainfully, portrayed as ordinary, banal, or prejudiced. The expression retains some of this negativity in what is undoubtedly its most famous use. In 1901, the Western Morning News published a negative review of a musical by T.C. McQuire, who subsequently sued it for defamation. The main issue in the lawsuit was whether the review fell into the realm of ‘libel’ or ‘fair comment’. Although the jury initially sided with the plaintiff, the judgment was overturned on appeal. Lord Collins justified the second decision in the following way: One thing, however, is perfectly clear, and that is that the jury have no right to substitute their own opinion of the literary merits of the work for that of the critic, or to try the ‘fairness’ of the criticism by any such standard. ‘Fair’, therefore, in this collocation certainly does not mean that which the ordinary reasonable man, ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’, as Lord Bowen phrased it, the juryman common or special, would think a correct appreciation of the work; and it is of the highest importance to the community that the critic should be saved from any such possibility.145

Although Collins identifies the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ as an ‘ordinary reasonable man’, he rejects the idea that critics should conform to the commonplace views of this type. In the years following this case, ‘the man on the Clapham omnibus’ became a common expression in Anglophone legal discourse where it was used to refer to the normal, average individual. As it gained currency as a legal term, however, it also became more neutral. Whereas in Bagehot the omnibus passenger is a symbol of middle-class mediocrity, and in Lord Collins’ decision, his perspective is a limiting mind-set from which critics must be ‘saved’, the twentieth-century type is an emblem of common sense.

Man as Number If the omnibus passenger came to be a symbol of reasonableness, the omnibus itself was often viewed as the opposite: as a metaphor for the absurdity of modern society. Frequently, it was associated with a systemising and objectifying tendency in the nineteenth century that was experienced as dehumanising, alienating, or irrational. In an 1849 article, the British conductor is described as viewing his fares as

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Something to be carried and paid for—that is the conductorial idea of human beings. Something rather troublesome to pack, from its varying sizes, but not easily damaged; not forbidden, like caps, to be squeezed, nor like glass, to be shaken […] in paying your fare you transform yourself to mere luggage, without independent will.146

In Paris, where the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus established a waiting list through numbered tickets, passengers often felt themselves reduced to mere ciphers: ‘you are no longer anything but a numeral […] it is always sad to cease being a man to become a number’.147 Even the horses, a French author complained, were referred to by digits instead of names.148 This reduction of living beings to figures is ridiculed in a poem by Raoul Ponchon in the Album zutique, which like ‘État de siège’ is jokingly attributed to François Coppée. As in Rimbaud’s poem, the omnibus heads towards the Odéon theatre, which at the time was staging Coppée’s one-­ act play Le Rendez-vous: Intérieur (d’omnibus) Dans le lourd omnibus une place est vacante Nous sommes trente-sept de moins qu’étant cinquante ; « Id est » treize : une femme, onze hommes, un moutard Qui tète le sein blanc de la femme. Il est tard, Et les vingt-deux quinquets des hommes s’illuminent, Pendant que les chevaux lentement s’acheminent Vers l’Odéon, qui doit jouer Le Rendez-vous Et je me dis avec raison : « Si l’un de nous Doit mourir cette année, il est temps qu’il s’y prenne: De la sorte il n’aura pas à donner d’étrenne. » —François Coppée R.P. Interior (of an Omnibus) In the heavy omnibus one seat is empty We are thirty-seven short of being fifty; Id est, thirteen: eleven men, one woman, one brat Who sucks the white bosom of the woman. It is late, And the twenty-two oil lamps of the men light up, While the horses slowly make their way

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Toward the Odéon, which must be playing Le Rendez-vous And I tell myself, reasonably, ‘If one of us Must die this year, it’s time for him to set about it: That way he won’t have to give New Year’s gifts’. —François Coppée R.P.149

In this poem, not only are the passengers reduced to numbers—demographic statistics—but even the eroticism of the space is quantified and defamiliarised: the male desire for the female breast is represented as an almost mechanical reaction, the illumination of 22 lamps (the eyes of the 11 male passengers). The reflection at the end of the poem, moreover, privileges an economic logic (financial savings) over the life of a passenger, who is referred to only as a number (‘one of us’). The new bureaucratic procedures established with the formation of the omnibus monopoly in Paris would inspire a whole subset of texts ridiculing its irrational, inefficient, and pointless procedures and regulations. For comic writers such as Willy, Georges Courteline, and Alphonse Allais, the omnibus encapsulates the absurdity and dehumanisation of the modern city. In a vignette entitled ‘Antibureaucratie’, for example, Allais mocks the useless data collected by the company’s inspectors. Surprised by a rain shower on the impériale, the narrator decides to move to an inside seat and pays the conductor a fifteen-cent supplement to make up for the difference in price. At the next station, when the contrôleur asks which passenger changed seats, however, he remains stubbornly silent, refusing to submit to such ‘ridiculous and odious bureaucracy’. He dismisses the other passengers, who take the employee’s side, as a ‘cowardly and servile band of Europeans, unworthy of liberty’.150 Like the young man who insists on his right to ride in Mirbeau’s ‘En attendant l’omnibus’, the narrator is a lone passenger who defies an absurd system. In another text, Allais pokes fun at the ridiculous statistics of the company: the number of passengers expected in 1900 is calculated by adding 1900 to the number of passengers from 1889 and then dividing the total by 1889.151 A number of stories mock omnibus employees for their blind adhesion to regulations and disregard for common sense. In Eugène Fourrier’s ‘Le Rè-gle-ment’ (1899), a conductor refuses to stop the tram for a man with diarrhoea because he fears a 5000-franc fine. In the end, the passenger

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‘forgets himself completely’ and then faints, but the conductor feels ‘triumphant’; ‘the rules had not been violated!’152 In another text by Fourrier, a woman stepping out of a tram realises that she has left her purse inside. The conductor, however, refuses to hand it to her because according to the rules he must send lost property to a central office. The rest of the story details the absurd procedures necessary to recuperate the bag. Ultimately, the woman gives up but not before she and her husband are slapped with a fine and an eight-day jail sentence for insulting the officials.153 The passenger-victim is similarly threatened with punishment in a caricature in L’Assiette au beurre in which a conductor tells an old woman that her correspondance expired an hour earlier. When she objects that she has been waiting for two hours, he threatens to have her locked up.154 Perhaps the most extreme example of this absurdity is the comic book Les Émotions d’un omnibus par Bonhumeur (1889) in which the two halves of a man who has been run over by an omnibus are carried to a ‘bureau des écrasés’ (office of the crushed) where he is instructed to glue himself together again and to stop showing off by getting run over.155 The system dehumanised not only passengers but also omnibus employees who were represented as cogs of a machine and devoid of human warmth. In an 1864 text, the Parisian station manager, in his indifference, is ‘similar to Brutus, he would give the number 47 to his own son’, and in an 1893 story by Paul Margueritte the conductor announces the transfer stations ‘with the savage energy of a coil spring’.156 An 1857 work contrasts the old-style omnibus driver—a jovial and fatherly type—with the bureaucrats of the Compagnie Générale des Omnibus—‘a singular generation of human machines’ who repeat the same phrases all day long and have few other ideas in their heads.157 Other texts focus not on victims or victimisers but on the irrationality of the system itself. A particular target of critique was the Panthéon-Place Courcelles line, generally considered the slowest and most tortuous in Paris.158 According to a 1912 chronicle, this omnibus ‘seemed to take a malicious pleasure’ in ‘inexplicable detours, which exasperated rushed passengers. It didn’t like straight lines’.159 In 1895, Willy published a facetious exchange of letters describing it as ‘an omnibus that goes nowhere’ for there is no place in Paris called ‘Place Courcelles’. As a result, 467,200 passengers fall off the map each year.160

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The most absurd evocation of the line, however, is undoubtedly Georges Courteline’s Panthéon-Courcelles, a fantaisie presented at the Grand Guignol in 1899. In this piece, the ride is represented as a religious litany in which participants, accompanied by two virgins with a harp and a lyre, chant at each station the names of all the preceding ones: CHOIR: From the Pantheon to the Rue du Vieux-Colombier, there are four stations: the station of the Boulevard Saint-Michel, the station of the Rue de Vaugirard, the station of the Place Saint-Sulpice and the station of the Croix-Rouge. VIRGINS: But there is only one God who reigns in Heaven.161

The liturgical structure of the piece underscores the lethargic pace and irrationality of the omnibus service, which requires an almost religious resignation and blind faith on the part of its passengers. The ways of the Panthéon-Courcelles, like those of God, are inscrutable. Just as the litany continually returns to its starting point, listing all the stations from the beginning, so too does the omnibus line: The Panthéon-Courcelles omnibus has this particularity: it is incapable of spotting a street without rushing into it with its head down [or] a kiosk or urinal without immediately circling around it. It is unexpected and madcap and, in some ways, recalls that astonishing railway of Sceaux which wore itself down by running after its tail in the hope of catching it.162

The omnibus in this text is a symbol of an involuted and irrational system, which no longer operates by human logic. Courteline’s Panthéon-Courcelles would inspire a story titled ‘Batignolles-Clichy-Odéon’ (1900) by G. L. D’Hébécourt, which begins as the narrator leaves the Grand Guignol where he has just seen the fantaisie: ‘the ancient chorus just booed eleven times the prehistoric jalopy, which, indefatigably, from the Latin Quarter to the Ternes, through the Faubourgs Saint-Germain and Saint-Honoré, from dawn until night, carries around its insolent challenge to progress’. In Courteline’s work, it is ironically the ancients who decry the antiquity of modern men. After seeing the play, the narrator climbs onto the impériale of an omnibus and promptly dozes off. When he wakes up, he notices that the vehicle is no longer stopping at stations. The narrator, who has only just returned to

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Paris after an absence of six months, asks the reason for this and is told that the omnibus company has recently introduced a series of changes, eliminating stations, contrôleurs, correspondances, and the distinction in price between inside and outside seats. The omnibuses now use turnstiles and tokens to count passengers and collect fares. The company has also improved the distribution of the lines, eliminating large hubs and zigzagging ‘baroque itineraries’ in favour of more logical east-west and north-­ south trajectories. Finally, it has made the omnibuses more frequent and introduced a night service. At the end of the story, however, the driver awakens the narrator, who realises that his vision was but a dream. In 10 years’ time, he concludes, Courteline’s play will be just as relevant as it is now.163 In this story, as in the other texts discussed in this section, the meaning of the omnibus is meaninglessness. The vehicle represents a senseless, irrational, and dehumanising system that tyrannises and baffles its passengers. The omnibus is a capacious symbol that can represent a wide variety values, which are sometimes contradictory: the government and its overthrow, equality, a loss of distinctions, the absurdity of the system, or the reasonableness of the ordinary citizen. As a general rule, however, when the omnibus is occupied, it tends to represent the state or its values. In the early British caricatures, political parties vie to drive the ‘omnibus of state’, and the ‘august omnibus’ represents Louis-Philippe’s government. The man on the Clapham omnibus is someone who has internalised the rules of the state and society. The brainwashed chorus of Courteline’s Panthéon-­ Courcelles similarly reiterates with blind faith the norms of the system. To be inside the omnibus is to represent the government or to be an adherent (or victim) of normative values. When omnibus texts evoke revolution or subversion, in contrast, the insurgents are generally outside the vehicle. Most often, they commandeer the vehicle and turn it over to build a barricade. In Rimbaud’s ‘État de siège’, the subversive débauché ‘yaps away’ on the street, while the ‘honest interior’ represents the conventionality and obliviousness of the bourgeoisie. When the republican does ride the omnibus, as in Maupassant’s ‘Avant la fête’, it is because the state has become a republic. In the British tradition, the omnibus passenger eventually became a metaphor for reasonableness and average, conventional views. The ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ could be seen as the extension of HB’s final

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print (in which the omnibus represents the centre) or of Alfred Morgan’s portrayal of Gladstone. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that the expression was initially used negatively. Lord Collins rejects the normativity of the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ just as Simms dismisses the homogenising ‘omnibus principle’. The French tradition of the omnibus of state, in contrast, tends to focus on the absurd. Louis-Philippe’s ‘august omnibus’ is a ramshackle jalopy that reflects the shabbiness of his regime and the hypocrisy of his embrace of revolutionary values. Later French representations similarly make the vehicle the symbol of a tyrannical and irrational system. Ponchon’s passenger who tells himself ‘reasonably’ that if someone is going to die, he should do so soon to avoid having to buy New Year’s gifts could be seen as the reductio ad absurdum of the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’. Like the British type, he has internalised the rules and economic logic of society but his application of them is ridiculous and dehumanising.

Notes

1. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 115. 2. ‘A Short Ride in a Parisian Omnibus: Translated from the French’ in Tales and Readings for the People (London: George Vickers, 1849), I, 59; Louis Huart, ‘Les Voitures publiques’ in Nouveau tableau de Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Librairie de Mme C. Béchet, 1834), IV, 178; ‘L’Omnibus de l’autre monde’, Figaro, 4 May 1832, 3. 3. On the symbolic function of the mail coach, see Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stagecoach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-­ Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2016), 27–55. 4. M.  Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1954), XI, 201. 5. Henry Miller, Politics Personified: Portraiture, Caricature and Visual Culture in Britain, c. 1830–80 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2015), 38. 6. The images in question are ‘The Man Wot Drives the Sovereign’ and ‘The Cad to the Man Wot Drives the Sovereign’ (both made by William Heath and published by Thomas McLean in April 1829). These caricatures were answered by the prints ‘The Man Wot Drives the Opposition’ (made by

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John Phillips and published by S. Gans in April 1829) and ‘The Cad to the Man Wot Drives the Opposition’ (made by John Phillips and published by John Fairburn on 7 May 1829). 7. Times, 25 December 1834, 2. 8. An Illustrative Key to the Political Sketches of H.B., From No. 1 to No. 600 (London: Thomas McLean, 1841), 235. 9. As M. Dorothy George explains, ‘Scotch feelosophy’ was a term coined by William Cobbett to refer to the Benthamite radicals. Joseph Hume subscribed to the ideas of James Mill and the philosophical radicals of Bentham’s school. Catalogue, XI, 652. 10. ‘Political Caricatures’, The Spectator, 31 January 1835, 116. 11. Albany Fonblanque, England under Seven Administrations (London: Richard Bentley, 1837), III, 146–47. 12. The reluctance of the Peel government to move forward with the reforms is clear in another article, in which the ministers are compared to the driver of a hackney coach who, when asked to move on, does nothing: ‘The driver of the state omnibus, and a common hackney coachman, are, in this respect, just on a footing’. The Satirist, 22 February 1835, 62. 13. On this print, see Mathew Crowther, C.J.  Grant’s Political Drama: Radicalism and Graphic Satire in the Age of Reform (London: Amazon Italia Logistica, 2020), 241. 14. The Age, 30 October 1836, 536. 15. ‘The Rival Omnibuses’, The Penny Satirist, 21 October 1837, 1. 16. An Illustrative Key to the Political Sketches of H.B. From No. 601 to No. 800 (London: Thomas McLean, 1844), 34. 17. ‘Sketches by H.B.’, The Morning Post, 11 April 1840, 5. 18. On HB’s moderate position, see Miller, Politics Personified, 40–44. 19. Betsy Cogger Rezelman reads Morgan’s painting and Frank  Bramley’s ‘Primrose Day’ (1885) as a continuation of the ‘Disraeli-­Gladstone rivalry’ even after Disraeli’s death. ‘Frank Bramley’s Primrose Day: A Disraeli Tribute and Artistic Gamble’, Victorian Review 17:1 (1991): 51–77, esp. 67 and 71. 20. Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power: Reasserting the Public Image of William Ewart Gladstone’ in Public Men: Masculinity and Politics in Modern Britain, ed. Matthew McCormack (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 93–122, esp. 94. 21. ‘The Bank Holiday’, Daily News, 2 August 1887, 2. 22. ‘“Omnibus Trips”: The Victorians and the New Culture’ in La letteratura vittoriana e i mezzi di trasporto: dalla nave all’astronave, eds. Mariaconcetta Constantini, Renzo D’Agnillo, and Francesco Marroni (Roma: Aracne, 2006), 285.

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23. Windscheffel, ‘Politics, Portraiture and Power’, 96. 24. Alphonse Pépin, La Royauté de juillet et la Révolution (Paris: Dezauche, 1837), I, 335. 25. Guy Antonetti, Louis-Philippe (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 713. 26. The first series began with an article titled ‘Voyage brillant de la monarchiecitoyenne dans l’intérieur de la Manche, pour faire suite au voyage de Panurge dans l’île des lanternes’ and ran from 29 August until 9 September 1833. The second series started with the article ‘Retour en omnibus de la pensée immuable, à travers la boue et la Normandie, pour faire contraste au retour de l’île d’Elbe’ and ran from 10–18 September 1833. For a similarly satirical take on the ‘august omnibus’, see the mock ‘reports’ in the Lyon newspaper La Glaneuse, journal populaire, 5, 8, 10 and 12 September 1833, as well as the ‘response’ published on 6 October 1833. 27. La Caricature, 24 October 1833, plates 324–25. 28. ‘Voyage brillant en omnibus’, Le Charivari, 30 August 1833, 3. 29. On the association between Louis-Philippe and the umbrella, see Annie Duprat, ‘Le Roi, la Chasse et la Parapluie ou Comment l’historien fait parler les images’, Genèses: sciences sociales et histoire 27 (1997): 109–23. 30. ‘Planches’, La Caricature, 24 October 1833, 1235. 31. La Caricature, 31 October 1833, plates 326–27. 32. ‘Planches’, La Caricature, 31 October 1833, 1244. 33. La Caricature, 7 November 1833, plates 328–29. 34. John Sanderson, The American in Paris (London: Henry Colburn, 1838), I, 169. 35. ‘Retour en omnibus’, Le Charivari, 18 September 1833, 2. 36. ‘Planches Nos. 328 et 329’, La Caricature, 7 November 1833, 1251. 37. ‘Nouvelle machine à crier vive le Roâ’, Le Charivari, 13 August 1833, 4. 38. ‘Résurrection de la censure’, La Caricature, 5 January 1832, plate 125. 39. ‘Planches Nos. 328 et 329’, 1251. 40. ‘Voyage brillant en omnibus’, Le Charivari, 30 August 1833, 3. 41. ‘Études du Constitutionnel d’après le beau’, Le Charivari, 20 August 1833, 1. 42. ‘Fabrication par Le Constitutionnel d’une araignée dilettante’, Le Charivari, 13 July 1833, 3–4. 43. See ‘Que criera la garde nationale?’, Le Charivari, 27 July 1833, 3–4. 44. ‘Planches Nos. 328 et 329’, 1251. 45. ‘De la grippe et de la croix d’honneur’, Le Charivari, 14 May 1833, 3–4. 46. ‘Dessin’, Le Charivari, 15 September 1833, 4. 47. ‘Démission forcément volontaire’, Le Charivari, 3 September 1833, 3–4. 48. ‘Logogriphe politique’, Le Charivari, 22 July 1833, 8. 49. ‘Dessin’, 4.

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50. La Caricature, 14 November 1833, plates 330–31. 51. ‘Planches Nos. 330 et 331’, La Caricature, 14 November 1833, 1258–59. 52. Jürgen Döring has pointed to the similarity between Traviès’ image and William Heath’s ‘New Union Coach’. ‘Caricature anglaise et Caricature française aux alentours de 1830’ in La Caricature entre république et censure, eds. Raimund Rütten, Ruth Jung and Gerhard Schneider (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1996), 43–53. 53. ‘Planches Nos. 330 et 331’, 1259. 54. ‘Parce que toutes les puissances de l’Europe ont bien voulu monter dans l’auguste omnibus’, Le Charivari, 15 October 1834, 2–3. 55. Feuilles volantes, par l’auteur des ‘Pleurs du Saule’ (Rouen: E.  Le Grand, 1838), 5; ‘Pensées d’un emballeur’, Le Tintamarre, 10–16 March 1850, n.p. 56. Charles Soullier, Paris-Neuf ou Rêve et Réalité (Paris: Gustave Barba, 1861), 160. 57. ‘Une lettre de M. Grévy’, Le Gaulois, 11 March 1883, 1. 58. Paul Hadol, ‘L’Omnibus de Versailles: La Députation parisienne du 2 Juillet’, Le Charivari, 1 August 1871, n.p. 59. Pierre Véron, ‘Bulletin politique’, Le Charivari, 5 July 1871, n.p. 60. Théodore Muret, L’Histoire par le théâtre, 1789–1851. La Restauration (Paris: Amyot, 1865), 297. 61. Charles Dupeuty, Frédéric De Courcy, and Espérance Hippolyte Lassange, Les Omnibus ou la Revue en voiture, vaudeville en quatre tableaux (Paris: J.-N. Barba, 1828), 12. 62. V. L. de Cotignac, Les Dames blanches ou le Tribut de la scène et des beauxarts (Paris: Le Roi, 1829), 12. 63. Cotignac, Dames blanches, 22. 64. Cotignac, Dames blanches, 17. 65. ‘Paris. Les 26, 27, 28 et 29 juillet’, Revue de Paris, Vol. 17, 1830, 8. 66. Eugène Desbuissons, La Noce de Christine, ou Trois jours en juillet 1830 (Paris: Barba, 1831), II, 189. 67. ‘Au redacteur’, Gazette de France, 31 December 1831, n.p. The series appeared from 31 December 1831 until 24 June 1832 generally under the title ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus’. 68. ‘Omnibus (2e lettre)’, Gazette de France, 8 January 1832, n.p. 69. ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus (8e lettre)’, Gazette de France, 7 March 1832, n.p. 70. ‘Omnibus (2e lettre)’, n.p. 71. ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus (11e Lettre)’, Gazette de France, 1 April 1832, n.p.

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72. ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus (15e lettre)’, Gazette de France, 24 June 1832, n.p. 73. Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (Paris: E. Hugues, 1879–1882), IV, 346. 74. ‘Honeycomb’, The Ladies’ Cabinet, 1 August 1854, 110. 75. ‘Le Commencement de la fin’, Le Figaro, 6 January 1838, n.p. 76. Louis Ulbach, Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1878), 54. 77. Édouard Gourdon, La Physiologie de l’omnibus (Paris: Terry, [1841–1842]), 106–7. 78. ‘L’Omnibus’ in Paris au dix-neuvième siècle: recueil de scènes de la vie parisienne (Paris: Beauger, 1841), 75. 79. Louis Huart, ‘Les Voitures publiques’, IV, 177; ‘L’Omnibus’, Paris au dixneuvième siècle, 75. 80. Maxime du Camp, Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Paris: L.  Hachette, 1869), I, 276; Roger-Henri Guerrand, Mœurs citadines: histoire de la culture urbaine XIXe-XXe siècles (Paris: Quai Voltaire, 1992), 126. 81. Victor Hugo, Choses vues (Paris: Ollendorff, 1913), 326–27. 82. Victor Hugo, Histoire d’un crime. Déposition d’un témoin (Paris: Eugène Hugues, 1879), 164–69. See particularly the illustration of Baudin’s death by J.P. Laurens on p. 169. 83. Charles Soullier, Les Omnibus de Paris: pièce curieuse et utile à l’usage des voyageurs dans Paris (Paris: Impr. de Cordier, 1863), 5. 84. Edmond About, Le Progrès (Paris: L. Hachette, 1864), 86–87. 85. François Coppée, ‘Croquis parisiens: L’Omnibus’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 7 September 1902, 147. 86. Arthur Rimbaud, ‘État de siège?’, Album zutique, ed. Pascal Pia (Paris: Le Cercle du Livre Précieux, 1962), 109. I cite Wyatt Mason’s translation in Arthur Rimbaud, Rimbaud Complete (New York: The Modern Library, 2003), I, 144. 87. Steve Murphy, Le Premier Rimbaud ou l’Apprentissage de la subversion (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon, 1990), 223. 88. François Coppée, Promenades et Intérieurs (Paris: Lemerre, [1920]), 30. 89. Murphy, Le Premier Rimbaud, 225. 90. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal des Goncourt: 1870–1871 (Paris: Charpentier, 1890), I, 78. 91. Ludovic Halévy, Notes et Souvenirs: 1871–1872 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1889), 81–82. I cite from Roger L.  Williams’ translation in Notes and Remembrances: 1871–1872 (Newark, Delaware: U of Delaware P, 2009), 58–59. 92. During rebellions, observes Edmond Texier, omnibuses do the same thing as ‘a good number of otherwise honourable citizens, and above all those

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who make the most noise after victory’: they go into hiding. Tableau de Paris (Paris: Paulin et Le Chevalier, 1853), II, 315. 93. Albert Robida, La Part du hasard (Paris: À la librairie illustrée, 1888), 90–92. 94. Léonce Schérer, ‘Bigre… c’est donc pas l’omnibus de la Madeleine’ (Paris: Desforet et César, ca. 1871). In another caricature, when insurgents topple an omnibus, a bourgeois passenger asks them to return his six sous. Cham (pseudonym of Amédée de Noé), Douze années comiques (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1880), 79. 95. Guy de Maupassant, ‘Avant la fête’, Le Gaulois, 12 July 1880, 1. 96. Jean Sincère, ‘La Foire aux abus: S.  M. L’Omnibus’, Le Charivari, 23 December 1884, n.p. 97. Octave Mirbeau, La Vache tachetée (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1921), 191–92. 98. Mirbeau, La Vache tachetée, 197–98. 99. Mirbeau, La Vache tachetée, 199. 100. Mirbeau, La Vache tachetée, 198. 101. Victorine Collin, ‘Ce qu’on dit, ce qu’on fait’, Gazette des salons, 17 September 1836, 167. 102. Anne Green, Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (London: Anthem Press, 2013), 44. 103. Ernest Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus, de la barrière du Trône à la barrière de l’Étoile’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris: Ladvocat, Paris, 1831), II, 81. 104. ‘De l’influence des omnibus sur les habitans de Paris’, Le Voleur, 20 October 1829, n.p. 105. Charles Friès, ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus’ in Les Français peints par euxmêmes (Paris: L. Curmer, 1841), IX, 103. An 1856 poem similarly describes the word ‘omnibus’ as ‘that magical name full of fraternity / To each, an equal place’. St-Gauvé, L’Omnibus (n.p.: Bénard, 1856), n.p. 106. Paul de Kock, Chipolata (Paris: Gustave Barba, 1845), II, 206. His words were echoed in an 1869 text: ‘If the principle of equality were banished from the rest of the earth, one would find it again in the interior of an omnibus’. Grandville et  al., Les Métamorphoses du jour (Paris: Garnier frères, 1869), 237. 107. Pierre Larousse, Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle (Paris: Administration du Grand dictionnaire universel, 1874), XI, 1338; ‘Promenades dans Paris’, L’Illustration, journal universel, 17 November 1860, 338. 108. ‘De l’influence des omnibus’, n.p. 109. Constantin Pecqueur, Économie sociale (Paris: Desessart, 1839), I, 314.

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110. Edmond Auguste Texier, Taxile Delord, and Arnould Frémy, Paris-­en-­ omnibus (Paris: A. Taride, 1854), 11. Yet another writer claimed that the omnibus had brought about ‘the fusion of classes’ and introduced ‘equality’. L.M., ‘L’Intérieur d’un omnibus’, The Court Magazine and Monthly Critic, 1 August 1838, 31. 111. ‘The Manners of the Tram’, The Saturday Review, 8 January 1887, 48. 112. Eugène Poncin and Paul Marinier, ‘Le Tramway du Bois de Boulogne’ (Paris: E. Meuriot, [1898]), n.p. 113. See, for example, Carlos Frontaura, ‘El amigo del tranvía’, La Época, 12 July 1887, n.p.; Ricardo de la Vega, ‘Vuelvo a mi tema’, El Liberal, 20 November 1893, n.p.; ‘Madrid’, El Liberal, 28 July 1879, n.p. 114. Julio Nombela, ‘El tramvía: paseo-fisio-filo-joco-serio y pintoresco por lo principalito de Madrid’ in Madrid por dentro y por fuera, dir. Eusebio Blasco (Soria: Trigo, 2010), 213. 115. Manuel Ossorio y Bernard, Viaje crítico alrededor de la Puerta del Sol (Madrid: M. P. Montoya, 1882), 37; Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘La vida contemporánea: Coches y ciencia’, La Ilustración artística, 14 June 1897, 386. 116. ‘Souvenirs, Impressions, Pensée et Paysages pendant un voyage en omnibus, ou Notes d’un voyageur’, L’Athénée, 22 January-22 July 1835, 527. 117. de Calonne, ‘Omnibus’, Le Caveau, Vol. 7, 1841, 184–87. 118. Hector de Cuzieu, ‘L’Omnibus’, Le Caveau, Vol. 9, 1843, 172–75. 119. Gustave Flaubert, Correspondance. Nouvelle édition augmentée. Quatrième série (1854–1861) (Paris: Louis Conard, 1927), 21. 120. Paul Zéro (pseudonym  of Paul Aimé Garnier), Le Voyage au Panthéon. Revue de 1843 (Paris: Ébrard, 1844), 81–82. 121. Zéro, Voyage, 92. 122. William Gilmore Simms, ‘The Philosophy of the Omnibus’, The American Monthly Magazine, 1 May 1834, 153. 123. Simms, ‘Philosophy’, 154. 124. Simms, ‘Philosophy’, 155, 154. 125. Simms, ‘Philosophy’, 156. 126. Simms, ‘Philosophy’, 157. 127. Simms, ‘Philosophy’, 159. 128. ‘Honeycomb’, 110. 129. Annie E.  Lane, ‘The London Bus’, Fortnightly Review, January 1906, 121–22. 130. Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri Beyle), Courrier anglais (Paris: Le Divan, 1935–1936), V, 364. 131. Grace Ramsay, Iza’s Story (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1869), III, 290.

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132. René, ‘Un bureau d’omnibus’, La Semaine des familles, 10 December 1864, 161. 133. ‘The Voice of the Omnibus’, Punch, 5 May 1855, 179. 134. ‘Average Government’, The Saturday Review, 29 March 1856, 429. 135. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1873), 325–26. Lord Palmerston was also said to have referred to the average Englishman as ‘the fat man with a white hat in an omnibus’. George W.  E. Russell, Collections and Recollections (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1903), 52. 136. James Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 36. 137. David Spring, ‘The Clapham Sect: Some Social and Political Aspects’, Victorian Studies, 5:1 (1961): 35–48. 138. Review of ‘The Letters of Civis on Indian affairs, from 1842 to 1849, by Henry Russell’, The Calcutta Review, 1850, 416. 139. ‘Metropolitan Improvements and Thames Embankment’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 1 May 1857, 348. 140. ‘The Civil Service’, Daily News, 23 April 1891, 4. 141. ‘French Plays’, The Saturday Review, 6 July 1861, 17. 142. Edmund Yates, Land at Last (London: Chapman and Hall, 1866), I, 227. 143. ‘The Crisis in France’, The Leeds Mercury, 8 November 1877, 8. 144. ‘French Opinion on the Crisis’, The Leeds Mercury, 2 August 1882, 3. 145. The All England Law Reports Reprint: 1900–1903, ed. G. F. L. Bridgman (London: Butterworth & Co. Ltd., 1962), 675. 146. ‘Human Goods’, The Spectator, 22 September 1849, 900. 147. ‘Les Omnibus’, Le Journal monstre, May 1857, 62. 148. Texier et al., Paris-en-omnibus, 23. 149. Raoul Ponchon, ‘Intérieur (d’omnibus)’, Album zutique, 181. 150. Alphonse Allais, Deux et Deux font cinq (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1895), 12. 151. Alphonse Allais, Ne nous frappons pas (Paris: Éditions de la Revue blanche, 1900), 69. 152. Eugène Fourrier, ‘Le Rè-gle-ment’, La Gaudriole, 10 August 1899, 92–94. 153. Eugène Fourrier, ‘En tramway’, Le Passe-temps et le Parterre, 22 April 1900, 5; 29 April 1900, 5. 154. ‘Les Omnibus’, L’Assiette au beurre, 6 January 1903, n.p. 155. Les Émotions d’un omnibus par Bonheur (Paris: Monrocq, 1889), n.p. 156. René, ‘Un bureau d’omnibus’, 161; Paul Margueritte, La Mouche: nouvelles (Paris: Lecène, Oudin et Cie, 1893), 137. 157. ‘Les Omnibus’, Le Journal monstre, May 1857, 63.

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158. Georges Montorgueil, Paris au hasard (Paris: Henri Beraldi, 1895), 131. 159. ‘Chronique parisienne’, Bibliothèque universelle et Revue suisse, July-­ September 1912, 172. 160. Willy (pseudonym of Henry Gauthier-Villars), L’Année fantaisiste (Paris: Delagrave, 1895), 108. 161. Georges Courteline, Sigismond: fantaisie en un acte avec chœurs; PanthéonCourcelles: fantaisie en un acte (Paris: F. Juven, 1901), 41. 162. Courteline, Sigismond, 44. 163. G.L.  D’Hébécourt, ‘Batignolles-Clichy-Odéon’, L’Illustration, 20 January 1900, 35.

CHAPTER 6

Streetcars of Desire

In 1848 a young woman named Maggie sent a query to The Family Herald: ‘Will you kindly inform me whether you ever heard of any one falling in love in an omnibus, as I have generally noticed myself, and heard many persons remark that human nature never appears to greater disadvantage than in an omnibus […]?’1 Many nineteenth-century writers shared Maggie’s scepticism. ‘An omnibus is the last place for a romance’, observes a character in Rosa Nouchette Carey’s novel Mollie’s Prince (1898), and in his Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (1878), Louis Ulbach warns readers not to expect amorous adventures in ‘that vehicle of banality’.2 The anti-erotic force of the omnibus is perhaps clearest is Édouard Cadol’s adultery tale ‘Madame Armande’ (1867), in which a wife sets out to meet her lover on a rainy day, hoping to live out a ‘little novel’ of a romance. Unable to find to a cab, she is reduced to taking the omnibus where her romantic self-fashioning is immediately deflated: ‘Have you ever imagined yourself l’adorée on an omnibus, rammed in between two drunken or stinking louts?’3 But although the omnibus was commonly seen as an ‘an unromantic mode of conveyance’, it was nevertheless one that ‘carrie[d] a great many love-stories about’.4 Many nineteenth-century narratives represent fantasies and relationships that are born and sometimes even develop in the space. Drawing on stories, novels, plays, songs, caricatures, and paintings, this chapter explores the different ways in which the omnibus figured in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7_6

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the erotic imagination of the nineteenth century as both a setting and an image. What types of desires were projected onto this new, heterogeneous social space? And what types of narratives are set there? The opening sections of the chapter offer an overview of popular motifs from the period that represent urban transit as a space of desire. As Pierre Véron observed, the omnibus was ‘the rolling symbol’ of a new type of ‘promiscuity’, one that thrived not in the ‘interior, so dear to our dignified grandparents’ but rather ‘outside’, in the public space.5 As we will see, nineteenth-century writers—particularly in France—playfully eroticised almost every aspect of the omnibus and tram: from the correspondance to the staircase to the impériale. The final sections of the chapter will then turn from commonplaces and figures of speech to narratives and will examine six types of love stories set in urban transit in the nineteenth century: the fleeting, the illegible, the iterative, the double, the transactional, and the inverted. The texts examined in this discussion vary considerably in their temporal structures, characterisation, and representation of the urban space and of gender roles. What most have in common, however, is a sense of both possibility and misgivings. The omnibus brought people into contact with strangers from diverse backgrounds and in so doing allowed them to imagine, if only fleetingly, a new relationship or a different life. The invisible walls that separated passengers, however, often made it difficult to act on those fantasies. Urban transit, moreover, was commonly perceived as a shady space and was associated with prostitution and easy adventures. Characters, therefore, frequently struggle to ‘read’ and understand one another or come to relationships with different expectations. The tight coaches and common commutes create an impression of intimacy among strangers that is often misleading. While some writers resolve these tensions by reincorporating their characters into familiar small worlds and reciprocal relationships, others underscore the danger of these encounters and the unknowability of the space.

Vehicles of Venality The association of the omnibus with easy adventures was a commonplace in nineteenth-century popular culture, and many songs, texts, and images evoke the erotically charged atmosphere inside the vehicles: ‘full of strapping youths, / Of sprightly damsels / Whom chance has brought together’, the Parisian omnibus in an 1884 ditty exudes a ‘breath of spring

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[…] Already eyes look for eyes: / This should heat up soon!’.6 The erotic possibilities, however, were not limited to the interior. In 1892, La Vie parisienne published a two-page illustration by Sahib and Kitt—‘Voyages dans Paris—L’Amour vu d’un omnibus’ (Fig. 6.1)—mapping out the titillating spectacles along the Batignolles-Clichy-Odéon line, including half-­ dressed women glimpsed through first-floor windows and belles de nuit on the streets. Notre Dame de Lorette, the caricaturist notes, offered a particularly ‘amusing and suggestive spectacle, at night, for the passengers on the impériale. They should make those seats cost 100 sous’.7 The Batignolles-Clichy-Odéon line—the North-South route featured in this image—seems to have had a special place in the erotic imagination of the period. In Georges Bouret’s story ‘En omnibus, parisienneries’ (1893), it is appreciated by ‘seekers of encounters’ as the ‘rendez-vous of modern chic and of easy love’.8 According Georges Montorgueil’s Paris au hasard (1895), its regulars include ‘skirt-chasers, cutters of plaits [i.e. people who derive erotic pleasure from cutting off women’s tresses], impulsive people whom a light stroke carries to the seventh heaven and lovers who take a correspondance only for certain little paths that lead far

Fig. 6.1  Sahib (drawing) and Kitt (captions), ‘Voyages dans Paris—L’Amour vu d’un omnibus’. Private Collection

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away’.9 And in Charles Virmaître’s Paris cocu (1890), the line is the favourite of a priest whose ‘tastes’ are ‘illustrated by a certain city burned by fire from heaven’ and who enjoys pressing the buttocks of his female neighbours.10 Another common locus of eroticism in French texts and images is the omnibus station (bureau). A painting by Jean-François Raffaelli, ‘En attendant l’omnibus’, for example, represents an old man looking with interest at a woman who sits on the same bench at a station. Separating them in the foreground is a heating device, which suggests the smoulderingly erotic atmosphere of the waiting area. This association was common in popular culture as well. A comic play from 1899 depicts the omnibus station as the haunt of prostitutes, demi-mondaines, and adulterous couples, and in a French caricature, a contrôleur admires the stamina of a redhead who frequents his station: ‘this is her sixth client in three hours’.11 The erotic potential of the bureau is perhaps clearest, however, in an 1892 song that plays on the rhyme between omnibus and gibus, a deflatable top hat that often served as a phallic symbol. When a young woman sits on the singer’s gibus at an omnibus station, its wires catch on her clothing. Taking advantage of the situation, he takes her to a private room in a restaurant so that she can re-compose her attire, and eventually they go off together in a fiacre.12 As an 1881 article summarises, ‘love chose as its headquarters those temples of correspondance’ (the station was where one requested a transfer ticket), in which there is an ‘enormous consumption of tender rendez-vous’.13 The author of this article, who signs only Fabrice, is likely the playwright and librettist Fabrice Carré, who published a year later a poem entitled ‘En attendant l’omnibus’ in which Love converts the ‘temple of correspondances’ into a temple ‘of ardent lovers’, a place where ‘more than one rendez-vous is given’ and where couples end up taking ‘the omnibus of Cythera’.14 Carré’s poem plays on two common motifs in erotic literature about the omnibus. The first is the double meaning of the word correspondance, which refers not only to the transfer ticket or connection to another line but also to the notion of reciprocated affection or desire.15 Some texts associate the correspondance ticket with requited love. In the song ‘Les Deux Correspondances’ (1883), a woman who has forgotten her purse is rescued by a gallant passenger, who pays her fare and requests two correspondance tickets. He then asks for her address so that they can ‘enter into correspondence’ (i.e., an exchange of letters). The song ends with their marriage: ‘we’ve taken for forever / the correspondance of happiness’.16

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In other ditties, however, the word takes on a more sexual meaning. The singer in ‘La Correspondance perdue!’ (1887), for example, has a transfer ticket for Madeleine when she is approached by a charming man who invites her to take a sapin (cab) with him. She resists the invitation because she is an honest girl and does not want to lose her correspondance (transfer tickets were valid for a limited period of time). Eventually, however, she agrees and accompanies him to the countryside where they dine and spend the night together. In so doing, she loses her correspondance, which now stands for her virginity. The logic seems to be that the correspondance is what allows her to transfer to another man through marriage.17 In another song, ‘La Correspondance!’ (1881), a man meets a woman in an omnibus, treats her to dinner in the private room of a restaurant, and begins to seduce her, promising a trip to paradise: ‘One can go anywhere’, he assures her, ‘when one has a correspondance’. When she finally reveals her name, however, he realises she is his cousin and takes her home, horrified that he has almost dishonoured his family. Once again, the transfer ticket seems to be associated not only with reciprocal feelings but also with a loss of virginity.18 The second motif in Carré’s poem is the image of the omnibus of Cythera, which carries passengers to the land of Aphrodite. An 1891 image by Gaston Noury, for example, depicts an omnibus carrying women on the impériale and driven by a beauty who wears nothing but a pair of stockings and a driver’s hat and cape.19 The expression also appears in the comic story ‘L’Omnibus de Cythère’ (1896), in which a hypocritical judge, who passes for a saint, is caught making love to a woman on an omnibus and publicly humiliated. Playing on Horace, the narrator concludes that ‘Non licet omnibus adire Cythera’ (it is not permitted to everyone [omnibus] to go to Cythera).20 When a nocturnal omnibus was proposed in Paris toward the end of the century, a satirical writer anticipated that it would become ‘an itinerant Cythera, asylum of love’, and another imagined its conductor charging ‘four francs more’ for a ‘correspondance to Cythera’. 21 The association of the omnibus with easy adventures is perhaps clearest in the secondary meaning that accrued to the word. As nineteenth-­century dictionaries of French argot attest, ‘omnibus’ was commonly used to refer to ‘a woman who has as much a right to that sobriquet as the vehicle of that name’ (i.e., a woman who is ‘for everyone’).22 This identification with prostitution seems to have emerged almost with the vehicles themselves. The 1828 text Les Omnibus. Premier voyage de Cadet la Blague begins with a poem that refers to prostitutes as ‘beauties who want to pass for

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new / Although they are among the number of the Omnibus’.23 An 1832 poem similarly plays on the double meaning of the word. The omnibus will always exist; it argues, Car la porte de sa rotonde, Brune, noire ou blonde, De tous temps au monde S’ouvrit pour les premiers venus. […] Tous en payant sont bien reçus. because the door of its (her) rear compartment, brown, black or blonde, since time immemorial in the world Opened to the first who came […] All who pay are well received.24

These equivocal verses represent at once the omnibus and the loose women who frequent it. The popular culture of the period often warned against the dangers of such passengers. The 1869 song ‘Gare aux omnibus’ begins by observing that the word omnibus, which means ‘for everyone’, could be applied to the ‘loose ladies / whose heart is to be had for quibus [money]’. A rich man who invites one for a ride in his carriage ‘believes he is driving a woman / but he is an omnibus driver’.25 Charles Virmaître, a chronicler of Parisian argot, cautioned that ‘those omnibuses give a correspondance for the Hôpital du Midi’ (an institution that treated syphilis patients).26 The danger is also clear in Alfred Le Petit’s 1870 caricature ‘Les Victimes de l’amour’ (Fig. 6.2) in which an old man is seduced by a prostitute whose chest is formed by a full omnibus driven by a skeleton whose assistant, a black-shroud figure, carries a coffin.27 An accompanying poem clarifies that his destination is a ‘sad and hastened death’ and that his corpse will be ‘disdained’ by worms and tomb plants alike. A correspondance on this omnibus/prostitute is a ticket to the grave. Another powerful evocation of the association of the omnibus with prostitution and death is Adolphe Willette’s 1884 painting for the well-­ known cabaret, the Chat Noir (Fig. 6.3). The image represents Montmartre revelers and courtesans engaging in a macabre dance as they descend toward the Seine led by a Pierrot who wields the revolver with which he has just committed suicide. The procession evokes the dangers of the aging Bohemian who carouses his way to the grave. Crowning the scene is

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Fig. 6.2  Alfred Le Petit, ‘Les Victimes de l’amour’. Gallica, BnF. Public Domain

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Fig. 6.3  Adolphe Willette, ‘Parce Domine’. CCØ Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet—Histoire de Paris

an omnibus careering forward inexorably toward death, haunted by a skull placed just above it. French texts often detail the ways in which prostitutes used the omnibus to ply their trade.28 Some haunted omnibus stations in search of clients.29 An 1893 song jokes that these women wait for ‘l’om…nibus’ (the first syllable of ‘omnibus’ is similar in pronunciation to the French word for man, ‘homme’).30 Another punster, playing on the double sense of ‘monter’ in French, points to the many women at stations who ‘never get into [montent] any vehicle but who invite well-dressed gentlemen to go up [monter] to their apartments’. A little while later they return and repeat the process with another passenger-client.31 And in a comic French text from 1888, a showily dressed woman asks the station master to give her a ticket with the number 97 instead of 2; her long wait eventually pays off when an old man invites her to share his coach.32 As in this example, the prostitutes who frequent the stations are often described as tapageuses, flamboyantly dressed in flashy colours.33 Their appearance, however, could also be discreet. As Jules Davray observes, the young widow at a station in a head-to-foot veil may seem overcome by grief but is easily consoled by a client who offers a half louis.34

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Prostitutes are also represented seeking clients in the omnibus itself. Baronne de Fresne’s etiquette manual De l’usage et de la politesse dans le monde (1858) depicts a sweet-looking passenger who ‘carries under her arm a small half-closed basket that lets the ear of a King Charles pop out; beware: the basket [panier, French slang for bed] is the true tip of the ear’ (bout de l’oreille is an expression that means ‘true colours’ in French).35 Despite her innocent appearance, the woman’s real goal is to bed her neighbour. French texts and images from the period often portray prostitutes revealing a titillating ankle or leg as they get on or off the omnibus. In a Charivari caricature, a woman lifts her skirts as she climbs the stairs of the impériale, prompting the conductor to remark, ‘Sixth trip since noon!… It seems business is going well!’36 Another strategy, which Virmaître called le coup de l’omnibus (the omnibus trick), was for a prostitute to ‘forget’ her wallet. When a gentleman paid her fare, she gave him her address and invited him to drop by to be repaid.37 The association of waiting for an omnibus with prostitution is at times represented as a source of ambiguous or uncomfortable situations. A Punch caricature from 1864 depicts a woman waiting for an omnibus in front of a door with a sign that states ‘A Young Man Wanted’. The caption reads ‘A Caution to Young Ladies Waiting for an Omnibus’. 38 In an 1860 anecdote in the Saturday Review, similarly, a philanthropist hands a young woman pacing the sidewalk a tract about prostitution and begs her to read it. When she realises what it is about, she replies, ‘Lord bless you, sir, I aint a social evil, I’m waiting for the ’bus’.39 Although the association of the omnibus with prostitution is much more common in French texts, these examples suggest that it was also present (though perhaps more latent) in Britain.

‘Providence of Lovers […] Inferno of Husbands’ Prostitutes were not the only women in search of men on the omnibus. Comic texts represent mothers ‘fishing’ or ‘hunting’ for husbands for their daughters among the passengers.40 In a vignette from 1882, a young woman is paraded by her mother on the omnibuses of Paris in the hopes of finding a suitor. On one ride, a lurch throws her in the arms of a young man, who finds himself obliged to marry her lest her mother sue him for insulting her honour. On an omnibus, he tells a friend, one runs the risk of ‘breaking a leg or contracting a mother-in-law’.41 A French poem from 1862 gave a similar warning:

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Love sets more than one trap there; It is there that Hymen hunts; There the first ring is forged Of an unfortunate chain.42

Chains were not only forged but also broken. As Édouard Gourdon observed in La Physiologie de l’omnibus (1841–42), the omnibus was ‘the providence of lovers and the inferno of husbands’.43 Adulterous scenarios are common in comic French texts about the conveyances. In Les Omnibus. Premier voyage de Cadet la Blague (1828), a wife fondles a cousin while sitting next to her husband, and later on the protagonist cuckolds the cousin taking up with the same woman himself. 44 In another story from the end of the century, a young man, bored with horizontales (prostitutes), decides to seduce a provincial wife he observes at an omnibus station; in his joy he blesses ‘the god of the omnibus’.45 A French poem from 1892 represents infidelity as one of many ‘microbes’ to be caught on an omnibus: ‘How many husbands have jaundice / Because their wife, one beautiful evening, / Between Mad’leine and Saint-Sulpice, / Had to sit next to a young man!’ (as we will see, yellow—the colour of jaundice—is associated in many texts with infidelity or jealousy).46 In French works from the late nineteenth century, the separation between inside and outside seats is often represented as facilitating infidelity. An 1892 song, for example, represents a husband riding the impériale while his wife consorts with another man inside the vehicle.47 ‘Do not go up alone [...] / To the impériale’, warns another ditty from 1885, ‘Follow your wife, it is much safer / Into the interior’.48 When women were finally allowed to ride outside, the roles were sometimes inverted. In an 1892 story, a wife riding the impériale makes a scene when her husband enters the interior in the company of a loose woman.49 The tram was also represented as a sexually charged space that invited infidelity. A Spanish drawing from 1898, for example, depicts a woman flanked by two soldiers who eye her with a smouldering gaze. As the title—‘Entre dos fuegos’ (Between two fires)—suggests, her virtue is under assault.50 The association between the tram and adultery is perhaps clearest, however, in a recurring French joke about a tramway jaune (yellow tram), which is identified with cuckolded spouses. In an 1879 ditty, the tramway jaune runs from Place Monge to La Chapelle, passing along its way sites associated with marital dysfunction: the Boulevard Saint Michel with its grisettes and absinthe, the Palais de Justice, where adultery

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cases are filed, and so forth.51 In another song, a tram following the same trajectory is called the ‘tramway of husbands’: it is yellow, the lyrics tell us, to clarify its mission, which is ‘to carry around cuckolds’.52 The motif of the yellow tram appears not only in songs but also in a story by Désiré Luc, ‘En tramway’ (1900), in which a man, feeling ill, sits inside the tram while his wife and friend climb to the impériale. As the husband looks up at the small windows above him through which the upper deck can be seen, he notices a man’s hand caressing a beautiful thigh and assumes that his friend is seducing his wife. He is unable to take his eyes off ‘the little window, yellow like the tram, which framed the scene’. In the end, it turns out that both hand and thigh belong to a priest, who is simply scratching himself, but the association between the yellow tram and the jealous spouse is clear.53

Dangerous Electricity Many texts, particularly French ones, celebrate the omnibus not just as a site of encounters but also as a source of visual titillation. During the heyday of the crinoline skirt in the 1860s, female passengers were often represented as inadvertently exposing themselves, displaying ‘a lot more than the lower leg’ as they took their seats.54 When women were finally admitted to the impériale in the 1890s, caricatures began to represent men looking up their skirts as they climbed the stairs.55 Maupassant’s novel Bel Ami (1885) describes a painting entitled ‘Le Haut et le Bas’, which portrays an attractive woman climbing a tram staircase: while the men on the impériale examine ‘with avid satisfaction, the young face that came toward them’, those below observe her legs ‘with a different expression of disdain and lust’.56 When a beautiful blonde descends in a Charivari piece from 1889, a male observer is able to tell that she is a ‘brunette by nature’.57 The beneficiaries in such anecdotes are often the conductors, who were known to admire the view en l’air, as they called the impériale. In the comic song ‘Les Conducteurs d’omnibus’ (1893), the narrator boasts that ‘Of phenomenal thighs / On the upper steps / When a skirt gets caught, we admire the picture / Without a telescope’.58 Other representations associate the erotic potential of the omnibus with the physical experience of the space: the body heat of the passengers, the suggestive darkness of the interior at night, or the lurches of the vehicle, which reveal hidden charms or push people toward each other. As a contributor to Grandville’s Les Métamorphoses du jour (1829) observed:

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[W]ho could tell the number of amorous novels that have been born on the omnibus? One sits so close to one’s neighbour! It is so difficult not to brush against an elbow or knee! And the chapter of the jolts! […] All in all, the most agreeable way to go down the river of life is in an omnibus, next to a young and pretty neighbour all along a badly paved road.59

Charles Quesnel is similarly transfixed by the way his neighbour’s bosom ‘translates’ the shaking movement of the vehicle, and Paul Margueritte’s story ‘L’Omnibus’ (1893) evokes ‘the subtly sensual influence that floats […] in the human heat of the omnibus’.60 Passengers often communicated their desire indirectly. In Joris-Karl Huysmans’ story ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus’ (1880), the title character observes the ‘little games’ by which passengers who have never seen one another before, end up, without saying a word and by mutual agreement, getting off one after the other and turning at the same street corner. Ah! for want of voice or gesture, what an ardent or dreamy phrase a leg can express furtively approaching and brushing against that of a neighbour, as does a loving cat.61

Camille Claus’ poem ‘La Botte et la Bottine’ (1892) relates an encounter between a man and a woman on an omnibus exclusively from the viewpoint of their footwear: a boot hops onto a tram pursuing an ankle boot that at first resists, hiding under the banquette, but gradually succumbs; the verses end with a happy marriage.62 Another text offers men instructions for omnibus footsie: an ‘attack’ (a light caress), followed by a ‘superposition’ (putting one’s foot on top of the woman’s), and finally ‘taking possession’ (holding her foot between one’s own).63 Male passengers, however, were not the only ones to resort to such strategies. Louis Ulbach warns foreign visitors about female passengers whose ‘knees have a dangerous electricity, elbows have an incendiary telegraphy and hips have conversations that make one dizzy’.64 The metaphor of the telegraph, indeed, frequently appears in French evocations of the erotic potential of the omnibus. In Lucien Rigaud’s dictionary of jargon, telégraphe sous-marin (submarine telegraph) is defined as ‘the language of feet on the omnibus’.65 Other texts draw on the metaphor of magnetism or electricity. An 1886 poem describes the elbow on the omnibus as ‘a practical means / To transmit one’s passion’ and compares it to ‘an electric machine’ which produces shocks.66 In Hector

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Malot’s novel Un beau-frère (1868), a character believes that if he focuses intensely on a woman in the omnibus, his eyes will serve ‘as a magnet or an electric machine’.67 Toward the end of the century, texts would also play with the notion of hypnotism. (In 1890s Paris, indeed, a number of women claimed to have been hypnotised on the omnibus by male passengers.68) The erotic magnetism of the omnibus could lead to abuses. In one essay, a Parisian vicar gropes women whose buttocks ‘cascade’ voluptuously over the seat dividers, while in another, a respectable-looking old man takes advantage of the crowded platform of the Madeleine-Bastille line to rub up against a young woman standing next to him.69 A recurrent joke in both French and Spanish texts is that of the streetcar ‘amputee’, the man who seems to have no arms because they are covertly fondling female neighbours.70 Some texts even hint at sexual activity on public conveyances. In an 1887 song, a couple plan to go to Montplaisir for a sumptuous dinner but take by mistake a crowded tram to Montchat in which they are squeezed up against each other. Since then, the woman travels to Montplaisir (literally, mount pleasure) only by way of the ‘tramway de Montchat’ (mount cat).71 The song plays on the sexual meaning of the word chat in French, which refers to the female genitalia. The British ditty ‘The Regular Omnibus’ is even more explicit: a maid who rides an omnibus alone with its cad gives birth nine months later to a child with a birthmark in the shape of the vehicle.72 Although it is generally men who take the initiative, occasionally texts imagine women’s pleasure in arousing fellow passengers. The author of the Victorian erotic memoir My Secret Life (1888–1895) recalls the dimness of early omnibuses in which oil lamps often went out: ‘I have in the dark felt women’s thighs, and had my prick felt by strange ladies […] without ever being caught at it. Women who were fairly well dressed and seemed quite respectable played these pranks’.73 In a French vignette from 1898, a young widow, who is caressed by the omnibus passengers to both her left and her right, derives pleasure from ‘the desires […] she had produced and felt rising towards her’.74 Similarly, a woman in Hugues Rebell’s novel Le Diable est à table (1905) enjoys exciting the male passengers around her: being pressed between two men of the people, or poor employees who do not dare touch you, but whose desires one sees eloquently inflating their

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pants! They look at you surreptitiously with fiery eyes, assassins’ eyes. It would not really be good to be alone with them in a forest or on a deserted road. […] One leaves, one gives them a light touch, a smell, a stroke of one’s skirt against their legs. That’s all. One has conquered them without giving oneself. Yes! I find that very amusing.75

The omnibus here is a silent space that constrains passengers and thus allows the woman an erotic victory of sorts: to subjugate men without yielding herself.

Driving Desires Passengers were not the only ones to participate in these erotic games. A number of texts represent the romantic lives of omnibus employees, whose fantasies and exploits contrast with their monotonous routine and commonplace surroundings. Among these workers, the least likely candidate for romance was the driver. Obliged to work long hours and separated physically from his passengers, he was ‘a bachelor, not by choice, alas! but by necessity’.76 As Pierre Véron noted, amorous feuilletons had drawn on almost all professions for their plots except the cocher d’omnibus. Although Véron goes on to recount a love affair between a baroness and ‘one of those martyrs of a perpetual état de siège [state of seatedness/siege]’, what attracts her to him is precisely his erotic unavailability: given his isolation and work schedule, he is one of the few men who would not cheat on her.77 Perhaps the most extravagant example of a driver’s frustrated desire is Félicien Champsaur’s 1881 story ‘Le Tramway amoureux’ (illustrated by Albert Robida), in which a tipsy cocher steers his tram off the rails to pursue a blonde cocotte (courtesan) who drives a coach decorated with a large letter ‘Q’ followed by the words: ‘De là ma fortune’ (Whence my fortune). The inscription plays on the pronunciation of the letter ‘Q’ in French, which is identical to that of the word ‘cul’ (ass), the source of the prostitute’s wealth. The cocotte whips her horses to escape from the lascivious driver, but he continues to pursue her for days, which turn into months and eventually years, through the countryside and forests, into the sea, the air, and eventually outer space. At the end of the story, he wakes up—fittingly at the Place de l’Étoile—and realises it was all a dream.78 As these examples suggest, the driver’s love life was generally treated in a comic and light-hearted way with a strong emphasis on the lack of verisimilitude.79

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The only women who seem available to him are servants who work in the entresol or first-floor apartments he passes along his route: in one text, a cocher courts a maid by attaching a marriage proposal to his whip and flinging it in her direction, and in another his hat is adorned by a peacock feather ‘offered along the way from an entresol window by a friendly hand’.80 The conductor, who had more contact with passengers, was in a better position to take advantage of the charged atmosphere of the vehicle and is often represented as a gallant type. Although his love life was, like the driver’s, the subject of comic songs and literature, some works take his perspective more seriously evoking both his fantasies and frustrations.81 In Henri Demesse’s ‘Le Conducteur de tramway’ (1889), a recently married tram conductor observes passengers who remind him of his wife and prompt him to recall the various stages of their courtship.82 The story sympathetically interweaves and contrasts his tedious routine with his wistful inner life. In Paul Gall’s ‘Allez!… Roulez!’ (1890), a hunchbacked conductor secretly falls in love with a regular passenger on his omnibus. When she appears one day with a handsome fiancé, he is surprised by his despair: Without reflections, without desires, without wishes, he had simply abandoned himself to happiness, for six months he had lived in a new world, receiving superior impressions, elevating himself, without realising it, to a too sublime and until then unknown order of sentiments and dismissing from his mind, by an involuntary calculation, the only thought that could trouble him: that it all had to end.83

As in the stories about the driver, Gall’s conductor is a figure isolated from life—one who can observe but not partake in romance—but his devastation generates pathos rather than humour. A similar frustration pervades Huysmans’ ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus’ (1880), in which the title character copes with the monotony of his job—‘always the same gutters, always the same route’—by imagining erotic intrigues between his clients or fantasising about an attractive passenger who seems to represent everything his shrewish wife is not. Like Demesse, Huysmans contrasts the conductor’s banal tasks with his reflections which are ‘a hundred leagues from reality’.84 In love stories, the omnibus usually functions as a starting point, and the first step in the development of the relationship is the act of leaving it. The employees who are condemned to stay in this space, therefore,

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tend to be limited to observing others or projecting fantasies that cannot be fulfilled.

The Fleeting As is clear from this survey, the omnibus and tram, though perceived as banal, are often represented as spaces of erotic possibility that facilitate encounters or inspire fantasies. It is not surprising then that urban transit is a common setting for amorous tales of the period. The discussion that follows will identify and analyse six types of love stories that draw on different features of the omnibus or tram to represent different forms of erotic experience in the urban transit: the fleeting, the illegible, the iterative, the double, the transactional, and the inverted. In the first category—the fleeting encounter—a male passenger (or occasionally a conductor) is fascinated by an interesting or beautiful woman on an omnibus who then descends and disappears into the city. Manley Hopkins, the father of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, sums up this experience in a poem entitled ‘What might happen to Me, or You’: I met her in an Omnibus, She sat beside the door. My heart bowed down, at once—but I Have never seen her more!85

The attraction to the stranger arises at times from a curiosity about her identity and at other times from a sudden but deep sense of connection. Often the woman is someone who stands out against the banality of the omnibus or the passengers. Fleeting encounters tend to be ‘sound off’ narratives and are generally predicated on a view of the city as a ‘large world’ in which invisible walls divide passengers making it difficult for them to communicate and express their desire. A common feature of these narratives is the ticking clock. The passenger has a limited amount of time to make an advance, and as he usually does not know the woman’s destination, he has no idea how many minutes are left. This often leads to an interrupted adventure (the woman descends before he makes up his mind) or to a temporal compression in which he anticipates the unfolding of the relationship during the brief span of the ride. Some narratives focus on the psychological obstacles preventing an encounter (the passenger’s diffidence or awkwardness), while

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others speculate about the woman’s identity or conjure up fantasies of future domestic bliss. Occasionally, the fleeting encounter is a source of pleasure that passengers actively seek out. In his dictionary of jargon, Lucien Rigaud defines a type called the pisteur d’omnibus (omnibus stalker), an idler who follows women onto the omnibus, touches them with his foot, his knee, his elbow, ventures into a bit of a conversation and has no serious occupation other than being driven from Bastille to Madeleine and vice versa. This lover of the fair sex is usually a fifty-something whose stomach has long since turned majestic.86

A clear example of this type is a grey-haired gentleman in Gourdon’s La Physiologie de l’omnibus, who spends his days in omnibuses touching female passengers ‘with his knee or his gaze’, handing them their change with a Louis XV smile and imagining ‘a very pink little horizon; to love this woman, to love her truly for five or ten minutes… and then to lose her all of a sudden’. He repeats the process with ten different women a day and then returns home, dines, and dreams of them.87 In this portrait, the omnibus is a place of inexpensive fantasy, one that is safe because it is only insinuated and never reciprocal. It offers an endlessly repeated simulacrum of love, which comes to supplant real life. The omnibus is a ‘glass menagerie’ of sorts but a completely satisfying one. The implication of Gourdon’s vignette is that the old man’s pleasure in the fleeting encounter depends in part on its inconsequentiality and non-­ fruition. This logic is even clearer in a nostalgic essay written by François Coppée in 1902 about the omnibuses of his youth on which he entertained ‘beautiful dreams of love’ inspired by pretty female passengers. His pleasure disappeared, however, if the ‘passing woman, loved for the space of a second’, returned his gaze, for he immediately became self-conscious. Only at night, protected by darkness, could he indulge in prolonged observation imagining ‘crazy and delicious adventures’.88 As with Gourdon’s grey-haired gentleman, the pleasure of the fantasy depends on a non-reciprocal attraction. More often, however, the fleeting encounter is a source not of pleasure but of melancholy or frustration. The reaction of Ernest Fouinet’s narrator to the departure of a ‘delicate, vaporous, svelte’ passenger is typical:

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Why was I sad? Had she even paid attention to me? I’d paid attention to her, I’d been happy to see her, enough to regret losing her, almost certain never to find her again. Who hasn’t seen a woman pass by in his life about whom he could say, ‘I will love her forever’, and then returned a hundred times to the route where he found her, and always in vain. This is why every good-­ bye scene is, for one who thinks and knows life, a scene of despair.—Oh omnibus! what a philosopher you are!89

The sense of the city as a large world in which passengers rarely coincide again often gives rise to broader philosophical considerations about missed opportunities and the limits of human existence. The cause of frustration varies from one text to another. Sometimes, the passenger feels too bound by his immediate duties to take advantage of the unexpected encounter: his destination is experienced as a form of destiny. In Georges Mazinghien’s vignette ‘En omnibus’ (1880), for example, a male passenger examines a pretty working girl on an omnibus with his looking glass, begins to make deductions about her profession, and imagines her life story: perhaps she works for an abusive, old, rich woman or is a cocotte who enjoys ‘easy luxury’.90 His theories, however, remain unconfirmed: though tempted to follow her, he is already late for an appointment with a friend and cannot descend when she leaves. The omnibus in this piece is a space of narrative fragments and unrealised possibilities. Interestingly, the male passenger is referred to throughout the story either with the impersonal on or the second-person vous: ‘one inspects the companions that chance…. Oh! The charming child! there, almost in front of you’.91 This use of pronouns universalises the experience, converting the common place into a commonplace: the episode is, in Manley Hopkins’ words, ‘What might happen to Me, or You’. In other texts, the impediment is not a conflict between duty and desire but rather self-doubt, inhibition, or a reluctance to intrude. This is clear in Georges Delaqys’ story ‘La Lueur’ (1900), which begins by evoking the alienating nature of the omnibus: ‘Inside the coach, a few people, each one isolated from the others, seem to meditate gravely, and are in reality extremely bored with their solitude. A common situation gives their faces a uniform expression and, jolted in the same directions, their bodies shift with the same movement’. In joining their ranks, the protagonist initially adopts the same ‘uniform of indifferent ennui’. After a while, however, he begins to exchange glances with the young woman across from him who pretends to read a newspaper to avoid his gaze. He does the same, but

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they cannot stop peering at each other over their pages. The narrative transcribes the young man’s internal dialogue. At first, he wonders whether he desires her simply because she is mysterious but gradually he becomes convinced that only this woman could make him ‘live, feel, vibrate’ and inspire him to write great literature. Trying to decide what to say to her, however, he feels overwhelmed by timidity: ‘I am not very sure that I won’t stammer’. As he starts to doubt himself, he also regrets his past inaction; he should have taken advantage of her last glance to start a conversation. He considers getting off at her stop to tell her about his dreams and once again imagines himself feeling an ‘expansion of his whole being’. Finally, he will stop ‘loving love’ and will love for real. But when the young woman gets up, he feels pinned down and forgets what he was going to say. Ultimately, he remains in the safety of the omnibus. Gazing at her empty seat, however, he feels ‘almost happy not to see his dream tarnished by its realisation’.92 Delaqys’ story illustrates two common features of fleeting omnibus encounters. The first is the representation of the vehicle as a backdrop of banality that contrasts with the hero’s romantic projections. The story could be read as the protagonist’s struggle to overcome a milieu that imposes an ennui, uniformity, and common motion. In the end, he feels unable to act in this space, which conditions his movements from the moment he enters. Second, the omnibus introduces a ticking clock: the protagonist must overcome his inhibitions before the woman reaches her (unknown) destination. This restricted and unclear time frame contrasts with the expansive temporality of his mind, which envisions a love story spanning over years. Another example of an encounter frustrated by awkwardness is Paul Margueritte’s ‘L’Omnibus’ (1893), which similarly evokes the oppressiveness of the omnibus. In this case, however, the vehicle is not simply a space of ennui and uniformity but also a torture chamber of sorts: passengers suffocate in heavy winter clothes; the jolting is like a hammer hitting their heads; and the noise resembles gums squeaking as teeth are extracted. As in ‘La Lueur’, the omnibus has a dehumanising effect on its occupants who seem an ‘exhibition of wax figures’ or a group of ‘cadavers at the Morgue’.93 Even the conductor is compared to a ‘coil spring’.94 As in Delaqys’ story, the monotony is broken by the entrance of a pretty woman, who is referred to in the second person and through free indirect speech: ‘You are quite pretty, madam, oh! very pretty, and it is very much a shame that one cannot tell you that’.95 The new passenger’s beauty

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contrasts with the ugliness imposed by the omnibus. As in Mazinghien’s ‘En omnibus’, the narrator speculates about her destination and her life: perhaps she is going to see a lover or is a bored housewife ready for a first adultery. Margueritte stresses the link between the uncomfortable physical conditions and the passenger’s erotic fantasy: Jolts of the omnibus rattling the spinal cord, the grinding noise of the wheels exasperating the nervous system, the boredom of the journey, the disgust for all those faces of a revolting banality, crushed, depressed by life, such a natural satisfaction in contemplating a healthy being in the flower of life and beauty; yes, that is without doubt what wakens in man’s miserable heart of mud a troubled sentiment comprising fleeting love, a stupid and sentimental tenderness, brutal desire and the bitterness that accompanies an awareness of the ephemeral.96

In Delaqys’ ‘La Lueur’, the vehicle seems an obstacle to romantic fantasy; it dictates a uniform rhythm and movement that the protagonist ultimately cannot overcome. In Margueritte’s story, in contrast, it is the jolting of the nervous system that leads the passenger to fantasise in the first place. The fleeting encounter in Margueritte’s story is a ‘sound off’ and ‘large world’ episode in which passengers stare at one another in silence and feel separated by invisible walls: the narrator evokes the ‘abyss’ between the woman and her admirers. Like Delaqys’ narrator, the protagonist is unable to overcome this divide and is acutely conscious of the ticking clock of the omnibus: ‘Will they find one another again? It is not probable. There is then just a brief instant to seize. But how?’ The passenger briefly considers following her but ultimately decides against it. The meeting of hearts, he believes, must occur spontaneously: ‘It would have to be right away, without even speaking, that the hearts understand one another, one would get off when she did, and the words would right away gush forth’.97 The encounter cannot be forced; it must be a shared, simultaneous impulse. A striking feature of Margueritte’s narrative is the second-person pronoun, which, unlike in Mazinghien’s text, refers to different characters at different points in the story. Initially, the narrator cannot tell the woman that she is beautiful, but he observes, ‘you must see it in the eyes that are looking at you’.98 In this passage, vous refers to the woman, but as the narrator observes the erotic tension she introduces, the antecedent shifts: ‘Is one a lout because, in spite of oneself, one experiences the delicate and

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fragile and exquisite magnetic attraction of a young and pretty woman? She does not seem more embarrassed for that. First her eyes met yours (les vôtres); then she lowered her gaze’.99 Here, ‘yours’ refers not to the pretty woman but to the narrator, who has made eye contact with her, or perhaps to the reader figured as a fellow passenger. Later, the narrator imagines that the woman is travelling to see a lover and asks himself (or perhaps the reader), ‘What a strange and sudden jealousy seizes you?’100 In the end, however, he shifts from the second to the third person in his description of the desiring subject: The pretty woman gets up, but without looking at you, she gets off and you do not follow her. Her skirt undulates and she lifts it with the pretty, almost indecent gesture of her sort. She goes away quickly, as if liberated from the annoying gaze of the intruder who contemplated her so fixedly; and the anonymous one who loved her in his heart and his senses for five minutes and who reflects that he will never see her again, stifles a small, a very small regret. It is the shadow of a vanished dream that will no longer project upon its sun.101

With these shifts in pronoun, the passenger moves further and further away from the possibility of an encounter. When he addresses the woman in the second person, he is simulating an exchange with her, which might happen if he overcomes his awkwardness. When he refers to himself as vous, however, he becomes divided against himself: the passenger who narrates is separated from the passenger who desires. The vous here might also refer to the reader, who becomes the narrator’s surrogate. This pronoun use increases the distance between the subject and object of desire: there is a now a ‘third’, this ambiguous vous, who stands between them. In the final passage, the shift to the third person further divides the narrator from the desiring subject; this coincides notably with the woman’s departure. As the narrator pushes away the side of him that desires, the encounter becomes impossible. In some cases, the obstacle is not awkwardness but passivity. Alfonso Pérez Nieva’s ‘Un amor chispa’ (1891) represents a tram passenger’s train of thought as he observes a beautiful blonde: My God, how blonde and what rustling skirts!… As if I felt the brush of a wing on my pants!… I bet no one will get up… Come on, thank goodness that the hussar captain… The military has always been famous for courtesy… Magnificent!… From here I can see her close up!…

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From the beginning, the narrator defines himself as an observer rather than an actor: unlike the soldier, he does not go out of his way to make room for the woman. After a brief exchange of glances, the narrator feels a longing to kneel before her: ‘What can this be?… I will have to have an interview with my heart… My God!… There is no doubt about it… I am in love with the passenger and I need to tell her’. When their eyes meet again, he tries to transmit a message through his gaze: ‘She’s looking at me again!…. I make a declaration… Madam!… For pity’s sake!… I idolatrise you… If you knew the love that you have inspired in me with your divine eyes!…’ And when she smiles, he believes she has understood: ‘She smiles again, but… how furtively!… That is so that the others don’t catch on. That ray of light was for me… She has answered in the affirmative… Thank you, thank you…. my beautiful stranger’.102 The ‘sound off’ communication reflects the passivity of the narrator, who fails to take the initiative and speak to the woman. Assuming a reciprocal desire, the narrator speculates about the woman’s marital status. At first, he imagines she is married, but almost immediately he reproaches himself, for this would make that her desire adulterous: ‘I’ve thrown her into the abyss!… I’m a wretch!…’ Nevertheless, he continues to refine this theory, weaving a narrative around her: But… She is so enchanting!… Perhaps her husband is an insufferable old man, perhaps she has a lover, perhaps they married her against her will… In her face there is a hidden pain, one of those pains that surface on the face when they overflow… The eyes are crying… And what might her name be?… I will baptise her Ofelia.

As he gives her a name and a story, he feels closer to her and begins to address her in his mind with the informal tú rather than the formal usted. In the end, however, he observes her making eyes at the hussar captain, who follows her off the tram. Her glances, it turns out, were never meant for him. The narrator’s experience, however, has been so intense that he momentarily loses sight of the distinction between fiction and reality. When a friend asks him why he is forlorn, he replies: —Leave me alone: I just had a fight in the tram with my girlfriend Ofelia. —And who is Ofelia?

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—My girlfriend… —But, man… Don’t take it so seriously… How long have you been together? —Five minutes!103

The story, which is described as a ‘lightning novel’, illustrates the temporal compression that often appears in fleeting encounters: in his imagination, the narrator condenses an entire relationship into the short span of a tram ride. A similar passivity characterises the narrator of Ernest d’Hervilly’s ‘Une main’ (1875) who fixates on the perfectly sculpted hand of a female omnibus passenger. The opening of the story clearly isolates the body part from the woman to whom it belongs: ‘It was in the omnibus, in the evening, a hand on a muff. It was very simple. Of the woman sitting in front of me, whom this hand adorned, I won’t say a word’. The fragmentary nature of this passage reflects the narrator’s limited perception of the woman: as she is ‘hidden by an Othello of a veil, of an absolute black’, and the narrator’s hat is lowered over his eyes, he sees only her hand.104 The repetition of the first sentence later in the story—‘It was then in the omnibus, in the evening, a hand on a muff’—suggests the obsessive, fetishistic nature of his observation; both his eyes and his words keep returning to the same spot.105 Like the protagonist of Delaqys’ ‘La Lueur’, the passenger imagines a future of domestic bliss: Oh! to hold, to retain that hand, frightened like a bird, tenderly in one’s own! or rather, sweetly, sweetly to pose one’s burning lips on those charming and fresh fingers! what life! Isn’t it made, that loyal and pure hand, to be tendered in a friendly way, in the evening, by the fireside, and to affirm modestly the love of a young girl who remains silent and blushing?106

Whereas Delaqys’ protagonist imagines the woman’s effect on his life, however, d’Hervilly’s narrator does not insert himself into these scenarios, which are evoked in a general way using infinitives and third-person pronouns. Like his seat on the omnibus, his fantasy is one that anyone could occupy. When the woman gets up, the narrator debates whether to follow her, but just as he is about to do so, she takes the arm of a man who has come

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down from the impériale. As in ‘Un amor chispa’, the reverie is foiled by the introduction of a rival. At the end of the story, the narrator bids his dream farewell: ‘Goodbye, poor poem, so laboriously constructed in the evening, in the omnibus, looking at a hand on a muff’.107 Here, the narrator seems to confuse the hand on the omnibus with the work of his own poetic hand, the poem he has woven around the mysterious woman: the vanishing hand is equated with the vanishing poem. In conflating his prose poem about the hand with the hand itself, the narrator in a sense loses sight of his own act of creation and projection. The dangling gerund of the final sentence reinforces this self-effacement: by leaving out the subject of ‘looking’, he dismisses his role in the authorship of the poem and adopts a purely passive stance. This confusion of fantasy and reality is even clearer in Ella D’Arcy’s 1891 story ‘The Smile’ (a rare case of a fleeting encounter by a female author). As in earlier examples, the narrator-passenger begins by evoking the banality of the omnibus and its vulgar types: the fat lady who ‘occupies the place of two’, the ‘deprecating little gentleman’ who ‘scarcely dares to occupy any place at all’, and so forth.108 This backdrop of ordinariness contrasts with a girl in the corner whose beauty is distinctive precisely because it is not obvious. Unlike the other passengers, who are legible and common, she is intriguing. The narrator feels that ‘the latent potentialities of her smile’—the ‘Koh-i-noor of smiles’—might ‘change the blackest world to a heaven of light’.109 Aware of ‘the perils of addressing a girl in an omnibus’, he is initially reluctant to speak to her. But somehow a conversation develops, which leads him to believe that he has finally found the ‘impossible She’ he had been seeking ‘so long and so eagerly in suburban drawing rooms and at subscription dances in country towns and bar-­ parlours, and fashionable assembly rooms, yea! even in the columns of the matrimonial papers’. The woman’s smile seems to overcome his timidity and to guide him ‘safely through the most difficult conversational mazes’.110 In the end, however, the conductor wakes him from his reverie, and he finds himself in an empty omnibus, far from his destination. ‘Did she ever really smile at all?’ he wonders, ‘Or had I fallen a prey to my dominant idea, and dozed off while studying the lines of her delightful mouth?’111 In this story, the fantasy is once again debunked, but what deflates it is not the revelation of the woman’s true situation but rather the narrator’s realisation that he himself is its author; it is ultimately nothing more than a daydream, a variation on his ‘dominant idea’. Notably, the

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movement from reality to fantasy is marked by a shift from ‘sound off’ to ‘sound on’ narration. The passenger, who suffers from awkwardness, dreams of overcoming his inhibitions and speaking. By ‘impossible She’ he seems to refer to a woman capable of giving him a voice. Ultimately, however, she is ‘impossible’ in a different sense: unlike other women he meets in spaces of ‘possible’ encounters (drawing rooms, etc.), she is separated from him by the invisible walls that divide passengers on the omnibus and is thus unattainable. At times, however, passengers do manage to break the ice. In Eugène Michel’s ‘L’Innocente Aventure’ (1896), a man encounters a woman on a rainy day in an omnibus and begins to deduce her character from her features: her eyes suggest an upright nature; her nose, goodness; and her mouth ‘reveals her to be ardently a woman’. She seems equally interested in him: ‘I clearly perceived the contact of her [gaze] on mine, as if our glances had really “touched” one another’. When she gets off, the narrator offers her to shield her with his umbrella, and a conversation develops. As they walk and speak—‘already almost friends’—they hardly look at each other. The story, thus, shifts from an alienating ‘textual’ encounter on the omnibus in which the characters see but do not hear and in which each silently deciphers the other’s signs to a ‘sound on’ exchange in which they hear but do not see. As the narrative shifts from ‘sound off’ to ‘sound on’, the protagonist feels that he has always known her and has only just found her again. By leaving the awkward ‘sound off’ space of the omnibus, the characters are able to experience the city as a ‘small world’, a familiar and accessible place. As in ‘The Smile’, the passenger’s dream is to overcome the barriers of the public space and to establish a more intimate, human exchange. In the end, however, it is the ‘large world’ that prevails. When the woman reaches her destination, she bids him farewell abruptly and goes her separate way. The obstacle in this case is not passivity or awkwardness but a simple lack of reciprocity. The final lines of the story attempt to convert this amorous disappointment into an aesthetic experience: Two gazes cross one another in the crowd. It is nothing; it is without a yesterday and without a tomorrow; it is the simple undulation of two souls who lean for a moment toward one another. Then one goes on. But the encounter is at times exquisite—and one remembers.112

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The city in this story is a large world that fleetingly seems a small one, and it is this illusion that lends it charm and interest. Though the encounter leads to nothing, the aesthetic impression lingers in the mind. The shift from a ‘large’ to a ‘small world’ and from ‘sound off’ to ‘sound on’ narration, however, can also deflate a fantasy as is clear in two Spanish stories about the tram, published in quick succession: N. de Leyva y Vizcarro’s ‘Un prólogo y una aventura’ (1887) and Aurelio Ribalta’s ‘El tranvía’ (1888). The first story begins with a lengthy description of the penury and aimlessness of a student named Juan, who feels disenchanted with his life and his lack of success with women. After much procrastination, he sets out on an errand and takes a tram where he offers a pretty girl his seat. Unlike most of the texts examined above, which take the perspective of the passenger-observer, this story contrasts his thoughts with hers. Juan speculates that she is a dressmaker’s assistant, while she, observing his shiny hat, imagines him to be an aristocrat. He considers following her but then dismisses the idea and simply stares at her boldly. As he returns from his errand, however, he runs into her again, walking in the same direction, just a few steps ahead of him. Once again, we are given both perspectives. Strolling behind her, Juan observes her graceful movements and feels annoyed at the men catcalling her. Meanwhile, she is aware that she is being followed by ‘the boy from the tram’ and assumes he has been waiting for her. When they reach the Puerta del Sol, Juan anticipates that their paths will diverge and that he will ‘not find her again’—he assumes a ‘large world’—but she ends up taking the same route. She looks back and sees that he is still following her, while he anticipates her shock on seeing him in her house. In the end, however, it is he who is surprised to see her enter his building. As it turns out, she lives on the floor below his. The ‘large world’ of the tram is thus replaced by the ‘small world’ of the apartment building, but surprisingly this does not lead to communication or understanding. The woman is annoyed that Juan has followed her home; she thinks he has mistaken her for a loose woman. When he identifies himself as a neighbour, she slams the door and is left wondering whether his claim is true or just an excuse for his behaviour. In the meantime, he adds her to the list of women who ignore him and imagines that she hears his footsteps without their having the slightest ‘echo in her heart’.113 In this story, the openness of the city and the unexpected possibilities it offers seem to awaken Juan’s interest and to dispel, if only briefly, his world-weariness. When this ‘large world’ unexpectedly becomes ‘small’, however, he returns not only to his home but also to his habitual

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inhibitions and negativity. Whereas in ‘L’Innocente Aventure’ the shift to a ‘sound on’ exchange creates a brief sense of connection, it is in this story the silent, impersonal, and inconsequential space of the tram that allows the fantasy to develop. When the object of desire enters the private space and speaks, the attraction disappears. The walls between the apartments are ultimately more powerful divides than the invisible walls of the tram. Aurelio Ribalta’s ‘El tranvía’ has a similar structure. It begins with a character, also named Juan, who has lost interest in life and feels himself to be stagnating. Though recently married to a woman he reveres, he feels trapped in his bourgeois domesticity and cannot motivate himself to work on the legal treatise he is writing. Ribalta conveys this lack of direction by referring to the protagonist first without any pronouns and then simply as ‘our man’. It is only when he encounters an attractive woman on the tram that he acquires a name, don Juan, an allusion to the legendary seducer whom he seems to imitate in this adventure. The encounter on the horsecar briefly jolts him out of his despondency and seems to open up new possibilities. As in ‘Un prólogo y una aventura’, however, the discovery that the woman lives on the floor below destroys the fantasy. Although the plots are similar, the characterisation and interactions in the stories are quite different. Whereas the student in the earlier story is poor, lonely, and luckless in love, Ribalta’s protagonist leads a modest bourgeois life and has a loving wife. Unlike the student, who abhors the idea of leaving his apartment and facing the world, the hero of ‘El tranvía’ is represented as a flâneur—he has no fixed destination—and is more at ease in social situations. When the student gives up his seat, he does not think to pay the woman’s fare. Ribalta’s don Juan, in contrast, tries to do so immediately. And when he is told that she has already paid, he does not lose his nerve but rather follows her onto another tram where he attempts to invite her again. This time it turns out that another passenger has already paid her fare, but once again he is not disconcerted. The coincidence breaks the ice and leads to a conversation among the three passengers, which continues after the other man leaves. When the woman realises she has taken the tram in the wrong direction, Juan gets off with her and escorts her back to the centre. He begins to feel nervous only when they approach the street where he lives. When she tells him that she is staying at the hostel on the second floor of his building, he panics and runs in the opposite direction.114 Whereas the emphasis in ‘Un prólogo y una aventura’ lies on the student’s awkwardness and the misunderstandings that result from it, the focus in Ribalta’s story is the hero’s awareness of the limitations of his

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bourgeois domesticity and his longing for adventure and new possibilities. He runs away not out of awkwardness but because his wife is waiting for him on the third floor. The beginning of the story, moreover, makes clear his disgust for the hostel, which constantly introduces noise and disorder into his calm bourgeois existence. The revelation of the woman’s address associates her with a seedy reality that jars with his domestic ideal. Whereas in the first story the coincidence leads the woman to reject the man, here it generates in don Juan a disgust for the female passenger. In ‘Un prólogo y una aventura’, the tram is a space of silence and thought, while the apartment building is where the two characters finally speak to one another. In Ribalta’s story, in contrast, the tram and the city are places of communication and exchange, while the arrival at their residence ends the conversation. As with the fantasies of Gourdon’s grey-haired gentleman, there is a certain safety and inconsequentiality in the anonymous public sphere. Where in many of the stories we have seen, the anxiety stems from the ticking clock, here it is its removal that is terrifying. As long as the encounter is simply fleeting, it remains relatively safe. But when the time constraints disappear, and the story comes too close to home, the fantasy is deflated.

The Illegible A second category of omnibus love story, which at times overlaps with the first, is the encounter with the illegible: a mysterious, enigmatic, or deceptive passenger who turns out to be very different from what he or she seems at first. This type of enigma also appears in texts about fleeting encounters, but whereas the emphasis in such texts usually lies on the ticking clock and the observer’s awkwardness or passivity, the focus of this second category is rather the struggle to decipher the other or a misreading that is ultimately corrected. These texts can represent either a conscious act of deception or simply an error of interpretation, but in all cases the focus is epistemological: what can one really know on an omnibus? And to what extent can character be deduced from physical appearance or behaviour? A simple version of this type of narrative is the discovery of a hidden disability. In Jules Ricard’s ‘Plaisir des Dieux’ (1890), for example, a young woman whose husband is unfaithful resolves to seduce an attractive passenger sitting next to her on an omnibus in order to avenge herself. The young man, however, seems oblivious to her advances, even when she caresses his foot with her own. Eventually he leaves without saying a word.

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The heroine is perplexed until she overhears the conductor and another passenger commenting on the young man’s wooden leg.115 In another French story, a shortsighted woman who similarly longs for an affair follows onto an omnibus a man who seems to be making signs at her but who turns out to be a deaf mute.116 And in yet another anecdote, a woman observes a man ogling her on an omnibus and sends a note proposing a rendez-vous to the building she sees him entering. She receives in reply a letter from a doctor informing her that man in question is a patient suffering from strabismus.117 In each case, the emphasis lies on the illegibility of the omnibus and on the limits of our understanding. It is noteworthy that all these texts feature female observers. When the male passenger is illegible, it is generally not an intentional deception. When the roles are reversed, however, the disability is sometimes deliberately masked. A fascinating example is a story in the satirical journal Le Charivari by the well-known caricaturist Paul Gavarni: ‘Un aventure d’omnibus’ (1840). The tale begins with the Devil stepping onto an omnibus and taking the place of its conductor. Spotting a dandyish poet named Numance on the sidewalk, he is inspired with a diabolical idea. First, he stops to let the young man on, and then he picks up a beautiful woman. Entranced by her charms, Numance follows her off the omnibus, engages in witty conversation, and makes an appointment to meet her again. But when he arrives at their rendez-vous, she is nowhere to be found. Instead, a boy hands him a note bearing a ducal coronet: ‘One of a woman’s sweetest pleasures’, it reads, ‘is to create a regret’. The narrator then explains what Numance will never know: the mysterious woman is the duchess of Margueray, an elegant and clever society woman who lost her right eye as a child. In the omnibus, Numance had been sitting to her left. Unable to inspire true love, she amuses herself inflaming passengers on the omnibus. The narrator contrasts the candour of the poet, who openly acknowledges his poverty, with the cowardly duplicity of the aristocrat, who lacking ‘the courage to avow her ugliness’, has ‘hidden her heart beneath her coat of arms, while dreaming of love’.118 The unequal social status of the two characters is reflected in their unequal understanding of the situation. In the end, Numance resolves to avenge himself on other women, who will be equally unaware of the motivation for his behaviour. The tale once again points to the illegibility of the omnibus, but unlike the stories about disabled men, it introduces a diabolical element: female deception and aristocratic malice.

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Gavarni’s text exemplifies a type of illegible narrative in which upper-­ class passengers engage in ludic forms of desire based on masks or intrigue. In publishing his story, indeed, Gavarni seems to have been participating in such a game. According to the Goncourt brothers, the artist had met a high-society woman on an omnibus and followed her, striking up ‘one of those laughing, witty, and politely daring conversations’. Like the duchess, she refused to reveal her name but mentioned that her husband subscribed to Le Charivari. By publishing his story about the one-eyed woman in the same journal, Gavarni was attempting to provoke her and reestablish contact. If the Goncourt brothers are to believed, the ruse worked: ‘Did the woman from the faubourg Saint-Germain want to prove to the author that she had a right eye just like her left one? We don’t know. What is certain is that the article in Le Charivari made her decide to write to Gavarni, or perhaps better, to the poet Michel’.119 (In the Goncourt brothers’ reprint of the Charivari story, Numance is renamed Michel.) Gavarni, thus, seems to have been luckier than his character but not that much more. The love affair that ensued, which Gavarni would capture in an unfinished epistolary novel, was ultimately a disappointing experience. Influenced by the lofty sentimental literature of the 1830s, the society woman continually resisted his desire, frustrating him with her insistence on an idealising romantic rhetoric. This episode seems to have been the basis for another story about an aristocrat who shields her identity: ‘A Feuilleton’, which appeared in 1860  in Blackwood’s Magazine.120 In this story, a caricaturist for Le Charivari who is identified as ‘Lahure (Mathieu)’ meets a beautiful woman in an omnibus who coyly withholds her identity and makes him promise not to follow her. To find out her identity, he publishes a story in the journal about a man who makes a rendez-vous with an attractive passenger only to discover, when a gust of wind lifts her veil, that she has just one eye. This piece prompts the mysterious woman to send Lahure a letter in which she observes that if he ‘went a little into respectable society, instead of secluding himself to write libels’, he might ‘meet young widows with two eyes’.121 Later, he attends a soirée where he finally reencounters the woman, who turns out to be a wealthy young widow. Unlike Gavarni’s tale, however, the Blackwood’s story has a happy ending: Lahure marries her. In rewriting the French story, the British writer changes not only the ending but also the vision of the city. Gavarni’s tale plays on the gap between the character’s knowledge and the reader’s; the latter finds out the duchess’ identity, while the former never does. The aristocrat

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disappears into a vast metropolis and will remain unknowable for Numance. This knowledge gap, however, disappears in ‘A Feuilleton’. In both the main tale (Lahure’s relationship) and the story within the story (the work he publishes in Le Charivari), the lover finds out the truth about the mysterious woman from the omnibus. The large, unknowable world of Gavarni’s story is replaced by a ‘small world’ in which the characters eventually come to know one another. By eliminating the knowledge gap, the British text puts the two characters on more equal footing. In Gavarni’s story, the duchess not only belongs to a higher social rank but also has more information. The British story, in contrast, insists on the parity between the lovers, a symmetry reflected in the two eyes discovered at the end of the story. This equality is clear in their conversation on the omnibus. When the widow asks Lahure about himself, he replies: Ah, Madame! The proverb says, ‘Chacun a son gout’. It might add ‘chacun a son secret’. I know your taste; it is the Charivari. In return I will tell you mine. It is to know something more of every beautiful widow I meet with in an omnibus. We are now quits on the score of taste, but we each retain our secret.

They decide not to reveal their secrets but to exchange hints instead: ‘Are you a draughtsman or a writer?’ ‘First tell me whether you live most at Paris or at Enghien?’ ‘I live equally at both’. ‘And I write and draw with equal merit’.122

The exchange emphasises not only the equality between the two activities and between the two addresses but also the equality between the speakers, who engage in rigorously fair play. When the woman asks Lahure not to follow her or try to learn her identity, he insists on a similar treatment: Madame, I flatter myself I am a man of honour. I give you my promise. In return, you must pledge yourself not to ask any questions about me, or to follow me when I leave the omnibus. Monsieur, I am a woman of honour. I give you my promise.123

These lines contrast with a passage in Gavarni’s story in which the duchess asks Numance for his promise as a gentleman and the young man responds

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proudly that he is no such thing. Where Gavarni underscores the inequality between his protagonists, the British story creates a level playing field. In the end, Lahure learns that the mysterious woman is a rich widow and is about to give up hope: ‘I thought I was speaking to my companion of the omnibus, equal to myself in fortune, and perhaps not above my love. No, Madame, I will not contend with the world, where there are so many rivals to mortify my pride during the race, and to win it at the end’. The widow, however, replies that ‘It is not thus I part with Mistigris’.124 She alludes here to Lahure’s pseudonym, Mistigris, which refers in French to a joker card that can be used as the equivalent of any other card in the game. The widow, thus, answers Lahure’s anxiety about the inequality of their situations with a reassertion of their equality in the game. She points out, moreover, that they have both played a role in finding each other again. Just as Lahure published a story in Le Charivari, the widow asked a friend to invite him to the ball. Whereas Gavarni represents the omnibus as part of a large world that is indifferent, illegible, and unequal, the British story represents it as a small one in which passengers meet again and engage with each other on equal terms. A similar upper-class game appears in Charles Joliet’s story ‘Antoinette’ (1861), in which the narrator, a young man named Maurice, meets a graceful woman at an omnibus station on a rainy day. Maurice wonders whether she is single or married but is unable to decide; even Gall and Lavater, he observes, would be stumped. To break the ice, he offers her his ticket, and when the omnibus arrives, he climbs to the impériale despite the rain. When he gets off completely drenched, she invites him to her place to dry off. As in ‘A Feuilleton’, however, they decide not to reveal their identities: ‘To finish the novel as it has begun, we will not try to know what each other is in society’. Instead they play a guessing game in which they attempt to deduce each other’s lives and thoughts.125 As in ‘A Feuilleton’, they insist on fair play: as the narrator knows the woman’s address, he reveals his own to put them on equal footing. Through deductions, Maurice successfully guesses that her name is Antoinette, that she lives alone, that she is a musician, and that she is Jewish. In the end, they finally exchange names and make a plan to meet again at his flat the next evening. Back at home, the narrator reflects on the pleasure of supposition: ‘To know others by observing oneself, to depart from the unknown to derive, by hypotheses, sure results, that is an ample and pleasant inquiry that has the powerful attraction of all problems’. He imagines himself contributing with his inquiries to the mass of information that a genius

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will one day use to ‘formulate the laws that govern the moral world’.126 The erotic quest is at once an epistemological one. As in ‘A Feuilleton’, thus, the male protagonist seeks to decipher his fellow omnibus passenger, but whereas the British story leads to clear revelations, the French story underscores the heroine’s ambiguity. When Antoinette visits him, he tells her that he would like to seduce her in Socratic fashion through yes or no questions, but she avoids direct answers. When he asks whether she loves him, she replies ‘maybe’. The ending is similarly ambiguous. At 2 a.m., it is pouring rain, and the narrator insists that she spend the night. At first, he plans to sleep on the couch, but when she asks for sugar water, he is overwhelmed by the sight of her naked arm as she reaches for the glass. At this point, the story cuts off with suspension points, leaving the reader in the dark just as the narrator is throughout the story.127 In these upper-class omnibus games, answered questions end in marriage as in ‘A Feuilleton’, whereas ambiguity and unresolved enigmas are associated with desire. In ‘A Feuilleton’ and ‘Antoinette’, the adventure is told from the man’s perspective, but in other texts, it is a female passenger who narrates. In Jacinto Octavio Picón’s ‘Confesiones’ (1892), three women share stories of love gone awry. The first two are extremely restrictive in their choice of lovers: one prides herself on sleeping exclusively with aristocrats, while the other consorts only with talented artists. Their stories relate what happens when they accidently find themselves with men who do not correspond to their ideals (a nobleman who is actually illegitimate or a mediocre artist). The third woman, in contrast, claims to be more ‘Christian’ in her approach to love.128 She accepts men ‘without distinctions of hierarchy or lineage or ancestry or even talent or genius’.129 Given this egalitarianism, it is fitting that she finds her lover on a tram, which she refers to as ‘that democratic vehicle so favourable to our conquests’.130 As her new lover is a student, she hides her upper-class status and pretends to be a servant. The relationship allows her to feel loved for herself (rather than her wealth) and to enjoy a hitherto unknown freedom from social constraints: ‘more than with him’, she confesses, ‘I was in love with the ease with which we could love each other’. In keeping with the revolutionary image of the omnibus, the tram is identified with an experience of ‘complete liberty’.131 As in Gavarni’s story, the student’s sincerity contrasts with the aristocrat’s falsity. When he finally discovers her identity, he breaks off the

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relationship. Interestingly, he uses the metaphor of reading to explain his decision: together we began to read and to savour the eternal poem in which youth and love collaborate. Now it turns out that I was reading sincerely, that I was deciphering for the first time, while you, although you pretended to be a novice, already know it by heart.

The game functions, he suggests, only when the two characters engage on equal footing. The student is disgusted because he has been ‘conquered’. The tram, which begins as the space of democracy and freedom, is now a ‘symbol that their journey together would be short’.132 Once the text has been ‘read’, the ‘illegible’ encounter becomes a ‘fleeting’ one. Eventually, however, the aristocrat finds a way to win him back, and the story ends on a light-hearted note. As in many of these aristocratic games, it is the woman who has the upper hand. Perhaps the clearest example of this power dynamic, however, is Léon Bérardi’s story ‘Une mystification: conte vrai en six chapitres’ (1843) in which the narrator encounters on an omnibus a beautiful aristocrat who begs him to seduce her husband’s mistress, Madame de St-Ildefonse.133 Like the heroine of ‘A Feuilleton’, she makes him promise not to inquire about her own identity. Drawn by her beauty and vague hints of an erotic reward, the narrator agrees. Madame de St-Ildefonse, it turns out, has two lovers: the mysterious woman’s husband and the young and fashionable marquis de la G. Shortly after the narrator begins an affair with her, the marquis de la G. receives an anonymous letter informing him of his new rival and breaks off with her. Not long thereafter, the mysterious woman’s husband visits Madame de St-Ildefonse and discovers the narrator’s hat there. When the narrator returns home, he finds a letter from the mysterious woman who refuses to meet again. Angry and disappointed, the narrator assumes that she has used him to recover the affection of a straying husband. Several months later, he visits a country estate where she is also a guest and finally discovers her name. When he is back in Paris, he begins to frequent the same social circles, which creates the impression that he is her lover. One day, he follows her out of the opera and is challenged to a duel by the marquis de la G.  The latter, it turns out, is the mysterious woman’s lover, and it is she who wrote the anonymous letter denouncing the narrator’s affair with Madame de St-Ildefonse. Her real goal in approaching the narrator on the omnibus was to recover not her husband

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but the marquis. Once again, the omnibus is the space of an aristocratic game in which the woman has the upper hand. In this case, however, the desire is not reciprocated. Unlike Gavarni’s and Picón’s heroines, the woman on the omnibus is not seeking an erotic frisson unavailable in her ordinary life but is using the narrator as a pawn in a larger chess match of which he is completely unaware. When the mysterious passenger on the omnibus is not rich but poor, the ludic quality of the encounter disappears, and the stories become more sinister. Often they feature dangerous or deceptive women from the lower classes or marginalised groups. The most banal version of this type of narrative is the attractive woman on the omnibus who turns out to be a pickpocket, a figure particularly prevalent in the song culture of the period.134 Another common motif is the innocent-looking passenger who is revealed to be more sexually experienced than she seems. French omnibus texts often evoke ‘beauties who seek to pass for new’ or the young woman who is ‘far from being a rosière’ (a virtuous girl).135 In an 1883 poem, the lyric voice meets a pretty blonde on a Parisian omnibus and invites her to dinner at a restaurant where she takes all his money and gives him in return a ‘sad souvenir’—presumably, a venereal disease.136 These two characteristics—rapaciousness and false innocence—are often combined in texts that use the illegibility of the omnibus to create an aura of mystery around a female passenger who turns out to have a hidden sexual past and a grasping nature. An example of this sort of omnibus femme fatale is the title character of Edmond de Varennes’ ‘Florentine’ (1850). At the beginning of this story, Gaston, a young man from the provinces, travels to Paris to ask his uncle’s permission to marry his fiancée. Once he arrives, however, he is overwhelmed by the ‘large world’ of the metropolis, struck with ‘the physical and moral tarantism that soon affects anyone who sets foot on the cobblestones of Paris’.137 When it begins to rain, he takes refuge in the first omnibus ‘that did not bear that discouraging inscription “Lasciat’ ogni speranza”, otherwise known as “Complet”’. (As we saw in Chap. 3, the comparison of the complet sign with the inscription above the entrance to Hell in Dante’s Inferno was a commonplace of the period.) Almost immediately, Gaston realises his mistake. The omnibus, it turns out, is going in the opposite direction from his uncle’s house. To his chagrin, moreover, he has forgotten his wallet. A ‘charming young woman’ sitting next to him pays his fare, but when he asks her name to reimburse her, she instructs him to give the money to a poor person instead. When

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she gets off accompanied by a ‘short powdered gentleman’, however, she drops a visiting card with the name Mme Lenoir. The next day the narrator, as if ‘possessed’ by an ‘intoxicating philtre’, begins to seek out his mysterious benefactress.138 At first, his search is fruitless, but just as he is about to give up, he runs into her again on the street where she is being pursued by a man who claims that she is a woman of ill repute named Florentine. Gaston rescues her from her accoster, accompanies her home, and is invited to visit the next day. When he arrives, she appears to him with ‘the fantastical effect of the apparition of Marguerite to Faust’.139 As Gaston repeats his visits, he falls deeply in love, but the woman and particularly her relationship to the ‘powdered gentleman’ remain an enigma. Sometime later, he overhears her conversing with a group of men who call her Florentine and make fun of her attachment to Gaston. When he confronts her about this, she leads him into a bedroom decorated with skulls and bones and finally reveals her story. After losing her parents in early childhood, Florentine was rescued from a troop of wandering singers by the man with the powdered hair who took her to Paris and gradually corrupted her. Only with Gaston has she learned to love. Just as Gaston asks her to marry him, however, she dies of a broken artery. In the end, the hero loses not only Florentine but also his fiancée who has become engaged to another man in his absence. With its Gothic imagery, Faustian allusions and Manichean opposition between the good country girl and the diabolical city seductress (whose dark soul is reflected in her last name, Lenoir), the story represents the omnibus as a space of danger and beguiling appearances. The initial reference to Dante foreshadows the dénouement: the omnibus initiates a descent into a social Hell (underscored by the skulls and bones) from which there is no hope of escape or redemption. The dark and ominous tone of the story contrasts with the ludic games of ‘A Feuilleton’ or ‘Antoinette’. When the mysterious character’s past is shady or low, the ambiguity is represented in a much more sinister way. A similarly enigmatic heroine is the title character of the Goncourt brothers’ novel Manette Salomon (1867) whom the aspiring artist Coriolis encounters for the first time on an omnibus. Disgusted by the vehicle, which is slow, dull, and malodorous, Coriolis initially observes in an absent-minded way: I contemplated stupidly the houses, the streets, the large machines of shadow… I came to follow them mechanically, against the shutters of the

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closed shops, the shadow of the people on the omnibus which begins again eternally… a series of silhouettes… Not even one curious chap… all of them, the heads of people who ride the omnibus… Women… women without sex, women by the parcel.140

Coriolis fixates on the shadows of both the outside world and his fellow passengers and is struck by the monotony and indifferentiation of the omnibus in which gender distinctions and specificities of character are blurred. As in many texts we have seen, the omnibus is a space not of adventure but of banality, a backdrop of ordinariness that contrasts with the uniqueness of the mysterious female passenger. With the entrance of Manette, the tone of Coriolis’ reflections changes: Have you ever remarked how all women seem mysteriously pretty in a coach at night?… Shadow, ghost, domino, I don’t know what but they have all of that… a veiled air, a voluptuous packaging, things that one senses but one doesn’t see, a vague complexion, a night-time smile, with those lights that strike their features, all of those demi-reflections that flutter their hats, those huge strokes of black they have in their eyes, even their skirt stirring in shadow.141

In keeping with his profession, Coriolis offers a painterly vision, examining the chiaroscuro effects on the women’s faces and hair. Unlike the upper-class games of ‘A Feuilleton’ and ‘Antoinette’, this is a ‘sound off’ representation of the woman, who is a visual enigma rather than a verbal sparring partner. Coriolis finds Manette charming but is aware of something vaguely foreign and ‘disconcerting’ about her. She seems neither grisette nor bourgeoise. The woman introduced in the indifferentiating space of the omnibus, thus, is one who herself blurs distinctions. This ambiguity is reinforced by the constantly shifting illumination of the space; the narrator sees her only by fleeting flashes of light along the route. As in ‘Florentine’, the illegible woman on the omnibus turns out to be a dangerous force. After Coriolis marries her, her avarice pushes him to the brink of madness. The Goncourt brothers exploit the illegibility of the omnibus and the vulgarity of its passengers not only to create a sense of mystery around Manette but also to anticipate the dénouement, Coriolis’ descent into banality. The classic British example of this type of narrative is Wilkie Collins’ Basil (1852) whose title character meets on an omnibus a femme fatale who brings about his ruin. In the first edition of the novel, the encounter

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with the mysterious woman is preceded by an intriguing conversation with a disfigured passenger. When Basil asks about his facial scars, the man explains that they are ‘of [his] own making’.142 As a veterinarian, he has on a number of occasions been bitten by mad dogs and has had to excise the resulting wounds. The passenger then tells the story of an apprentice named Tosh who cut his finger with an infected tool but refused to allow the wound to be cauterised. Soon the finger swelled, but Tosh would not allow it to be cut off. When the infection spread to his arm, he again rejected amputation. Eventually his entire body swelled, and the veterinarian offered him prussic acid to put him out of his misery, but Tosh resisted and ultimately died a painful death. After the veterinarian leaves the omnibus, the remaining passengers discuss the anecdote. While some are repulsed by the doctor and make ‘strong remarks on his character’, Basil defends him: ‘His humanity might be ignorant enough—but was it the less humanity, in him, on that account? My fellow-passengers said, Yes, very much less. I differed with them’.143 The opening of the episode underscores Basil’s willingness to enter a lower social sphere and to appreciate the virtues of its humble occupants and represents the omnibus as a ‘small world’ in which people engage in collective conversations and openly share experiences and points of view. In his interpretation of the anecdote, however, Basil draws the wrong conclusion. The point of the story is not the doctor’s humanity but rather the danger of Tosh’s obstinacy. After the veterinarian leaves, a veiled woman enters the omnibus with her mother. As Basil helps her in, he briefly touches her arm and is transfixed by their contact: ‘how the sense of that touch was prolonged! I felt it thrilling through me—thrilling in every nerve, in every pulsation of my fast-throbbing heart’.144 This emphasis on a momentary touching that quickly spreads throughout his body suggests a parallelism between Basil and Tosh, whose brief contact with the infected tool poisons his entire organism. Just as the apprentice refuses to cut off his finger and then his arm, Basil will be unable to separate himself from this femme fatale. Like Florentine who is an ‘intoxicating philtre’ for Gaston, the woman in the omnibus will prove a venom in Basil’s life.145 The entrance of the woman not only electrifies Basil but also confuses him. While initially he defines the omnibus as a legible space—he compares riding it to ‘reading for the first time an entertaining book’—and prides himself on his ‘aptitude for discovering points of character in others’, he is perplexed by this woman: ‘My powers of observation, hitherto active enough, had now wholly deserted me’.146 Like Manette, she is not

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easily classified. Although Basil does not know her, she seems strangely familiar: ‘It seemed as if I must have known her in some former state of being—as if I had died for her, or she for me, after living for each other and with each other in some past world; and that we were now revived and reunited again’.147 The ambiguous nature of the omnibus—at once public and intimate—and the collective conversation among the passengers create a false sense of a ‘small world’ in which one encounters familiar faces. This feeling of connection leads Basil to pursue the mysterious passenger with disastrous consequences. The woman, it turns out, is a middle-­ class adventuress who, though secretly betrothed to her father’s assistant (another deeply illegible character), lures the well-born protagonist into a frustratingly long engagement. The novel makes clear that Basil’s sin is to frequent people beneath his rank. The ‘poison’ in his case is precisely his readiness to lower himself socially, to enter an omnibus, to defend a vulgar veterinarian, and to associate with a disreputable upstart. In Collins’ novel, the ‘small world’ effect that Basil experiences turns out to be a misleading sign, which blinds him to the dangers and unknowability of the ‘large world’ that is London. Most texts about the illegibility of the omnibus, indeed, view the city as vast and unfamiliar. Occasionally, however, the revelation of the hidden identity leads to the discovery of an unexpectedly ‘small world’. This is a common motif in comic texts. In a British ditty, for example, a man runs after a pretty girl on the Putney Bus only to realise at the end that she is his wife, and in a French text, a young woman who plays a prank on a flirtatious old man on the omnibus discovers on arrival that he is her boyfriend’s father.148 In other texts, however, the shift from a ‘large’ to a ‘small’ world can be used to give meaning and coherence to a life lacking direction. In a British story by the ‘New Woman’ writer Eliza Margaret Jane Gollan—‘Knot in a Handkerchief’ (1889)—a man observes a woman tying a piece of cloth and so longs to ask her the meaning of the sign that he feels ‘hot and cold with dread and suspense’.149 A collision jolts her into his arms and leads to a brief conversation, but he does not inquire about the handkerchief. During the rest of the day, he finds himself thinking about the ‘desirability of attaining wealth; of having a house of one’s own; of the joys of domesticity, as opposed to bachelorhood’. The woman’s gesture has subtly led him to reflect on the advantages of tying the knot, but he observes that ‘it was not the face, or the eyes, or the girl herself; it was only, and simply, and entirely that she had chosen to puzzle me into conjectures about that knot in the handkerchief’.150 After work, he visits a painter and discovers on his easel a portrait

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of the woman on the omnibus. As it turns out, she is an accomplished actress capable of representing a lady ‘without affectation’. Surprised by the coincidence, the narrator wonders at ‘how small the world seems, and how one is always knocking up against people quite unexpectedly’.151 The tying of the knot now represents not only the domestic ideal but also a bringing together of the loose ends of the large city, a revelation of hidden connections among people. Eventually, the narrator meets the woman again and asks about her gesture. She explains that she tied the knot to remind herself to buy a copy of his book. Just as he is longing to read her sign, she is reminding herself of her desire to read him. This final revelation underscores not just the smallness of their world but also the requited nature of their affection. In the end, the protagonist wins his fortune abroad and returns to marry the actress. As in ‘A Feuilleton’, the answered riddle leads to marriage. The emphasis here, however, lies not on the sparring of wits but rather on the connectedness of the world, the unsuspected knots in the social handkerchief. Still other stories probe the tension between ‘large world’ and ‘small world’ views of the city. In Louis Ulbach’s story ‘Histoire à faire peur’ (1884), a youth from the provinces is surprised when a well-dressed man, travelling with his attractive daughter, pats him on the knee and invites him along with his friends to a house-warming party. Disconcerted to be invited by a complete stranger, the young man gets off the omnibus as soon as he can. When he relates his adventure to his companions, however, they are intrigued and convince him to attend the party with them. The description of the house and the guests is replete with Gothic images and insinuations of danger. The host lives in a neighbourhood known for nocturnal ambushes; the old women in attendance resemble sorceresses or fairies on the prowl for ‘fresh flesh’; and when the guests are offered a sumptuous meal, they suspect that ogres are fattening them up in order to devour them later on. At nightfall, their worst fears seem to come true. Just as they are about to leave, their host, observing the dangers of the neighbourhood, blocks the door and insists they spend the night. Terrified, they escape, jumping over a garden wall only to be arrested by the police patrolling the area. The next morning the magistrate recognises them as fellow guests at the party and bursts out laughing when he hears their story. Their host, it turns out, is a former omnibus conductor who has recently inherited a large fortune. To find guests for his party, he has returned to the space he knows best. The ending hints at a possible marriage between the protagonist and the conductor’s daughter.152 In

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Ulbach’s work, the ex-conductor and protagonist take opposite approaches. The former projects the ‘small world’ of his family sphere onto the omnibus where he recruits guests and a potential son-in-law, while the latter projects the ‘large world’ of the city onto the party, which he considers more forbidding than it is. As in ‘Knot in a Handkerchief’, it is the reassertion of a ‘small world’—the coincidence of a magistrate who has attended the party and who knows the host’s story—that allows the lovers to unite.

The Iterative Whereas fleeting omnibus encounters generally represent the city as a large world to which the object of desire is ultimately lost forever, iterative stories depict the omnibus as a space experienced as a ‘small world’ in which passengers regularly meet and develop an acquaintance or sense of familiarity over time. Such texts often build relationships gradually from ‘sound off’ to ‘sound on’, beginning with eye contact and polite gestures, which eventually lead to small talk and meetings outside the omnibus. Unlike the coups de foudre of fleeting and illegible encounters, thus, iterative narratives have a slower rhythm; as characters meet regularly, there is no ticking clock. In these stories, moreover, there is generally a greater reciprocity of feeling or interest than in fleeting encounters in which the desire is almost always unidirectional. Nevertheless, the man and the woman often come to these relationships with different expectations, which ultimately make them incompatible as a couple. When iterative stories are focalised through the male passenger, relationships can develop in a positive way. In Hector Malot’s Un beau-frère (1868), for example, a young man named Céneri rides the omnibus every day with a pretty music teacher named Cyprienne. Having read that the gaze can have a magnetising effect, Céneri begins to stare at different parts of her body: One day it was her ear that I chose; another day, her black headbands simply smoothed over her forehead; another day her red lips, fresh like a pomegranate flower; another day her hands; and well! I assure you, you are perhaps going to laugh, I assure you that more than once I saw her ear blush under the fire of my gaze; more than once, I saw her chest swell and beat as if a fluid, something unknown and without a name, shot by my looks, passed into her, awoke a sympathy, a sensibility, life in that ear or that chest, and put her in communication with me. All this, of course, without her lifting her

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eyes from that devil of a book, that is, without her seeing that I was looking at her. One does not engage in such a game with impunity; I had begun out of pure absent-mindedness, to ease the boredom of the ride; it wasn’t long before I began to feel that I was caught and had to admit to myself that I loved her.153

Céneri resorts to the fetishistic gaze that typifies many fleeting encounters (e.g., d’Hervilly’s ‘Une main’) but over time comes to feel a genuine love for Cyprienne. By contemplating each part, he comes to appreciate the whole. Interestingly, the passage describes the seduction as a circular process. Céneri is projecting a ‘life’ onto the inert woman, whose body seems to take up the energy that he transmits. It is as if he is making a statue come to life. As she assumes the life projected upon her, however, he falls under her sway. The seducer is seduced by his repeated projection. As a site of regular encounters and silent ocular exchanges, the omnibus is an ideal setting for this type of slow, hypnotic seduction. The two characters eventually wed but their story ends tragically. To prevent Céneri from inheriting a fortune, his brother-in-law has him interned in an insane asylum. Cyprienne engages in a long legal fight to free him, but when he is finally released, he is so traumatised by the experience that he commits suicide. The projection of desire in the omnibus is in a sense the inverted image of the projection of madness later in the novel. In both instances, Malot explores forms of psychological control and manipulation. Unlike the femmes fatales of illegible encounters, however, Cyprienne is not an adventuress but rather a loyal wife and supporter of Céneri. When the female passenger’s perspective is also represented, however, these relationships tend to be disappointing. Like Cyprienne, the women featured in iterative stories generally work for a living, and the omnibus forms part of their daily commute. These texts often emphasise the suffocating monotony and banality of their routine, symbolised by the confinement and repetition of the omnibus rides. As in stories about fleeting encounters, the vehicle offers a backdrop of vulgarity that foregrounds the special quality of the sentimental experience narrated. The feelings evoked are generally requited but often in an asymmetrical way, with the man generally less committed than the woman. Like illegible encounters, ‘iterative’ texts frequently end in revelations. Generally, however, it is not the male but the female passenger who is disappointed to discover the true

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nature of her beloved. ‘Iterative’ stories also differ from illegible encounters in that the emphasis lies less on the struggle to interpret an ambiguous individual than on a sense of trust or connection that is ultimately betrayed. The dénouement often involves a brutal shift from a ‘small’ to a ‘large world’. The repeated encounters create a false sense of intimacy: a familiar face makes the ‘large world’ seem ‘small’, but ultimately this is an illusion. A clear example of this type of narrative is Guy de Maupassant’s story ‘Le Père’ (1883) about a bureaucrat who sits in front of a young woman on the omnibus every day on his way to work. As in Ribalta’s ‘El tranvía’, the story begins referring to the protagonist only with the third-person pronoun (il); his name, François, is revealed only in the sentence describing his first encounter with Louise who seems to represent his ‘ideal of love’. The suggestion is that it is only with this love affair that François comes into being and acquires a subjectivity that goes beyond the empty routine of his commute and his rote government job. From the outset, François is torn between a romantic vision of love and a possessive desire. Although he perceives Louise as an ideal, he is unable to control his gaze on the omnibus: ‘He looked at her stubbornly, despite himself. Bothered by this contemplation, she blushed. He noticed this and tried to turn his eyes away, but he kept bringing them to her, although he made an effort to direct them elsewhere’.154 This hesitation between respect and desire reflects to a certain extent the ambiguous nature of the omnibus, which, as Masha Belenky notes, ‘blur[s] the boundaries between public and private’.155 Although François’ insistent gaze makes Louise uncomfortable, after a while they begin to recognise one another, and when the omnibus is full, he offers her his seat and climbs to the impériale. Eventually, they begin to converse, developing an ‘intimacy of a half an hour each day’. One day François invites her to lunch in the countryside. Before they leave, she begs him to respect her virginity, and he swears to do so, at once relieved and disappointed: ‘he perhaps preferred it this way; and yet… and yet he had allowed himself to be cradled that night by dreams that had put fire in his veins’. Their conversation in the countryside underscores the awkwardness of their relationship. As they stroll through the idyllic landscape, she complains of the monotony of her life—‘it’s so sad, every day, the same thing’—and he kisses her ear, leading her to protest, ‘Oh, monsieur François, after what you swore to me’. After lunch, he suddenly he asks her name. When she answers, ‘Louise’, he repeats her name and says nothing more. The couple’s unequal knowledge of one another (she uses his

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first name while he is ignorant of hers), the strange order of their conversation (they discuss sex before he even knows her name), and his silence when she confides her feelings reveal François’ fundamental lack of interest in her as an individual. Unlike  in illegible encounters in which the object of desire is an enigma to resolve, the young woman inspires little curiosity in François. From the beginning, he sees her as an object not to be known but to be possessed: ‘It seemed to him that the complete possession of that little person would be for him insane happiness’. She represents an antidote to his tedious, anonymous existence, the possibility of an event. To a certain extent, her own desire is similar; she too longs to escape from the relentless monotony of her life. Eventually, the two lovers consummate their relationship without saying a word: she gives herself to him fully ‘without knowing what she was doing, without even understanding that she had delivered herself to him’. Afterwards, when she ‘wakes up’ and realises what she has done, she is disconsolate. The next day on the omnibus, she breaks off the relationship; even when he promises to marry her, she refuses. Nine days later, however, she arrives at his house and throws herself into his arms. For three months, Louise lives with François as his mistress, but he quickly tires of domestic life. When she becomes pregnant, he stealthily moves out and disappears from her life. The relationship, initiated as an antidote to monotony, has become monotonous in its own right. The story draws a distinction between two chronotopes: the iterative temporality of the city and the event-time of the countryside. Once the lovers return from the latter to the former, their relationship reverts to its iterative logic, which wears down the sentiments and ideals of the natural space. After moving, François resumes his banal and lonely routine: ‘He led the monotonous and sorrowful existence of bureaucrats, without hope and without expectations’.156 Some years later, in the Parc Monceau, François sees Louise, now a bourgeois housewife with a dignified air, with a boy who seems a younger version of himself. An honest neighbour has taken pity on Louise and married her. François goes back to the park and approaches Louise, but she runs away with the child. For months afterward, he fixates on the idea of kissing his son. Here again, his longing is crystallised in a single act; just as he yearned to possess Louise years earlier, he will now do anything to hug his son just once. He sends Louise various letters, which go unanswered. Finally, he writes to her husband, who allows him to visit. When the child is brought to him, François subjects him to a possessive embrace: ‘seizing the little one in his arms, he began

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to kiss him madly all over his face, his eyes, his cheeks, his mouth, his hair. The boy, scared by this hail of kisses, tried to avoid them, turned his head away, pushed away with his small hands the gluttonous lips of that man’. Afterwards, François puts the child down and escapes ‘like a thief’.157 In its structure, the second half of the story resembles the first; it begins with a period of monotony, followed by an encounter that produces a desire (François’ longing for Louise in the first and for his son in the second), and ends with its realisation, which provokes an escape back into the routine and anonymity of bureaucratic life. In each case, the desire is associated with a natural space: the countryside and the park. But where the former represents a wild, unthinking desire, unrestrained by convention, the Parc Monceau stands for a pleasure held in check by civilisation; as Belenky notes, it is ‘a space of propriety’.158 The shift underscores Louise’s evolution, her transition from inexperienced young woman to responsible wife. François, in contrast, is condemned to repetition. Just as his life is meaninglessly iterative—a repetition symbolised by his omnibus commute—his reencounter with Louise is nothing more than a reenactment of the past. The omnibus commute is a metaphor for the circular nature of his routine and of his desire, his inability to grow and develop as a subject. Another example of incompatible expectations is Camille Lemonnier’s ‘Un amour en omnibus’ (1889), a story about a woman named Noémie Bonamour who returns home on an omnibus each night after squaring the accounts of the bakery where she works as a cashier.159 At 38, she is generally considered a spinster, and her sedentary lifestyle—for 20 years she has spent 12 hours a day behind a counter—has padded her waistline. The first part of the story describes in painstaking detail the monotony of Noémie’s routine from her arrival at work to her departure on the omnibus. On her commute, she regularly coincides with Eusèbe Plèche, ‘a gastralgic and overindulgent fifty-something’ who rides the same line: ‘in front of her, with the abrupt fits of light alternating with the passage of shadows, she perceived her friend M. Plèche’s silk top hat, turned brown through wear and tear and washings, oscillating with the regularity of the swaying and dithering suddenly at the stops in confused and reiterated twitches’. The flickering light through which Noémie views him suggests her limited perception and understanding of his character. The second part of the story is a long flashback tracing the slow development of their relationship. Lemonnier insists on the reciprocal nature of

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their exchanges, often using reflexive pronouns: at first ‘they hardly looked at each other’; then they begin to pay ‘a little more attention to each other, without departing from a mutual reserve’. The text also highlights the similarity of their thoughts. Just as Noémie wonders who he is and notices the absence of a wedding band, he is ‘tormented by a similar idea’ until she removes her glove to reveal a ringless finger. On another ride, she notices that he has waited for her, while he observes that she has run to arrive on time. As the relationship develops, however, it becomes less symmetrical. Noémie would like for Plèche to speak to her but for months he remains silent. Eventually they do engage in small talk: ‘they now said small nothings that they repeated to themselves with delight’ later on. Nevertheless, his desire seems somewhat at odds with hers. Whereas she is touched by his ‘poetic sensibility’ and his ‘heart’, he is drawn to the ‘sumptuous elasticity of her bosom’. When the lovers finally reveal their identities to each other after three years of acquaintance, Eusèbe Plèche notes the contrast between the ‘musical cadences’ of Noémie Bonamour’s name and the ‘vulgarity’ of his own—an asymmetry that anticipates the dénouement. The second part of the story concludes by returning to the initial image of the flickering light in the omnibus: And the years passed thus—always together taking the omnibus at Madeleine, that ten-o’clock omnibus that, through the silent streets, with the gaslight flickering suddenly in the interior on the bobbing figures and then immediately afterwards bouts of shadows that sketched in black the hollow of the cheeks, the inside of the ears, the dark spots under the eyes, fired its noisy salvos scraping the sidewalks at bends, splashing puddles at grooves, making its invariable parabolas toward inalterably identical horizons. She, reliving in that passion to the trot of three white horses all the arrears of youth, the eighteen years of her heart, which had beaten a little in all directions but had never given itself—and he, through the rifts of light and dark in which the heavy yellow box hid itself and emerged, conveying, through blinking eyelashes, a languishing glance, a simple and frank gaze, a bit of his joy at extracting from the banal world that surrounded them their poor dear love story.

The play of light and shadow here recalls the passage in Manette Salomon in which the heroine first appears on the omnibus at night. But whereas in the Goncourts’ novel the chiaroscuro increases the mystery and appeal of the ambiguous figure, the alternation of light and shadow has a more

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rhythmical effect in Lemonnier’s story. The emphasis here lies on the sameness of the trajectory—‘invariable parabolas’ and ‘invariably identical horizons’—and the repeated variations in lighting. The use of the omnibus gives a sense of longue durée and serves as a backdrop of banality that contrasts with the precious connection developing between the middle-­ aged protagonists. The third part of the story shifts from the imperfect tense, the description of iterative actions, to the narration of a specific event. At Carnival, Plèche invites Noémie to take a walk with him through the streets full of masked revelers. As midnight approaches, he takes her to a restaurant in the Latin Quarter with a private dining room. As they eat, they recall the development of their relationship, but at a certain point, the server locks them in, and Plèche begins to grope Noémie, prompting her to escape through a window.160 Her parting words draw attention to the asymmetry of their expectations: ‘Ah! monsieur Plèche, I thought that this was for life’. Their desires differ not only in nature (spiritual versus carnal) but also in temporality: whereas she takes pleasure in the durée, in the iterations, and in the route, he (like Maupassant’s protagonist) looks forward to a destination and an event, the satisfaction of his desire. It might be tempting to classify Lemonnier’s and Maupassant’s stories as examples of the ‘illegible’. The male protagonists turn out to be very different from what they initially seem. Both men, however, do appear genuinely enamoured of the women at first. François is drawn to Louise because she represents an ‘ideal love’. He is not a predatory seducer but a slightly autistic individual who struggles to understand himself. His inability to engage the world and to form lasting relationships is a character flaw from which he suffers just as much as Louise does, if not more. Plèche is also a complex character, an odd combination of diffidence and aggression. It is noteworthy that the final episode in which he transgresses boundaries takes place during Carnival. In agreeing to the promenade and dinner, Noémie is embracing the transgressive spirit of the festival, playfully adopting a different persona. When he proposes the walk, she jokes, ‘but what if someone sees us?’, and when he suggests a restaurant with a private room, she jokes that he is becoming truly ‘dangerous’. Noémie is ‘slumming’ in the spirit of Carnival, exploring a seedier side of Paris that contrasts with her decorous spinsterhood. To a certain extent, the long iterative nature of their relationship has made Plèche a familiar figure and has taught her to trust him. From her perspective (and ours as readers), the dénouement is a revelation. Plèche, however, interprets Noémie’s

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acceptance of his proposals in another light. Day after day for six years, her wishes have been a mirror of his own. It is perhaps unsurprising that he assumes that his desire is requited in the restaurant as well. After all, honest women generally did not dine alone with men in restaurants. The ending ultimately seems a misunderstanding, resulting from an asymmetry in their expectations. Unlike the ambiguous characters in illegible stories, François and Plèche are not seeking to deceive but are rather awkward and divided figures. The final revelation is not the true nature of the protagonist—something hidden by a false appearance—but another side of his character, one that he himself does not quite know how to handle. Lemonnier’s and Maupassant’s stories are subtle, realist explorations of mundane lives and awkward miscommunications. In more popular literature, however, the male characters in such narratives are not reserved and inhibited but rather scheming and unscrupulous. Often these works have a fairy-tale structure: a young woman whose family has lost its fortune coincides regularly on an omnibus with a man from a higher sphere who seduces her. Her Prince Charming, however, turns out to be deceitful and unprincipled. In the end, she is rescued by a decent man or family member. The title character of Frances Cashel Hoey’s story ‘Dulcie’s Delusion’ (1871), for example, is an Irish girl from a good family who has come down in the world and must earn her living in Paris. A few times a week, she takes an omnibus to give English lessons to the daughters of a Parisian couple. At first, Dulcie feels degraded rubbing shoulders with working-­ class passengers, but one day she sits across from an elegant youth who seems almost English and ‘who differed very much from its general occupants’.161 The next day she sees him again, and he makes it clear to her that he recognises her. The young man, whose name is Léon, works for the same family as an art teacher. Dulcie, who has been thrown suddenly into a new social class and a foreign context, latches onto Léon whose predicament and lowered status seem to mirror her own. As she continues to meet him on the omnibus, she gradually falls in love. To dress well and offer him gifts, she begins to stint on food. Soon after, however, Léon disappears, and Dulcie, on the point of starvation, falls ill and loses her job. Eventually, a neighbour who nurses her back to health reveals that Léon is actually married. In this story, the repeated encounters in the omnibus make the large, foreign metropolis seem a recognisable ‘small world’, but the impression is ultimately a dangerous ‘delusion’ as the title indicates. By placing the initial encounter on the omnibus rather than in

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their shared workplace, the story identifies Léon with the ‘large world’ of Paris in which identities are misleading. A similarly predatory seducer appears in Adrien Paul’s melodramatic novella ‘Nicette’ (1859) about the illegitimate daughter of an aristocratic family who teaches in the boarding school where she was raised. On holidays, Nicette takes the omnibus to visit Albertine, an old school friend with a wealthy husband. One day, a man named Édouard sits across from her on the omnibus and looks at her ‘with such persistence’ that she closes her eyes and pretends to sleep. When she changes lines, he sits next to her at the omnibus station. She longs to move away from him but is reluctant to show that she has observed his ‘pursuit’. When he starts a conversation, she replies only to avoid being taken ‘for an idiot or for a mute’.162 Like François in Maupassant’s story, Édouard is clearly cornering Nicette, transgressing a boundary with his gaze. As he begins to repeat his omnibus trips, however, Nicette’s resistance wears down. Édouard, it turns out, is Albertine’s cousin and belongs to the elegant world from which Nicette has been excluded by birth. As in ‘Dulcie’s Delusion’, thus, the characters meet in two different spaces: the omnibus (part of a large world in which morals are looser) and the upper-class domestic sphere (where Dulcie works and Nicette visits her friend). A practised seducer, Édouard uses the familiarity created by their regular encounters to manipulate Nicette. When she refuses to spend a day with him, he punishes her by missing their next meeting and ignoring her at Albertine’s. When she finally agrees, he takes her to the private room of a restaurant, where, like Lemonnier’s Plèche, he makes inappropriate advances prompting Nicette to flee. The two stories, however, differ in an important way. In Lemonnier’s tale, nothing in Plèche’s behaviour over six years of omnibus encounters anticipates the dénouement. Édouard’s conduct, in contrast, is improper from the outset. The adventure with Édouard is the first of a series of melodramatic episodes in which various men attempt (unsuccessfully) to seduce or assault Nicette. In the end, however, she rediscovers a lost brother and marries a noble suitor. The omnibus, here, serves to remove her from the respectability of her boarding school and to plunge her into the treacherous ‘large world’ of the city, full of seedy characters and unclear intentions. It is a space of ambiguity that leads her astray. In most iterative texts, the men introduced on the omnibus turn out to be dangerous. The disappointment in these stories is all the more poignant because of the familiarity that has developed over time and the woman’s intense longing to escape a mundane or degrading existence.163 We should

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note, however, that all these examples are set in Paris. In the British context, the iterative encounter is often used in a lighter way. Netta Syrett’s ‘The Royal Blue’ (1893), for example, adopts the viewpoint of a conductor for whom the omnibus is sort of ambulatory theatre: ‘It’s like bein’ at the “Delphi”, pon my word it is! Only it’s aggravatin’ not seein’ the end of the pl’y sometimes’.164 The conductor regularly observes a young man and woman who commute to work and seem to be falling in love. One day, however, the youth climbs to the roof rather than going inside with the young lady. For several days, the conductor tries to understand their behaviour waiting for the ending of the play but ‘still the curtain did not descend’.165 Finally, he devises a stratagem to force the youth to go inside, and the two lovers are reunited. In some ways, the conductor recalls Gavarni’s Devil-conductor who also brings two lovers together—both intervene in authorial ways on the omnibus—but where the French tale emphasises the unknowability of the space, the English story underscores its legibility and converts the omnibus into a ‘small world’. The iterative tale works in a similar way in ‘The Green Omnibus’ (1897), a story published in a girls’ magazine. The tale opens as a young clerk named John returns a hat dropped by a young woman named Maisie on alighting from an omnibus. Gradually a friendship develops over repeated trips: John is always there when Maisie gets off and walks her part of her way home. He also coincides with her in a course for Sunday school teachers. As in ‘The Royal Blue’, however, a misunderstanding soon brings this idyll to an end. When John is offered a job in America, he decides to deliver the news to Maisie not where she gets off but where she gets on and when he arrives, he sees her in the company of another man whom he mistakes for a rival. John begins to avoid her taking a different route home. One afternoon, though, he passes a railway station just as Maisie is bidding farewell to the other man whom she introduces as her brother-in-law from America. The story ends with the couple’s reconciliation as they return on the ‘green omnibus’.166 For the first time, they ride together. In this story, the omnibus trajectory serves to demarcate the beginning and end points of Maisie’s Bildung: her family is identified with the stop where she gets on, and her future husband, with her destination. As in the French stories, this iterative tale involves a misunderstanding, but in the British context, the urban space is represented as a ‘small world’ in which the lovers find each other again and in which love is reciprocated.

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The Double Another form of repetition in omnibus stories is the encounter with a ‘double’, someone who is uncannily similar to an acquaintance or someone whom a passenger feels he has met in the past. In these works, the city is generally perceived as a ‘large world’ but one that occasionally provokes a strange sense of déjà vu. The metropolis is so immense and so varied that eventually it seems to repeat itself, producing beings or experiences that are eerily familiar. Often, these simulacra serve to displace desire from one person to another. A clear example of this type of doubling is Gabriel Marc’s sketch ‘La Jeune Fille du coin de l’omnibus’ (1868), which begins with an imperative that immediately throws the reader into the scene: ‘She is there, in the corner of the coach, in her usual place. Look at the omnibus that is passing and you’ll see her’. The narrator then explains that he has observed the woman for a long time and has even figured out her name. ‘In short,’ he confesses, ‘I was madly in love with her’. At this point, the story resembles the standard ‘iterative’ tale of growing familiarity and affection. As it continues, however, we begin to note something odd about this relationship: ‘I looked at the omnibuses. In each one, I saw the young girl of my dreams, always the same, blonde, lively, graceful and mischievous’. All of a sudden, the young woman seems to have multiplied or become omnipresent. Then the narrator hails an omnibus and gets on just as a girl descends: A young girl got off it. I got on; and I observed with chagrin that the place that had become available was precisely one of the last ones at the back. The young woman of the corner of the omnibus had just gotten off. She had disappeared into the crowd.

In these lines, he seems to recognise the woman as his beloved only after he identifies the seat she has vacated. The woman is in a sense a placeholder. The narrator almost immediately gets off and hails another omnibus, in which he finds himself ‘in front of her’. We now realise that almost any woman can be the titular young woman of the corner of the omnibus as long as she occupies the right seat. The phrase functions almost as a pronoun. The commonplace of the fille du coin is defined by her place on the common vehicle that is the omnibus. In some ways, the narrator of this story resembles the grey-haired gentleman in Gourdon’s La Physiologie de l’omnibus who indulges in fantasies

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about one pretty passenger after another. But whereas the latter appreciates the differences among the women, this narrator conflates them all into a single invariable type. Unlike Gourdon’s character, moreover, he eventually does break the ice. At one point, he follows the fille du coin off the omnibus and asks her why she always chooses that seat. In the corner, she replies, ‘[n]o one bothers you. You could almost believe that you’re in your own coach’. The narrator is disappointed by this answer. It confronts him with a reality the grey-haired gentleman never faces: the non-­reciprocal nature of his desire. The narrator has made the mistake of shifting from ‘sound off’ to ‘sound on’, of crossing the divide between his fictional projection and reality. Almost immediately, however, he is consoled when he sees another omnibus with ‘the young girl of the corner of the omnibus in her usual spot’.167 Through this doubling, his desire is easily displaced from one woman to another. Although the simulacra are jarring for the reader, they are ultimately reassuring for the narrator—a source of continuity that makes the large world familiar and predictable. In Marc’s sketch, what links the women is their physical location—the corner seat—but more commonly the connection is an uncanny physical resemblance. In J. Loring’s story ‘Las dos rosas’ (1899), a man named Juan, who has led the ‘existence of an automaton’ or of a ‘living dead person’ after losing his fortune and a beloved wife, meets a woman on a tram who eerily resembles her. Distracted by his grief, Juan does not notice her at first—as usual, his eyes ‘looked without seeing’—but he is taken aback on hearing her voice. The narrator conveys his thoughts through free indirect discourse: ‘Do the dead speak? Has the tomb opened? Or has a madness, a repugnant but liberating madness, taken over his brain?’ When Juan turns to look at her, he is even more struck by her uncanny similarity to his late wife: The divine form could not be lost; that special blend of colour and line, of line and expression, of expression and sentiment, that paragon of perfections could not die. It is she, without being the same woman; those blue eyes that look at him with surprise, picaresque and affectionate at the same time, are her eyes; those are the lips that he has kissed so many times; […] and that clear and sonorous voice, which vibrates in the soul, leaving a memory of love, is the voice that he hears in his dreams.

He murmurs ‘Rosa’, his wife’s name, which surprises the young woman, who wonders how he knows her. When she looks at him, she too feels a

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‘strange sensation’. She observes with wonder his transformation, the way he gradually takes on ‘expression and life’. He too seems to be coming back from the dead. Several months later, their roles are reversed. Now it is Rosa whose gaze is distracted, ‘not fix[ing] on anyone’, and who experiences a sudden trembling and rush of blood on seeing Juan enter the patio of her family’s house. Just as Juan finds in Rosa the echo of his late wife, she finds in him a vague reminiscence: ‘Rosa asks herself if she has not seen that man many years before. It seems to her that she has loved him very much in another period, when she was a girl’. What brings the lovers together, thus, is a bizarre doubling of the past, which makes them somehow familiar to each other and breaks down the walls that normally separate tram passengers. The symmetry between the two episodes underscores the requited nature of their love. The story ends with their marriage and the symbolic resurrection of Juan: like the rose of Jericho, Rosa’s voice has recalled his body from the tomb.168 Another example of a doubling that displaces desire from one woman to another is ‘Montrouge-Gare de l’Est’, one of Émile Dartès’ Contes en omnibus (1893). Its protagonist Paul is a well-off bachelor whose maid Marie is the daughter of a servant who married her boss and hopes that her offspring will do the same. Paul is attracted to Marie but sees through her attempts to seduce him. After he teases her one afternoon, she resigns in a fit of pique. Shortly afterward, he takes a tram on which he falls under the spell of an elegant woman wearing a thick veil. At the last station, he follows her off the tram. At first, she resists his advances, but when a lightning storm breaks out, they take refuge together under a carriage door where they strike up a conversation, and he kisses her (‘she was vanquished’). Eventually, they stroll through a solitary Buttes-Chaumont where she finally lifts her veil, reveals her name—Marie Lucienne—and confides her frustration with her marriage to a prosaic businessman. She is willing to accept Paul, however, only as a platonic lover. Henceforth, she resolves, she will be ‘Marie’ for her husband and ‘Lucienne’ for Paul. They plan to meet again the next day at the Pigalle omnibus station, but when he arrives, she is nowhere to be found. Only as he is about to leave does he catch sight of her. She is surprised when he addresses her as Lucienne instead of Marie, but Paul repeats her promise from the night before: ‘let us leave the name of Marie to the master, to the tyrant! For the friend, for the lover, you will be Lucienne!’169 Together they return to his home where Paul realises to his chagrin that ‘Lucienne’ is actually his maid

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Marie. The mysterious woman from the tram has most likely had second thoughts, and by pure coincidence, Marie, her uncanny double, entered the omnibus station shortly after the planned rendez-vous. Through this doubling, the large world of the city is reduced to small one, and desire is once again displaced from one woman to another. Ultimately, Paul behaves as a gentleman and marries his maid. The final shift from ‘Lucienne’ to ‘Marie’ not only marks the transition from one woman to another but also the change in Paul’s role from lover to spouse, as ‘Marie’ is the name reserved for the husband. Where Gabriel Marc’s sketch gives the sense of a vast metropolis full of replicas, Dartès’ story moves from a large world to a small one. Another example of such a transition is Carlos Frontaura’s novel La novela de un joven rico, which was published in instalments in the Ilustración española y americana in 1873 and later as a book entitled Mano de ángel. Set against the backdrop of the sexenio revolucionario—the period of instability in Spain between the Glorious Revolution of 1868 and the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874—the novel is a Bildungsroman about an Andalusian youth named Joaquín who moves to Madrid to complete his education. Early in the novel, his widowed mother worries about sending him to the capital in the midst of such upheaval. She consents to the trip, however, when an old friend, Salvadora, offers to take him under her wing. One day, when Joaquín is riding the Madrid tram, he sits across from a heavily veiled woman and is intrigued by her beautiful hand adorned with a distinctive ruby. When she discovers that she has forgotten her wallet, he pays her fare. After she descends, he becomes obsessed with the idea of finding her again. He later runs into her—always veiled—at the opera, at the bedside of a dying man, and at church, and soon she begins to send him letters, signed Soledad, in which she offers advice. Nevertheless, he is unable to discover her identity. One night at a masked ball, she is drawn aside by a man whom a friend believes to be a marquis with an accomplished but reclusive daughter named Soledad. Joaquín becomes convinced that the veiled woman from the tram is the marquis’ daughter. When he overhears a young man insulting her, he reprimands him and is challenged to a duel. His prudent second, however, replaces the bullets with duds so that no one is hurt. After hearing about the duel, the marquis travels from Bayonne to Madrid to rebuke Joaquín but is so impressed by the young man’s integrity and honesty that he invites him to visit his family in France.

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At the end of the novel, Joaquín takes up the invitation and meets the marquis’ daughter who is of the same height and wears the same ruby ring as the woman in the tram, but her voice is very different. Unlike in other stories of doubling, the similarity is not a coincidence. The woman on the tram, it turns out, is Salvadora, who has enacted a ‘novel’ of her own invention. Her own son, whom Joaquín uncannily resembles, has died of love for a heartless coquette. Salvadora, in keeping with her name (‘saviour’ in Spanish), has sought to save Joaquín from a similar fate by becoming a placeholder for his affection. The ruby she wears is identical to a ring that belongs to his mother and to another worn by the marquis’ daughter. Salvadora thus has served as a double that subliminally transfers Joaquín’s love for his mother to the bride whom she has chosen for him.170 Ultimately, Joaquín’s freedom is just as a much a simulacrum as his duel. His movements are continually manipulated by his hostess and her friends; he is but a character in her ‘novel’. The three women in Joaquín’s life—his mother, the woman in the tram, and his bride—turn out to be doubles of one another, embodiments of the same values of domesticity, faith, and virtue. In Frontaura’s novel, the resemblance is the product not (as in ‘Las dos rosas’) of the accidental doubling of a ‘large world’ but rather of a carefully contrived plan to keep the hero within the small world of approved family acquaintances. The omnibus is generally perceived in the nineteenth century as a heterogeneous space, a window into social and individual differences. The stories examined in this section, however, represent an encounter with similarity, a moment in which the vast city seems to fold back on itself, producing an eerie mirror effect. In Frontaura’s novel the resemblance is contrived, part of a plan to ‘save’ the protagonist, and in Gabriel Marc’s ‘La Jeune Fille du coin de l’omnibus’, it seems a deliberate decision to fetishise a specific seat in the omnibus, but in other cases the similarity is simply uncanny as in ‘Las dos rosas’. Generally, however, these stories have positive dénouements, as the male passenger transfers his desire from one woman to another, whom he marries or with whom he finds consolation.

The Transactional Frontaura’s tram episode offers an example of another common motif in omnibus seductions: a character rendering a service to a fellow passenger (usually, paying his or her fare) and thus initiating a conversation and possible relationship. In plots of this type, there is an implicit notion of

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transaction, exchange, or reward: something is offered, and something, received. These stories vary in a number of ways. Sometimes, the act is a form of gallantry or an attempt to break the ice, while at other times, it is an attempt to rescue from embarrassment a passenger who has either forgotten a wallet or been pickpocketed. Perhaps the most important variable in these works, however, is the gender of the benefactor: whether the man aids the woman or vice versa. When a female passenger pays for a male one, the emphasis generally lies on the altruism of the gesture, which is seen as proof of a noble character. In a French story entitled ‘L’Écu de cinq francs’ (1838), for example, a shop girl named Marie whose family has lost its fortune is struck by the anguish of a poorly dressed youth who uses his last six sous to pay his fare. Marie follows him off the omnibus and hands him her last coin. To spare him embarrassment, she claims that it fell from his pocket in the omnibus and begs him to believe her. Six months later, as she is crossing the street, she is almost run over by a tilbury driven by the man from the omnibus. They recognise one another, but, having lost control of his horse, he is unable to stop. Later, it is revealed that he is the son of a Spanish aristocrat executed as a political dissident by Ferdinand VII. On the day of the omnibus encounter, he was on his way to pawn his family’s remaining jewels. In the opening scene, thus, his situation mirrors Marie’s: they both give up their last belongings. At the end of the story, after his fortune is restored and he has married Marie, he displays side by side his father’s medal of honour and her five-franc écu.171 The juxtaposition suggests the exchange implicit in the story. Marie’s new status is a reward for her honourable act. The work has the structure of a Byzantine novel: two virtuous characters come together and are then separated, each disappearing into a ‘large world’, carried away by circumstances they do not control, but ultimately, they reunite, and their true identities are revealed. The tale converts the vast metropolis into a ‘small world’ in which compassion and virtue prevail. A similar moral logic may be observed in Jorge de Saavedra’s story ‘Diez céntimos’ (1891) whose protagonist Pepe discovers on a tram that he has forgotten his wallet and is rescued by a veiled woman who pays his fare. When she gets off, she leaves behind her gloves. Later, his sister’s friend Laura mentions that she is going to replace a pair of gloves lost on a tram, and Pepe realizes that she is the ‘angel’ who rescued him from an embarrassing situation. He returns her gloves and takes her hand in marriage.172 The story has a Cinderella-like structure: Laura’s altruistic gesture proves that she is a fitting wife, a conclusion reinforced by the fit between

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the glove and the hand. Once again, the story converts a ‘large world’ into a ‘small’ one and ends with a symbolic exchange (glove for hand) in which female generosity is rewarded.173 Both stories establish a symmetry between the benefactress and the recipient: the sacrificed last coin mirrors the sacrificed jewels, and the forgotten wallet mirrors the forgotten gloves. When this symmetry is lacking, however, the happy dénoument is impossible. Consider, for example, Camille Bruno’s melodramatic novel Un grand amour in which a poor girl attempts to offer her seat to a hunchback on a tram only to be rebuffed. Regretting his brusqueness, the hunchback later seeks out his benefactress and eventually falls in love with her, but when she agrees to marry him, he is unable to overcome the idea that she feels more pity than passion. The novel ends with his suicide just before the wedding.174 As in ‘L’Écu de cinq francs’, the male character turns out to be wealthy and is in a position to return the gesture by raising his humble benefactress through marriage. The hunchback, however, feels himself to be physically inferior. The equality and reciprocity that are established through exchange in ‘L’Écu de cinq francs’ and ‘Diez céntimos’ is lacking here. The same impulse that led the hunchback to reject the proffered seat makes the inversion of the gesture impossible. When a man covers a woman’s fare, the nature of the exchange is more ambiguous, as paying for a woman on the omnibus could also be seen as paying for the woman herself. In the discussion above, we have already come across several examples of this: the protagonist of Ribalta’s ‘El tranvía’ pays for a woman on a tram in the hope of going home with her, and in the strategy of the coup de l’omnibus, a prostitute secures a new client by allowing a gentleman to pay her fare. Perhaps the clearest example of this logic, however, is the 1888 song ‘Mon voisin d’omnibus: chansonnette’, in which a young lady, on her way to visit her aunt, discovers that she has taken the wrong omnibus and forgotten to bring money. An elegant gentleman rescues her by paying her fare and then takes her to lunch. His wording—‘I like you; here are six sous’—clearly suggests that he is purchasing her. When she discovers that it is past midnight and that she is far from her aunt’s lodging, she decides to postpone her visit and spend the night with him instead.175 Given this logic of exchange, episodes in which men pay for women can be difficult to reconcile with the bourgeois marriage plot. In Georges Bouret’s short story ‘En omnibus’ (1893), for example, the narrator rides the Batignolles-Clichy line, which he describes as the ‘rendez-vous of

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modern chic and easy love’. When an attractive blonde is unable to find her money, and he pays for her, the other passengers begin to stare at them, ‘already reading, into a simple act of politeness, the preface to a novel’.176 The narrator has a similarly jaded view of the situation: ‘Man, in general, has little faith in the virtue of a woman, and the Parisian, in particular, classifies her without exception in the category of things that are always up for sale’.177 When she gives him her card, however, he discovers that she is an institutrice and hence an ‘honest woman’.178 The narrator begins to call on her family during their visiting hours and soon falls in love. Resolved to ask her hand in marriage, he writes her a letter pretending to be a father seeking to place his daughter in her school and invites her to discuss the matter at his house. When she arrives, he declares his love but she laughs at him. At her parents’ next soirée, her father announces that she will marry another man. The encounter on the omnibus and the false negotiation proposed in the letter introduce into the story a transactional logic that jars with the heroine’s upright bourgeois values. Repayment is one way to resolve the conflict between the marriage plot and the motif of the man paying for a woman on the omnibus. Authors sometimes represent the fare as a temporary loan and insist on the woman’s efforts to reimburse her benefactor. In P. Darasse’s ‘Un coup de foudre en omnibus’ (1876), a play intended for private theatricals, a young man named Marcel who takes a dim view of womankind discreetly pays the omnibus fare of a lady who has forgotten her purse. Shortly afterward, the woman, who turns out to be his sister’s friend, visits him to return his money: ‘omnibus debts’, she explains, ‘like gambling debts, should be repaid within twenty-four hours’.179 When Marcel offers her his arm at the end of the play, she takes it, observing, ‘I am free… and I have returned your six sous…’.180 Both the repayment and the discovery of the ‘small world’—the connection between the heroine and his sister—legitimate the initial encounter and permit the final union of the couple. In other cases, the solution is to make the marriage itself a symbolic repayment. In the song ‘Six sous: historiette’ (1885), a woman who has forgotten her purse on the omnibus borrows six sous from a well-dressed man across from her. Several days later he begins to follow her on the street. When she inquires whether he has come for his money, he asks for a kiss. She replies that she prefers to return his six sous. The young man, however, does not give up and returns to ask her hand in marriage: ‘I have for you the love / that Monsieur the Mayor permits’. Her response underscores the transactional logic of the song: ‘You [will have] the woman, and

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I, the six sous’.181 A similar logic is clear in Henri Second’s story ‘Quaranteet-un sous de dettes’ (1895) in which a bourgeois girl forgets her wallet on an omnibus and fears being taken for a ‘pauper woman’ or an ‘adventuress’. To her relief, a proper-looking young man comes to her rescue. Horrified that she has accepted money from a stranger, her father immediately takes a hired coach to his house to repay him. When he arrives, however, he discovers that in his haste he too has forgotten his wallet. The young man pays the father’s fare, is invited to dinner, and ends up marrying the daughter. The moral of the story underscores the transactional logic of the plot: ‘Do not take on debts’, warns the father, ‘It costs too much! I had once in my life a debt of forty-one sous, and I had to pay it by giving my daughter, plus 120,000 francs in dowry’.182 The marriage plot and the omnibus fare paid by the man are reconciled when the wedding is framed as the repayment of the debt. In other transactional texts, authors avoid the logic of paying for the woman by replacing the fare with a different type of service such as offering a seat or recuperating stolen property.183 Such texts, however, retain a sense of exchange and reward. A striking example is Emilio de la Cerda’s ‘Del viaducto a la vicaría’ (1885) in which the narrator observes on a tram a beautiful woman in tears and follows her after she gets off. When she attempts to throw herself to her death from a viaduct, he holds her back and takes her to a hotel where she confesses that she has been abandoned by a lover and can no longer return to her family. He offers her a small sum as a ‘loan’, but she disappears the next day. Years later, the narrator, now an established artist in Paris, represents the incident in a painting, which is purchased by a baroness, who insists on paying 10,000 francs, five times the selling price. When he delivers the work, he discovers that the purchaser is the woman from the tram. The painter, who has long dreamt of her, declares his love and marries her.184 Ultimately, the logic of the story is similar to that of ‘L’Écu de cinq francs’ and ‘Diez céntimos’: a virtuous gesture is rewarded with marriage, though in this case the initial benefactor is a man. Yet another strategy is to reverse the roles of the protagonists in a later episode. In the novel, Which Shall It Be? (1866) by Mrs Alexander (Annie French Hector’s pseudonym), the heroine, who works as a music teacher and singer, is pickpocketed on an omnibus and rescued by a rugged man sitting across from her, who pays her fare. In the dénouement, however, their roles are reversed. When she comes into an unexpected inheritance, she is able to save him from financial ruin. The reciprocal gestures set the

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two characters on an equal footing, which allows for their happy marriage at the end of the novel.185 As is clear from these examples, transactional stories often have a moral logic. When the benefactor’s motives are pure, he or she is rewarded with marriage. When they are impure or ambiguous, they lead to illegitimate relations or (as in Bouret’s ‘En omnibus’) to a failed marriage plot. Many of these stories flirt with the notion of prostitution implicit in the idea of paying for a woman, but authors also sidestep this association through a logic of repayment (literal or metaphorical), which gives legitimacy to a relationship that begins in a shady public space.

The Inverted The reversal of male and female positions at the end of Mrs Alexander’s novel brings us to our final group of texts—the inverted—in which conventional gender roles are questioned or reversed. These works, which are generally British and from the end of the nineteenth century, reflect the entrance of middle-class women into the workforce and the emergence of the figure of the ‘New Woman’. The association of the omnibus—often part of these women’s daily commute—with this social phenomenon is clear in Maud Morin’s 1909 poem ‘To Moderna—who is waiting for a ’Bus’, which contrasts the ‘dainty slippered’ heroines of Jane Austen’s novels with New Women sporting ‘boots […] strong and stout of sole’: For them, how fraught with wild alarms Would be the city’s fuss. While you, with perfect unconcern Now mount the motor ’bus.186

The New Woman is identified here with public transit—the symbol of a ‘large world’—which contrasts with the limited domestic sphere of traditional femininity. The texts in this category, generally written by women, capture in nuanced ways the tension between these two visions of gender roles. Although they also draw on features from the categories explored above, their main preoccupation is women’s experience of the metropolis as they venture into the work force. A clear example of this new female protagonist is the title character of Mabel E. Wotton’s ‘A Particularly Nice Girl’ (1890). In this story, a misogynist narrator who has recently been appointed the editor of a

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London newspaper rides to work on his first day on an omnibus with eleven male passengers. When the vehicle stops to pick up a twelfth, he imagines that all the passengers are hoping for a thin man but ‘[i]nstead of a man it was a girl’.187 The narrator is disappointed but soon finds himself intrigued by the young woman who radiates bliss. As in ‘illegible’ encounters, she is an enigma: he wonders what she is thinking and who she is, but at the same time, he feels ‘annoyed’ by her happiness. When he arrives at work, he learns that she is his secretary, which only irritates him more, for he has a ‘detestation for writing women’.188 Instead of firing her, though, he gives her a trial period and gradually grows fond of her. In the end, he discovers that she is the author of his favourite column titled ‘Man about Town’, which she secretly took over from her father when he became too ill to write. The young woman’s function as the ‘Man about Town’ is clearly anticipated by the initial omnibus ride: just as ‘[i]nstead of a man it was a girl’, so the author of the male column is a female. The story ends happily with their marriage and his acceptance of her role as a writer. Other stories, however, offer a less rosy view of the experience of working women. In Evelyn Sharp’s story ‘In Dull Brown’ (1896), published in the Yellow Book, the omnibus is once again associated with the ‘New Woman’, but the ending underscores the heroine’s sacrifice in adopting a male role. The story features two sisters who have chosen opposite lifestyles. Whereas the pretty Nancy has adopted a traditional domestic role and stays at home, Jean, who is more intelligent and interesting but less attractive, has taken a teaching position in the city. The story begins as Jean, dressed in the dull brown dress of the title, travels to work on top of an omnibus. (The upper deck features in many ‘New Woman’ texts as like the workplace, it was a traditionally male space to which women gained access only at the end of the century.189) At first, Jean feels ‘contempt for the other thirteen [passengers] who were engrossed in their morning papers’ and who were ‘missing [the] glorious effect’ of the sun coming out from the fog. Almost immediately, however, she is recalled to the banality of her surroundings. Her neighbour, who is already intruding on her space—‘taking more than his share of the seat’—intrudes as well on her thoughts with a vapid remark: ‘Nice morning’. This passenger, whose name is Tom, makes Jean feel ill at ease—speaking with a stranger on the omnibus violates her sense of female decorum—but he also shares something with her: an appreciation of the beauty of the sky. Nevertheless, his expression strikes her as commonplace: ‘That the morning was “nice” would never have occurred to her; and it seemed unfair to sacrifice the

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effect over the Green Park, even for conversational purposes’. Almost immediately, however, Jean regrets her ‘priggishness’ and makes a friendlier remark.190 Gradually, she begins to open up about herself, and the conversation becomes deeper. When he hypothesises that she is happy because of her hard work, she rejects the notion. Work is not amusing; indeed, it has dangers: ‘It builds up our characters at the expense of our hearts. It makes heroines of us and spoils the woman in us […] You don’t like the kind of woman who works, you know you don’t!’191 Almost immediately, however, she apologises for her contrariness and makes a quick exit. This initial encounter on the omnibus reveals Jean’s awkwardness in the masculine role she has assumed in entering the workforce. Although she enjoys the omnibus roof, she feels constrained in her behaviour and is reluctant to break with certain notions of decorum. The distinction she draws between ‘the woman’ and the (working) ‘heroine’, which reflects the opposition between her sister and herself, suggests that the two roles are irreconcilable. Her light-hearted exchange with Tom, however, seems to introduce the possibility of overcoming these stereotypes, of being accepted and appreciated as she is. Tom and Jean coincide several times in the city, but their encounters continue to be overshadowed by Jean’s sense of conflicting roles. When Tom runs into her on the street on a rainy day and offers her his umbrella, Jean ‘resent[s] his air of protection’.192 Whereas the omnibus encounter opened up the possibility that Tom and Jean might interact as equals, the implicit gender roles in this exchange seem to erect a wall between them. When Tom observes her changed attitude toward him, she accuses him of having a rigid view of female conduct: ‘of course, you think like everybody else that a woman is only to be tolerated as long as she is cheerful […] You should keep to women who don’t work; they will always look pretty, and smile sweetly and behave in a domesticated manner’.193 At this point, Tom is beginning to find this advice compelling, though he pretends otherwise, and Jean’s theory seems likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy: Tom will not like her because Jean is determined to think that he does not like women who work. When they coincide again several days later, however, Jean seems more relaxed, and Tom expresses a disregard for convention and an eagerness to understand her: he does not want ‘suitable replies’ but her real opinion. As in the initial omnibus encounter, she speaks freely, commenting on the oddity of living ‘two perfectly different lives at the same time’, at once

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working as a respectable governess and conversing with a complete stranger on the street. She imagines her employer’s shock if she ‘knew I was walking along Oxford Street with someone I had never been introduced to’.194 In this exchange, Jean still has a sense of the incongruity between two roles but now seems to believe that they can co-exist. Notably, she externalises the disapproval; whereas in the omnibus she censured herself for speaking to a stranger, she now projects this reaction onto a third party (her employer). In their next encounter, however, Tom reverts to male chivalry, carrying her books, and Jean, irritated, abruptly ends their conversation.195 After this, many months pass, but when Tom and Jean finally meet again, they quickly fall back into an easy familiarity, and he plans to visit her at home after work. Jean, however, returns late and, on her arrival, finds him deep in conversation with her sister Nancy: The room was in partial darkness, but the fire was burning brightly, and it shone on the face of a man as he leaned forward in a low chair, and talked to the beautiful girl who lay on the sofa, smiling up at him in a gentle deprecating manner, as if his homage were new and overwhelming to her.196

The use of ‘man’ and ‘girl’ instead of the characters’ names emphasises the traditional gender positions they have adopted: Nancy demurely looks up at Tom. Tom’s spontaneous connection with Nancy contrasts with his prolonged and ambivalent courtship of Jean, who has rejected female roles and insisted on equality. The subsequent exchange of polite phrases among the three characters is awkward and insincere: Tom’s ‘carefully picked words did not come naturally from the boyish fellow who had talked slang to her on the top of the omnibus’.197 Sharp, thus, contrasts the omnibus, the space of the New Woman, in which Jean slowly opens up and makes irreverent, heartfelt comments, with the drawing room, the space of female domesticity and insincere social niceties. At the end of the story, Jean retreats upstairs, leaving Tom in Nancy’s company, and finds herself wishing she were as ‘ordinary’ and as pretty as her sister.198 Unlike the heroine of ‘A Particularly Nice Girl’, Jean is unable to reconcile romance with her ‘New Woman’ lifestyle, but the story leaves us wondering whether she fails because they are fundamentally incompatible or rather because she has never believed in their compatibility. The tension between work and womanliness is central as well in G.  E. Mitton’s novel A Bachelor Girl in London (1898), in which the

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omnibus once again features prominently. Its heroine, Judith, is a young woman from the middle classes who goes to London after her father’s death to work as a writer. Through connections, she manages to find a job as a secretary and takes pride in being ‘the working woman, the bachelor girl of the period, who owed her bread to no one, but walked fearlessly and straight on her path’.199 As in ‘A Dull Brown Dress’, however, Judith’s participation in the workforce comes at a price. When she visits her family in the countryside, she realises that in pursuing her independent life, she has given up ‘the gentler, finer qualities, the atmosphere of a graceful, refined elegance’ that characterises her stepmother’s life.200 As with other ‘New Women’ heroines, the omnibus roof becomes a symbol of the heroine’s newfound freedom and a space of joyous flânerie: ‘the types of faces flowing over the pavement, the great flood of working humanity seemed to sweep over and obliterate the narrowness and dinginess in her own life’.201 On one trip, Judith strikes up a conversation with an omnibus driver named Ireland who gradually becomes a friend. Judith feels drawn to the ‘rough simplicity’ of his work and feels a ‘wild desire to be down among the realities of life, among those hard-hitting, hard-spoke men’.202 Ireland becomes her main interlocutor in periods of loneliness as well as a moral guide, but although she enjoys his company, she is aware of the social distance between them. At one point, she observes that she dislikes the ‘half-and-half classes because they put themselves on a level with one’ and prefers working men because ‘the gulf is too immense to be bridged’.203 Horrified that Judith is associating with a lower-class man, her sister encourages Laurence Pitt, a rising novelist, to court her in order to distract her from the driver. At the climax of the novel, a subtle parallelism is drawn between Judith and Ireland. Judith falls under the influence of Lex—a young man who has lost his fortune and reputation—who pressures her into showing him one of her employer’s letters at the risk of losing her job. Soon thereafter, Ireland engages in ‘omnibus racing’ with a driver from a rival company and is in danger of being fired or reprimanded by his employer. When Judith is finally dismissed for her indiscretion, she visits Ireland to find out whether he has been punished, and on hearing her story, he asks her to marry him. Without thinking, she replies, ‘How could I marry a man of your class?’204 Immediately she regrets her harsh words but is unable to unsay them or to make him understand the radical gulf between their ‘ways of thought’. Doubly disgraced by the loss of her job and this degrading proposal, Judith decides to abandon London, but just as she is about

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to leave, Pitt proposes, restoring her dignity and sense of self: ‘The sordid, stained creature, whose reflection she had grown used to look for in the mirror of her mind, had vanished, and she stood reincarnate once more, a strong, pure woman, sanctified by the privilege of her greatest gift, the power of raising and ennobling man’.205 In the end, Judith renounces her ‘New Woman’ lifestyle and accepts a traditional role. As in ‘A Dull Brown Dress’, the ‘inversion’ of roles that is represented by the omnibus is ultimately a source of frustration, but unlike Jean, Judith finds consolation in the domestic role she embraces. The association between Judith and the omnibus driver suggests that the ‘New Woman’ lifestyle is a form of slumming. Women who adopt male roles are often seen as lowering themselves socially. This is particularly evident in Florence C. Armstrong’s novel Sisters of Phaeton (1890) in which the heroines become omnibus drivers. In this unusual plot, two sisters are adopted at a young age by a wealthy man who raises them in an eccentric fashion. Instead of learning art, music, and languages (skills required of a governess), they are trained to be capable horsewomen. When their protector dies, however, he leaves them only his horses and stable. To earn a living, they decide to create a new omnibus line in London’s elite West End and to work as drivers. The company is an immediate success. Described as the ‘sisters of Phaeton’, the young women quickly inflame the hearts of the young men of London: just as Phaeton ‘is credited by the poets with setting the world on fire’, the sisters were ‘setting the town—at least the masculine portion of it—on fire too’.206 Their popularity, however, comes at a significant personal price. Seen as public women, the girls are shunned by their own sex and harassed by male passengers, one of whom even tries to barge into their home. Though raised ‘with a holy horror of commonplaceness’, they now find themselves the stewards of the common place that is the omnibus with all its vulgar passengers.207 In the end, the sisters meet a fate similar to Phaeton’s. In attempting to avoid a collision with a van, one of the them loses control over her ‘fiery horses’, crashes, and is knocked unconscious.208 After this incident, the sisters give up their omnibus company and decide to marry eligible young men. As one of them summarises, ‘I thought I could take my fate into my own hands, and do as I pleased with it. See the result. Failure—almost death’.209 Similarly, when the other one accepts her suitor, she feels her ‘old independent self slipp[ing] from her like a worn-out garment’.210 Armstrong’s novel stretches credulity from beginning to end, but curiously what is most unbelievable is the abrupt return to traditional female

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roles in the dénouement. For over 200 pages, the novel has defended the sisters and their ‘New Woman’ desire for autonomy. The sudden shift in the ending ultimately obeys the logic of the myth (Phaeton’s story) more than that of the novel itself. In all these ‘New Women’ stories, the omnibus becomes the symbol of the female characters’ new mobility, independence, and professional roles. In some ways, their position resembles those of Maupassant’s Louise or Lemonnier’s Noémie: the heroines of all these texts are women who work and who venture out into the large world where they meet unfamiliar men on the omnibus. But whereas the male authors focus on the difference between love and desire, these ‘New Women’ tales explore the incongruity between traditional and modern female roles. As we have seen in these pages, the omnibus was an ambiguous space in the nineteenth century. At once intimate and alien, it brought strangers into a closeness that inspired desires and fantasies but also erected barriers between them and was often seen as a dubious space—one that led to dangerous encounters. In most of the texts we have analysed, the omnibus functions as a starting point for romance: it is the place where the lovers first meet and where the desire is born. In some, it is also the end point— in fleeting narratives, the object of desire ultimately gets off and disappears into the vastness of the metropolis—while in others, particularly those featuring commuters or omnibus employees, it is a space in which love develops over time through repeated encounters. In most of the examples we have seen, the omnibus is a ‘sound off’ space, and the attraction is initially a desire to resolve a visual enigma. The desiring subject begins to project narratives onto the object of observation, who is intriguing or perceived incompletely. When the encounter is ‘sound on’, the exchange often involves misunderstandings, which suggest the opaqueness and illegibility of the space. Throughout these pages, we have also seen that plots vary considerably according to gender. In ‘transactional’ stories, women who pay men’s fares are virtuous, while men who pay for women are suspected of attempting to ‘buy’ them. In ‘illegible’ texts, however, women deliberately hide their identity, while men are simply misread or misunderstood. In ‘iterative’ narratives, male and female passengers come to the relationship with divergent expectations, the former seeking adventures and the latter commitment, and in ‘inverted’ texts, women begin to experience the liberation of the space but, unlike men, do so with misgivings, with a sense of slumming or of violating codes of female decorum. Different classes also

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generate different types of narrative. When ‘illegible’ stories feature aristocratic women, they tend to involve ludic games, but when the enigmatic passenger comes from the lower classes, she is generally a seedier and more dangerous figure, a femme fatale. Finally, narratives also differ significantly from one national context to another. Whereas continental stories often insist on the vastness of the metropolis and the alienating experience of urban transit, British ones tend to convert the large world into a small one in their dénouements.

Notes 1. ‘Love in an Omnibus’, Family Herald, 29 January 1848, 619. 2. Rosa Nouchette Carey, Mollie’s Prince (Philadelphia: J.  B. Lippincott, 1899), 23;  Louis Ulbach, Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1878), 57. 3. Édouard Cadol, Contes gais. Les Belles Imbéciles (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1867), 179, 181. 4. [Frances Cashel Hoey], ‘Dulcie’s Delusion’, Chambers’s Journal, 16 September 1871, 586. 5. Pierre Véron, Paris s’amuse (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), 78. 6. Louis Byrec, O.  Pradels, and J.  Cauchie, ‘L’Amour en omnibus: Chansonnette’ (Paris: Nouveau repertoire des concerts, [1884]), n.p. 7. Sahib (drawing) and Kitt (captions), ‘Voyages dans Paris—L’Amour vu d’un omnibus’, La Vie parisienne, 24 September 1892, n.p. 8. Georges Bouret, En omnibus, parisienneries (Paris: aux bureaux de ‘l’Encrier’, 1893), 7. 9. Georges Montorgueil, Paris au hasard (Paris: Henri Beraldi, 1895), 132. 10. Charles Virmaître, Paris cocu (Paris: L. Genonceaux, 1890), 94. 11. Louis Autigeon and Louis Ratcée, Le Contrôleur d’omnibus: pièce-bouffe en un acte (Paris: P.-V. Stock, 1899); ‘L’Omnibus à 2 sous’, L’Assiette au beurre, 7 March 1908, 794. 12. Auguste Doucé, ‘Les Tribulations d’un gibus’ (Paris: A.  Fouquet, [1892]), n.p. 13. Fabrice, ‘En attendant l’omnibus’, La Silhouette, no. 79, 9 June 1881, n.p. 14. Fabrice Carré, Rimes sans raison (Paris: A. Ghio, 1882), 98. 15. This double meaning is clear in a joke from a comic journal: ‘A woman who asks for a correspondance is worthy of some interest. One cannot correspond [i.e. reciprocate] enough’. ‘Le Code Tintamarresque du cérémonial’, Le Tintamarre, 24 November 1867, 2.

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16. Louis-César Desormes and Delormel Villemer, ‘Les Deux Correspondances. Chansonnette’ (Paris: Emile Benoit, [1883]), n.p. 17. Frédéric Wachs, Maxime Bell, and J. Cauchie, ‘La Correspondance perdue! Chansonnette’ (Paris: Bassereau, [1887]), n.p. 18. Charles Pourny, Villemer, and Labarre, ‘La Correspondance! Chansonnette’ (Paris: E. Benoît, [1881]), n.p. 19. Gaston Noury, ‘L’Omnibus de Cythère—Toujours complet, jamais en grève’, Le Messager français, 31 May 1891, 1. 20. A. Callet, ‘L’Omnibus de Cythère’, La Lanterne—Supplément, 25 August 1896, 3–4. 21. Le Charivari, 9 September 1893, n.p.; Ascanio, ‘Omnibus de nuit’, La Gaudriole, 15 November 1900, 319. 22. Lucien Rigaud, Dictionnaire du jargon parisien (Paris: Paul Ollendorf, 1878), 238. 23. Les Omnibus. Premier voyage de Cadet la Blague de la Place de la Madelaine [sic] à la Bastille, et retour (Paris: Chassaignon, 1828), 2. 24. Marie (aîné), Les Coups de brosse: chansons politiques sur le précédent et sur le nouveau système, contes et autres pièces légères (Paris: chez l’auteur, 1832), 110. For another early poem that plays on the double meaning of the word, see ‘Les Omnibus’ in Le Chansonnier des grâces pour 1829 (Paris: F. Louis, [1828]), 218. 25. A. Nemo and Alfred Sobaux, ‘Gare aux omnibus: chansonnette’ (Paris: S. Bathlot, [1869]), n.p. 26. Charles Virmaître, Dictionnaire d’argot fin-de-siècle (Paris: A.  Charles, 1894), 198. 27. Alfred Le Petit, ‘Les Victimes de l’amour’, La Charge, 16 July 1870, n.p. 28. Masha Belenky, ‘Transitory Tales: Writing the Omnibus in Nineteenth-­ Century Paris’, Dix-Neuf 16:3 (November 2012): 292; Nicholas Papayanis, Horse-drawn Cabs and Omnibuses in Paris: The Idea of Circulation and the Business of Public Transit (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996), 66. 29. Jules Davray, L’Armée du vice (Paris: Fort, 1895), 82. 30. J. Odekerken, Abron de Cangogis, and Henri Chapelle, ‘Elles attendent l’om… nibus: romance fin de siècle’ ([Paris]: Chaimbaud, [1893]), n.p. 31. La Mésangère (pseudonym of Henri Boutet), Les Petits Mémoires de Paris: I. Coulisses de l’amour (Paris: Dorbon l’ainé, 1908), 15–17. 32. Jules Desmolliens, ‘Pour visiter un omnibus’, La Caricature, 17 March 1888, 82–83, 86. 33. In another comic vignette, the daughter of a bourgeois couple dreams of marrying a handsome man at an omnibus station until he walks off with a ‘vile yellow woman with such a flashy look [aux allures si tapageuses]’. C.C., ‘Fenêtre sur la rue’, L’Éclipse, 11 February 1877, 263. 34. Davray, L’Armée du vice, 82.

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35. Baronne de Fresne, De l’usage et de la politesse dans le monde (Paris: Taride, 1858), 72. 36. ‘Croquis par A Grévin’, Le Charivari, 28 September 1879, n.p. 37. Charles Virmaître, Paris-Impur (Paris: n.p., 1891), 101. A vignette that illustrates this strategy is Henri Duvernois, ‘Dans l’omnibus: Débuts’, La Presse, 24 October 1897, 2. 38. ‘A Caution to Young Ladies Waiting for an Omnibus’, Punch, 3 December 1864, 225. 39. ‘Decency’, Saturday Review, 28 July 1860, 105. 40. Pedro Bofill, ‘El filósofo del tranvía’, El Día, 1 January 1893, 3. 41. P. Yorick, ‘En omnibus’, La Caricature, 22 July 1882, 235, 238. 42. J.  Petit-Senn, ‘L’Omnibus’, La Tribune lyrique populaire, 16 March 1862, 33–34. 43. Édouard Gourdon, La Physiologie de l’omnibus (Paris: Terry, 1841–1842), 20. 44. Les Omnibus. Premier voyage, 29. 45. Dubut de Laforest, ‘Le Petit Chasseur du cosmo-club’, La Petite Caricature, 12 April 1898, 34–35. 46. Henri Second, ‘Autres guitares: Les Microbes de l’omnibus’, Courrier français, 5 June 1892, 4. 47. Eugène Bastin and Victor Meusy, ‘L’Impériale et l’Intérieur’ (Paris: A. Manuel, [1892]), n.p. 48. J.  Jouy and H.  D’Arsay, ‘L’Impériale et l’Intérieur: scie-locomotrice’ (Paris: Maillard, [1885]), n.p. 49. Jean de Bourgogne, ‘Sur l’impériale’, La Grande Revue, 25 August 1892, 388–96. 50. J. Díaz Molina, ‘Entre dos fuegos’, La Ilustración artística, 31 October 1898, n.p. 51. E. de Reichenstein, Corbié, and Vinbourg, ‘Le Tramway jaune: physiologie parisienne’ (Paris : Le Bailly, [1879]), n.p. 52. Victor Robillard and Adolphe Joly, ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus: scène comique’ (Paris : Le Bailly, [1859]), n.p. 53. Désiré Luc, ‘En tramway’, La Gaudriole, 22 July 1900, 52. 54. Marie A. de Lauréal, ‘Voyage en omnibus’, Revue pour tous illustrée, 28 July 1861, 187. 55. See, for example, the cover of René Esse and Gerny, ‘Du Panthéon à la Villette: Chansonnette’ (Paris: Émile Benoit, [1890]), n.p. 56. Guy de Maupassant, Œuvres complètes de Guy de Maupassant: Bel Ami (Paris: Louis Conard, 1910), 198. 57. Mario Prax, ‘Physiologie du mollet’, Le Charivari, 25 October 1889, n.p. 58. Émile Spencer and A.  Poupay, ‘Les Conducteurs d’omnibus: chansonnette’ (Paris: Broudert, 1893), n.p. 59. Grandville et  al., Les Métamorphoses du jour (Paris: Garnier frères, 1869), 400.

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60. Charles Quesnel, ‘En omnibus’, Le Caveau, Vol. 54, 1888, 351; Paul Margueritte, La Mouche: nouvelles (Paris: Lecène, Oudin et Cie, 1893), 141. 61. J.-K.  Huysmans, Croquis parisiens; À vau l’eau; Un dilemme (Paris: P.V. Stock, 1905), 56–57. 62. Camille Claus, ‘La Botte et la Bottine’, Le Petit Parisien: Supplément littéraire illustré, 24 April 1892, 132. 63. Aug. Des Masures, ‘En omnibus’, La Fantaisie parisienne, 1 November 1875, 2–3. 64. Ulbach, Guide sentimental, 56. 65. Rigaud, Dictionnaire du jargon parisien, 323. 66. Semainier, ‘Confidence’, Le Tintamarre, 10 October 1886, n.p. 67. Hector Malot, Un beau-frère (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1869), 40–41. 68. Jean de Paris, ‘Hypnotisée en omnibus’, Annales de psychiatrie et d’hypnologie, 1894, 95-96. For a comic treatment of this motif, see Miguel Thivars’ ‘L’Hypnotisme en omnibus’, La Caricature, 28 May 1898, 170–71. 69. Virmaître, Paris cocu, 95; ‘Les Petits Cahiers d’une masseuse’, La Caricature, 4 May 1904, 146–47. 70. Georges Courteline, ‘Les Amputés: pantomime mêlée de quelques répliques’, La Gaudriole, 23 April 1891, 45; S., ‘Enigma cruel’, Vida galante, 3 May 1901, n.p. 71. C. Verdellet and B. Arnaud, ‘Le Tramway de Montchat: chansonnette’ (Lyon: B. Arnaud, [1887]), n.p. 72. ‘The Regular Omnibus’ (C. Paul, n.d.), n.p. 73. My Secret Life. Volumes I-VI (New York: Grove Press, 1966), 974. 74. Savioz, ‘En omnibus’, La Lanterne: Le Supplément, 19 April 1898, 3. 75. Hugues Rebell, Le Diable est à table: roman (Paris: Mercure de France, 1905), 169. 76. Paul Courty, ‘Mariage sur la ligne’, Le Charivari, 18 June 1890, n.p. 77. Pierre Véron, Les Propos d’un boulevardier (Paris: E. Dentu, 1888), 135–45. 78. Félicien Champsaur, ‘Le Tramway amoureux’, La Caricature, 12 March 1881, 81–83. 79. A notable exception to this comic treatment is Achille Gastaldy’s ‘Le Cocher d’omnibus: histoire marseillaise,’ a melodramatic story with an omnibus driver as a hero. L’Essor, October 1833, 177–90, 200–12. 80. Courty, ‘Mariage sur la ligne’, 114; Paul Arène, Paris ingénu (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1882), 120. 81. For comic representations of the conductor’s love life, see Durand-Dahl and H. Noyrb’s ‘Le Conducteur et la Couturière’ in Chansons de zig et de zag (Paris: G. Ondet, 1892), 195–97; and Robillard et al., ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus’, n.p.

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82. Henri Demesse, ‘Le Conducteur de tramway’, Petit Parisien—Supplément littéraire illustré, 11 August 1889, 5–6. 83. Paul Gall, ‘Allez !… Roulez !…: nouvelle’, La Revue pour tous, 8 March 1890, 33–36, and 15 March 1890, 60–62. 84. Huysmans, Croquis parisiens, 56, 58. 85. Manley Hopkins, Spicilegium poeticum; a gathering of verses (London: Leadenhall Press, 1892), 149–50. 86. Rigaud, Dictionnaire du jargon parisien, 267. 87. Gourdon, Physiologie de l’omnibus, 70–73. 88. François Coppée, ‘Croquis parisiens: L’Omnibus’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 7 September 1902, 147–48. 89. Ernest Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus, de la barrière du Trône à la barrière de l’Étoile’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris: Ladvocat, Paris, 1831), II, 77. 90. Georges Mazinghien, Express-nouvelles (Paris: M. Dreyfous, 1880), 178. 91. Mazinghien, Express-nouvelles, 174. 92. Georges Delaqys, ‘La Lueur’, Le Journal pour tous, 18 October 1900, 2–3. 93. Margueritte, La Mouche, 138–39. 94. Margueritte, La Mouche, 137. 95. Margueritte, La Mouche, 139. 96. Margueritte, La Mouche, 141–42. 97. Margueritte, La Mouche, 144. 98. Margueritte, La Mouche, 139. 99. Margueritte, La Mouche, 141. 100. Margueritte, La Mouche, 143. 101. Margueritte, La Mouche, 145. 102. Alfonso Pérez Nieva, ‘Novelas relámpago: Un amor chispa’, Blanco y negro, 7 June 1891, 73. 103. Pérez Nieva, ‘Un amor chispa’, 74. 104. Ernest d’Hervilly, Mesdames les Parisiennes (Paris: Charpentier, 1875), 58. 105. d’Hervilly, Mesdames les Parisiennes, 59. 106. d’Hervilly, Mesdames les Parisiennes, 60. 107. d’Hervilly, Mesdames les Parisiennes, 61. 108. Gilbert H. Page (pseudonym of Ella D’Arcy), ‘The Smile’, The Argosy, October 1891, 348. 109. D’Arcy, ‘The Smile’, 349. 110. D’Arcy, ‘The Smile’, 350. 111. D’Arcy, ‘The Smile’, 351. 112. Eugène Michel, ‘L’Innocente Aventure’, Supplément littéraire illustrée du ‘Petit Parisien’, 27 September 1896, 310. 113. N. de Leyva y Vizcarro, ‘Un prólogo y una aventura’, La  Ilustración ibérica, 29 January 1887, 78.

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114. Aurelio Ribalta, La campaña de ultramar; El viático; El señorito; La visita del gran hombre; El tranvía (La Coruña: Andrés Martínez, 1888), 247–67. 115. Jules Ricard, Histoires fin de siècle (Paris: C. Lévy, 1890), 127–36. 116. Georges Elcar, ‘6425’, La Grisette, 17 August 1895, 98–100. 117. ‘La Victime des deux yeux’, Les Coulisses, 20 February 1842, 4. 118. Paul Gavarni, ‘Une aventure d’omnibus’, Le Charivari, 26 August 1840, n.p. On this story, see my essay ‘The Devil in the Omnibus: From Le Charivari to Blackwood’s Magazine’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 39:1 (2017): 1–13. 119. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Gavarni: l’homme et l’œuvre (Paris: Henri Plon, 1873), 198. 120. ‘A Feuilleton’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1860, 629–34. The story has been attributed to Sir Henry Drummond Wolff. Lindsy M. Lawrence, Seriality and Domesticity: The Victorian Serial and Domestic Ideology in the Family Literary Magazine (unpublished dissertation, Texas Christian University,  2008), 131. On this story, see my ‘Devil in the Omnibus’. 121. ‘A Feuilleton’, 632. 122. ‘A Feuilleton’, 630. 123. ‘A Feuilleton’, 630. 124. ‘A Feuilleton’, 634. 125. Charles Joliet, ‘Antoinette’, Revue fantaisiste, 15 May-1 August 1861, 264–65. The story was  reprinted in his Romans microscopiques (Paris: Librairie du ‘Petit Journal’, 1866), 1–43. 126. Joliet, ‘Antoinette’, 269. 127. Joliet, ‘Antoinette’, 282. 128. Jacinto Octavio Picón, Novelitas (Madrid: La España Editorial, 1892), 38. 129. Picón, Novelitas, 39. 130. Picón, Novelitas, 45–46. 131. Picón, Novelitas, 58. 132. Picón, Novelitas, 61. 133. L. Bérardi, ‘Une mystification: conte vrai en six chapitres’, Revue étrangère de la littérature, des sciences et des arts, October 1843, 180–219; reprinted in his Histoires d’il y a vingt ans (Paris: M. Levy, [ca 1880]). 134. See, for example, ‘The Dark Girl Dressed in Blue’ in Selected Songs Sung at Harvard College (Cambridge: Press of John Wilson and Sons, 1866), 31–33; Félicien Meurice and Hilger, ‘La Déception de Marianne: historiette’ (Paris: A. Patay, [1910]); L. Delormel and Garnier, ‘L’Omnibus de l’Odéon: chansonnette’ (Paris: Société Anonyme, [1891]); and Louis Raynal and Jules Jouy, ‘Dans l’omnibus: chansonnette’ (Paris: E. Benoit, [1884]). See also Saint-Sénac’s sketch ‘Un voyage en tramway’ in which the narrator distracts himself from the discomfort and ordinariness of the tram—a ‘tin of conserves’ with ‘muddy and vulgar neighbours’—by

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reimagining an attractive female passenger as a shepherdess in a Watteau painting with whom he retires to a ‘ravishing Pompadour boudoir’ decorated with cherubs and roses. His rococo reverie is deflated when he discovers that the pretty passenger has stolen his wallet. Revue de la France moderne, February 1890, 97–107. 135. Les Omnibus, premier voyage, 2; Mouton-Dufraisse, ‘Ma voisine de l’omnibus’, Le Caveau, Vol. 44, 1878, 63–64. 136. F. Descors, ‘Si ça vous fait plaisir’, Le Caveau, Vol. 49, 1883, 76–78. 137. Edmond de Varennes, ‘Florentine’, Bulletin de la Société des gens de lettres, January 1850, 30. 138. E. de Varennes, ‘Florentine’, 31. 139. E. de Varennes, ‘Florentine’, 35. 140. Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Manette Salomon (Paris: A.  Lacroix, Verboeckhoven & Co., 1868), I, 251. 141. Goncourt brothers, Manette Salomon, I, 251–52. 142. Wilkie Collins, Basil: A Story of Modern Life (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), I, 101. 143. Collins, Basil, I, 108–9. 144. Collins, Basil, I, 114. 145. E. de Varennes, ‘Florentine’, 31. 146. Collins, Basil, I, 97, 116. 147. Collins, Basil, I, 114. 148. Florian Doré and Augustus Martini, ‘The Putney Bus’ (London: Hopwood & Crew, [1884]); Gabriel Seguy, ‘Sur la plate-forme’, La Lanterne, 19 May 1898, 3. 149. Rita (pseudonym of Eliza Margaret Jane Gollan), ‘Knot in a Handkerchief’, All the Year Round, 30 March 1889, 2. 150. Gollan, ‘Knot’, 3. 151. Gollan, ‘Knot’, 5. For other British stories that shift from a ‘large’ to a ‘small world’, see Mary Angela Dickens’ ‘An Idyll of the Omnibus’, Some Women’s Ways (New York: R. F. Fenno & Co., 1896), 239–66, and ‘The Omnibus’, The Metropolitan Magazine, September-December 1845, 73–85. 152. Louis Ulbach, Autour de l’amour (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1885), 103–14. 153. Malot, Un beau-frère, 41. 154. Guy de Maupassant, ‘Le Père’, Gils Blas, 20 November 1883, 1. 155. Masha Belenky, Engines of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019), 141. 156. Maupassant, ‘Le Père’, 1. 157. Maupassant, ‘Le Père’, 2. 158. Belenky, Engines of Modernity, 142. 159. Camille Lemonnier, ‘Un amour en omnibus’, La Lanterne, 30 June 1889, 3.

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160. It is interesting to compare this story with an episode in Zola’s La Curée in which Renée commits adultery with Maxime in the private room of a restaurant. In both Lemonnier’s and Zola’s texts, the bourgeois heroine takes pleasure in ‘slumming’, entering a space associated with women of ill repute. As Belenky points out, Zola underscores the association with prostitution by having Renée observe the passengers who stare at her from the impériales of passing omnibuses. Both texts associate the public space of the omnibus with the illicit sexuality of the cabinet particulier. On the Zola passage, see Belenky, Engines of Modernity, 139–40. 161. [Hoey], ‘Dulcie’s Delusion’, 584. 162. Adrien Paul, Nicette (Bruxelles: Meline, 1860), I, 51–52. 163. For a fascinating but very different example of an iterative love story, see Clément Saphcla’s melodramatic feuilleton La Pauvre Mère partially serialised in L’Avenir républicain (beginning on 26 May 1850) and set in May 1848. In this work, the narrator overhears the conversation of several omnibus passengers headed to the countryside and continues to follow the love story that develops on subsequent trips back and forth to Paris. The omnibus serves here not so much as a space that facilitates the development of the relationship but rather as a recurring litmus test by which a third party (the narrator) checks in on the state of affairs in the family. After a few instalments, however, the author dispenses with this limiting perspective and opts instead for an omniscient narrator who can enter into the characters’ heads and homes. As in the iterative tales examined in this section, the omnibus is a ‘small world’ in which characters come to know one another, and the plot centres on a misunderstanding and a non-reciprocal desire. The daughter of a bourgeois couple falls in love with an artist whom she has met on the omnibus and comes to believe that he cares for her. The artist, however, has fallen in love with her mother, who ultimately commits suicide to avoid the conflict. Clement Saphcla, ‘La Pauvre Mère’, Le Livre des feuilletons, November 1851, n.p. 164. Netta Syrett,  ‘The Royal Blue’, Longman’s Magazine, September 1893, 464. 165. Syrett, ‘The Royal Blue’, 466. 166. ‘The Green Omnibus’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 1 December 1897, 15. 167. Gabriel Marc, ‘Impressions parisiennes: La Jeune Fille du coin de l’omnibus’, L’Éclair: journal littéraire, 15 March 1868, 3. The figure of the girl in the corner seems to have been a motif in the period. The narrator of the 1854 edition of Paris-en-omnibus also evokes a woman in the corner whom ‘everyone has encountered’. Edmond Auguste Texier, Taxile Delord, and Arnould Frémy, Paris-en-omnibus (Paris: A.  Taride, 1854), 88–89. 168. J.  Loring, ‘Las dos rosas’, Album Salón, 16 February 1899, 50. For a similar case of doubling, see Blue-Devil, ‘Laquelle?’, Petit Parisien, 31 August 1890, 2–3.

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169. Émile Dartès, Contes en omnibus (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1894), 317. 170. Carlos Frontaura, Mano de ángel (novela de un joven rico); El caballo blanco (memorias de un empresario) (Madrid: Est. tipográfico de Ricardo Fé, 1891). 171. Mme D….x, ‘L’Écu de cinq francs’, Journal du Cher, 18 and 20 December 1838, n.p. 172. Jorge de Saavedra, ‘Diez céntimos’, La moda elegante, 6 March 1891, 105–7. 173. For another example of a woman assisting a man, which leads to a happy dénouement, see José de Campos’ ‘Un mariage en omnibus’, Le Progrès de la Côte-d’Or, 26 July 1896, 4–5; 2 August 1896, 4–5; 9 August 1896, 4–5; 16 August 1896, 4. 174. Camille Bruno, Un grand amour (Paris: Ollendorff, 1891). 175. A. Jambon and Émile Bouillon, ‘Mon voisin d’omnibus: chansonnette’ (Paris: Société anonyme, [1888]). 176. Bouret, En omnibus, 8. 177. Bouret, En omnibus, 9. 178. Bouret, En omnibus, 10. 179. P. Darasse, Comédies pour les salons (Paris: Hurtau, 1876), 74. 180. Darasse, Comédies, 85. For other examples of the use of repayment to resolve this tension, see Charles Durand, Ça m’est arrivé en tramway: monologue en prose (Paris: J.  Strauss, 1889), 2; and Jean Raulet, ‘L’Omnibus’, Le Monde illustré, 14 February 1891, 127. 181. A.  Guyon fils, ‘Six sous: historiette’ (Paris, [1885]), n.p. For a similar plot, see Desormes et al. ‘Les Deux Correspondances’. 182. Henri Second, ‘Quarante-et-un sous de dettes’, Petit Parisien, 29 September 1895, 309–10. 183. See, for example, Maurice Alhoy, ‘Tribulations des Omnibus: Complet!!!’ in Le Musée pour rire (Paris: Aubert, 1839), II, no. 71, n.p.; and ‘In a City ’Bus’, Chambers’s Journal, 19 October 1867, 668–72. 184. Emilio de la Cerda, ‘Del viaducto a la vicaría’, La novela ilustrada, 20 October 1885, 233–40. 185. Mrs Alexander (pseudonym of Annie French Hector), Which Shall It Be? (New York: Henry Holt, 1874). 186. Maud Morin, ‘To Moderna—who is waiting for a ’Bus’, Pall Mall Magazine, August 1909, 319. 187. Mabel E. Wotton, Pretty Radical and Other Stories (London: D. Stott, 1890), 248. 188. Wotton, Pretty Radical, 249. 189. In Ménie Muriel Dowie’s novel Gallia (Philadelphia: J.  B. Lippincott, 1895), Margaret revels in the experience of riding the top of a London omnibus (107). A similar pleasure is evoked in Amy Levy’s The Romance

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of a Shop (Boston: Cupples and Hurd, 1889), in which a young woman seeking to earn her living as a photographer is represented ‘careering up the street on the summit of a tall, green omnibus, her hair blowing gaily in the breeze, her ill-gloved hands clasped about a bulky note-book’ (61). 190. Evelyn Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, Yellow Book, VIII, 1896, 182. 191. Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, 185. 192. Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, 186. 193. Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, 187. 194. Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, 188–89. 195. Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, 190. 196. Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, 195. 197. Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, 196. 198. Sharp, ‘In Dull Brown’, 198. 199. G. E. Mitton, A Bachelor Girl in London (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1898), 64. 200. Mitton, A Bachelor Girl, 170–71. 201. Mitton, A Bachelor Girl, 102. 202. Mitton, A Bachelor Girl, 122. 203. Mitton, A Bachelor Girl, 125. 204. Mitton, A Bachelor Girl, 285. 205. Mitton, A Bachelor Girl, 339. 206. Florence C. Armstrong, Sisters of Phaeton (London: Ward and Downey, 1890), 58. 207. Armstrong, Sisters of Phaeton, 154. 208. Armstrong, Sisters of Phaeton, 274. 209. Armstrong, Sisters of Phaeton, 286. 210. Armstrong, Sisters of Phaeton, 299.

CHAPTER 7

An Observatory of Poverty

In an 1869 poem by William Armes, the lyric voice observes a poor mother holding a child inside an omnibus. Noting the ‘Deep care […] printed on her brow’, he longs ‘To act a brother’s part / And remove the load which seemed to press / So heavily on her heart’. Nevertheless, he feels unable to act and limits himself to a second-degree prayer: And she looked on the babe upon her knee And seemed praying for ‘daily bread’. While I responded, mentally, ‘Lord, let that prayer be heard’.1

Armes’ poem illustrates the awkward experience of early urban transit. Omnibuses and trams brought a wide range of social classes into close contact with one another, making differences in wealth and fortune uncomfortably noticeable.2 In Armes’ representation, the vehicle is a silent space in which passengers feel themselves to be separated by invisible walls, unable to interact. The poem invites us to sympathise not just with the mother but also with the lyric voice for being unable to act on his compassion. As a means of transportation that was broadly affordable and in which passengers were not segregated into first- and second-class compartments, the nineteenth-century omnibus was a uniquely heterogeneous space. Artists from the period captured this diversity in images such as William © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7_7

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Maw Egley’s 1859 painting ‘Omnibus Life in London’ (Fig. 3.2) in which individuals from various classes and walks of life pile into a claustrophobic omnibus interior. Writers too were drawn to the omnibus for its odd juxtapositions and unique encounters. In nineteenth-century literature, the omnibus and particularly the tram functioned, as in Armes’ poem, as an observatory of poverty, a space in which bourgeois characters (and readers) witnessed, contemplated, and interacted with an anonymous social ‘other’. This chapter explores the different strategies used to convey the experience of social difference in nineteenth-century texts about the omnibus and tram. How do writers evoke, interpret, and come to terms with the fleeting but striking encounters with poverty that became common in city life with the introduction of urban transit? What types of lower-class figures are portrayed? Are they working or idle, the so-called ‘deserving’ or ‘undeserving’ poor? Do they speak or are they spoken for? Is class difference downplayed or represented as an unbridgeable divide? And finally, does the focus lie on the poor or (as in Armes’ poem) on the bourgeois observer’s sentiments? The analysis that follows will identify seven different approaches to the representation of the social other in these texts: (1) grotesque exaggeration, (2) the aestheticisation  or spiritualisation of poverty, (3) contrasts between speech and silence, (4) social analyses of behaviour, (5) class juxtapositions, (6) stories of mutual understanding, and (7) lessons in compassion. With only a few exceptions, the texts discussed below date from the second half of the nineteenth century and reflect the heightened awareness of class difference of the post-1848 period. In analysing them, we will see that works that treat the poor as a group tend to represent them as grotesque and degraded, while those that zero in on a single passenger or family are generally more sympathetic, though in some cases the focus lies more on the observer’s compassion than on the poverty observed. Most commonly, the poor passengers singled out are mothers and children who are represented as a vulnerable and ‘deserving’ poor rather than as a threatening underclass. Fathers, when they appear, are generally portrayed in a more negative light, identified with the ‘undeserving’ poor and with vices and ignorance.

‘A Museum of Grotesques’ A common technique in French omnibus texts is the use of the grotesque, generally in ‘sound off’ descriptions that represent the poor not individually but as a group that is abject, homogeneous, or in some way deformed.

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Usually the observer feels himself to be socially superior to the other passengers. Although these representations sometimes distinguish small differences among the latter, they ultimately subsume them into a common vulgarity or grotesqueness. The focus lies not on the passengers’ misery but on the bourgeois observer’s reaction to them, which often is a feeling of discomfort. In Maupassant’s ‘La Dot’ (1884), for example, a bourgeois bride from the provinces feels increasingly ill at ease as she surveys her fellow passengers in an omnibus: All of the other travellers, aligned and silent,—a grocer boy, a working girl, an infantry sergeant, a man with gold eyeglasses wearing a silk hat with enormous rims turned up like gutters, two women with an important and grumpy air who seemed to say in their attitude, ‘We are here, but we are worth more than this’, two nuns, a bare-headed girl, and an undertaker,— had the air of a collection of caricatures, a museum of grotesques, of a series of fares with human faces, similar to those rows of comic puppets that one shoots at with bullets at fairs. The jolts of the coach tossed their heads about a little, shook them, made the flabby flesh or their cheeks tremble; and the quivering of the wheels dazed them, they seemed idiots or asleep’.3

Although the passengers are very different and not all belong to the lower classes, their common movement in the jolting vehicle blurs the differences among them, creating the impression of a shared vulgarity, grotesqueness, and idiocy. As Belenky notes, they are dehumanised, ‘reduced to caricatures’.4 The attitude of the two self-important women mirrors that of the heroine, who also considers the other passengers beneath her. This echoing suggests that she is ultimately just one more figure in this ‘museum’, equally vulgar in her pretensions. The blurring of the distinction between observer and observed makes the experience even more unsettling. Paul Margueritte’s psychological novel La Tourmente (1893) features a similarly disturbing scene in which the well-to-do Jacques, whose wife has just confessed to having an affair with his best friend, observes the occupants of an omnibus he has entered on a whim after aimlessly wandering through Paris: They all showed the fatigue of the journey and their heads oscillated, in a half-slumber. A woman, still young, but whose features were prematurely aged, looked fixedly in front of her, and her eyes, between withered eyelids,

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had an almost savage expression; what pain, treason or jealousy had so devoured that one? An old woman, who did not speak at all, nevertheless let her lips go with an air of maniacal and dazed worry. A hunchback in the back, like a big dressed toad, was folded up on himself with that important and meditative gravity that hunchbacks often have. The other passengers were not remarkable; life, worries and everyday fatigues had polished, worn down and erased them; some, immobile and sagging, their soul absent, resembled wax figures. Jacques, in the depth of the humiliation that throbbed in his heart in piercing reverberations of anguish like a toothache, felt a commiseration for these beings similar to himself, whose joys and pains, surely, give or take a bit, differed little from his own; and yet, in spite of himself, the idea of his intellectual and social superiority, the illusion that his suffering and even his misfortune were of a more delicate, more elevated nature, inspired in him a small sentiment of vanity so ridiculous that he immediately mocked himself for it.5

Like Jeanne, Jacques considers himself above his fellow passengers whom he sees as a dazed, sagging, and repugnant mass. Both passages dehumanise and objectify: just as Jeanne views the other passengers as a museum of grotesques, Jacques converts them into wax figures.6 Unlike Jeanne, however, Jacques briefly identifies with them and recognises their suffering. Nevertheless, the focus lies not on their pain so much as on the impact of their appearance on his mental state. The experience of being with them makes Jacques aware of the ‘depths of mud’ inside of him—‘cowardly ideas, egotism, vanity’—and, scared of himself, he jumps off the omnibus to ‘breathe fresh, purer air’.7 The episode is the beginning of a turning point in the text in which Jacques shifts from focusing on his own sufferings to considering his wife’s as well. As in the omnibus, however, his attempts to commiserate with and to forgive her will ultimately be mired by the ‘mud’ of his jealousy and distrust. In comic texts, this sort of grotesque representation often involves animalisation. The hero of Eugène Woestyn’s story ‘Une course d’omnibus’ (1855) describes the other passengers as a very pretty sample of the uglier half of the human race in its two divisions, male and female. One would almost take it for the crystallisation of a dream of Grandville, so much did those thick-lipped, squashed, flattened, beak-like faces seem analogous to certain animals, mainly with several varieties of the canine species, and (it is sad to admit), the lower ranks of society […] are not the only ones to fill the ranks of that hybrid exhibition; the upper classes, the

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classes of 29-sous gloves are represented there by the woman in the middle, who seems to have been born to transmit to posterity the portrait of the last pug, and her neighbour, the fashionable parakeet whose pince-nez turns away with sacrosanct horror from the gentleman on the folding seat, a squalid and mud-encrusted barbet.8

As in Maupassant’s text, various social classes are represented here, but all are reduced to grotesque, animalised figures in the protagonist’s imagination. The passage recalls Grandville’s caricature in Les Métamorphoses du jour (1828) representing the omnibus as a Noah’s ark with animals as passengers (Fig. 4.1). As in Grandville’s caption, in which a bird-like passenger exclaims, ‘What! Those people are also getting on!’, one of the grotesque figures in this evocation (the parakeet with a pince-nez) looks with disdain on a neighbour.9 The passage, however, is less a reflection on the passengers than on the observer himself, a frivolous young man who, like Maupassant’s heroine, is as ultimately as vulgar as his travelling companions. Perhaps the most dismal example of such grotesque representations, however, is Jean Lorrain’s story ‘Le Possédé’ (1895) in which a recovering opium addict takes to riding the tram and observing its occupants. Like Margueritte’s Jacques, the narrator initially attributes the passengers’ abjection to their poverty and the tram setting. The ‘ugliness’ of these ‘low people’ is exacerbated and aggravated in an almost fantastical way inside omnibuses! With the first cold spells, it becomes terrible. Is it the everyday worry, the low needs, the depressing weight of petty concerns, the terror of the end of the month, the deadlines and debts that they will never pay, the weariness of all those without money grappling with life, a rancid life without surprises, all the sadness of even existing without a slightly higher thought in the skull or without a slightly vaster dream in the heart?10

As with Jacques, however, the narrator’s understanding for the plight of the poor gradually gives way to a sense of disgust and superiority: a sudden slackening seems to take over all those beings crammed in there; those who are standing struggle still, worried in an animal way about not falling from the platform; but the fat women collapsed in the four corners of the interior, the old workers with gnarled fingers, with poor necks bitten by the cold, with poor scarce hairs and the sly-looking faces of the maids on errands, a chlorotic and vicious air, oblique eyes, always rolled from one

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corner to another under flabby eyelids, ambiguous gentlemen buttoned to the neck whose linen one never sees; can there be, my dear, in the drab clarity of a November day a gloomier and more repugnant spectacle than that of the interior of a tram?

In the accumulation of details, the description of one passenger seems to run into another; the individuals are subsumed into a single grotesque mass. As the passage continues, the narrator begins to project this abjection onto their characters, which he imagines as either deranged or criminal: their ‘glassy looks, without expression, are the looks of insane people and somnambulists’ and reflect thoughts of ‘greed and theft; lust, when it appears, is venal and despoiling; each one, deep down, thinks only of how to plunder and dupe his neighbour’.11 Like Woestyn’s protagonist, moreover, he assigns animal features that again recall Grandville: desire, hate, and despair at being poor give some flattened, churlish heads, the sharpened, twisted faces of shrews and vipers; avarice and egotism give others snouts of old pigs with jawbones of sharks, and it is in this bestiary where every low instinct is stamped in animal features, it is in this rolling cage, full of wild beasts and batrachians comically decked out like the characters of Grandville in modern pants, shawls, and dresses, that I travel and circulate since the beginning of the month.12

As in the other examples, the focus of Lorrain’s story is not the passengers themselves but rather the psychology of the observer, whose grotesque vision ultimately reflects his mental breakdown. Lorrain’s representation, however, differs in its emphasis on the grasping and greedy nature of the passengers represented. Whereas Maupassant and Margueritte turn the passengers into immobile figures (a museum of grotesques or wax figures) and Woestyn portrays them as innocent pets, Lorrain’s image of a ‘rolling cage full of beasts and batrachians’ suggests a violence on the verge of explosion. This is ultimately a much more threatening underclass.

‘A Mater dolorosa of the People’ Grotesque depictions represent one extreme in literary descriptions of social difference on urban transit. At the opposite end of the spectrum are a series of texts that offer spiritual or aesthetised visions of poverty. Like the first group, these depictions are ‘sound off’ representations, but the

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focus lies not on the group but on the poverty of a single individual—usually, an impoverished mother—who is observed in isolation. Generally, these portraits identify a sublime or aesthetic quality in the passenger that transcends her misery. A clear example is the sonnet ‘Dans l’omnibus’ (1880) by the Parnassian poet Albert Mérat. The poem describes a young mother who nurses an emaciated infant on an omnibus, exposing in the process her torn blouse. The child’s laughter, however, transforms the scene. As the mother smiles, It is holiness that this misery conveys this misfortune of the seedy underbelly gives off a ray of light And the august redemption has for its frame The back of the omnibus that goes to Glacière’.13

By introducing pictorial diction (‘frame’), Mérat transforms extreme poverty into a spiritual painting framed by the omnibus. Although the subject matter is far from Parnassian, Mérat treats it in an idealising and aestheticising manner. The observer’s class sensitivity becomes in this poem a form of artistic sensibility, which converts the social other into an almost religious icon. By isolating, framing, and spiritualising the mother, however, Mérat defuses any social critique: poverty here is not a social evil but a redemptive force and thing of beauty. A similarly aestheticised vision of a poor mother appears in Joseph Étienne’s vignette ‘En omnibus’, published in a family periodical in 1856. Travelling on an omnibus that winds its way through dirty streets in foggy weather, the narrator is initially disgusted and depressed by the scene but when a woman, ‘dressed in the colours of the street and the weather’, smiles at her toddler daughter, everything changes: that drab face […] was suddenly illuminated by the most adorable expression of devoted, complete love, of intense and silent rapture. That ugly and dirty creature, of indeterminate age and without freshness, became divine. Correggio never found such a look, even in the angelic head of that young martyr whose soul is raptured to heaven as the sword plunges into his bosom; never did a Virgin of Raphael, contemplating the infant Christ, have a more touching expression of delight and of love.

Inequalities may divide society, Étienne concludes, but they ‘do not exist before the Creator’.14 Once again, the aestheticisation and spiritualisation of the social other distracts the bourgeois narrator from the shock of

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poverty and, in this case, leads him to dismiss class difference altogether. In Mérat’s and Étienne’s texts, the mystical experience is reserved for the middle-class observer. The poor woman’s voice and perspective are not represented. Indeed, it is precisely her silence that allows the writer to project a sublime and aestheticising vision onto her smile. It is interesting to contrast these texts with another ‘sound off’ work that represents a poor mother as the Virgin Mary but that does evoke her thoughts and experience: Jean Lorrain’s ‘Pietà de Mazas’ (1892). The story features a nameless maidservant—a ‘Miserable and sensitive creature with the instincts and ugliness of the people’—who wakes up early one morning and finishes her chores quickly to be able to visit her son in the Mazas prison. As the omnibus slowly makes its way through muddy, melting snow, she recalls the sad story of his life: ‘a son without a father naturally, a sin of youth (promiscuity of maids’ rooms in the stinking kennel of the mansards)’. As in many naturalist texts, the son’s fate is determined by his birth (his wanton parents) and by his social milieu: after falling into bad company, he begins to steal. Through free indirect speech, however, Lorrain creates sympathy for the mother’s predicament: ‘Stolen, he had stolen! Stolen! he too… She really didn’t have any luck; the father had also stolen and now the sin has taken seed and flowered again’.15 As in the aestheticising texts discussed above, Lorrain moves toward a spiritual and exalted representation of the mother’s suffering: Oh mater dolorosa of the people, Patrocles of the gutter, pains and unknown tenderness. The poor woman’s throat is dry at the idea of seeing all that again; she went there in the old days for her lovers, now she goes there for her son, beast of pain, flesh of suffering, heart of misery!… And the omnibus slowly rattles, so slowly, the axles creak, the horses stumble, and the melted snow drips along the roofs.16

Whereas the omnibus in Étienne’s and Mérat’s texts contrasts with and frames the beauty and nobility of the mother’s smile, Lorrain’s slow vehicle with its creaking axles and its stumbling horses becomes a metaphor for her troubled life, her struggle to make her way through the mire of her social circumstances. Far from Mérat’s and Étienne’s idealising portraits, Lorrain’s text foregrounds the brutality and degradation of poverty and enters into the head and grief of the social other. The spiritual transformation of the mother in the poems reconciles us with her poverty. In Lorrain’s

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text, however, the allusion is not to a radiant Virgin and Child but rather to the Pietà, the tragic icon of suffering motherhood. It is noteworthy that Lorrain includes both the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, but by focalising the story through the worthy and repentant working woman, he defuses the threat of the rapacious and criminal underclass represented by her son and former lovers. In all these texts, the poor mother becomes an almost spiritual icon. The effect, however, is quite different when the perspective shifts from the bourgeois observer to the poor woman. Lorrain’s naturalist approach inspires a deeper empathy. By attributing the woman’s situation to heredity and a depraved milieu, Lorrain steers away from a political critique. The Belgian anarchist Georges Eekhoud, in contrast, uses the technique of spiritualisation to make a scathing commentary about nineteenth-century working conditions in his story ‘Le N° 23 du tramway jaune’ (1895). As in the texts considered above, the narrator initially takes an aesthetic perspective, evoking the comeliness of the protagonist’s house: In one of those working-class neighbourhoods with low and deplorably uniform houses that only increase the monotony and utilitarianism of our modern streets, I knew a charming household that introduced, one might have said, a certain coquettishness to contend with the influence of such a pernicious phalanstery.17

Whereas Lorrain’s text describes the inescapable influence of a degraded milieu, Eekhoud evokes an individual who steadfastly resists a homogenising and debased environment. His house is a model of cleanliness and taste, and he himself is a ‘paragon of virile beauty, of a beauty in complete harmony with the perfections of the soul’.18 His working conditions as a tram conductor, however, are brutal and unforgiving. He is not only miserably paid but also exposed to the elements for hours on end. Eventually, he develops a chronic illness and begins coughing up blood at work. Eekhoud denounces the indifference of the bourgeois passengers (stockbrokers and businessmen), who converse with him and offer tobacco but do nothing to alleviate his plight, and the cruelty of his employers, who secretly resent his model conduct and look for pretexts to dismiss him in order to replace him with cheaper labour. Even the horses are better treated than he is. Nevertheless, the protagonist continues to work to support his family, despite the blood filling his lungs. Even on his deathbed, he longs to struggle on.

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Like Lorrain’s piece, Eekhoud’s concludes with a spiritualising evocation of the impoverished protagonist: Impossible to forget the expression of that noble and suffering head: a Christ after the flagellation […] That Calvary had lasted four years. Who speaks to us still of the fourteen stations of the Way of the Cross? For four years, that long martyrdom, that intermittent torture of small knocks, has been put into practice in an opulent city, which I will not name out of respect for the brave people it still contains who could legitimately say, ‘I am innocent of the blood of that just man!’ For four years that unhappy man dragged on in this way, smiling, without complaining, and did not find among those rich ones a saviour, a redeemer!19

Where Lorrain draws on the image of the Pietà to elevate the poor mother, Eekhoud uses his martyred conductor to downplay Christ’s suffering. The 14 stations pale in comparison to 4 years of constant abuse. The aestheticisation and the spiritualisation serve in this story not only to elicit sympathy but also to spark anger at a system that is oppressive and unjust.

Silence Versus Speech In the texts discussed above, the sound is generally ‘off’: what is observed is the outward appearance of misery or the inner thoughts of the sufferer. In other texts, however, silent observation is complemented by speech and exchange. The third type of text we will consider draws a contrast between the bourgeois passengers’ silence and the loquaciousness of the poor. As we saw in Chap. 4, these divergences in conduct generally reflect different conceptions of the omnibus as a social space. Silence suggests a consciousness of class difference and a vision of the omnibus as a public space filled with strangers, while speech indicates a more intimate view of the vehicle and a recognition of fellow passengers as social peers or as part of the same community. A clear example of this contrast is the vignette ‘La Médaille’ (1883) by François Coppée, a writer known for sentimentalising sketches of Paris and particularly of its humbler classes.20 The text juxtaposes the stories of two omnibus passengers. In the first half, a poor mother tells the conductor about the protracted illness of her son, whom she has just retrieved from the hospital. This moving ‘sound on’ narrative is followed by a ‘sound off’ account of the thoughts of a young nun from an aristocratic family, who envies the poor woman’s marriage and motherhood. Silently,

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the nun recalls her own engagement to an Irish lord, which was broken off after he killed a man in a duel over an actress. In her shock, she decided to take orders. In the end, the nun gives the poor boy a medal blessed by the pope that had been given to her by her fiancé. The common experience of suffering seems to build a bridge between the two women that transcends their difference in rank. Nevertheless, the exchange is not reciprocal: the mother’s openness—the poor are described as ‘big children, full of trust and abandon’—contrasts with the nun’s introspection and reserve, and the former never learns of the latter’s grief.21 In her silent and secret suffering, the aristocrat to a certain extent displaces the poor mother as the object of compassion. As Carolyn Betensky has observed, nineteenth-­ century texts often represent affluent characters’ envy of the lower classes and transfer to the former the vulnerability of the latter.22 Coppée’s story is a clear example of this displacement. In ‘La Médaille’, the mother’s eagerness to share her story is natural and endearing, but in other texts, the confessions and indiscretions of the poor provoke social awkwardness. Renée Allard’s vignette ‘Le Tramway: Note sur Paris’ (1899), for example, begins abruptly as a peasant from the provinces clumsily enters a tram and greets her fellow passengers, ‘Bonjour la compagnie’ (hello everyone). Amused by her openness, they smile ‘with the egoism of Parisian mockery’ and observe her ‘with curiosity and pity, as one looks at something strange, something out of place in the large city’. The Parisians, who view the city as an indifferent, anonymous space, maintain an icy silence. Nevertheless, the wet nurse who considers the omnibus as a ‘small world’, an extension of her village, begins to share her story: ‘she talks to herself. Whom was she addressing? She herself could not have said. But she was speaking. It was necessary for her to recount out loud everything that had happened to her’. Until this point, the narrative is entirely in the third person, but when she begins to talk to herself, the narrator intervenes: ‘Then, I listened to that woman. She inspired pity. I even encouraged her to chat. It would be impossible for me to tell you all the expressions, all the local words that that countrywoman used’.23 Notably, it is precisely in the moment that the narrator engages the peasant woman that he also creates a conversation with the reader, using firstand second-person pronouns. Initially, the reader is in the position of the other passengers, silently observing. The shift in address, however, draws him into the conversation. Just as we are drawn in, so are the other passengers, who begin to listen to her story, admiring her calm, simple manners. It is at this point that the narrator finally transmits her words (rather

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than simply describing her way of speaking): as she acquires listeners, she takes on a voice. The peasant woman, we learn, has come to Paris to work as a wet nurse but has been rejected because her own baby is too small. As she explains her situation, she begins to nurse the child, causing a young woman to blush. Allard’s text, thus, contrasts the candour of the peasant, who bares her breast and her story, with the alienation of the Parisians who are separated by invisible walls of formality and restraint. For a brief moment, however, she succeeds in breaking through their indifference, giving them a glimpse of the struggles of her class and bringing them into her ‘small world’. Ultimately, the focus of the story is not so much the poor woman’s hardship as the transformation of the other passengers and the awakening of their compassion. An even more powerful example of an awkward, ‘sound on’ encounter with poverty is Emilia Pardo Bazán’s story ‘En tranvía’ (1890). The work opens with a ‘sound off’ portrayal of the elegant passengers on a tram in the upper-class Barrio de Salamanca in Madrid. The narrator describes the well-dressed children of a bourgeois couple, focusing particularly on an infant wrapped in white lace who laughs ‘irradiating light from heaven in his pure eyes’. In this happy, well-to-do context, even the ‘plebeian tram’ seems ‘aristocratic’. The introduction to the story, thus, is a silent, highly visual representation that is evoked with the diction of portraiture: ‘I only noted one blot in the composition of the tram’. The ‘blot’ is an indigent woman carrying an infant in her arms. With her dark complexion, humble clothing, and air of misery, the mother contrasts with the happy bourgeois children in their white dresses. Observing the woman’s appearance, the narrator hypothesises that she is not only poor but also desperate. When the conductor collects the fare, the poor woman hands him 10 cents instead of 15. When he asks for the rest, she recounts her life story in a raised and trembling voice: her husband has gone off with another woman leaving her alone with her infant. Shocked by her situation and her candour, the other passengers hasten to give alms. Their gesture, however, fails to calm her grief and only increases the awkwardness on the tram. Embarrassed by her non-response, they simply look away. The narrator points to the self-interest of their gesture: He who gives alms is almost always a first-class egotist who is dying to transform tears into rejoicing with the touch of a wand. Absolute despair disorients him, and even mortifies him in his self-esteem, as if a declaration of independence that the unhappy one allows himself.24

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Charity here is not a gift but an exchange. As the other passengers look away, the narrator decides to see whether words have a greater effect than money. As is typical in naturalist fiction, the text sets up an experiment of sorts. Addressing the woman, the narrator reminds her that her child will one day support her. At this point, however, the text reverts to ‘sound off’ narration as the infant, waking, opens his eyes to reveal the cloudy white pupils of blindness. It is interesting to contrast Allard’s and Pardo Bazán’s stories. In both, a poor mother’s monologue creates awkwardness and awakens her fellow passengers’ compassion. In each story, moreover, the narrator engages in conversation with the poor woman while the others tune out. But whereas in Allard’s vignette irony and disdain give way to pity and admiration, Pardo Bazán’s story moves from sympathy to indifference. Disappointed that their alms have produced no effect, the passengers simply look away in embarrassment. Whereas the French narrator engages in a reciprocal exchange with the poor mother, the Spanish narrator gives advice that is answered only by the woman’s silent stare and her child’s blind gaze. Unlike Allard’s garrulous peasant, the mother in Pardo Bazán’s text does not see the bourgeois tram as an extension of her community; she is aware that she is the ‘blot’—an outsider—in this space. The ending underscores not only the contrast between the baby’s dead pupils and the shining eyes of the bourgeois infant at the beginning but also the non-reciprocal nature of the exchange in the scene: just as the narrator sees the baby but is not seen by it, so speech in the story is never answered in kind. The passengers respond to the woman’s monologue with coins, and she responds to the narrator’s consoling words with a dead stare. The movement of Allard’s sentimentalising narrative toward a ‘small world’ is impossible in Pardo Bazán’s naturalist story. Poverty, however, is not always associated with speech. ‘A Bit of Guido in an Omnibus’ (1857), a story by the Scottish author William Wilson, begins, like Pardo Bazán’s text, with a ‘sound off’ evocation of a sorrowful poor woman with an infant but no wedding ring. The mother’s beautiful ‘pale face seemed, as it were, to reveal a living story. I read those features, and turned them over in my mind, as I would actually the leaves of a book’.25 This silent reading contrasts with the ‘shallow, obtrusive and common’ conversation of two ‘stout fussy, middle-aged City men’.26 When one of them finds a worthless trinket on the omnibus floor, he shoves it in the poor woman’s face: ‘There, this’ll do for you’, he tells her.27 Wilson’s story inverts the usual pattern of representing bourgeois

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characters with the sound ‘off’ and poor characters with the sound ‘on’. Here it is the rich who engage in meaningless, cruel chatter, while the poor girl in her silence seems copied from a ‘Magdalen’ by Guido (the description resembles Mérat’s and Étienne’s aestheticising portraits). In the end, Wilson concludes that ‘the highways of life’ are full of ‘quiet touching pictures’ which are often neglected ‘for matters of greater sound and fury’.28 The inversion of the usual positions of speech and silence underscores the lower-class woman’s dignity and suggests that the encounter with wealth could be just as awkward for the poor as contact with the indigent is for the well-to-do in Allard and Pardo Bazán. In all the texts explored above, the ‘sound off’/‘sound on’ divide places the poor and the other passengers in different categories. In each case, they engage in some form of interaction or exchange (sharing stories or giving alms or trinkets), but only in Allard’s vignette is the divide overcome and a sense of community established.

Explaining Poverty The works we have just seen draw attention to awkward encounters between ranks and particularly to the discomfort of well-off passengers on witnessing poverty on the omnibus. Other texts—particularly in the Spanish context—however, focus not so much on the observers as on the misery of those observed. The next group of texts we will consider are works that attempt to offer an explanation or analysis of the behaviour or abjection of the poor. Generally, these works focus in naturalist fashion on the influence of a degraded social milieu or on the vices or ignorance of the underclass. Unlike most of the texts examined so far, they often feature the so-called ‘undeserving’ poor. In Enrique Sepúlveda’s story ‘Herodes modernos’ (1891), the narrator observes a poor couple with a child on a tram. Whereas the father is showily (if cheaply) dressed, the mother is emaciated and ill with eyes that are ‘dimmed, inexpressive, almost those of a blind person’.29 The narrator notes her silent submission to her abusive husband. When the boy complains that he is cold, his father reproaches him, grabs him from his mother’s arms, and exposes him to the freezing wind, which blows off his hat and reveals his wasted, sickly body: ‘Then I could see the child well. Poor creature! Large head, protruding cheekbones, a neck so unbelievably thin that one would think it was made of a bunch of cords, the thin little legs

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also like canes: the perfect type of physiological misery’.30 When the child later complains of thirst, his father offers him wine over his mother’s objections. Echoing John Stuart Mill, the narrator observes that her passivity can be understood only as the result of an ‘inhuman slavery, a thousand times worse and more repugnant than the primitive slavery of the blacks, in which many of these women of the pueblo live beside their husbands’.31 When the family gets off at the circus, the narrator overhears the father telling a friend that his son has become sick from wine at a bullfight. This story once again combines a ‘sound off’ observer with a ‘sound on’ scene of poverty. The focus, however, is not as in Allard or Pardo Bazán an awkward encounter between classes but rather the degradation of the impoverished family. The work underscores the abuse of power, poor parenting, and ignorance of the lower-class father. Whereas most of the texts examined above represent a mother and child in isolation—at times even recalling images of the Virgin Mary and Christ—Sepúlveda’s story introduces the delinquency of the poor father, one of the ‘modern Herods’ of the title, who condemns his own son to suffering and very likely to premature death. It is noteworthy, however, that the family does not interact with the other passengers. By isolating them, Sepúlveda limits the threat of this underclass: they do harm only to themselves.32 The story ‘El tranvía del Este’ (1889) by the republican and pro-labour playwright and politician Francisco Pi y Arsuaga offers a similarly dismal reflection on the conduct of the popular classes. Unlike ‘Herodes modernos’, however, the narrative is mediated by ‘sound on’ observers: the narrator and Julio, a popular playwright who writes sainetes (one-act farces) on flamenco themes. At the beginning of the story, the narrator complains of Julio’s stereotyped representations of the pueblo singing, drinking, and stealing: ‘in addition to vitiating the taste of the public, [the plays] do nothing more than encourage our low pueblo, today more lacking in enlightenment than anything else, to go down the road of that ill-fated flamenco-mania’.33 Julio would do better to show the tragic consequences of their frivolous lifestyle. To illustrate his point, the narrator draws attention to a passing tram whose lower-class passengers are singing on their way to a wedding. In this story, unusually, the observers are placed outside the vehicle, isolated spatially from the unruly and criminal underclass evoked.

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The narrator, who has been observing the bride and groom for a while, tells Julio their story. Carmen, a poor girl raised by a virtuous mother, has been seduced by Julián who then abandons her to marry Estrella. Carmen’s brother, Tomás, who also loves Estrella, disguises himself as a blind man and sings ominous verses at Julián and Estrella’s wedding. Carmen also sings of her own disgrace and loudly reproaches Julián, inciting Estrella’s jealousy. Julián is about to strike Carmen when Estrella appears alongside Tomás, who stabs Julián. At this point, another tram appears in the background in which ‘another happier wedding party […] is already returning from its festivities’.34 The trams at the beginning and end of the episode are identified as tranvías del Este, a line that carried passengers to the Ventas del Espíritu Santo, a popular recreational area where the lower classes engaged in singing, dancing, and drunken revelry. By framing the story with these trams, Pi y Arsuaga underscores the consequences of the popular culture that Julio celebrates in his plays and clearly separates the poor characters’ world from that of the bourgeois observers: as in Sepúlveda’s story, the lower classes are a danger only to themselves. The vision of the masses is naturalist—their destinies seem determined by their milieu—but the narrator offers the hope that a more enlightened literature, one that shows the pueblo their defects and the perils of their revelry, might correct their profligacy and instill good values and a healthier way of life. Perhaps the most intriguing example of this type of moral and social analysis, however, is Juan Lapoulide’s ‘Del dicho al hecho (monólogo de un pillo)’ (1891), which echoes naturalist discourse but also calls it into question. The story records the thoughts of an unemployed young man— identified in the subtitle as a pillo (rascal)—as he observes his fellow tram passengers. Unusually, the narrator-observer in this story belongs to the lower ranks. Initially, his attitude is extremely critical, not unlike that of Jean Lorrain’s narrator in ‘Le Possédé’: the other people on the tram seem ‘a collection of idiots, some rich, others poor, all egoists with very little shame’; their physiognomies reflect their moral debasement. Observing a worker’s wife weighed down with a heavy basket and two children, he draws attention to her shameless flirting and indifferent parenting: But what…. what naturalist jokes she cracks with the conductor of the tram! Jokes, eh? They seem more than jokes. It’s the same as always. All women are the same! Even this one, who must have enough to think about with caring for her family. And so vulgar! What obscenities she uses to quarrel

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with her brood! A good upbringing! Aren’t the little ones just delicious! Their skin hasn’t seen more water than that of their baptism and the rain. Nothing: intellectual and physical misery. There is nothing else in the world.35

Later, the narrator speculates about a rich builder seated across from him, who, he imagines, has made his fortune by using shoddy materials or rickety scaffolds, endangering his employees’ lives. The narrator, however, does not disapprove of his behaviour: ‘he is in his right, as I would be if I grabbed him on a highway and robbed him’.36 The narrator assumes the worst not only of his fellow passengers but also of himself. If he is not a thief, he observes, it is only because no one taught him to steal. Reflecting on his life, he recalls many missed opportunities for cheating or filching. He attributes his behaviour, however, not to virtue or honesty but rather to circumstance or cowardice; if he does not swindle, it is because there are no more gullible people in the world to deceive. Morality, he concludes, is simply the ‘law […] imposed by those who accumulate for themselves all the joys of life to the detriment of those who possess nothing’.37 Although he has done nothing wrong, thus, he considers himself part of the ‘undeserving’ poor. The contact with the (allegedly) corrupt passengers seems to have a de-civilising effect on the narrator. Influenced by the vulgar milieu of the tram, he reimagines himself as the degraded mirror of his neighbours. In the end, however, the narrator’s actions belie his discourse. When the builder injures himself stepping off the tram, the narrator assists him and returns his wallet, which he has found on the ground. Even when he finds a vulnerable person, it turns out, he behaves honourably. The contrast between the narrator’s character and his own assessment of it is clear in the distinction between his speech and his thoughts (placed in parentheses): ‘Go with God. (Go on and may they shoot you.) You’re very welcome. (Thanking me! If he knew my intentions!)’38 Whereas Pi y Arsuaga represents in the tram the lower classes’ recklessness, which even well-raised children cannot escape, Lapoulide’s story reveals a deep and almost involuntary sense of values that resists this demoralising milieu. Lapoulide, thus, plays on the naturalist discourse of texts such as Sepúlveda’s and Pi y Arsuaga’s by having a poor character apply it to himself in an utterly incongruous way. As the protagonist’s behaviour contradicts his thoughts, his cynical logic is undermined. Whereas Sepúlveda and Pi y Arsuaga point to a seemingly unbridgeable gap between classes, Lapoulide represents a basic human decency that transcends social stereotypes.

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What all these texts share, however, is an attempt to explain a degraded form of poverty by pointing to a vitiating milieu, literature, or upbringing. The characters in these stories do not belong to the ‘deserving’ poor: the sadism of Sepúlveda’s modern Herod, the destructive passions and violence of Pi y Arsuaga’s lovers, and the cynicism of Lapoulide’s rascal are far from the idealised Madonnas of Mérat and Étienne. Nevertheless, these debased characters do not pose a threat to anyone but themselves. Although Lapoulide’s narrator voices clear class resentment, the title of the story, a proverb that means ‘easier said than done’, indicates his fundamental inability to act on it.

Unequal Juxtapositions Whereas the texts in the last section deal with the lower classes in isolation, the next group of works we will discuss focus on inequality, drawing attention to glaring disparities between rich and poor. In general, however, these differences are perceived by an outside observer who is struck by a contrast. As we will see, the two groups contrasted do not enter into conversation or contact with one another; the juxtaposition occurs on the page or in the observer’s mind. A clear example of this type of juxtaposition is Julio Nombela’s sketch ‘En el tranvía’ (1890) in which a narrator-flâneur eavesdrops on two conversations: one between two working-class women and the other between two young ladies from the bourgeoisie (one of whom is accompanied by her mother). The text alternates between the two sets of dialogues, which are separated only by dotted lines. Unlike texts contrasting speech and silence (such as Coppée’s ‘La Médaille’), both classes are represented with the ‘sound on’. From the beginning, however, the narrator points to the strikingly different language used by the two groups: ‘The readers will understand, without my insinuating, who is speaking’.39 As the tram crosses Madrid, the women comment on the buildings they pass, and the juxtaposed conversations reveal vast differences between the two classes’ perspectives. When the streetcar passes the Casa de la Equitativa (a life insurance company), for example, one of the poor women explains to the other how insurance works, while the wealthy girls discuss the building’s lavish decor and their families’ policies. The two sets of women occupy the same space and talk about the same topics but never exchange a word with each other. The dotted lines separating the conversations suggest the invisible social barriers between passengers and social classes.

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At first, the story seems to contrast the bourgeois girls’ comfort and taste with the poor women’s ignorance and vulgarity. The ending, however, undermines our initial assumptions about the two groups. After they all leave the tram, the other passengers begin to gossip about them calling into question the financial security of the wealthy family and pointing to the poultry vendor’s accumulated capital. Ultimately, the essay draws attention to the disconnect between our perception of class difference and the material reality. Nombela’s text represents a physical juxtaposition between two classes, but more commonly the contrast takes place in the mind of the observer. In the chronicle ‘Viajeros’ (1900) signed by the Spanish journalist Ernesto López, for example, the narrator-passenger observes two peasants carrying an elderly blind woman. Eventually, they catch up with the tram and lift her onto it, but, to his surprise, they leave her to travel alone. The woman explains that she has saved for 3 years to travel to Madrid for a cataract operation. The family, however, has so little money that the sons can accompany their mother only by running breathlessly behind the vehicle. The narrator is struck by the contrast between the poverty of this family and the wealth of a friend who is travelling on a train in a private coach with several servants and a spendthrift mistress to a property in the North that he almost never uses. Once again, the juxtaposition points to radical disparities in circumstances and fortune. The essay concludes that the rich man’s ‘blindness in sentiment and in the heart’ far exceeds that of the old woman in the tram.40 As in Pardo Bazán’s ‘En tranvía’, blindness becomes a metaphor for poverty, but in this case the poor do not confront the affluent directly. The narrator critiques inequality, but by placing the classes in different forms of transport, he maintains a safe distance between them. The contrast occurs purely in his mind. An even bleaker reflection on blindness on the tram appears in Adolphe Chenevière’s story ‘En tramway’ (1890). Like Pardo Bazán’s ‘En tranvía’, the story begins with a happy representation of bourgeois families at leisure on a Sunday morning in early spring. The bucolic scene, which takes place in a park, is interrupted by the dissonant noise of a tram ‘pitching its mechanical and deafening call’.41 After stepping on, the narrator begins to observe a 10-year-old boy in a school uniform whose father ‘judging by his outfit, probably had neither independent means nor a large salary’.42 Perhaps influenced by the idyllic scene in the park, the narrator imagines the modest pleasures awaiting the child at home: the joyous reunion with his mother, the dessert with mendiants, and a stroll through the Jardin des

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Plantes. The boy, however, seems unhappy. When he turns his head, the narrator notices that one of his eyes is missing and that his report card is in Braille. Just as Pardo Bazán contrasts the blind infant with a bourgeois baby with radiant eyes, the narrator contrasts the boy’s ‘dead gaze’ with his own son’s ‘large blue eyes, limpid and wide open’.43 At this point, the father begins to reprimand his son. At first, the narrator cannot hear the conversation, but he deduces from the father’s angry gestures and the son’s repentant look that his grades are disappointing. When the father raises his voice, the narrator hears him threaten, ‘You’ll see, you’ll see, when we get home’.44 In his rage, the father forgets that he is in a public space and utters a series of expletives. As in ‘Herodes modernos’, the focus lies on the brutality of the lower-class father. The contrast between the two boys’ situations underscores fundamental differences in upbringing and behaviour among social classes. After the father and son get off, the narrator revises his earlier vision of their homecoming: ‘I saw them climbing the winding wooden stairs to the fifth floor […] the mother who asks for mercy, the child who trembles and who, without seeing it, knows that the father has taken up his cane;—and then a groan, an expletive, cries…’.45 When the narrator returns home and kisses his son tenderly, he can still hear the blind boy crying in his mind. As in Pardo Bazán’s story, the tale moves from joyous bourgeois leisure to the darkness of a blind boy’s life. But whereas in the Spanish text the revelation of the child’s blindness petrifies the observer and cuts off the narrative, in the French tale it introduces a greater compassion. In the end, the narrator not only empathises with the poor child but also places himself in the same position: like the boy, he knows what he cannot see. As in other texts, however, the focus lies primarily on the bourgeois observer, who is struck by the contrast in circumstances. All these texts, thus, draw attention to social inequalities, but in most cases a solid divide separates the classes, be it the dotted lines in Nombela’s sketch or the geographical separation in López’s and Chenevière’s stories.

Forging Community Whereas works focusing on social juxtapositions use superficial similarities to highlight glaring disparities in fortune, other stories point to an underlying sameness—a human decency—that transcends apparent differences in circumstance. In these texts, the omnibus is represented positively as a school of mutual understanding where people from different classes learn

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to appreciate and feel sympathy for one another. As the goal is to overcome social difference and encourage solidarity, such works generally focus on the ‘deserving’ poor and neutralise any initial sense of threat or conflict. An example of this type of story is Auguste Germain’s dialogue ‘Sur l’omnibus’ (1899), which begins as a conductor calls out the number 93, which he jokingly refers to as ‘the great Revolution’. This reference to the year of the Terror anticipates the class tension at the heart of the work. On entering the tram, the bearer of ticket number 93, a well-dressed young man, bumps into a plump femme du peuple who expresses annoyance: ‘Because I wear a bonnet and monsieur wears a top hat, does monsieur think that everything is allowed?’46 Later, when the young man mistakes a Swiss for a French coin, the woman accuses him of trying to cheat the conductor. The young man looks for his wallet but discovers to his chagrin that it is missing. Realising that his distress is real, the woman immediately pays his fare. Her gesture leads to a conversation in which the roles of the two figures seem to invert. The young man is an accountant whose firm has gone bankrupt and who can no longer support his wife and child. He wishes his parents had taught him a manual profession so that he could exchange his top hat for a casquette (cap). In the end, it turns out that he is on his way to an interview with the woman’s cousin to whom she promises to recommend him. As in Nombela’s ‘En el tranvía’, thus, the dialogue begins by insisting on a class difference that turns out to be more apparent than real. Ultimately, the two passengers come to feel solidarity, sympathy, and respect for each other. Whereas the stories of social analysis such as Sepúlveda’s and Pi y Arsuaga’s point to the deep social divide between classes, works such as Germain’s defuse the threat of ’93 representing social difference as ultimately superficial—a matter not of heart but of headwear (bonnets versus top hats). This type of moral is particularly common in omnibus texts by women writers such as Elizabeth Youatt’s story ‘The Twopenny Omnibus’ (1847) in which a poor girl named Mary, who works to support her family, shares an omnibus with the fashionable and ‘haughty’ Miss Wilmot, who sports a ‘magnificent bracelet’.47 Miss Wilmot scorns her fellow passengers insisting on opening the window to avoid ‘catch[ing] some horrible fever from these mean-looking people’. Nevertheless, Youatt clarifies, her sins are the result of ‘education and habit rather than disposition’.48 When Miss Wilmot accidently leaves her bracelet behind, Mary spends days looking for her. When she finally locates her and takes her home to restore the

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trinket, Miss Wilmot is shocked to discover Mary’s poverty and becomes the family’s benefactress. Whereas in ‘Sur l’omnibus’ it is the femme du peuple who corrects her initial negative assumption, here the bourgeois character learns to appreciate the social other. Once again, the story emphasises a similarity of feeling—an underlying decency and compassion—that transcends social divides. Another text by a woman writer in which prejudices are overcome is Julie Fertiault’s ‘En omnibus’ (1890), a vignette about an encounter between a working-class toddler and an elegantly dressed bourgeois boy. Although their mothers ignore each other, the children show mutual interest, though with different attitudes: ‘One expresses the pleasure and joy of finding someone similar, it is the physiognomy of the budding worker; on [the physiognomy] of the other, though very intelligent, one reads only a little surprise and a great deal of coldness’. When the poor child caresses the rich boy’s hand, the latter does not initially reciprocate. But as in Youatt’s text, his reaction is a matter of upbringing; he is reticent not out of pride but out of ‘a certain timidity’ and possibly ‘a lack of education of the heart’.49 After the poor boy drops his hand, the affluent child looks sad and reaches for him ‘with equal effusion on one side and the other’.50 In the end, the two children achieve a form of equality in their mutual affection. Their parents, however, remain separated: whereas the poor mother observes the scene approvingly, the well-to-do one is distracted and indifferent. The narrator considers her an unworthy mother. Unlike the other texts in this category, this is a ‘sound off’ encounter in which social classes are isolated from one another. The children’s gestures overcome this icy divide, but the final message is less optimistic than in Youatt’s story: the youngsters may arrive at a mutual understanding, but the lesson is not encouraged by the bourgeois mother and may well be forgotten in adulthood. All these texts, however, have a clear didactic function: they seek to overcome prejudice and encourage solidarity across class lines by offering examples of friendship and mutual respect.

Modelling Compassion A final approach, particularly common in women’s writings and in stories directed at female readers, is to encourage sympathy for the poor by modelling acts of charity or compassion. Unlike the texts examined above, in which two classes are placed on the same level, these works generally distinguish between a recipient and benefactress, who is usually from the

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upper classes. In the vignette ‘Souvenir d’omnibus’ (1873), for example, the narrator observes a pauper woman, emaciated, dressed in tatters, and lacking teeth, who is nursing an attractive, well-groomed baby. The child looks joyously at a woman in rich furs who gives the mother a coin. From his seat, the narrator can see the lady’s gesture but not her face: ‘I see the hand, so correctly and so carefully gloved, of the beautiful lady come out of its muff and insinuate itself surreptitiously into that of the poor creature seated in front of her’.51 When the narrator gets off, he takes with him the memory of ‘the expansive and generous compassion of the lady whose face I could never see; whether she is beautiful in her features, I do not know; but certainly in physiognomy, of that I am sure’.52 The story encourages charity by aestheticising the giving hand and shrouding the benefactress in an almost erotic mystery and fascination. The pictorial approach and silence of this scene recalls the spiritualising works of Mérat and Étienne, but what is aestheticised here is not the poor but the rich woman’s altruistic gesture, the beauty of the hand reflecting the virtue of the act. Other authors, however, point to the awkwardness of charity or to the superficiality of the benefactor. Lucien Griveau’s ‘En omnibus’ (1883), a sketch in a women’s magazine, begins with a ‘sound off’ description of a poor woman with a dying child on an omnibus: ‘He looked at you seriously with his light blue eyes, which were two pale stains on his old man’s face, and the mute interrogation of that child’s look provoked in you the anxiety of a profound enigma’.53 The second-person pronoun puts the reader in the narrator’s place and inspires sympathy. Overhearing the mother’s conversation with a neighbour, the narrator learns that her husband, a painter, has died of lead poisoning. Sick and down to her last coins, the mother is on her way to find work. The other passengers generously offer alms, but the narrator notes a brutality in their gesture: In these situations, the public shows a delicacy that one does not suspect in it, it is sensitive, generous. But whatever it does, it is always the public, that is to say, a being with an unlimited number of pairs of eyes and ears, a blasé who has brushed against so many things that he has an onlooker’s pity that is almost hurtful. He feels moved but deep down he is not sorry to have a little drama to break the monotony of the day, the details of which he can relate in the evening over dinner.54

The poor woman’s suffering is an almost welcome distraction for the other passengers who are fused together here in a sort of monstrous ogling

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being. The mother, the narrator observes, is experiencing for the first time ‘the atrocious humiliation of charity’.55 In this passage, the author exploits the ambiguous status of the omnibus as a social space. Its close quarters create a sense of intimacy and community—the impression of a ‘small world’—but it is nevertheless a public space situated in a vast and indifferent metropolis. Whereas the ‘sound off’ treatment of charity in ‘Souvenir d’omnibus’ allows for the idealisation of the gesture, which ultimately displaces the poverty as the focus of attention, the ‘sound on’ representations in texts such as Griveau’s and Pardo Bazán’s expose the awkwardness of such public confessions and the benefactors’ ultimate indifference. What is modelled in this essay is not so much the act of charity as the narrator’s sensitivity to the poor woman’s shame. Other texts offer lessons in compassion by contrasting different ways of reacting to the poor. Like Julie Fertiault’s ‘En omnibus’, Marie Bersier’s two-part sketch ‘Compagnons de route: de Paris à Paris’ (1895) evokes an encounter between a rich and a poor boy. But whereas Fertiault represents the wealthy parent as spoiled and indifferent, Bersier’s affluent mother makes a point of sitting next to her lower-class counterpart, and here it is the well-off child who takes the poor boy’s hand. The work distinguishes not between the boys—‘children know no distances’—but rather between two nuns in the omnibus. One, momentarily forgetting her prayers, is touched by the encounter, while the other, deeply engrossed in her book  of hours, does not even notice it. The narrator rejects the latter’s closure to the world, which prevents her from encountering ‘He who opened his arms to humanity’.56 The opposition recalls the Biblical story of Martha and Mary. The truly spiritual sister is the one who is open to life and the omnibus and who engages others. Later, a working girl with a dying infant provokes an exchange of pitying glances between the kind nun and a benevolent-looking woman. The essay represents the omnibus as a community in which passengers show concern for one another, but this compassion is notably a silent one. The distances remain despite the well-meaning glances. A similar lesson is offered in Emma Ferrand’s story ‘Il était trop tard!…’ (1833), in which a poor widow sells her only decent piece of clothing to pay for an omnibus trip to visit her sick son in a hospice. When a fat woman with a large purse gets on, the widow becomes aware of the unfairness of poverty: ‘she experienced for the first time feelings of revolt against the difference in positions’. Briefly she is even tempted to steal: ‘that money’, she reflects, ‘seems to want to insult my misery, or to invite me…

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it would be so easy…’.57 Horrified by her thought, however, she draws herself away from the purse. During the rest of the trip, she continues to resist temptation: when the contents of the bag fall onto the omnibus floor, she is the only passenger who does not help to pick up the coins. Her behaviour is closely observed by another passenger, who later asks a wealthy baroness to give her alms. Whereas in most texts of this category the benefactor and recipient meet on the omnibus, here they are geographically separated. The second part of the story recounts the many engagements that lead the baroness to postpone this act of charity. When she finally visits the widow, it is too late: she is dead. The vignette, thus, draws two oppositions: between the compassionate observer on the omnibus and the frivolous aristocrat and between the ‘deserving’ poor and the ‘undeserving’ rich. These stereotypes, however, are to a certain extent undermined by the story’s melodramatic emphasis on the temptation of theft. The woman may resist the urge to steal, but she is represented as exceptional in so doing.58 As in Germain’s dialogue and Youatt’s and Fertiault’s stories, these works generally have a didactic function, but their aim is not understanding or community—a recognition of an underlying sameness—but rather compassion and sensitivity to the plight of the poor. As in Wilson’s ‘A Bit of Guido in an Omnibus’, they often capture the awkwardness that the poor passengers experience in interacting with the affluent or receiving charity. The two classes interact in these texts, but the awareness of social differences remains strong. The omnibus was one of the few spaces in nineteenth-century cities in which residents came into close and often awkward contact with strangers from other classes. These encounters were short but generally long enough to allow passengers to speculate about the conditions of others and at times even to interact with them. As we have seen, literary evocations of these experiences take many forms and involve different types of reactions: from judgment and speculation to conversation and charity. Nevertheless, the texts point to several general tendencies. In many works, the poor person observed is a woman and often a mother accompanied by a child. This image of impoverished motherhood offers a vulnerable and passive image of poverty, which inspires compassion and understanding. With the exception of Eekhoud’s story, the fathers who appear in these texts are generally negative figures, embodiments of the ignorance, vices, and social degradation of the lower ranks. It is also noteworthy that in most cases the social other on public transit is not portrayed as a threatening underclass

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(Jean Lorrain’s ‘Le Possédé’ is an exception). Although the omnibus was often a symbol of revolution, equality, or democracy, the indigent passengers in these texts are not the ‘swinish multitude’ on the verge of revolt but rather representatives of the ‘deserving’ poor who are generally separated from the rest of their class. The compassion is generated not by the masses but by a single sympathetic individual or family described in isolation. Finally, the focus of many of these texts lies less on the poverty observed than on the sentiment, actions, and reactions of the bourgeois observer.

Notes 1. William Armes, Fragments of Poetry (King’s Lynn: Lynn News Office, 1869), 97–98. 2. As Masha Belenky points out, ‘the vehicle’s physical space made lower classes visible to their bourgeois fellow passengers in unprecedented ways’. Engines of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-­ Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019), 128. 3. Guy de Maupassant, Toine (Paris: C.  Marpon and E.  Flammarion, 1886), 47. 4. Belenky, Engines of Modernity, 127. 5. Paul Margueritte, ‘La Tourmente’, Revue des deux mondes, 1893, 512. 6. Margueritte also compares the omnibus passengers to wax figures in his story ‘L’Omnibus’. La Mouche: nouvelles (Paris: Lecène, Oudin et Cie, 1893), 139. 7. Margueritte, ‘La Tourmente’, 513. 8. Eugène Woestyn, ‘Une course d’omnibus’, Bulletin de la Société des gens de lettres, October 1855, 266. 9. Grandville et al., Les Métamorphoses du jour (Paris: Gustave Havard, 1854), plate LX. 10. Jean Lorrain, Sensations et Souvenirs (Paris: G. Charpentier et E. Fasquelle, 1895), 164. 11. Lorrain, Sensations et Souvenirs, 165. 12. Lorrain, Sensations et Souvenirs, 165–66. 13. Albert Mérat, Poèmes de Paris. Parisiennes. Tableaux et Paysages parisiens (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1880), 166. 14. Joseph Étienne, ‘En omnibus’, L’Ami de la maison, 31 January 1856, 51. 15. Jean Lorrain, Vingt femmes (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2014), 77. 16. Lorrain, Vingt femmes, 78–79. 17. Georges Eekhoud, Mes communions (Bruxelles: Kistemaeckers, 1895), 205.

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18. Eekhoud, Mes communions, 206. 19. Eekhoud, Mes communions, 219–20. 20. Coppée was particularly fond of the omnibus and later in life attributed his literary awakening to time spent in the public conveyances. See his ‘Croquis parisiens: L’Omnibus’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 7 September 1902, 147; ‘Physionomies parisiennes: Le Conducteur d’omnibus’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 24 June 1906; and ‘Le Sou du conducteur’ in Souvenirs d’un parisien (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1910), 272–76. 21. François Coppée, Vingt contes nouveaux (Paris, A. Lemerre, 1883), 237. 22. Carolyn Betensky, ‘Envying the Poor: Contemporary and Nineteenth-­ Century Fantasies of Vulnerability’, in Narrating Poverty and Precarity in Britain, eds. B. Korte and F. Regard (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2014), 20. 23. Renée Allard, ‘Le Tramway: Note sur Paris’, Journal du dimanche, 18 June 1899, 518. 24. Emilia Pardo Bazán, ‘En tranvía’, El Imparcial, 24 February 1890, 3. 25. William Wilson, Such is Life (London: Samuel Eyre, 1857), 131–32. 26. Wilson, Such is Life, 136, 135. 27. Wilson, Such is Life, 138. 28. Wilson, Such is Life, 140, emphasis mine. 29. Enrique Sepúlveda, 1891-Madrid-1892: artículos, cuentos, críticas, semblanzas (Madrid, Imprenta de Navegación y Comercio, [1893]), 323. 30. Sepúlveda, 1891-Madrid-1892, 326. 31. Sepúlveda, 1891-Madrid-1892, 327. 32. For a similar critique of the ignorance and alcoholism of the poor on the tram, see A. Danvila Jaldero, ‘Supersticiones populares: los apóstoles del agua en Madrid’, La Ilustración artística, 12 July 1897, 452, 454. 33. Francisco Pi y Arsuaga, ‘El tranvía del Este’, La Ilustración artística, 30 December 1889, 431. 34. Pi y Arsuaga, ‘El tranvía del Este’, 434. 35. Juan Lapoulide, ‘Del dicho al hecho (monólogo de un pillo)’, Ilustración ibérica, 24 October 1891, 682. 36. Lapoulide, ‘Del dicho al hecho’, 683. 37. Lapoulide, ‘Del dicho al hecho’, 682. 38. Lapoulide, ‘Del dicho al hecho’, 683. 39. Mario de Lara (pseudonym of Julio Nombela), ‘En el tranvía’, La última moda, 28 December 1890, 4. 40. Claudio Frollo (pseudonym of Ernesto López), ‘Crónica: Viajeros’, Correspondencia de España, 27 June 1900, 1. 41. Adolphe Chenevière, Contes d’amour (Paris: A. Lemerre, 1890), 285. 42. Chenevière, Contes, 287. 43. Chenevière, Contes, 290. 44. Chenevière, Contes, 291.

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45. Chenevière, Contes, 292–93, emphasis mine. 46. Auguste Germain, ‘Sur l’omnibus’, Le Papillon, journal humoristique, 11 January 1899, 2. 47. Elizabeth Youatt, ‘The Twopenny Omnibus’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 2 October 1847, 332. 48. Youatt, ‘Twopenny Omnibus’, 333. 49. Julie Fertiault, ‘En omnibus’, La Femme, 15 February 1890, 30. 50. Fertiault, ‘En omnibus’, 31. 51. ‘Souvenir d’omnibus’, Magasin pittoresque, August 1873, 275. 52. ‘Souvenir d’omnibus’, 276. 53. Lucien Griveau, ‘En omnibus’, Journal des demoiselles, February 1883, 48. 54. Griveau, ‘En omnibus’, 49–50. 55. Griveau, ‘En omnibus’, 50. 56. Mme Eugène Bersier [Marie Bersier], ‘Compagnons de route: de Paris à Paris’, La Femme, 15 April 1895, 59. 57. Emma Ferrand, ‘Il était trop tard ! …’, Journal des demoiselles, 15 June 1833, 147. 58. For other examples of didactic omnibus stories by women that encourage compassion or generosity, see Gabrielle Moret’s ‘Batignolles-Clichy-­ Odéon’, La Joie de la maison, 31 March 1892, 205–6; and Maude, ‘In an Omnibus’, The Ludgate Monthly, November 1892, 306–9.

CHAPTER 8

Winged Coursers of the Mind

In an 1888 essay, Carlos Frontaura describes two different ways of experiencing the tram. When he feels ‘a longing to dream a bit’ and ‘to travel through imaginary spaces’, he sits to the conductor’s left in the first row from which he can observe various sites in Madrid, which prompt memories, fantasies, and philosophical reflections. When he is ‘in the mood to make observations’, however, he sits in the last row, from which he can observe every detail of the passengers’ interactions and even overhear their conversations.1 Frontaura distinguishes here not only between looking in and out of the tram but also between looking inside and outside of himself. Interestingly, it is when he looks outside the vehicle that he is most looking inside himself and vice versa. As is clear in this example, urban transit was a source of knowledge about both the world and oneself, a space in which observation and reflection were intimately entwined. An 1869 essay entitled ‘The Philosopher in the Omnibus’ describes the vehicles as ‘winged coursers of the mind’, in which passengers had ‘plenty of time to speculate, and plenty of pabulum to speculate on’.2 This chapter explores how the omnibus and horsecar are represented as spaces of observation, reflection, and insight in nineteenth-­ century culture. How do passengers observe the city, one another, and themselves in these texts? And what insight or inspiration do they draw from such observation?

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7_8

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The first sections of this chapter examine how the external view not only offered new experiences and knowledge about the city but also gave rise to a sedentary form of flânerie. Far from routine or commonplace, the omnibus in these texts opens up unknown worlds and exotic perspectives. The chapter then turns to the ways in which passengers decipher (or project narratives on) others based on visual clues or overheard conversations or by prying into domestic spaces observed along the way. The final sections pass from these practices of ‘reading’ and projection to more subjective modes of omnibus observation in which the city is viewed as a historical palimpsest, a series of aesthetic juxtapositions, or a space of artistic creation.

‘A Metropolitan Grand Tour’ One of the most immediate impacts of the omnibus was that it allowed city-dwellers unable to afford a horse or hired coach to reach neighbourhoods beyond walking distance. This new mobility was often represented as a form of exploration, a way to discover exotic lands without leaving the city. Parisians no longer needed to embark on maritime journeys to see the world, observed the narrator of Samuel-Henry Berthoud’s ‘Huard et Verduron’ (1837); there is another ‘vessel […] that sets sail every ten minutes’ and that takes him to places as novel as ‘the savannas of America or the beaches of the Congo. That vessel is the omnibus’.3 Similarly, in an 1888 sketch, Mariano de Cavia claimed that the Madrid tram had ‘awakened more appetite for locomotion than the novels of Jules Verne. To travel! To see lands! To cross the torrid zone between Fornos and the Suizo! To pass the glacial zone between Cibeles and the circus of Rivas!’.4 In a British poet’s words, urban transit made possible a ‘Metropolitan Grand Tour’.5 Another commonplace of the period was the idea of the tram or omnibus as a poor man’s holiday, ‘recreation’ for those who could not afford to ‘summer’ abroad.6 Those unable to go to the Pyrenees, observed a French writer in 1872, could ‘trick their boredom by a simulacrum of a trip that did not require more than five minutes and that did not cost more than six sous’.7 In an 1888 sketch, a Spanish ‘traveller without a satchel on his shoulder’ dismisses the North as ‘too familiar’ and the South as too hot and opts instead to travel by tram to the Manzanares river, sitting in the corner as if it were a first-class train seat.8 Writers would even identify specific trajectories for replicating different types of foreign experiences. In a French vignette from 1854, a narrator

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who takes the omnibus to a Jewish neighbourhood feels that he has gone to Jerusalem and back for 60 cents.9 In his essay ‘Omnibus de Paris’ (1900), Octave Uzanne gives a list of substitutions: the Parisian banlieue is similar to London, Manchester or Glasgow; the Étoile neighbourhood resembles American cities; and the Jardin des Plantes is like a trip to India. On the omnibus, he argues echoing Verne, one can take ‘a tour of the world in 18 hours’.10 Urban transit, indeed, allowed passengers to appreciate the internal diversity of the metropolis, the many cities within the city. It was ideal for studying ‘the curious and mobile physiognomy of the different neighbourhoods of Paris’, for observing ‘the great cities within Paris [which] do not resemble one another’, or for taking in ‘the immensity of London, its marvelous extent and growth, its aspect as a collection of cities rather than one single city’.11 For the title character of Maupassant’s ‘Le Père Montgilet’ (1885), riding the impériale was like ‘taking a trip around the world, so different are the people from one street to another’.12 As the practice of tourism developed in the middle of the nineteenth century and became accessible to a broader range of classes, the omnibus began to be used to tour the city.13 In 1867, Lasserre inaugurated a series entitled Paris en omnibus, itinéraire pittoresque, historique et industriel des 31 lignes d’omnibus, which promised an instalment for each omnibus line offering ‘descriptions, legends, historical facts, anecdotes, [and] information’ about the sites passed along the route. As Lasserre states in the preface to the first volume (about Line H), his goal is to make history present for the reader: ‘Anyone could read and take interest in [the history of Paris] as one takes interest in a reading in a cabinet de lecture. We want to do something else: the history and the painting of what one sees in the moment that one sees it’.14 It is not clear that the project was continued beyond the first instalment, but the idea of offering a more living vision of history through the omnibus would be taken up two years later in a book entitled Paris en omnibus, guide familier dans le Paris de 1869 (Paris ancien et Paris nouveau), which purports to explain Paris ‘not just from the point of view of stone, but also from the point of view of the attractions, customs, habits, industry or commerce of this or that neighbourhood’.15 These works would be followed by other guides such as Eugène Ferrieux’s La Bastille à la Madeleine et vice versa (1878), Éric Besnard’s Guide historique de Paris à Saint-Germain-en-Laye en tramway à vapeur (1894), and Through London by Omnibus: A Chatty Guide to the Principal Sights of London (1898).16

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Pedagogical texts from the period sometimes used the omnibus in a similar way to teach young readers about their city and its history. An early example is the Comtesse de Flesselles’ posthumously published Les Jeunes Voyageurs dans Paris, ou les Tablettes de Jules (1829) in which a boy rides an omnibus with his parents and, propped up on his knees on the banquette, observes the sites and monuments they pass along the way. An obliging passenger explains each site combining historical observations with amusing personal anecdotes.17 British and Spanish children’s magazines use the omnibus and tram in similar ways.18 Urban transit, thus, was not only a form of transportation but also a means of exploration and a source of knowledge.

Flâner assis The omnibus, however, also facilitated a more capricious and unscripted encounter with the city: a sort of seated flânerie. Traditionally, discussions of the flâneur have focused on the strolling observer. Some critics have even argued that flânerie and urban transit are opposite ways of experiencing the city. For Karlheinz Stierle, for example, the ‘flâneur is that urban walking philosopher who refuses on principle collective transportation by omnibus’.19 A similar opposition can be found in some early reactions to the service. In an 1837 letter, Delphine de Girardin considers the hurtling omnibuses a ‘death sentence’ for the flâneur, and Ernest Fouinet, in an 1831 sketch, laments that the omnibus ‘has destroyed that sweet state of far niente, of abandon, of strolling meandering that is called flânerie’.20 As Masha Belenky has observed, however, the omnibus narrator and the flâneur had much in common. Although the former’s movement is more constrained than the latter’s (it is limited by the path and pace of the omnibus), both figures have ‘literary ambitions and a keen observer’s eye’ and are ‘more interested in the journey itself than in the destination’.21 This attitude is clear in a text by Alphonse Daudet that evokes the pleasure of riding omnibuses at random and observing the city: ‘Where am I going?… I have no idea. That’s the omnibus’ business, not mine. I am happy to know that I am rolling through Paris, and I open my eyes as much as I can […] At every moment the landscape changes around me: it is true magic’.22 An English sketch similarly evokes the pleasure of observing London from the top of an omnibus ‘travelling you know not whither’.23 Later in the century, the comic writer Willy would defend the

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Panthéon-Courcelles, a zigzagging line attacked for ‘going nowhere’, by citing Baudelaire: ‘true travellers’ are those with ‘light hearts similar to balloons’ who ‘without knowing why always say: Let’s go!’.24 The early tram would also serve as a vehicle of flânerie: in ‘El amigo del tranvía’, an 1887 story by Carlos Frontaura, a man who has recently inherited an immense fortune from an uncle who has been run over by a horsecar dedicates his newly acquired leisure time to riding trams at random and observing their passengers.25 Many nineteenth-century texts, indeed, identify the flâneur with urban transit. In one of the earliest literary representations of the space, Les Omnibus, premier voyage de Cadet la Blague (1828), the narrator takes the omnibus for the first time and amuses himself by observing the interactions among its passengers; his opening words are ‘Je flâne’.26 By 1853, flâneurs who once ‘trotted on foot on the Parisian cobblestone’ were found ‘lounging around, from morning to evening, on omnibus banquettes’.27 In his Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (1878), Louis Ulbach represents as a common omnibus type the ‘bourgeois qui flâne assis’ (the bourgeois who engages in flânerie sitting down).28 Some writers even claimed that it was easier to flâner on the omnibus than on the street. As F.  G. Lee points out in his 1849 essay ‘London Pencillings’, There is far more to be seen in the interior of a bus than in almost any street in London. When you wander through those noisy streets, or loiter in the quite gloomy square, you only behold the pedestrian passenger for a short time; whereas in the aforenamed vehicle you have an opportunity of observing their countenances and actions during the journey.29

Similarly, in an 1888 essay, Carlos Frontaura argued that one encountered the same types on the tram as on the street, but in the former one could observe them better.30 Many artists would embrace the omnibus as a space of observation: Degas, for example, preferred omnibuses to fiacres because in the former ‘one [could] look at people’.31 Perhaps the clearest example of omnibus flânerie is Henri Maret’s Le Tour du monde parisien (1862), an expansive travelogue in which a narrator, who prefers ‘endless zigzags, trips without destinations, new horizons [and] novel-like adventures’, sets out with the confidence of a ‘Columbus’ to ‘discover’ Paris from the impériale of an omnibus.32 The hundred-page description of his journey that follows is a series of meandering digressions

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inspired by the random incidents of the omnibus and sights and sounds observed along the way. Unlike a philosopher’s reflections, his thoughts follow the ‘wings of imagination’ and are ‘guided by chance’.33 The winding trajectory and arbitrary encounters of the omnibus prompt a capricious, fleeting, and random contemplation of the city, similar to that of the flâneur. The omnibus roof particularly lent itself to flânerie. Writers revelled in the elevation of the space—the feeling of overcoming ‘the fatality of gravity’—and in the visual mastery they experienced perched ‘halfway between heaven and earth’.34 Nineteenth-century observers described the impériale variously as ‘an aerial promenade without parallel in the world’, a ‘front-row seat’ to the city, and a ‘coign of vantage’ for observing ‘the wonderful, ever shifting panorama of London life’.35 For Willy, it was ‘the moving belvedere of the poor student’ which reveals the ‘beauties of Paris’.36 When women gained access to the impériale at the end of the century, they would similarly bask in the spectacle. One of the heroines of Amy Levy’s novel The Romance of a Shop (1888) observes from the top of an omnibus ‘the familiar London pageant with an interest that had something of a passion in it’.37 In a poem published a year later, Levy again revels in the view from the ‘topmost summit’ of the omnibus: The scene whereof I cannot tire, The human tale of love and hate, The city pageant, early and late Unfolds itself, rolls by, to be A pleasure deep and delicate.38

A striking visual representation of this perspective is Sidney Starr’s painting ‘The City Atlas’ (1888–89) in which a flâneuse, viewed from behind, takes in the beauty of the ‘London pageant’ at dusk from a garden seat (Fig. 8.1). The subject turns her back to us, opting to observe rather than be observed, and seems almost to direct the scene from above. The experience, however, was not always exhilarating. One of the protagonists of Florence C. Armstrong’s Sisters of Phaeton (1890) feels estranged from society when she looks down from the top of an omnibus: ‘Don’t it feel to you as if we were looking at it from the outside?—we who were in the heart of it last year. Now it passes us by, like a pageant, in which we take no part’.39 Similarly, the title character of Julia E. Chesson’s

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Fig. 8.1  Sidney Starr, ‘The City Atlas’, c. 1888-1889. Oil on canvas, 60.9 x 50.6 cm. Gift of the Massey Collection of English Painting, 1946. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Photo: NGC

story ‘Thirza: A Minor Chord’ (1896) feels anguished and unwanted as she looks down on ‘the busy world that now hummed and buzzed on all sides’. In these texts, the elevated perspective emphasises the vastness of the urban space and the observer’s sense of alienation. Whereas the traditional flâneur is immersed in the crowd, the garden seat imposes a distance from others. Thirza will feel at home in the world only when she enters the communal space of St. Paul’s Cathedral at the end of the tale: ‘The wall of separation seemed in this place to have broken down between herself and others’.40 The observation from above, however, could also create a sense of connectedness and of a ‘small world’. In George Gissing’s The Town Traveller

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(1898), an upbeat young man named Gammon dedicates an hour or two each day to observing London from the top of an omnibus: It was a sure way of forgetting his cares. Sometimes he took a box place and chatted with the driver, or he made acquaintances, male and female, on the cozy cross seats just broad enough for two. The London panorama under a sky of June feasted his laughing eyes. Now he would wave a hand to a friend on the pavement or borne past on another bus; now he would chuckle at a bit of comedy in real life. Huge hotels and brilliant shops vividly impressed him, though he saw them for the thousandth time; a new device in advertising won his ungrudging admiration. Above all he liked to find himself in the Strand at that hour of the day when east and west show a double current of continuous traffic, tight wedged in the narrow street, moving at a mere footpace, every horse’s nose touching the back of the next vehicle. The sun could not shine too hotly; it made colours brighter, gave a new beauty to the glittering public-houses, where names of cooling drinks seemed to cry aloud. He enjoyed a “block,” and was disappointed unless he saw the policeman at Wellington Street holding up his hand whilst the cross traffic from north and south rolled grandly through. It always reminded him of the Bible story—Moses parting the waters of the Red Sea.41

Gammon’s attitude is that of the flâneur who allows his attention to drift along with the changing spectacle. The description highlights the visual and pictorial nature of the scene (the vivid ‘colours’, ‘glittering public-­ houses’, the ‘panorama’) as well as the drama of the everyday (‘comedy in real life’). Unlike Thirza, Gammon remains connected to society conversing with drivers and fellow passengers and waving at friends on the street. On the omnibus roof, he experiences the city as a ‘small world’. He masters this space just as the policeman does the traffic below. The final comparison of the latter to Moses suggests not the random collisions of a chaotic metropolis but rather an orderly and providential movement in which one has a sense of community and belonging. Whereas Gammon feels immersed in the city despite the remove of the omnibus roof, other passengers engage in a more distanced form of flânerie. In Arthur Symons’ London: A Book of Aspects (1909), the narrator recalls from an outside seat earlier moments in which he mingled in the crowds: Then, as I sit on the top of an omnibus, coming in from the Marble Arch, that long line of Oxford Street seems a surprising and delightful thing, full

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of picturesque irregularities, and Picadilly Circus seems incredibly alive and central, and the Strand is glutted with a traffic typically English. I am able to remember how I used to turn out of the Temple and walk slowly towards Charing Cross, elbowing my way meditatively, making up sonnets in my head while I missed no attractive face on the pavement or on the top of an omnibus, pleasantly conscious of the shops yet undistracted by them, happy because I was in the midst of people, and happier still because they were all unknown to me. […] Baudelaire’s phrase, “a bath of multitude,” seemed to have been made for me.42

The distance separating the rooftop passenger from the street reflects the distance between the present and the past remembered. Whereas the experience of immersion in the crowd is a largely unconscious and immediate one—a revelling in the present—the top of the omnibus introduces a sense of remove, which allows the narrator to reflect on this experience. This shift is marked by a change in the direction of the gaze: where in the past he looked up at the omnibus roof, he now looks down from the garden seat on the observer he once was. Unlike Gammon, Symons engages in a second-degree form of flânerie, reminiscing on the immediacy of an experience and reliving it from a distance.

‘The Dickens of Vehicles’ Whereas the tourist and flâneur concentrate on the city—the former on its sites and neighbourhoods and the latter on its ‘pageant’ and serendipitous juxtapositions—other omnibus observers focus on their fellow passengers. Nineteenth-century texts regularly describe urban transit as ideal ‘for the salacious delight of studying people’, identifying ‘the characteristics and peculiarities of our fellow-creatures’, and analysing ‘character, under its different phases’.43 A classic example of this sort of ‘omnibus student’ is the title character of Wilkie Collins’ Basil (1852), an aristocrat who has no need for public conveyances but who frequents them for the ‘unfailing delight in studying characters of all kinds’.44 The omnibus was often considered a space in which people were more legible or transparent than in other places. For the author of an 1891 piece in Heart and Home, the omnibus is ‘the Dickens of vehicles’: what one encounters there ‘is always active character, revealing its idiosyncrasies’.45 As Vere Dudley explains in an 1893 text, this is because omnibus passengers are frequently ‘in a state of unconsciousness with regard to those

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around them, and allow themselves so much play of feature that one can almost imagine the thoughts passing through their minds’.46 In his 1866 treatise De la physiognomomie, Jean-Baptiste Delestre recommends the omnibus interior to art students as a space for observation, for there ‘manners are not affected; they are legible’.47 Similarly, the narrator of Auguste Méral’s novel L’Homme aux romans (1858) contrasts the salon in which people wear masks with the omnibus in which they are seen ‘au naturel’. As passengers do not try to make themselves agreeable to people whom they will never see again, ‘each one retains his individuality’.48 Writers would make similar observations about the tram: ‘it is there’, observed Lucien Descaves in 1893, ‘that one best enters by surprise into the intimate lives of strangers’.49 In studying fellow passengers, omnibus observers relied on various types of clues. One of most revealing was attire, which often served as a marker of class. In an 1836 chronicle, for example, Delphine de Girardin observed that the sign of a femme comme il faut (a proper woman) was the use of ‘brand new gloves and a very simple dress’; more common women wore new gloves only on special occasions; and those ‘of another world’ never used them at all.50 Gloves are here a sign not only of rank but also of virtue: the ‘other world’ refers to prostitution. This association of dress and morality is also clear in a French article from 1847 that jokes that a femme comme il faut on an omnibus sports a ‘little basket and mittens’, while a femme comme il en faut (a woman as is needed, i.e., a woman of loose virtue) wears perfume and allows her dress to reveal her shoulders.51 In still other texts, clothing is a window to the soul. An 1888 vignette describing a Madrid tram on All Souls’ Day juxtaposes two grieving women, a blonde with fresh-cut immortelles with a brunette with artificial pansies and forget-me-nots. Although both travel to the cemetery to mourn loved ones, the difference in their accessories reveals the gap between their feelings: whereas the former’s grief is genuine, the latter has dry eyes and is ‘dressed with a certain je ne sais quoi that suggests a desire to please others’.52 As Belenky notes, omnibus narrators often seek ‘to uphold the established moral order by exposing those attempting to mask their lack of social and moral standing behind fashionable clothes’.53 ‘Omnibus students’ also deduced passengers’ characters from their behaviours. ‘To watch merely the different methods of getting into the vehicle, and taking their seats, adopted by different people’ observes the protagonist of Basil, ‘is to study no incomplete commentary on the infinitesimal varieties of human character’.54 For the narrator of Maret’s Tour

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du monde parisien, similarly, passengers’ professions can be deduced from an ‘attentive study of their way of paying’.55 And in a French sketch from 1879, the egotist can be recognised by the way he spreads his legs, while the conductor’s politics can be determined from the way he wears his uniform and pronounces ‘Montmartre’.56 As in this example, speech was another important clue. As Delphine de Girardin notes in an 1836 chronicle, passengers often ‘betray[ed] themselves by their language’: whereas the femme comme il faut would observe, ‘Quelle singulière voiture!’ (What a singular carriage!), and the femme semi comme il faut (the semi-proper woman) would say ‘Ah! la drôle de voiture!’ (What a droll carriage!), the shop girl would exclaim, ‘Quelle straordinaire!’ (How ’straordinary!), and the boulevard actress would blurt out, ‘Dites donc caucasse [sic]!’ (Goodness, how funny!).57 Yet another indicator was a passenger’s reading material. In Richard Le Gallienne’s ‘A Literary Omnibus’ (1897)—a ‘prose fancy’ published in the aestheticist Yellow Book—the narrator attempts to identify the volumes his fellow passengers are reading on an omnibus and to draw conclusions about their characters from these clues. The ‘digest of statutes’ of an older gentleman, for example, suggests a ‘dry and dingy’ personality, far from the ‘upper crust’ of readers.58 Another passenger is described more coquettishly: ‘The pretty dark-haired girl next but one on my own side, what was she reading? No!… but she was, really!’59 The omission of the title suggests the frivolity (and perhaps indecency) of both reading material and reader. The main focus of observation, however, is a new passenger—‘an aristocrat, a poet among readers, a bookman pur sang’—who carries several volumes including Dr Wharton’s translation of Sappho: ‘That penny bus was thus carelessly carrying along the most priceless of written words’.60 The books become metonyms for their owners to such an extent that the narrator eventually confuses reader and writer: ‘Yes, it was no less a presence than Sappho’s that had stepped in amongst us at the corner of New Oxford Street. Visibly it had been a little black-bearded bookman, rather French in appearance, possibly a hard-worked teacher of languages—but actually it had been Sappho’.61 Finally, the body itself offered clues. Passengers are often represented studying one another’s faces and speculating at length on their meaning. In Eugène Michel’s ‘L’Innocente Aventure’ (1896), the narrator takes apart a woman’s visage feature by feature: her ‘big brown eyes, very mobile’ represent ‘an upright soul, incapable of trickery’; her ‘aquiline nose’ suggests ‘goodness’; and her mouth ‘reveals her to be ardently a

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woman’.62 Not surprisingly, omnibus students often evoke theories of physiognomy: nothing is more ‘entertaining and instructive for a disciple of Lavater’, writes Vere Dudley, ‘than to watch the faces and try to decipher the characters of his companions in an omnibus’.63 Other observers focused instead on the hands. In Jean Richepin’s ‘La Chiromancie en omnibus’ (1886), the narrator begins by studying his fellow passengers’ physiognomies but finds them too ordinary. A ‘less banal distraction’, he notes, is to study their hands, ‘to make one’s little Desbarolles by divining their occupations by this rapid and furtive examination’ (Adolphe Desbarolles was the father of palm reading). Although one cannot get close enough to read the fine lines, ‘differences in form, colour, calluses [and] twisting’ reveal the professions of the passengers.64 Lucien Descaves, citing Verlaine, notes how tram passengers’ hands ‘betray’ their identity and psyche, reflecting ‘the meteors of the head’ and the ‘tempests of the heart’.65 Such claims of total legibility were not uncommon in nineteenth-­ century texts: Hugues Le Roux claimed that a regular who entered wearing a blindfold could tell on its removal exactly where the omnibus was situated just by examining his fellow passengers.66 Not everyone, however, was a ‘Desbarolles’ of the omnibus. Often the ability to read these clues is limited to a specific passenger who has either extensive experience or a special talent. As Belenky observes, many works feature a narrator-­ passenger who ‘flaunts his ability to interpret social clues’.67 In Richepin’s text, for instance, omnibus chiromancy requires ‘a practiced eye’.68 Other writers contrast competent and incompetent readers of the space: Marie Bersier’s sketch ‘Compagnons de route’ (1895) uses a series of vignettes to draw a distinction between good and bad readings of the omnibus. In her first example, a decorated gentleman is annoyed by a working girl carrying a large package and a child who ruffles his newspaper. But just as he is about to complain, he looks more carefully at the boy and becomes ‘from one minute to the next good like a grandfather’. He even wonders about the young woman’s life. The gentleman, thus, shifts from a reading that cuts him off from other passengers (the newspaper) to reading the omnibus itself, which leads him to take an interest in others’ lives. This charitable reading contrasts with that of a nurse who, forgetting her own humble origins, shows her ‘disgust for the femme du peuple’.69 The implication is that to decipher the ‘book’ that is the omnibus, one must be open to its heterogeneity, willing to mingle with social others. Carlos Frontaura’s essay ‘El tranvía’ (1888) draws a similar distinction between adept and

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inept readers of the tram. At the beginning of the sketch, the narrator recognises a thief and subtly warns a female passenger that she is in danger. Realising that his target has been forewarned, the thief moves from the interior to the platform. A magistrate who observes this exchange, however, misinterprets it and later, to avoid sitting next to two lower-class women, goes to the platform himself, where he is promptly robbed. As in ‘Compagnons de route’, the inept reader of the omnibus is unable to decipher its signs in part because he resists its social diversity.70 Belenky has argued that the ‘trope of omnibus travel’ served to ‘give coherence and structure to the chaos of modern Paris’ and to ‘[achieve] mastery over the otherwise disparate and anxiety-producing crowd’.71 It should be noted, however, that many texts insist on the fundamental illegibility of the omnibus and its passengers.72 As Leigh Hunt observes in an 1847 text, the up-close perspective of the omnibus interior only underscored the impenetrability and mystery of others’ lives: ‘What an intense intimacy we get with the face, neckcloth, waistcoat, and watch-chain of the man who sits opposite us! Who is he? What is his name? Is his care a great care,—an affliction? Is his look of cheerfulness real?’73 Despite the intimate viewpoint, strangers remained strangers. In his essay ‘Omnibus de Paris’, Octave Uzanne would define the pleasure of omnibus flânerie as one of communing with a group whose members were ‘all the more interesting because they remain in the mystery of their anonymity’.74 Appearances are often represented as misleading. In Gustave Kahn’s ‘Le Bureau d’omnibus’ (1896), a ‘sage with the face of Hippocrates’ turns out to be ‘an excellent tailor’, and a ‘bearded man who you would think was going to take out from somewhere in his enormous jacket a keg of olives’ is actually ‘a deputy, one of the thunderous voices of the nation’. Deciphering such a space required the ‘divination’ of ‘a Hoffman or a Dickens’.75 Many omnibus texts, indeed, feature surprising revelations of unexpected identities. A striking example is George Augustus Sala’s ‘Inside an Omnibus’ (1859) which describes a series of female passengers on a rainy day. At first the narrator seems to recognise the limits of his understanding: ‘[L]adies’ business in the City is one of the most intimate mysteries of London’.76 The first woman observed—a ‘dashy, showy dame’ whose flounced dress overflows onto her neighbours’ laps—is an object of intrigue: why would a wealthy woman opt for the omnibus rather than her own coach? As he considers other passengers, however, he begins to gain confidence, classifying them easily within recognisable types. A woman sporting a photograph of her late husband is one of those widows who

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‘distress people, going about with their bewildered, grief-worn faces, and the odour of newly-made graves hanging about their hot black garments’, and a ‘snuffy old Frenchwoman’ is either a ‘lady’s maid to an Italian prima donna, or a French ballet dancer’ or the owner of ‘getting-up-fine-linen shops’.77 When the ‘dashy, showy dame’ steps off, the narrator imagines that she is going to buy a diamond-studded watch. Shortly afterward, however, the widow and Frenchwoman discover that they have been pickpocketed. The essay ends with narrator speculating whether the culprit was the flashy woman ‘who looked as if she were worth ten thousand a-year’.78 While the narrator initially seems to conform to the type of the all-knowing omnibus connoisseur, the final sentence deflates his omniscient posture and underscores the illegibility of the space. Sala’s piece is clearly ironic, but in other texts, the passengers’ ambiguity and impenetrability lends the space a sense of poetic mystery. In Jacques Villebrune’s sonnet ‘En omnibus’ (1886), the lyric voice observes a woman dozing voluptuously in an omnibus and wonders whether she is going to or returning from a rendez-vous, recalling a pleasure in the past or anticipating one in the future: La volupté frémit dans sa peau transparente, Dans son dormant sourire aux vagues contours flous, Mais va-t-elle, furtive, à l’heureux rendez-vous, En vient-elle, la chair encore délirante ? [Voluptuousness quivered on her transparent skin, In her sleepy smile with its vague, blurred contours, But is she going, furtively, to the happy rendez-vous, Is she returning, her flesh still frenzied?]

Ultimately, however, he realises that no one will ever know: Qui pourra lire ainsi dans ses traits languissants, Et deviner le charme extatique des sens, Sous le voile changeant de la vaine apparence ? [Who could thus read in her languid features, and guess at the ecstatic charm of the senses, Under the changing veil of vain appearance?]79

Appearances here are ‘changing’ and inscrutable. The sonnet captures a fleeting perception, an elliptical trace of a past or future that the poet can only surmise.

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Another poem that attempts to penetrate an enigmatic female passenger with a beguiling smile is Arthur Symons’ ‘In an Omnibus’ (1890). At first the poet imagines that she is thinking merely about fashion: Of Paris, Paris is your thought, Of Paris robes, and when to wear The latest bonnet you have bought To match the marvel of your hair.

In the next stanza, however, he wonders whether her expression might have a deeper meaning: Yet that fine malice of your smile, That faint and fluctuating glint Between your eyelids, does it hint Alone of matters mercantile? Close lips that keep the secret in, Half spoken by the stealthy eyes, Is there indeed no word to win, No secret, from the vague replies Of lips and lids that feign to hide That which they feign to render up? Is there, in Tantalus’ dim cup, The shadow of water, nought beside?

Symons’ poetic voice is even more in the dark than Villebrune’s: whereas the French sonnet assumes an unknowable depth—a hidden emotional life—here it is unclear whether a secret actually exists. If the heroine in the French poem is a romantic enigma hovering between recollection and anticipation, past and future, Symons’ passenger may be nothing more than the vacuous shopper of modern capitalism.80 Whereas Symons suggests a void of meaning, other students of the omnibus find philosophical insight in the space. In an 1883 vignette, for example, Lucien Griveau observes that ‘a philosophy wafts from the bundle of scattered destinies that come here to be tied by a light bond, to touch each other and be confused for a minute in the same swaying of heads with the quivering of the window panes’.81 At times this philosophy is a dark meditation on the hypocrisy and greed of capitalist society. In a poem entitled ‘Un philosophe en omnibus’ (1865), the lyric voice surveys his fellow passengers and draws a depressing conclusion:

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Before the golden calf, a vile cult, The human race is on its knees. One sees only corrupted customs, Lies, prejudice, abuse.82

Other philosophers of the omnibus, however, observe more sympathetically. The title character of the essay ‘The Philosopher in an Omnibus’ (1869) doubts at first whether to imitate Democritus’ laughter or Heraclitus’ tears as he observes and speculates on his neighbours in an omnibus. In the end, he contemplates a young man whom he imagines to be a failed composer who resigns himself to playing in an orchestra to save enough money to return to his mother and sweetheart in Provence. ‘I fancy that we all have about the same story to tell’, the narrator observes, ‘Burning out fingers is the first step in life that we usually take’.83 Ultimately, however, he draws a more positive conclusion: ‘It is good to build these chateaux en Espagne, that when they collapse, we may erect substantial, though common-place habitations on their ruins’.84 At the beginning, the ‘Philosopher in an Omnibus’ apologises for discussing a topic as commonplace as the omnibus—‘I am well aware that the subject I have chosen for a few moments’ chat is not an eminently original one’—but at the end of the essay, the ‘commonplace’ becomes a virtue.85 It stands for a more grounded and realistic philosophy of life. In all these texts, urban transit is a space in which passengers attempt to ‘read’ their neighbours. Unlike the flâneur whose attention flutters from object to object, these omnibus observers zero in on specific passengers and seek to find clues to their identity or the enigma of their expression. Their degree of confidence and precision, however, varies considerably. While some are convinced of their ability to decipher the space, others insist on the impenetrability of appearance and the unknowability of the ‘large world’ of the city.

‘Heard in an Omnibus’ In the texts we have just considered, urban transit is depicted as a silent space in which passengers interpret visual signs as if they were reading a text. Other works, however, represent the omnibus with the sound on and depict passengers eavesdropping on one another’s conversations. An early example of this is a series of letters attributed to a conductor in the Gazette de France in 1831–32 (see Chap. 5), which offer accounts of

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conversations he claims to have overheard in his omnibus, an ‘ambulatory parlour’ with passengers ‘of every neighbourhood, sex, age and condition’.86 This idea of urban transit as an echo chamber of society appears in many later texts. The flâneur in Frontaura’s ‘El amigo del tranvía’, for example, revels in the panoply of voices, accents, and discussions overheard in a tram: In the tram I hear little voices, sweet, soft and virginal, I hear very funny accents that recall my beautiful Andalusia, others less amusing but energetic and characteristic, like those of my beloved Catalonia; I hear people speaking all languages and dialects; I hear voices of chronic colds and tremendous booming voices; I see extremely curious phenomena; I delight in hearing very original jokes, jests, quips, and witticisms; I find out about political, financial, literary and society news; about infallible remedies for all public and private illnesses, of the aspirations and wild schemes of many people; I educate myself hearing artistic and literary criticism and solutions for all social, philosophical, and economic problems.87

The one ‘I see’ in the middle of this passage stands out for its isolation; the overwhelming emphasis lies on the auditory experience and plurality of voices and ideas expressed. As in Frontaura’s sketch, a common focus is the linguistic diversity of the space. A comic piece in Le Charivari from 1884 contrasts an Anglicism used by an elegant woman, who compliments a nurse for her ‘délicieux baby rose’ (delicious pink baby), with the informality of a conductor who refers to the same child as a ‘gosse’ (kid). The narrator laments that people no longer speak of ‘enfants’ (children): ‘Gnawed away from above, gnawed away from below, the true French language resembles Balzac’s peau de chagrin, which shrank away every day’.88 Most commonly, however, the emphasis lies on the ‘gnawing from below’: lower-class cockney or the provincial dialects of visiting peasants. As the bourgeois were taught to maintain a decorous silence on the omnibus, conversations were generally dominated by working-class passengers or outsiders unfamiliar with the codes of the space. Comic journals often poke fun at newcomers’ rustic accents. An 1897 piece in Judy contrasts a Scottish passenger who says ‘Marble Airch’ with a cockney one who says ‘Marble Harch’, and an 1890 anecdote in the Sporting Times transcribes at length the protestations of a lower-class woman when asked to forfeit a seat for which she has already paid: ‘You’re no bizzness takin’ on passengers when the ’bus is full, an’ I’ll

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see yer ’hung ’fore I’ll give up one inch o’ my rights to help carry on any such imposition. Ketch me bein’ ordered ’round by a conductor—pooh! Thinks I’m afeerd of him—pugh! I wasn’t born to be skeered by a screech owl!’ 89 As the poor were more vocal on urban transit, it was often their conversations that were overheard. Omnibus and tram observers took particular delight in the gossip of servants who carelessly divulged their masters’ private lives. In ‘Madeleine-Bastille’ (1894), one of Émile Dartès’ Contes en omnibus, a nurse who bares her breast to feed an infant in her care is equally ready to bare his parents’ secrets to the amusement of an eavesdropping narrator.90 The tram flâneur of Frontaura’s ‘El amigo del tranvía’ similarly listens in as the maids on the morning tram eviscerate their employers in Madrid’s upper-class Barrio of Salamanca, and in an 1895 sketch, Alfonso Pérez Nieva describes servant girls ‘slicing other people’s honour with the razor’s blade of their tongues’, converting the seemingly ‘inoffensive’ tram into ‘a battering ram’.91 All these texts play on the social ambiguity of urban transit. Whereas the servants tranquilly air their masters’ dirty laundry as if in the privacy of their chambres de bonne, the narrator-­observer underscores the public nature of the space. The examples, however, also suggest a ‘small world’ view of the city. Dartès’ narrator notes that he might encounter the nurse’s employers in society, and Frontaura’s tram flâneur is amused by the maids’ titillating accounts of his neighbours. Other texts dispense with the eavesdropping narrator and simply juxtapose conversations to give a sense of the heterogeneity of the passengers and the disconnect between their worlds. In these works, the overall impression is of a large world in which people are separated by invisible walls. In Frontaura’s ‘En el tranvía’ (1881), a series of exchanges, separated by dotted lines, portray in succession an adulterous flirtation, a woman hoping to release a neighbour from military duty, a widow rekindling a flame with a former suitor, a resident of the suburbs complaining about his dependence on the tram, a young man and a young woman making a rendez-vous, and passengers whose watches are stolen.92 The accumulation of unrelated conversations gives a sense of parallel but disconnected lives that pass by one another. In the examples above, the conversations are generally audible, but other texts insist on the cacophony and chaos of the space and playfully represent exchanges heard only in fragments that sometimes run into one another. In Clara de Chatelain’s ‘Life in an Omnibus’ (1857), the narrator struggles to make sense of competing aural stimuli:

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Fragments of conversations din my ears with their hubbub in that close atmosphere. My right ear hears one sentence, my left ear catches another. It was like a kind of cross-fire to this effect: “He has betted a large sum on that mare.”—“They say she has run off with a cavalry officer.” “Did you hear the Rev. Jack Preachall’s last sermon?”—“No, but I met him the other day in liquor.”—“Oh, shocking!” cried a prim old maid next to me.93

As in this example, many texts derive comedy from these arbitrary juxtapositions. A Fun piece entitled ‘Heard in an Omnibus’ (1894), for example, represents a humorous jumble of conversations: ‘Very sad about poor Jones!—yes, and it was his first tooth, too, and he cut it beautifully— Didn’t you think it perfectly killing when the fat man, Mr. Blakeley, wasn’t it, said—do you know I don’t believe Brown was quite sober when he— wouldn’t take his bottle and cried all night’.94 The effect of these interwoven conversations is to underscore the bewildering and vast nature of the urban space, the heterogeneity of the omnibus, and the randomness of its juxtapositions. Other texts represent conversations that are only partly audible. In Frontaura’s ‘El tranvía abierto’ (1888), a passenger recounts his financial woes to a well-to-do retiree hoping the latter will give him alms. The narrator cannot hear the poor man’s words but deduces the situation from the reactions of the wealthy one who speaks in a booming voice. The effect of the half-heard conversation is to place the emphasis on the pensioner’s annoyance and awkwardness rather than on his interlocutor’s plight. The poor man has inappropriately taken advantage of the proximity of the space—its false familiarity—to corner a semi-acquaintance in an uncomfortable conversation. The one-sided representation, however, also suggests the indelicacy of the retiree who, in echoing the poor man’s words in an indiscreet voice, carelessly reveals his distress to one and all.95 Still other texts play on the way conversations are cut off when interlocutors exit the tram or omnibus. In a Punch piece titled ‘Voces Populi: In an Omnibus’ (1890), a group of passengers, fascinated by a strange conversation between two girls, ‘dissemble a frantic desire’ to hear the rest of the story. When one of the speakers steps off the omnibus, however, ‘the tantalised audience’ is left ‘inconsolable, and longing for the courage to question her companion’.96 The chattiness of the girls, who are identified in the title with the populace, contrasts with the reserve of the other passengers, who respect the privacy of the conversation, though they wish to know more. Another essay from 1887 similarly contrasts the general

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silence of the tram with the volubility of two women of the ‘gloveless class’ who discuss an aunt who is reluctant to claim an inheritance. When the eavesdropping narrator reaches his destination, he finds himself longing to know more and struggling ‘to construct […] an Aunt Eliza from these scanty materials. Why did she obstruct the family interests? Why was she lukewarm, to say the least, in claiming the family rights? But now we shall never know’.97 Like the fleeting encounters discussed in Chap. 6, these stories revolve around a ticking clock that runs out, leaving listeners in the dark. The omnibus briefly creates the impression of a ‘small world’ as the passengers are drawn into one another’s narratives and intimate concerns, but the interruption ultimately underscores the vastness of the city: as they are unlikely to meet the chatting women again, they will never know the end of the story. In these examples, the invisible walls between strangers and the reserve imposed by omnibus etiquette serve as footlights separating passengers from the spectacle they observe. The divide, however, is at times overcome. In Dartès’s story ‘Batignolles Clichy Odéon’ (1893) from his Contes en omnibus, two widows strike up a conversation on an omnibus, which the narrator—an aloof flâneur— overhears and transcribes at length. The women discover not only that they share similar views but also that they live on the same street and that they both have children of marriageable age, one a son and the other a daughter. As in other examples we have seen, the chatting women come from relatively humble backgrounds: one runs her own laundry establishment, while the other, a carpenter’s widow, makes corsets for a fashion house. The silence of the bourgeois flâneur, thus, contrasts with the garrulousness of his petit-bourgeois neighbours who reveal their entire life stories. Three months after this encounter, the eavesdropping narrator runs into one of the mothers as she is making inquiries about her omnibus neighbour’s son who has asked her daughter’s hand in marriage. The narrator, who introduces himself as a witness to the initial conversation, is later invited to the wedding. In this story, the invisible walls separating passengers are broken down as strangers become family, and even the bourgeois eavesdropper is brought into the fold.

‘Speculative Acquaintance’ In Dartès’s story, a ‘small world’ comes into being over the course of a single omnibus ride. More commonly, however, this sense of familiarity is the result of a shared commute, of daily observation of specific passengers.

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In descriptions of omnibus regulars, the emphasis sometimes lies on the predictable behaviour and sameness of the passengers over time. In Charles Dickens’ Sketches by Boz (1836), the morning passengers on an omnibus line ‘generally occupy the same seats; they are always dressed in the same manner, and invariably discuss the same topics—the increasing rapidity of cabs, and the disregard of moral obligations evinced by omnibus men’. The description goes on to identify various regulars distinguished only by their typical actions on the omnibus: the officious old man who sits to the right of the door and pokes the cad to request a stop, the ‘shabby-genteel man’ who agrees ‘as he has done regularly every morning for the last six months’, and so forth.98 Similarly, the narrator of Félix Galipaux’s monologue ‘Batignolles-Clichy-Odéon’ (1895) recognises all the regulars on the 8:30 a.m. omnibus: the fat woman who eats garlic sausage, the man who reads the newspaper and is seen only in profile, the butcher who simply wipes his meat basket when it is stepped on, the conductor with dirty hands, and others.99 Neither Dickens’ nor Galipaux’s narrator knows these passengers’ names—there is no real social connection—but each seems to have a sense of acquaintance and of a predictable ‘small world’. Some texts draw attention to the oddity of this semi-familiarity. The narrator of an 1864 story rides to London everyday with the same ‘solemn old fogies’ and amuses himself in speculating on their lives: I know they fancy I am thinking about Consols or indigo, and such matters; but no, I fix my thoughts on the face of one of them, perhaps I know the man in business, and then I picture his home life; there he sits in the omnibus, stately, starched, and grand; there are clerks and business honours grimly awaiting him in the city—I wonder whether he snubs and bullies in the household as he does in the office?100

The narrator regularly travels with these men and may even have professional connections with them, but their characters and lives remain a mystery. His ignorance of their experiences is mirrored by the mistaken assumption he imagines them to be making about his train of thought. The passage underscores the vague combination of observation and conjecture that characterised regulars’ relations with one another; they engage in what the Scottish writer Eliza Gollan called a ‘speculative acquaintance’.101 Notably, the sound is ‘off’ in these stories: the passengers accumulate over time silent clues to their fellow passengers’ identities. In other texts, however, regulars do come to know one another, forming a sort of community and following one another’s development over

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time. A British article entitled ‘Heads from an Omnibus’ (1843)—no doubt, a riff on the popular panoramic collection Heads of the People (1840–41)—describes a group of ‘regular first morning customers’ who have been ‘acquaintances from an uninterrupted association of twelve years’. Over this period, the ‘gay Lothario has become a Benedict’, and the stockbroker who was once ‘the winner of boat races, and the bragger of his wine feasts and bacchanalian orgies—is now bloated and feeble, tremulous and shattered, his eye watery, his hair prematurely gray’. Two accompanying illustrations contrast the ‘heads’ of the omnibus at the beginning and end of this period (Fig. 8.2).102 The passengers are united not only by the vehicle but also by the shared experience of ageing and the passing of time, which creates a greater sense of bonding and community. The postures of the passengers, which are varied in the first image, are

Fig. 8.2 ‘Heads from the Omnibus’. Courtesy of The University of Chicago Library

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Fig. 8.2  (continued)

much more homogeneous in the second, in which all six men look to the right, suggesting a convergence of views and perhaps a conservative shift with old age. Texts describing regulars frequently adopt the perspective of the cad who has deduced his passengers’ stories over repeated encounters. In an 1869 song, a Parisian conductor boasts that he knows ‘all the stories, of yesterday, of today [and] of tomorrow’. He goes on to reveal his regulars’ lives, assigning each one a correspondance appropriate to his or her situation: the cuckolded husband receives a transfer for the ‘rue d’Enfer, la Chaussée des Martyrs, la Porte St. Denis, le Calvaire’, while a thief is redirected to the police station and Palais de Justice as well as ‘la Roquette, Ste. Pélagie, Mazas’ (Parisian prisons).103 Similarly, in the 1854 sketch ‘Views of Life from a Fixed Stand-Point’, the conductor-narrator knows the full history of Mr Philpotts and his family from his birth in Cornwall

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and ‘unwise speculations’ as a youth to his marriage to a rich woman and his stingy treatment of his daughters, who risk becoming ‘old maids’ because he refuses to give them a dowry. The conductor’s information comes from overhearing the gossip of other regulars in Mr Philpotts’ absence.104 The story plays on the odd mix of intimacy and distance that characterises the omnibus, on the experience of knowing of people without being formally acquainted. Perhaps the most unusual perspective, however, is that of the omnibus itself. The 1859 sketch ‘Omnibus Life in London’, inspired by Egley’s painting (Fig. 3.2), begins by imagining what the vehicle could tell us about its passengers: ‘Could it set before us the passions, emotions, hopes, fears and sorrows of a title of that vast multitude, what a picture of life would be set before us!’ The narrator then proposes that we briefly adopt the perspective of ‘an omnibus Cushion or an omnibus “Knifeboard”’ that has been peering up at its occupants ‘for many months’. Just as Crébillon’s sofa spies on private lives in eighteenth-century France, the omnibus seat pries into passengers’ secrets, entering even into their minds. When one passenger considers ‘doing a little dirty work’ to make money, the omniscient cushion wishes its fabric were ‘hedgehogs’ bristles just to prick […] the conscience of the backsliding jobber’.105 The use of a supernatural device to depict the passengers in this sketch suggests that these secrets are inaccessible to mere mortals for whom the omnibus remains an illegible space.

‘The Fin de siècle Asmodeus’ The idea of voyeurism introduced in this sketch is particularly common in texts about the impériale or knife-board. For many nineteenth-century writers, the attraction of the outside seats was the access they gave to secrets and intimate spaces, the pleasure of peering into entresols and first-­ floor interiors passed along the way. Often texts liken this perspective to that of Asmodeus, the devil protagonist of Alain-René Lesage’s Le Diable boiteux (1707), who removed the roofs of houses and spied on their occupants’ private lives. A British essay from 1893 describes the outside passenger as a ‘fin de siècle Asmodeus’.106 Similarly, Octave Uzanne defines a type of impériale regular whom he calls the plongeur (diver), who, like a ‘little Asmodeus’, enjoys observing ‘the whole phantasmagoria of other people’s lives surprised by chance on passing’.107 In many cases, what was glimpsed was a source of erotic titillation. In Sahib and Kitt’s ‘L’Amour vu d’un omnibus’ (1892) (Fig. 6.1), the first-­ floor windows of the Notre Dame de Lorette neighbourhood, known for

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its grisettes, offer an arousing spectacle worth far more than the price of the ticket.108 In other works, passengers delight in observing the ‘belle horizontale’ (courtesan) removing her ‘false bosom’, the ‘demure maiden lacing her virgin bodice before a cracked triangle of a looking-glass, at an attic window’, or ‘people very lightly dressed and scenes that are more or less conjugal’.109 In French texts, the gaze is often described as ‘penetrating’—‘having penetrated the sweet secrets of a very Parisian interior’, ‘that fortuitous and fleeting penetration of the lives of a heap of unknown people whom one surprises in varied attitudes and occupations’—or ‘plunging’ into boudoirs: ‘Through the window, one plunges as a sounder into the interior’; ‘My eyes plunge into the entresols’; ‘one plunges into the interior with startling ease’.110 Male passengers visually take possession of intimate female spaces. While in most cases the individuals thus glimpsed are strangers, occasionally passengers recognise acquaintances and discover surprising secrets. In the British song ‘Riding on the Top of an Omnibus’ (1886), the singer observes a woman waiting for her husband in one window and then spots him ‘in a house around the corner / With another fellow’s wife upon his knee’, and in an 1891 story by Pierre Véron, a woman discovers her husband’s bigamy when she sees a portrait of him in the window of a house observed from the impériale.111 In other texts, the view from the outside seats is an aesthetic experience, akin to contemplating a painting or going to the theatre. In an essay entitled ‘Croquis parisiens: L’Omnibus’ (1902), François Coppée compares the windows to ‘frames’ which enclose ‘genre paintings, varied and full of bonhomie, worthy of a contemporary Teniers, of a modern Chardin’.112 A popular song from 1875 considers the impériale to be better (and cheaper) than the ombres chinoises, and the title character of Maupassant’s ‘Le Père Montgilet’ describes the domestic scenes observed as ‘good, real theatre, the theatre of nature’.113 Still other works use the impériale to observe social difference. Coppée, for example, recalls glimpsing open windows that revealed, ‘under the low ceiling of the entresols in successive scenes, the life of the humble in their intimacy’.114 The essay ‘On the Knife-Board’ (1863), similarly, describes the omnibus roof as the best way for the tourist to ‘make himself acquainted with what is called the “inner life” of the lower classes of London’. In one area, the streets are so narrow that if one turns one’s gaze too quickly from left to right, one risks confusing the interiors of the two sides of the street: ‘the note-book of the too observant foreigner will record that the ladies of Theobald Street use razors, and the men wear stays’.115 This defamiliarising representation suggests the degraded living conditions of the poor,

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whose houses are so close that individual distinctions are lost and whose intimate lives are on display. The omnibus roof also allowed passengers to perceive glaring inequalities. In an 1893 essay, a knife-board observer sees first ‘Sir Gorgius Midas at dinner, amidst the glitter and sparkle of silver and plate-glass’ and then ‘the humble apartment where the great man’s groom is sitting down to steak and onions in his shirtsleeves’.116 Often, the pleasure of the impériale was that of deciphering situations viewed in passing. Maupassant’s père Montgilet ‘guesses at domestic scenes just by glimpsing the face of a man who shouts’, and the narrator of Henri Maret’s Le Tour du monde parisien claims that ‘All professions, all habits are divined by nothing other than the way in which the clock is made, the position of the sofa […] The positioning of the arm chairs at times suffices to develop for you the whole history of the hour that has just passed’.117 Reminiscing on the omnibus in 1902, Coppée recalled how ‘In each interior, a detail, quickly glimpsed, […] revealed all of an existence’.118 At times, however, writers complain about the limits of this type of observation and the frustration of unfinished stories. Maret’s narrator regrets that he cannot intervene in a situation he observes and that he will never find out what happens after the omnibus moves on.119 In some cases, speculating on the lives of others glimpsed from the omnibus leads characters to reflect in new ways about their own circumstances. In J.-K. Huysmans’ novel En ménage (1881), for example, the painter Cyprien Tibaille returns home one night on the impériale and imagines the experience of residents whose houses he observes along the way: Having become very melancholy, Cyprien gave himself over to his meditations, arranging in the closed rooms, gaily lit by a lamp, peaceful existences cozily sprawled under duvets, bourgeois couples sleeping back to back, wheezing, singing through the nose under the covers, then in front of the darkness of the rooms, he imagined the disorders of people who had not yet come home, dawdling in pubs, prolonging the evening to avoid as long as possible being alone with themselves in poor chambers.

When he glimpses an old prostitute faisant la fenêtre (soliciting clients from her window), Cyprien is reminded of his companion André who has just gone off with the courtesan Blanche. Cyprien proceeds to imagine their evening together: I see the scene from here—Blanche embracing her cat or her dog to show that she has a heart, André half undressed, contemplating, leaning on the console table between the two windows, the undoing of the corset and the

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skirts and realising that he has been robbed; Blanche approaching him, in a nightshirt, rocking him in her arms, her head thrown back a bit, her eyes half-closed, her lips pouting, murmuring in a flute-like tone: tell me, are you going to make me very rich, my little man?—and I see also from here André’s nose and I hear his defensive reply: Why, it depends!120

The act of looking into the windows prompts the hero not only to project a narrative onto his friend but also to look inside himself. Although he recognises Blanche’s grasping nature, he partly envies André and returns home feeling ambivalent about his own solitude: while he is happy to ‘sleep in peace’ and to enjoy ‘stretch[ing] out at ease’ in his bed, he is nevertheless disturbed by what he has seen and feels ‘a fit coming on of that fever that he thought he had overcome for good after years of living disdainfully in a permanent solitude’.121 The narrative reconstruction of other people’s lives glimpsed from the impériale leads him to question his own. A similar projection and self-questioning may be observed in Alphonse Allais’ vignette ‘Famille’ (1891) in which an omnibus stops in traffic at the Quai d’Orfèvres. For a brief moment, two young men on the impériale find ‘themselves mingling, despite themselves, in a happy family gathering’ taking place in an entresol apartment with open windows. Entranced by this scene of domestic bliss, which reminds them of the interiors in Dutch paintings, the friends feel a sudden longing for family life and decide to get off the omnibus to see the dinner again. From the street, however, they cannot observe as well, so after drinking an absinthe, they climb onto the impériale of another omnibus on the same line and pass by the building again. They take the same trip ten times, each proceeded by a glass of absinthe, which they promise will be the last, and glimpse in passing every course of the meal as well as the music performed afterwards by the daughter of the house. Whereas most texts about impériale voyeurism evoke fleeting perceptions of interiors, Allais’ story depicts an unusual, iterative form of observation: in a sense, the young men are accumulating a set of ‘stills’, which, put together, allow them to project in their minds a moving picture of the domestic bliss they covet. Just as the windows in Huysmans’ novel represent different options in life (bourgeois couples, solitary revellers), the entresol in Allais’ story represents an alternate form of existence, which leads the two Bohemians briefly to question their priorities. In the end, the young men, now entirely drunk, decide to ask the daughter’s hand in marriage, knock on the door, and are promptly thrown out of the house.122 Allais’ protagonists do what Maret’s narrator longs to: they cross the footlights and attempt to enter the world observed from the impériale. In so doing, however, they break the spell. The windows glimpsed from

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the omnibus are a canvas for fantasy only to the extent that they remain distant and unavailable. At the end of Allais’ text, the observers are observed by the objects of their observation, the surprised bourgeois family. A similar inversion occurs in Ernest La Jeunesse’s L’Inimitable (1899) in which the flamboyant André uses his last sous to buy a pastry chef’s uniform and then sits at his desk wearing his toque, intriguing the impériale passengers who ride by his window: ‘He felt himself becoming a neighbourhood Alcibiades’. The direction of the gaze is reversed in this text: not only do the omnibus passengers observe André, but their observation is in turn observed by him. As in Allais’ story, the perception is iterative, but in this case, it is the character in the window who repeats his observation: ‘The comedy lasted four hours: the omnibuses succeeded one another and resembled one another; the quality of the surprise of the people remained the same, and the gaiety increased, rolled from the sidewalk onto the street […] invaded everything’.123 The ocular exchange between impériale passengers and first-floor residents was a source of fascination that moved in both directions.

Spaces of Memory Texts in which impériale passengers peer into other people’s homes tend to be salacious and comic (Huysmans’ episode is a rare exception), and the conclusions they draw are generally personal and introspective. When impériale passengers focus on the exterior world, however, they often make more grandiose and generalising observations, contrasting past and present. In Paul Arène’s Jean-des-Figues (1868), for example, the protagonist, an aspiring poet from the provinces, and his artist friend Barbignan decide to take an omnibus, ‘because if it was charming in the land of Plato to expatiate with one’s bare feet in water, it is much less so to discuss politics or philosophy with one’s boots soaking in Parisian mud’.124 This opposition between ancient Greece and Paris introduces the main theme of their conversation on the impériale: the contrast between the glory of the past and the degradation of the present. When the poet speaks of his ambitions, the more jaded Barbignan gestures grandly towards Paris as the omnibus crosses the Seine and damns a city that mocks the artists to whom it owes its ‘glory’. He longs for Barbarians to invade and rejuvenate Paris ‘as one does an olive tree by razing it to the ground so that it grows new shoots’.125 To his friend, Barbignan seems in the position of Nero, ‘crowning himself with roses to watch Paris burn from the top of the impériale’. Barbignan, however, immediately deflates his own gesture: where in

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another age he might have sculpted marble statues, he observes, he is now reduced to carving on oyster shells.126 Barbignan might imitate the gestures of Nero, but his perch is not the Palatine hill but the impériale of an omnibus. The remove of the impériale allows Barbignan to appreciate the big picture of historical decline, but at the same time that it elevates him above what he despises, it also symbolises his own degradation. This sense of the inferiority of the present in relation to the past is similarly the focus of a discussion on the impériale in Albert Robida’s La Part du hasard (1888), a novel set during the Paris Commune. Looking out at the city, the protagonist Gardel and his friends lament that it has become ‘utilitarian, practical, comfortable and ugly’; Paris is now ‘the beginning of America’, and its inhabitants are ‘little animals that swarm over the ruins of the past’127 For Gardel, the problem is that time moves faster in the present: hours and days are shorter than they once were, and men no longer have ‘time to reflect and to work’.128 The end of the episode proves his point. His ruminations are cut short by rioters who commandeer the omnibus and flip it over to use in a barricade. ‘You’ll philosophise later’, his friend tells him, ‘Here’s the riot!’129 Their haste and utilitarian repurposing of the omnibus symbolise the degradation of the present. This sense of speed and inevitable change characterises one of the earliest sketches about the omnibus, Ernest Fouinet’s ‘Un voyage en omnibus, de la barrière du Trône à la barrière de l’Étoile’ (1831), which begins by evoking the two custom gates at the ends of the line: Trône, constructed to honour Louis XIV, and Étoile, dedicated to Napoleon. Recalling the destruction of Trône in 1716 and the shifting commemorative function of Étoile, the narrator observes the ‘vicissitudes’ of time and the futility of attempts to fix history: ‘To eternalise, to perpetuate, to make immortal! Oh, puny atoms of a few days, you want to perpetuate, eternalise! Could you prevent Time from destroying, cholera from marching on?’130 For Fouinet, the city observed from the omnibus is a fleeting, constantly changing space. The quick movement of the vehicle serves to underscore the passage of time: The hasty rolling of the wheels, that hurried jolting, that quivering of the floorboard under your feet, the buzzing of the coach, the sight of the well-­launched horses, all that lifts and shakes the blood, fertilises thought, one imagines, one creates, one remembers again, one reconstructs the past, and I saw still at the corner of the Rue de Reuilly the royal abbey of Saint-Antoine.131

The speed and jarring physical experience of the omnibus momentarily conjure up the long-gone abbey but just as quickly it moves on, jolting the

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narrator back into the present. Later, the narrator replays in his mind the evolution of a neighbourhood from forest to farmland and then from swamp to gambling houses, theatres, and cafes.132 The velocity of the vehicle is assimilated to the rapid transformation of the urban space. As in Arène’s and Robida’s texts, the external view leads the passenger to appreciate the gap between the past and the present, but in this case, he seems to see the changes pass before his eyes in fast forward. Another text in which history seems to come back to life is the British poem ‘The Omnibus: A Satire’ (1865) in which the lyric voice observes London from an omnibus roof and discovers that all the ages, by some elfin power, Are here compressed into a single hour. […] Greeks, Russians, Yankees, Jews, Australians, Tartars, Thus, Magis, Sophists, Cannibals, and Martyrs; Wretches who dyed their blades in Pompey’s blood, And laughed at Noah just before the flood; And white-robed saints, angels in human guise, Who staid, when Adam fled from Paradise; All, all are here—each shadow, type and mystery, Terrific drama of man’s tragic history, As, day by day, the mighty town repeats The worlds’ vast record in its echoing streets.133

As in Fouinet’s text, the city viewed from the omnibus is a space in which the past is briefly recovered and reverberates in the present and in which time is ‘compressed’. The poet seems to project the heterogeneity and inclusiveness of the omnibus onto the city itself, which becomes a composite of all periods of human history. An interesting example of this type of historical reflection is Julio Nombela’s ‘El tramvía: paseo psico-fisio-filo-joco-serio y pintoresco por lo principalito de Madrid’, published in 1873 during the sexenio revolucionario and just a few years after the introduction of the tram in Madrid in 1871. The new conveyances, observes the narrator, offer ‘a complete course in revolutionary philosophy’, but one that has made him ‘very reactionary’.134 The narrator’s  tram  ride begins in the Puerta del Sol, ‘the theatre that popular ire always chooses to raise the alarm’, and then passes the ‘mutilated Calatravas’ (a convent destroyed during the uprising) and the ‘calle del Turco’ (where the revolutionary leader Juan Prim was assassinated in 1870). Finally, it arrives at the Palacio de Buenavista, which prompts a long digression.135 The narrator recalls that the building, given

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to Manuel Godoy by Carlos IV, became the Ministry of War in 1847. Its beautiful gardens, however, make one want a change in the sign of the house: instead of Ministry of War, Ministry of Peace. But that idea is too naïve. War must be surrounded by beauties, above all since Napoleon said ‘war is peace’. Poor France! You see it already, the tram makes us think of France, which, sure of going to Berlin to dance the can-can, found that Prussia tap-danced over Paris.136

The narrator’s reflections are a series of free associations, which take him from the Ministry to Napoleon and from Napoleon to France’s recent defeat in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. He then returns to the assassination of Juan Prim, who was carried to the Palacio de Buenavista after being shot.137 The fragmentary nature of these observations forces the reader to piece together the political commentary of the essay. The narrator seems to admire Prim, a man whose ‘gigantic ambition’ is matched by his ‘natural talent’, but feels that his death has left the Revolution ‘without a head’, which suggests a lack not just of leadership but also of a rational project for the nation.138 As the sketch continues, the passengers observe the topsy-turvy effect of the Revolution, which has made and broken fortunes: the nouveaux riches flaunt their wealth on the Paseo de Recoletos, while others, plagued by debt, haunt the ‘old Salesas [i.e. the Convent of the Salesas Reales], now converted into the Palace of Justice’.139 With these observations, the narrator’s reaction against the uprising becomes clearer: the revolution has brought revolving fortunes but no significant change. Combining external observation with overheard conversations, the sketch offers an impressionistic, elliptical commentary that captures the accelerated experience of change during the revolutionary sexennium. As is clear in these texts, urban transit was a space from which passengers contemplated lieux de mémoire and reflected on history. As they saw these sites from a certain remove, they were often able to view them more philosophically or place them in historical perspective. In their fleeting and fragmentary impressions, many of these texts convey a sense of melancholy, an awareness of ‘man’s tragic history’ and of the inexorable force of change. Just as the omnibus moves on, history has left these sites and all that they represent behind.

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The Whimsical Eye Other texts view the city not as a vestige of the past but as a sort of living museum, an aesthetic spectacle. In the opening of Enrique Segovia Rocaberti’s 1887 poem Catálogo humorístico en verso de la Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes, for example, the narrator critiques the architecture and monuments he observes from the tram on his way to a fine arts exhibit and then on arrival evaluates the art displayed on the walls. The city viewed from the tram, thus, becomes the antechamber of the exhibit.140 In ‘The Omnibus: A Satire’—the British poem from 1865 cited earlier— the lyric voice similarly evaluates and reflects on various statues observed from a knife-board. London, the poet claims, is ‘Teaching to all, whom roofs of ’busses carry, / The laws of Taste, by the street statuary’. What follows is a series of idiosyncratic impressions of the sculptures of the Duke of Wellington (whose ‘cocked hat’ seems ‘a portentous nose’), of George I (a ‘legless king’ whose horse seems ‘brok’n out with the Small Pox’), and of Charles I (‘The greatest Liar of the Stuart race’ who ‘In statue tramples on the Roundheads’ dust, / And thus, in Art, revokes a sentence just’), among others.141 Often these texts celebrate the heterogeneity and odd juxtapositions of the urban space. In ‘The Omnibus: A Satire’, the lyric voice celebrates the bizarre palimpsest produced by advertisements posted on top of or alongside one another: On yon vast hoarding, pasted o’er and o’er, They meet at last who never met before; And, though held back by no apparent tether, They seem to live most happily together. Here Priests and Players linger cheek by jowl […] The Bishop of London lauds the Alhambra’s fame.142

In this passage, the walls of the city are an ever-changing collage in which opposites come together, a church authority seemingly promoting a popular music hall. Observers appreciated not only the museum of the city as viewed from the omnibus but also the bizarre aesthetic impressions produced by the omnibus itself. In Édouard Gourdon’s La Physiologie de l’omnibus (1841–42), the narrator uses pictorial diction to evoke the fleeting effects of the omnibus lanterns at night:

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The lanterns of the omnibus throw onto the passengers green and yellow reflections which, attaching themselves here and there, on a face, a hat, a profile, a tie, a hand, define them forcefully at night. They are bizarre caprices and always in movement; it is a page of Hoffman, a sketch of Rembrandt or of Callot; here are dogs and bats, serpents and wolves, a hairy rock, a bridge and clouds. The dogs are the ribbons of that woman; the bats, the ears of that gentleman, the serpents, the fingers and the nose of that one there.143

The distortions produced by the lighting generate phantasmagorical, romantic images inside the omnibus. Shortly afterward, when the shadow of the vehicle is projected against a white wall, the horses seem ‘elephants’; the driver, ‘a harpy’; the conductor, ‘a bishop’; the footboard, ‘a drawbridge’; and the passengers, ‘Patagonians who devour one another’.144 The omnibus here is a defamiliarising, distorting space, which affords the discerning passenger new aesthetic perceptions. Whereas Gourdon offers a generally silent vision of the omnibus, Pedro Bofill’s sketch ‘De Chamberí a la Puerta del Sol’ (1879) ricochets between visual and auditory observation and between internal and external stimuli, revelling in the strange echoes and aesthetic effects of the horsecar. As the narrator steps onto the tram, he gives alms to several beggars, who respond, ‘May God reward you’. This prompts him to look up towards the Heavens, and in so doing, he observes the façade of the Church of Chamberí, which is so deteriorated that, like the mendicants, it seems to ask for charity. Moved by this decay, the narrator silently wonders, ‘Where is the religious fervor that in other eras raised temples as monumental as the cathedrals of Burgos, León and Toledo?… Where?’ Almost immediately, his question is echoed by the conductor who asks his destination: ‘Where?’ The observation, thus, bounces back and forth between sights and sounds, inside and outside. As the tram moves along, the narrator offers aesthetic impressions of new buildings along the route. The Homeopathic Hospital (completed in 1878) wins his approval as ‘the most apt for restoring calm to the spirit and health to the body’. In contrast, he pities the patients of the coldly geometrical Hospice, its façade an ‘emblem of the affective petrification that reigns therein’. Its architecture not only reflects the depressing experience of its patients but also influences the narrator’s sentiments: ‘I felt my heart oppressed’. Just as Bofill’s narrator blurs the distinction between the inside and outside of the building, his impressions of the exterior world are inflected by his inner thoughts and feelings.145 Another example of this idiosyncratic approach to the city is an 1890 sketch ‘Un voyage en tramway’ signed by Saint-Sénac in which a

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passenger offers an aetheticising, often whimsical vision of the urban space, which captures the rapid shifts in the city as the tram moves along. The ‘calm of the beautiful neighbourhoods’ near the Parc Monceau—‘an emerald in a stone case’ and ‘a painting by Firmin Girard with its lawns lovingly maintained by gardeners who dream of perfection’—contrasts with the noisy hub of Place Moncey (now Place Clichy), full of newspaper boys and street peddlers hawking ‘those thousand nothings that are mass-­ produced every day, that last only a moment’.146 The ‘vulgarity’ of this spectacle, however, is mitigated by the carts of flowers, which give the scene ‘a more poetic note’.147 As in Bofill’s description of the Church of Chamberí as a beggar, the objects observed are often anthropomorphised. The new houses on one square ‘seem to look at you with disdain from their eyes, open and drinking the day’.148 The omnibus itself is represented as a lung that inhales and exhales passengers, and its horses seem to converse, recollecting their native Normandy, and later, when given water, seem to be taking ‘their absinthe’.149 Elsewhere, the narrator observes how the changing viewpoint of the tram transforms the sights observed: as the vehicle moves away, the Arc de Triomphe becomes smaller ‘like an object seen from the large end of a lorgnette’.150 Playing with perspective and projecting human features onto the urban landscape, the text offers a subjective, impressionistic, and defamiliarising view of the city. The effect of distance on perception is also the focus of a prose poem by Ephraïm Mikhaël from the same year in which a tram passenger observes from the platform trees disappearing into the horizon: The sky is a deep grey. One imagines that it will always be that way. The trees are rigid, extending in branches infinitely thin and sad. At the end of the avenue, the two last trees, the farthest that I can perceive, seem to evaporate, melted marvelously into the air. One would say the ghosts of trees, forms of trees made only of mist. Those two fade, become blurred, are lost in the great greyness down there. The others appear to me in the same way. I dream, for a brief instant, that the sky engulfs one by one those phantom trees.151

The text moves from the seeming permanence of the grey sky, reinforced by the rigidity of the branches, to a sense of marvel at the disintegration of the images of the trees, which suggests the fleetingness of things. Whereas ‘Un voyage en tramway’ is generally light and whimsical, however, Mikhaël’s prose poem adopts a melancholy tone, as everything is subsumed in the ‘great greyness’ of the sky.

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‘A Three-Sous Pegasus’ Nineteenth-century writers found the omnibus not only a unique aesthetic experience but also a source of literary inspiration. For Victor Hugo, the impériale was a ‘three-sous Pegasus’ on which he composed his works in his head, and Walt Whitman attributed Leaves of Grass in part to ‘those Broadway omnibus jaunts and drivers and declamations and escapades’.152 Théophile Gautier and Wilkie Collins were also said to have been inspired by the space.153 Arnould Rogier would celebrate this form of poetic inspiration in ‘Le Tramway’ (1892), a sonnet in which an indigent poet opts for the impériale on a rainy day to save money. Despite his poverty, he offers the conductor an extra coin, which is identified with his poetic creation: Le poète en travail monte à l’impériale, Car c’est complet, en bas, et c’est trois sous, ici. «En voilà quatre ! Il donne, il rime d’abondance, Il reçoit pour le ciel une correspondance, Et pour un petit sou sur terre un grand merci.154 [The poet at work climbs to the impériale, Because it is full below and it’s three sous here. “Here are four! He gives; he rhymes in abundance, He receives a transfer for Heaven And for a small sou great thanks on earth.]

The poet’s generosity wins him a ‘correspondance’ (a transfer ticket) to heaven, but as we know from Baudelaire’s poem of that title, the word also has poetic meaning. The lyric voice is rewarded not only with gratitude but also with inspiration, abundant rhyme, and an insight into the connectedness of things. As the poor poet’s solidarity with the conductor exemplifies, the inspirational potential of the space was often identified with its humbler occupants from whom writers learned to represent the lower ranks more authentically. According to one of Hugo’s contemporaries, the ‘contact with the popular element’ on the omnibus was essential to his writing.155 François Coppée similarly recalls conversing with the poor on the impériale and advises ‘writers of noble company’ to take ‘lessons of truth in everyone’s vehicle’. If he is ever to write a poem or a story that survives him, he believes, ‘it is in the omnibus, among the humble’ that he will be inspired to do so.156

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Some writers gathered raw material by eavesdropping: on omnibuses, observed Vere Dudley, one overheard ‘scraps of conversation […] invaluable for a writer, or student of human nature’.157 The inspiration, however, could also be visual. The silent examination of passengers’ faces, remarked one British writer in 1847, gave rise to ‘certain vague and dreamy conceptions’ from which one could ‘weave the story’ of their lives.158 Finally, the space could inspire through its random juxtapositions. For Lucien Griveau, ‘The omnibus has a poetry of its own. Is it not the warehouse of chance, and what poet is greater than chance?’159 The omnibus was not only a source of material but also a space in which writers found a certain seclusion or isolation despite the agitation and the crowds. Describing Hugo’s rides on the impériale, Édouard Drumont notes that ‘the deafening brouhaha of Paris produced in him the same effect as the sea; he believed himself to be a desert in himself only in the midst of those multitudes that come and go, that press in, that collide, that dispute and like waves, rush with a strange, regular tumult toward a mysterious goal’.160 Coppée, similarly, found a ‘singular calmness and isolation favourable to intellectual work in the roar of the wheels over the cobblestones and the trembling window panes’.161 Perhaps the most striking example of this isolated creativity on the omnibus, however, is Romain Coolus’ essay ‘Les Toupies’ (1894), which appeared in the avant-garde and anarchist-leaning journal La Revue blanche: With the shaking of the omnibus, memories start to gossip (rumeurent), images rise and sink (ludionnent) and the subconscious gets to work […] nothing impedes the cerebral tick-tock that grinds illusion, not even the hoax of eyelids released over the fallacious little plums that join us with the world. Once the umbilical gaze is cut and the eyes closed off from the outside, infinite inner eye-shaped spots stud with stars the voluntary shadow in which we take refuge. Little by little the male ideologies by which we adroitly increase by a cruel coefficient our sentimental miseries withdraw backstage, like hasty dancing women, still gymnoting choreographic emotions, eager for the foyers where—occasionally—the clear water of diamonds rustles in the hollows of financiers’ palms. But the lamps (rampe) neutralised, the interminable spectacle begins again and suddenly all the emigrants of the fictive countries appear. Theoretical and prestigious, in tunics of liturgical linen and sowing painful, silent gestures of my sadness and multiplying to unreachable horizons, as if in mirrors in which images, the same extinguished attitudes, jump on a trampoline, but so soothing as to be almost unreal, they process out… And then, a dream…

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In the omnibus, Coolus’ poet-passenger cuts himself off from everything: the umbilical cord connecting him to external reality is severed, and he is metaphorically born into a new world of images. His thoughts are evanescent, entering and exiting the ‘stage’ of his mind, constantly multiplying, bouncing, and shifting. The fluidity of these images is reflected in the gender shift of the simile in which ‘male ideologies’ become ‘dancing women’. When the conductor asks the passenger for his fare, however, the reverie is broken, and his visions disappear. The narrator laments that no insurance company will reimburse him ‘for the prestigious treasures that [the conductor’s] imbecile vociferation […] has caused to fall from the seas of unconsciousness, from the Caspians of unfathomable oblivion, for all the deceased visions, dead fairylands and defunct chimeras’.162 Coolus’ text represents the inner world of the omnibus passenger as a space of creative freedom in which his mind, propelled by the jolting of the vehicle, generates an endless stream of mercurial images. In nineteenth-century texts, the omnibus serves as a space of observation, speculation, and creation. As passengers look in and out, eavesdrop, and ogle, they not only attempt to ‘read’ the spaces and people they encounter but also project stories and meanings, drawing connections that are playful, profound, and fantastical. The attitudes in these texts vary considerably. Some observers display a sense of mastery or possession, be it that of the regular who knows his fellow passengers by heart, of the impériale voyeur who peers into others’ homes, or of the connoisseur who skilfully deciphers faces and hands. Others emphasise the mystery and illegibility of the space, the unknowability of the large world that is the city. Some seek general patterns of meaning or higher truths, while others revel whimsically in the arbitrary juxtapositions and superficial differences or derive inspiration from the aesthetic impressions glimpsed along the way.

Notes 1. Carlos Frontaura, Tipos madrileños: cuadros de costumbres (Madrid: Ricardo Fé, 1888), 215–27. 2. ‘The Philosopher in an Omnibus’, The St. James’s Magazine, October 1869, 750. 3. Samuel-Henry Berthoud, ‘Huard et Verduron’, Musée des familles, February 1827, IV, 129.

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4. Mariano de Cavia, ‘Diez céntimos, cualquier distancia’, La Risa, 22 July 1888, 7. 5. ‘The Omnibus: A Satire’ (London: Trubner, 1865), 8. 6. Alfonso Pérez Nieva, ‘Lo que rueda por Madrid’, Revista moderna, 11 September 1897, 455. 7. Argus, ‘Chronique’, La Semaine des familles, 17 August 1872, 320. 8. E. de Cortázar, ‘Excursiones veraniegas’, El Imparcial, 10 September 1888, n.p. 9. E. Nevire, ‘En omnibus jusqu’à Jérusalem’, Le Mousquetaire, 27 March 1854, n.p. 10. Octave Uzanne, ‘Omnibus de Paris’, Le Monde moderne, January-June 1900, 482–83. 11. ‘Les Panoramas—Les Omnibus—Les Vidanges de Paris’, Petites chroniques de la science, September 1861, 295; Alphonse Daudet, ‘Mémoires d’un homme de lettres’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 8 June 1884, 355; E.E., ‘On an omnibus’, Bow Bells, 26 May 1893, 511. 12. Guy de Maupassant, ‘Le Père Montgilet’, Gils Blas, 24 February 1885, 136. 13. As Masha Belenky points out, the ‘omnibus journey’ served ‘as a narrative vehicle to explore the changing urban environment and to give the reader a textual tour of Paris’. Engines of Modernity: The Omnibus and Urban Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2019), 62. 14. Paris en omnibus, itinéraire pittoresque, historique et industriel des 31 lignes d’omnibus (Descriptions, légendes, faits historiques, anecdotes, renseignements). Ligne H de l’Odéon à Clichy (Paris: A. Parent, 1861), vi. 15. Paris en omnibus, guide familier dans le Paris de 1869 (Paris ancien et Paris nouveau) (Paris: Serriere, 1869), vi. 16. Eugène Ferrieux, La Bastille à la Madeleine et vice versa (Paris: E.  Donnaud, 1878); Éric Besnard, Guide historique de Paris à Saint-­ Germain-­en-Laye en tramway à vapeur (Paris: J.  Kugelmann, 1894); Through London by Omnibus: A Chatty Guide to the Principal Sights of London (London: Hodder Bros, [1898]). Edmond Deschaumes’ Pour bien voir Paris (Paris: M.  Dreyfous, 1889) similarly lists the sites and monuments to be seen from each omnibus line. For comic tours by urban transit, see Bernadille (pseudonym of Victor Fournel), Esquisses et Croquis parisiens (Paris: E. Plon, 1879), 29–35; and ‘Tram-Car Dialogues: How Urban Led Rusticus Round London Town’, Fun, 1 January 1895, 23. 17. Comtesse de Flesselles, Les Jeunes Voyageurs dans Paris, ou les Tablettes de Jules (Paris: Locard et Davi, 1829), 216–52. 18. Arthur Somerset, ‘London and Some of its Wonders: 1. A Journey through the City’, Little Folks, n.d., 21; Frontaura, ‘El tranvía que va a mi pueblo’, La Edad Dichosa, 28 May 1891, 226–28.

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19. Karlheinz Stierle, La Capitale des signes: Paris et son discours (Paris: Éd. de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2001), 127. 20. Delphine de Girardin, Lettres parisiennes (Paris: Charpentier, 1843), 148; Ernest Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus, de la barrière du Trône à la barrière de l’Étoile’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris: Ladvocat, Paris, 1831), II, 78. See also Le Voleur, 20 October 1829, n.p. 21. Masha Belenky, ‘Transitory Tales: Writing the Omnibus in Nineteenth-­ Century Paris’, Dix-Neuf 16:3 (November 2012): 288. 22. Daudet, ‘Mémoires’, 355. 23. ‘Omnibus Sketches’, Chambers’s Journal, 18 December 1847, 394–96. 24. Willy (pseudonym of Henry Gauthier-Villars), L’Année fantaisiste (Paris: Delagrave, 1895), 112. 25. Carlos Frontaura, ‘El amigo del tranvía’, La Época, 12 July 1887, n.p. 26. Les Omnibus, premier voyage de Cadet la Blague de la Place de la Madelaine [sic] à la Bastille, et retour (Paris: Chassaignon, 1828), 3. A French sketch from 1838 makes a similar connection: ‘Nothing is more amusing for the observer, the professional flâneur, than the interior of an omnibus’. L.  M., ‘L’Intérieur d’un omnibus’, The Court Magazine and Monthly Critic, 1 August 1838, 31. 27. J.  Lovy, ‘D’où viennent les rhumatismes?: C’est la faute des omnibus’, Journal pour rire, 26 March 1853, 5. 28. Louis Ulbach, Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1878), 57. 29. F.  G. Lee, ‘London Pencillings: No. VI.—The Omnibus’ in Tales and Readings for the People (London: George Vickers, 1849), I, 281. 30. Carlos Frontaura, ‘El tranvía’, La Risa, 22 January 1888, 10. 31. Cited in Walter Sickert, ‘Degas’, Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, November 1917, 191. 32. Henri Maret, Le Tour du monde parisien (Paris: J. Hetzel, 1862), 18. 33. Maret, Tour du monde, 74. 34. Watripon, ‘Les Gras et les Maigres’, Journal amusant, 20 July 1861, 6; Vere Dudley, ‘A Chat on the Omnibuses’, The Ladies’ Treasury, 1 April 1893, 206. Daumier satirises this attitude in the caricature ‘Sur l’impériale. Voir à ses pieds grouiller la fourmilière humaine’ (1869) in which outside passengers look down haughtily at the ‘swarming’ of the ‘human anthill’ on the street below. Le Journal Amusant, 31 July 1869, 7. 35. Edmond Auguste Texier, Taxile Delord, and Arnould Frémy, Paris-en-­ omnibus (Paris: A. Taride, 1854), 78; Daudet, ‘Mémoires’, 355; and ‘In a City ’Bus’, Chambers’s Journal, 19 October 1867, 668. 36. Willy, L’Année fantaisiste, 111. 37. Amy Levy, Romance of a Shop (Ontario: Broadview Editions, 2006), 80. 38. Amy Levy, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verses (London: T.  Fisher Unwin, 1889), 22.

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39. Florence C. Armstrong, Sisters of Phaeton (London: Ward and Downey, 1890), 77. 40. Julia E. Chesson, ‘Thirza: A Minor Chord’, The Woman’s Signal, 16 April 1896, 243. 41. George Gissing, The Town Traveller (London: Methuen, 1898), 78–79. 42. Arthur Symons, London Book of Aspects (London, 1909), 22. 43. Fernando Ruiz y Feduchy, Madrid por dentro: cuadros sociales tomados del natural (Madrid: E. Velasco, 1890), 39; Dudley, ‘A Chat’, 206; Leopold Wray (pseudonym of Clara de Chatelain), ‘Life in an Omnibus’, Reynolds’s Miscellany, 24 October 1857, 197. 44. Wilkie Collins, Basil: A Story of Modern Life (London: Richard Bentley, 1852), I, 96. 45. ‘Society in an Omnibus’, Hearth and Home, 1 October 1891, 637. 46. Dudley, ‘A Chat’, 207. Helen Hamilton similarly observes that ‘humanity […] reveals itself frankly’ in an omnibus. ‘Concerning the Bus’, The Queen, 29 March 1913, 556. 47. Jean-Baptiste Delestre, De la physiognomonie: texte, dessin, gravure (Paris: Vve J. Renouard, 1866), 386. 48. Auguste Méral, L’Homme aux romans (Paris: Pouget-Coulon, 1858), 7. See also St-Gauvé, ‘L’Omnibus’ (Bénard, 1856), 1. 49. Lucien Descaves, ‘En tramway’, Gil Blas, 12 December 1893, 1. 50. Charles de Launey (pseudonym of Delphine de Girardin), ‘Courrier de Paris’, La Presse, 3 November 1836, 2. 51. ‘Lettres parisiennes’, Asmodée, 15 August 1847, n.p. 52. Ricardo Blasco, ‘Conversación’, Día de moda, November 1, 1888, 2. In an 1893 sketch, an omnibus conductor claims to be able determine a woman’s ‘state of mind’ from her dress; ‘Inevitably he enters into their intimacy’. ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus’, Le Petit Parisien, 21 July 1893, n.p. 53. Belenky, Engines of Modernity, 76. 54. Collins, Basil, I, 97. 55. Maret, Tour du monde, 21. 56. Fournel, Esquisses, 23–24. 57. D. de Girardin, ‘Courrier de Paris’, La Presse, n.p. 58. Le Gallienne, ‘A Literary Omnibus’, Yellow Book, April 1897, 314. 59. Le Gallienne, ‘A Literary Omnibus’, 315. 60. Le Gallienne, ‘A Literary Omnibus’, 314, 316. 61. Le Gallienne, ‘A Literary Omnibus’, 316. 62. Eugène Michel, ‘L’Innocente Aventure’, Petit Parisien—Supplément littéraire illustré, 27 September 1896, 310. 63. Dudley, ‘A Chat’, 207.

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64. Jean Richepin, Le Pavé (Paris: Maurice Dreyfous, 1886), 183. 65. Descaves, ‘En tramway’, 1. 66. Hugues Le Roux, ‘La Vie à Paris’, Le Temps, 10 January 1889, n.p. 67. Belenky, ‘Transitory Tales’, 290. 68. Richepin, Le Pavé, 184. 69. Mme Eugène Bersier [Marie Bersier], ‘Compagnons de route: de Paris à Paris’, La Femme, 15 April 1895, 58. 70. Frontaura, ‘El tranvía’, 9–11. 71. Belenky, ‘Transitory Tales’, 284; Engines of Modernity, 65. 72. Emmeline Raymond, for example, pointed out that omnibus rides tended to be too short to decipher others’ sentiments. ‘L’Omnibus’, La Mode illustrée, 27 October 1862, 352. 73. Leigh Hunt, Men, Women and Books (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1847), 22. 74. Uzanne, ‘Omnibus de Paris’, 485. 75. Gustave Kahn, ‘Le Bureau d’omnibus’ in Paul Adam et al., Badauderies parisiennes (Paris: H. Floury, 1896), 7. 76. George Augustus Sala, ‘Inside London’, London Journal, 9 July 1859, 409. 77. Sala, ‘Inside London’, 410. 78. Sala, ‘Inside London’, 411. 79. Jacques Villebrune, Sonnets mystiques (Paris: Plon, Nourrit et Cie, 1886), 339. 80. Arthur Symons, Selected Early Poems, ed. Jane Desmarais and Chris Baldick (Cambridge, UK: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017), 51–52. 81. Lucien Griveau, ‘En omnibus’, Journal des demoiselles, February 1883, 48. 82. François Bouchard, ‘Un philosophe en omnibus’, Académie de Macôn, Tome VII, 1865, 124. 83. ‘The Philosopher in an Omnibus’, 759. 84. ‘The Philosopher in an Omnibus’, 761. 85. For another, somewhat later example of philosophising in urban transit, see José Ortega y Gasset’s 1916 essay ‘Estética en el tranvía’ in El Espectador (Madrid: Biblioteca nueva, 1943), 41–51. 86. ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus (Septième Lettre)’, Gazette de France, 23 February 1832, n.p.; ‘Au redacteur’, Gazette de France, 31 December 1831, n.p. 87. Frontaura, ‘El amigo del tranvía’, n.p. 88. ‘Sur la langue’, Le Charivari, 11 January 1884, n.p. 89. ‘On a ’Bus Top’, Judy, 21 April 1897, 182; Sporting Times, 15 November 1890, 5.

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90. Émile Dartès, Contes en omnibus (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1894), 355–440. 91. Frontaura, ‘El amigo del tranvía’, n.p.; Alfonso Pérez Nieva, ‘Las horas madrileñas’, La Correspondencia de España, 28 June 1891, n.p. 92. Carlos Frontaura, ‘En el tranvía’, El imparcial, 7 November 1881, n.p. 93. C. de Chatelain, ‘Life in an Omnibus’, 197. 94. ‘Heard in an Omnibus’, Fun, 23 October 1894, 177. 95. Frontaura, Tipos madrileños, 220–21. 96. ‘Voces populi’, Punch, 30 August 1890, 100. 97. ‘The Manners of the Tram’, The Saturday Review, 8 January 1887, 49. 98. Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895), 102–3. 99. Félix Galipaux, ‘Batignolles-Clichy-Odéon (monologue)’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 18 August 1895, 104–5. 100. ‘A Love Tale by an Old Fogey’, Once a Week, 26 November 1864, 631. 101. Rita (pseudonym of Eliza Margaret Jane Gollan), ‘Knot in a Handkerchief’, All the Year Round, 30 March 1889, 1–10. 102. ‘Heads from an Omnibus’, Illustrated London News, 12 August 1843, 109. 103. Charles Pourny and Alfred Isch Wall, ‘Le Conducteur d’omnibus! Physiologie parisienne’ (Paris: L. Bathlot, [1869]). 104. ‘Views of Life from a Fixed Stand-Point’, Chambers’s Journal, 9 December 1854, 380–81. 105. ‘Omnibus Life in London’, The Illustrated London News, 11 June 1859, 571. 106. E.E., ‘On an Omnibus’, 510–11. George Augustus Sala similarly writes of the pleasure of ‘being your own Asmodeus, and unroofing London’. Twice Round the Clock (London: Richard Marsh, 1862), 220. 107. Uzanne, ‘Omnibus de Paris’, 492. 108. Sahib (drawing) and Kitt (captions), ‘Voyages dans Paris—L’Amour vu d’un omnibus’, La Vie parisienne, 24 September 1892, n.p. 109. Jouy et al., ‘L’Impériale et L’Intérieur’, n.p.; Sala, Twice Round the Clock, 220; ‘Madrid’, El Día, 31 July 1892, n.p. 110. Willy, L’Année fantaisiste, 111; Pierre Véron, Paris amoureux (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1891), 6; J.  Jouy and H.  D’Arsay, ‘L’Impériale et L’Intérieur: scie-locomotrice’ (1885), n.p.; Edmond L’Huillier, ‘Sur l’impériale: grande scène comique avec parlé’ (Paris: L. Bathlot, [1875]), n.p.; Alphonse Allais, À se tordre: histoires chatnoiresques (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1891), 284. 111. G.  W. Hunter, ‘Riding on the Top of an Omnibus’ (London: Francis Bros. & Day, [1886]); Véron, Paris amoureux, 15–23.

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112. François Coppée, ‘Croquis parisiens: L’Omnibus’, Les Annales politiques et littéraires, 7 September 1902, 149. 113. L’Huillier, ‘Sur l’impériale’, n.p.; Maupassant, ‘Le Pére Montgilet’, 136. 114. Coppée, ‘Croquis’, 148. 115. ‘On the Knife-Board’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, 13 June 1863, 369. 116. E.E., ‘On an Omnibus’, 510. 117. Maupassant, ‘Le Père Montgilet’, 136; Maret, Tour du monde, 36. 118. Coppée, ‘Croquis’, 148. 119. Maret, Tour du monde, 36. 120. Joris-Karl Huysmans, En ménage (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1881), 170. 121. Huysmans, En ménage, 171. 122. Allais, À se tordre, 283–88. 123. Ernest La Jeunesse, L’Inimitable: roman contemporain (Paris: E. Fasquelle, 1899), 36–37. 124. Paul Arène, Jean-des-Figues (Bruxelles: A.  Lacroix et Verboeckhoven, 1870), 124–25. 125. Arène, Jean-des-Figues, 126. 126. Arène, Jean-des-Figues, 127. 127. Albert Robida, La Part du hasard (Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1888), 87, 88. 128. Robida, La Part du hasard, 89. 129. Robida, La Part du hasard, 90. 130. Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus’, II, 60. 131. Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus’, II, 64. 132. Fouinet, ‘Un voyage en omnibus’, II, 74. Urban observers often used the omnibus to survey the transformation of the cityscape. See, for example, ‘Lettre d’un convalescent, sur les travaux et embellissements de Paris; ou Une promenade en omnibus’, Journal des artistes, 6 July 1828, 147–50; and ‘An Omnibus Story’, All the Year Round, 7 October 1893, 352. 133. ‘The Omnibus: A Satire’, 9. 134. Julio Nombela, ‘El tramvía: paseo-fisio-filo-joco-serio y pintoresco por lo principalito de Madrid’ in Madrid por dentro y por fuera, dir. Eusebio Blasco (Soria: Trigo, 2010), 212–13. 135. Nombela, ‘El tramvía’, 213. 136. Nombela, ‘El tramvía’, 214. 137. Nombela, ‘El tramvía’, 215. 138. Nombela, ‘El tramvía’, 214. 139. Nombela, ‘El tramvía’, 217. 140. Enrique Segovia Rocaberti, Catálogo humorístico en verso de la Exposición Nacional de Bellas Artes (Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fé, 1887), 6. 141. ‘The Omnibus: A Satire’, 17–21. 142. ‘The Omnibus: A Satire’, 16–17.

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143. Édouard Gourdon, La Physiologie de l’omnibus (Paris: Terry, [1841–1842]), 117. 144. Gourdon, Physiologie de l’omnibus, 118. 145. Pedro Bofill, ‘De Chamberí a la Puerta del Sol’, El Imparcial, 16 June 1879, n.p. 146. Saint-Sénac, ‘Un voyage en tramway’, Revue de la France moderne, February 1890, 101, 103. 147. Saint-Sénac, ‘Voyage en tramway’, 103. 148. Saint-Sénac, ‘Voyage en tramway’, 98. 149. Saint-Sénac, ‘Voyage en tramway’, 98–99, 101. 150. Saint-Sénac, ‘Voyage en tramway’, 98. 151. Ephraïm Mikhaël, Poèmes en vers et en prose, ed. Matthew Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1994). 152. R.  L., ‘Une soirée chez Victor Hugo’, Paris à l’eau-forte, December 1873–March 1874, 69; Walt Whitman, Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1897), 19. On Hugo’s love for the impériale, see Léo Claretie, Histoire de la littérature française (900–1900) (Paris: Société d’éditions littéraires et artistiques, 1909), IV, 186. Hugo dated one of his poems ‘10 September 1873. On the impériale of an omnibus’. ‘Toute la vie d’un cœur. 1817. Adolescence’,  Toute la lyre (Paris: Albin Michel, 1935), II, 116. Fittingly, a poem written on the occasion of the centenary of his birth takes up the voice of an omnibus conductor who recalls Hugo on his impériale. Dominique Bonnaud and Jules Mévisto, Victor Hugo en omnibus (Paris: Mévisto aîné, [1902]). 153. Maurice Dreyfous, Ce que je tiens à dire. Un demi-siècle de choses vues et entendues (Paris: P.  Ollendorff, 1912), 75–76; Richard D.  Altick, The Presence of the Present (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 1991), 441. 154. Arnould Rogier, ‘Le Tramway’, La Grande Revue, 10 July-25 September 1892, 93. 155. R. L., ‘Une soirée’, 69. 156. François Coppée, ‘L’Omnibus’, Le Journal  quotidien, littéraire, artistique et politique, 25 April 1895, 1. 157. Dudley, ‘A Chat’, 207. 158. ‘Omnibus Sketches’, 395. 159. Griveau, ‘En omnibus’, 48. 160. Édouard Drumont, Figures de bronze ou statues de neige (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1900), 25. 161. Coppée, ‘Croquis’, 147. 162. Romain Coolus, ‘Les Toupies’, La Revue blanche, January 1894, 15–16.

CHAPTER 9

Epilogue: The Omnibus and Its Others

This study has considered the experience, meaning, and function of the omnibus and tram in nineteenth-century texts and images: the ways in which they serve as metaphors, as narrative settings, and as spaces of desire, knowledge, observation, and creation. It is important to remember, however, that these public conveyances coexisted with various other forms of transportation, a few of which such as the train and Underground were also novelties in the period. In this epilogue, I would like to reflect on the relation between cultural representations of the omnibus or tram and those of other modes of transit. How do nineteenth-century observers evoke the differences between omnibus sociability and the experience of the train, stagecoach, hired cab, steamboat, or Underground? And how do the literatures that evolved around these spaces differ from one another? In what follows, we will see that texts about the omnibus stand out in a number of ways. Unlike the literatures of the railroad or the Underground, which often evoke anxieties about runaway trains, explosions, or a terrifying Underworld, the omnibus is rarely represented as a Gothic space. The concerns expressed in works set on the omnibus usually relate to the encounter with shady or illegible strangers and often suggest a fear of being contaminated, displaced, or declassed. As the omnibus was a more heterogeneous space than other forms of public transportation, the disturbing proximity with the social other is much more prominent in these works. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7_9

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More than other literatures of public transportation, omnibus texts insist on the awkwardness of the ‘sound off’ encounter with strangers. As conversation was rarer in the omnibus than in the train, diligence, or hired coach, the emphasis of these narratives frequently lies on passengers’ visual experience or on overheard conversations rather than collective ones. When the passengers’ gaze is directed inward, they are frequently represented as ‘reading’ (with varying degrees of accuracy) visual clues about others observed either fleetingly or over repeated trips. When they look out, in contrast, what is portrayed is not the blurry perception of the train, the romantic reverie of the steamboat, or the frightening darkness of the Underground but rather a leisurely and idiosyncratic vision of the odd juxtapositions of the urban landscape; the passenger-flâneur views the city as a rich and ever evolving palimpsest. The omnibus also functions differently as a space of desire: unlike the train compartment or hired coach, it does not allow for intimate encounters but rather offers visual stimuli and a titillating proximity that inspire fantasy. It tends, therefore, to serve more as a starting point than an end point of affairs, as a catalyst for encounters that develop elsewhere or in the passenger’s imagination.

Stagecoach Storytelling The vehicle that most resembled the omnibus at the time of its introduction was the short-term stagecoach. An early observer described Shillibeer’s service as ‘a sort of second edition of the old long Greenwich stage’, which ran between London and Greenwich.1 Technologically, little distinguished the two types of coaches, and in London, they sometimes competed for the same clientele: a comic poem from 1830 represents a woman torn between an omnibus cad and a stagecoach conductor, each of whom warns her against the other’s service.2 In Paris, the distinction between the two types of coaches was clearer. The closest equivalent to the omnibus was the coucou, a public conveyance introduced around 1780 that served the suburbs but was not allowed inside the city. Observers generally considered the omnibus an improvement. The coucou was dilapidated, old-fashioned, uncomfortable, and inefficient: ‘two bad banquettes that had once been stuffed’ and a single, decrepit horse burdened with as many as 12 passengers.3 A text from 1835 contrasts the ‘ignoble coucou’ whose drivers dawdled, fought over passengers, and haggled over prices, with the well-organised omnibus service with its transparent fares and regular schedules.4 Nevertheless, the coucou

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was not without its pleasures. Louis Couailhac considers it a vestige of the eroticism of the ‘rococo era’: ‘how elbow touches elbow, how knee presses knee, how the waists of young girls are abandoned without defence to the initiatives of the bold’. Such daring, he claims, is impossible in an omnibus ‘where each couple is under the immediate surveillance of fourteen Arguses who spy on their movements’.5 As we saw in Chap. 6, many nineteenth-century texts contradict this view of the omnibus, but what is typical in this passage is the vision of the coucou as belonging to an earlier period. Texts from the 1830s and 1840s often associate it and its drivers with the Napoleonic era. For Maurice Alhoy, the drivers are ‘old troops of the Empire, swaggering in coaches in their homeland after having toured Europe by foot’, and the protagonist of Achille Jubinal’s ‘Le Conducteur de coucou’ (1834) is a soldier who has lost his leg and his beloved defending Napoleon in 1814.6 Perhaps the most well-known literary depiction of the coucou is Honoré de Balzac’s Un début dans la vie (1842) which features the driver Pierrotin, who transports passengers between L’Isle-Adam and Paris (a five-hour journey on a good day). With his magnetic personality, Pierrotin has won the villagers’ loyalty and come to know intimate details of their lives. The coucou is in many ways an extension of the ‘small world’ of the village. The first part of the novel deals with a conversation among Pierrotin’s passengers who, though not acquainted with one another, are connected in various ways. An elderly count travelling incognito rides together with his notary’s clerk, his painter’s assistant, and the son of his administrator’s former mistress. Encouraged by the seeming anonymity of the space, the young men begin to regale one another with fabulous but false stories about their lives. The accountant recounts his military adventures in Algeria, to which the painter’s assistant replies with a love story set in Dalmatia. Finally, the adolescent, who feels humiliated by his humble dress and lack of accomplishments, represents himself as a friend of the count’s sons. To prove his story, he reveals embarrassing details of the count’s skin condition, which he has overheard the administrator discussing with his mother. At the end of the first volume, the characters’ true identities are revealed with disastrous consequences: the administrator is dismissed for his indiscretions, and his mistress’ son is banished. As the coucou moves from Paris to L’Isle-Adam, the ‘large world’ turns into a ‘small’ one: the hidden relationships between the passengers become clear, and their romantic self-fashioning is deflated.

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Like many omnibus texts, the novel insists on the egalitarian nature of the space: ‘All passengers are equals before the coucou, just as the French are before the Charte’; ‘All Frenchmen are equals in the coucou’.7 This equality, however, is undermined by the shameless self-fashioning of the passengers who attempt to establish their superiority through invented stories. Moreover, Balzac draws a careful distinction between the posturing characters, who are generally taken in by one another’s tales, and the count who easily sees through them. The ability to decipher the space is reserved for the aristocrat. Balzac’s story also differs from omnibus literature in its representation of the coucou as a space for collective conversations and storytelling. Early in the novel, the narrator draws attention to this aspect of stagecoach sociability: although passengers initially examine one another silently, they usually go on to strike up a conversation as ‘everyone feels the need to embellish the trip and to beguile its boredom’.8 This sort of community and extended exchange is rare in omnibus texts. ‘As to long stories’, wrote Dickens, ‘would any man venture to tell a long story in an omnibus?’9 In long-term stagecoaches or diligences, which served more distant towns, the passengers were generally less connected to one another than in the coucou, but the lengthy trips, which often involved sharing meals and inns, often led to the formation of acquaintances. As Dickens points out, the passengers in a stagecoach generally went ‘all the way with you’, whereas those on an omnibus ‘change[d] as often in the course of one journey as the figures in a kaleidoscope’.10 The longer trajectories of the stagecoach also encouraged more extended conversations: Ramón de Mesonero Romanos evokes the ‘philosophical, political, economic, commercial, literary, amorous and even ridiculous dialogues’ on a diligencia from Paris to Madrid.11 It was also a space for storytelling. A classic example of this is Marivaux’s 1714 novel La Voiture embourbée in which carriage passengers, obliged by an accident to spend a night in a hotel, tell a story collectively, each one taking up the plot where the last one left off.12 A nostalgic 1886 essay recalls ‘the literature of the old stage-coach days’ and in particular ‘one old book […] in which the whole story is laid in a stage-coach, one of the passengers relating the history of her life’. The omnibus, laments the author, is far less conducive to conversation.13 Anne Green has contrasted the ‘conviviality of stagecoach scenes’ with the ‘bleak vision of anomie’ on the omnibus.14 There is some truth to this—the omnibus is often depicted as a ‘sound off’ space in which passengers are limited to deciphering one another’s appearances and

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gestures—but, as we have seen, the omnibus could also be represented as a space of cordial exchanges. The short nature of the rides, however, tended to limit the depth of the interaction and characterisation. Passengers rarely regale one another with the type of stories featured in Balzac’s or Marivaux’s novels, and acquaintances struck up tended to develop either outside of the omnibus or in a more fragmented way over repeated journeys. It is interesting to contrast Édouard Gourdon’s La  Physiologie de l’omnibus (1841–42) with his Physiologie des diligences et des grandes routes (1842).15 The former is mostly a reflection by a narrator-passenger who rides an omnibus and silently observes and speculates about people who get on and off. The narrator of the Physiologie des diligences, in contrast, transcribes at length the passengers’ conversations. Gourdon resolves the problem of the constantly shifting dramatis personae of the omnibus by making the narrator himself a passenger, who observes as people come and go. The Physiologie des diligences, in contrast, has a more stable cast of characters (the passengers are generally the same at the beginning and end of the text), but one that is spatially segregated, placed in different compartments of the vehicle. As a result, Gourdon opts for an omniscient narrator who knows what is happening simultaneously in the three parts of the diligence. The treatment of desire is also different in the two texts. Where the erotic tension in La Physiologie de l’omnibus is generally not satisfied (the fantasies of the man with grey hair about his female neighbours are never acted upon), various liaisons are established in the Physiologie des  diligences. At the end of the work, a young man and a married woman move from the intérieur to the empty coupé in order to be alone together. In the stagecoach, such relationships can develop slowly, favoured by the length of the journey and the many opportunities for exchange at resting places and inns.16 As Mariano José de Larra observes in his sketch ‘La diligencia’ (1835), on a diligencia love […] makes great headway in little time. On journeys, Nature, stripped of the considerations of society and often of modesty, which is the child of acquaintances among people, is left alone and usually triumphs. How do you not attach yourself to a person whom you have never seen, whom you will perhaps never see again, who does not know you, who does not live in your circle, who cannot talk or discredit  you, and with whom you are enclosed inside a box for two or three days and their nights? Then it seems that society is not there; a diligencia becomes for the two

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sexes a desert island […] How many occasions to offer mutual services! How many times in a day is a glove lost, a handkerchief dropped, something forgotten in a coach or an inn! How many times one must give a hand to enter or descend!17

The sentence about passengers who will never be met again recalls similar passages in omnibus texts, but where the latter emphasise the missed opportunity, here the focus lies on the occasion to be seized, the possibility of forming an inconsequential liaison en route with a complete stranger. The division of the diligence into several compartments (coupé, rotonde, intérieur, and impériale) is another important difference. Unlike the omnibus with its single cabin, the diligence segregated passengers into separate areas based on fare. Gourdon’s Physiologie des diligences captures the distinct social composition and sociability of each space: whereas the rotonde passengers are nursemaids and soldiers, who smoke and engage in lively conversation, the intérieur passengers are bourgeois and restrained, and a wealthy man rides alone in the coupé. Later in the century, Pierre Zaccone would compare the three compartments to the ‘three orders’ of the ancien régime.18 The most interesting literary exploration of these distinctions is Auguste Ricard’s novel La Diligence ou le Coupé, l’Intérieur, la Rotonde et la Banquette (1833), which describes the maiden voyage of a stagecoach from Paris to Rouen, which ends up overturning close to its destination. Each of the four volumes describes the same trajectory from the perspective of a different area of the vehicle. The first volume clarifies the social distinctions among the compartments through Parisian geography: ‘The coupé is the Chaussée d’Antin [the fashionable neighbourhood of the nouveaux riches]; the intérieur, the Rue Saint-Denis [a bourgeois street known for its tradesmen and shops]; the rotonde, the rue Trousse-Vache [a humbler street near the horse market]; the banquette [roof seat] is the airy mansarde [the attic associated with artists and grisettes]: wind and cold!’19 As the focus moves from one compartment and class to another, the type of narrative shifts accordingly. The first volume, set in the privileged coupé, evokes the noble sentiments of a wealthy doctor who finding himself in the company of his former fiancée and her provincial husband, selflessly resolves to nurse his rival back to health. The overturning of the diligence, however, fatally injures the husband, allowing the former lovers to reunite. The second volume moves slightly down the social ladder to the intérieur and deals with somewhat baser emotions: the jealousy

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provoked when a young man and his fiancée coincide with his former mistress, a pretty but mediocre actress, who is accompanied by a lieutenant. Whereas the three characters in the love triangle in the first volume ride alone in the coupé, the intérieur is a more public space in which several other passengers are present. They all, however, turn out to be connected to one another. The third volume, set in the rotonde, features two artists, a beef merchant, a petit commis, a nurse, and a veiled Italian woman. As the novel descends the social ladder once again, the plot shifts from bourgeois comedy to melodrama with a story about a French painter in Rome, who turns out to be the meat vendor’s nephew and the former lover of the Italian woman. As in the second volume, the diligence is a ‘small world’ in which people discover through conversation their interconnectedness. Finally, the fourth volume deals with the banquette focusing on a revolutionary of 1830 who has gone into debt and is now escaping the law. Curiously, this volume features the most delicate love story of the novel. The debtor is seated next to a young woman who has been harassed on an earlier trip by a travelling salesman and is still somewhat traumatised. The narrative emphasises the young man’s consideration for her feelings and gentle efforts to care for her, which gradually lead them to fall in love. As in many omnibus texts, Ricard explores differences among social ranks, but as the diligence passengers are segregated, he must resort to the strategy of parallel lives. Although passengers occasionally leave the vehicle for coffee or to lighten the horses’ load while going uphill, characters from different compartments almost never interact with one another (the only exception occurs in the final volume when the doctor from the coupé attends to the debtor of the banquette after he is injured in the accident). Even when different classes ride in the same compartment, the consciousness of social difference is often more acute in diligence than in omnibus texts. In Maupassant’s novella ‘Boule de suif’ (1880), for example, various Rouen residents travel by stagecoach to Le Havre to escape the Prussian invasion in 1870. The opening pages describe in detail the social differences among the middle- and upper-class passengers (a count, a respectable factory owner, and a shady merchant of cheap wine). The entrance of a ‘democrat’ and a plump prostitute, however, creates a solidarity among the bourgeois and noble passengers who all disdain these outsiders. As they travel in snowy weather, the vehicle advances slowly, and soon the passengers become hungry. When the prostitute good-naturedly shares her food basket, the other passengers overcome their repugnance

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and happily accept. Momentarily, the heterogeneous group seems to come together in a community of sorts. Eventually, they reach an inn, but a Prussian officer refuses to allow them to continue on their way. Pressured by her fellow passengers, the prostitute agrees to sleep with him to obtain the necessary authorisation. Far from expressing gratitude, however, the others treat her with undisguised disdain the next day and do not reciprocate her generosity when they have provisions, and she does not.20 It is interesting to contrast Maupassant’s novella with an episode set on a batignollaise (an early omnibus) in Hippolyte Regnier d’Estourbet’s novel Louisa ou les Douleurs d’une fille de joie (1830), which similarly represents other passengers’ dismay upon the entrance of Louisa, a pretty but showily dressed harlot.21 Sensing their disapprobation, Louisa gives them a defiant look. Like Maupassant’s heroine, however, she turns out to be a prostitute with a heart of gold. When a tilbury runs over an elderly ragpicker, she hops off the batignollaise to offer him her last louis. But unlike ‘Boule de suif’, the episode is short and takes place almost entirely with the sound ‘off’. The other passengers observe the fille de joie but do not engage with her. Whereas the long journey and shared meals of the diligence allow Maupassant to develop a plot of manipulation and betrayal, the reaction to Louisa is simply judgmental voyeurism. Although omnibus texts occasionally do represent collective conversations and the emergence of a sort of community, these features are much more typical of stagecoach stories such as Balzac’s and Ricard’s. In general, the literature of the diligence allows for a greater degree of interaction and exchange, develops over a longer time  frame, and involves more socially homogeneous groups than stories set on omnibuses and horsecars.

‘Rolling Pornography’ Another vehicle that preceded the omnibus was the hired coach: the fiacre and cabriolet in Paris and the hackney carriage and later the hansom cab in London. In both cities, the drivers of these vehicles felt threatened by the new omnibus services as is clear in the revised title of one of Dickens’ Sketches by Boz: ‘The Last Cab Driver and the First Omnibus Cad’ (1835). Early French texts also attest to tensions between fiacre and omnibus employees. In the vaudeville Les Omnibus ou la Revue en voiture (1828), fiacre drivers try to dissuade the Wandering Jew from taking an omnibus, warning him about its pickpockets and annoying trumpet, but the old man prefers the new service because it is cheaper, involves no tipping, and has

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inside lighting.22 In a mock epic from the same year, a hundred fiacre drivers attempt to block the route of an omnibus, which has robbed them of their fares, but are easily pushed aside by the heavy vehicle.23 As the Wandering Jew points out, however, the omnibuses were not taking away fiacre passengers so much as catering to a humbler clientele.24 In Paris, a fiacre could cost six times more than an omnibus ride.25 As a result, its customers were generally more affluent. Louis Huart distinguishes between omnibus passengers, who tended to be ‘petits rentiers, students and grisettes’, and the fiacre clientele, made up of ‘the bourgeois and small property owners’.26 As these coaches were hired for private use, their literary representations generally lack the chance meetings and observation of social others that characterise omnibus texts. Indeed, a common complaint about both hired and private coaches was that they isolated passengers from the city and society. The 1890 essay ‘A Rambler in London’ contrasts the experience of a hansom cab in which one is ‘out of touch with the average man’ and ‘outside the crowd’ with the roof of an omnibus from which one can ‘catch the spirit of the place exactly’.27 Many omnibus narrators echo this sentiment, expressing a ‘pitying pride / Towards those in Broughams and Hansoms doomed to ride’.28 In Amy Levy’s ‘Ballade of an Omnibus’ (1889), for example, the lyric voice claims not to envy ‘Lucullus’ phaeton and its freight’ because the rich man misses out on the ‘city pageant’ seen from an omnibus roof.29 In other cases, the pleasure lost is that of observing the inside of the vehicle. The narrator of Lucien Descaves’ ‘En tramway’ (1893) feels for ‘poor millionaires who never go by omnibus’ because it is in public conveyances that ‘one best enters by surprise into the intimate life of strangers’.30 Where the omnibus offers ‘gay, noisy, changing and varied spectacles’, observes the narrator of Émile Dartès’ ‘Madeleine-­ Bastille’ (1894), the fiacre results in ‘fatigue, more or less sad thoughts and irritation’.31 Because of this isolation, texts about hired coaches usually focus either on the interactions between the passenger(s) and the driver or on the amorous relationship of a couple who takes refuge in the coach. In the French context, the cabriolet, in which the driver and the passenger often sat side by side, particularly lent itself to the first type of representation. The cocher de cabriolet is often depicted as chatty but curiously knowledgeable—in Louis Ulbach’s words, ‘a forced friend’ who ‘transmitted to you his heat’ and often ‘struck up a conversation’.32 Ulbach cites as an example Alexandre Dumas père’s ‘Le Cocher de cabriolet’ (1831) in which a

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successful playwright hires a cabriolet, whose driver regales him with a melodramatic story. Dumas’ work opens with a distinction between the fiacre driver, who is ‘grave, immobile and cold […] isolated on his seat’, and the cabriolet driver, who, sitting next to and chatting with his clients, comes to know a little bit about everything.33 In the hackney coach and fiacre, in contrast, the driver was physically separated from his passengers, who sat inside a closed box. In the 1813 text The Interesting Adventures of a Hackney Coach, the narrator-driver spies on his clients’ conversations but only through an artificial mechanism: a pipe ingeniously inserted between the ‘front glasses’ of the carriage, which allows him to hear their voices.34 In fiacre texts, the driver becomes a protagonist only through conversations and interactions that take place outside his coach. In such works, the emphasis generally lies on his uprightness and decency: he is often represented restoring lost possessions or helping out in other ways. Auguste Ricard’s novel Le Cocher de fiacre (1828), for example, begins with a preface in which a fiacre driver returns to the author the manuscript of his novel, which the latter had left behind in the cab. This good deed is echoed by those of the novel’s title character, who shelters a ci-devant during the Terror and then raises his daughter as his own.35 Because of the isolation of the box, the fiacre was associated with erotic and often adulterous encounters. The classic example of this is Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), in which Emma and Léon pull down the shades in a fiacre and consummate their affair, but as a lawyer would point out in the obscenity trial following its publication, an even more explicit fiacre scene may be found in Prosper Mérimée’s La Double méprise (1833).36 The shady nature of the space is clear as well in Dartès’ ‘Montrouge-Gare de l’Est’ (1893) in which a married woman refuses to take a fiacre with the protagonist: ‘it is an accepted rendez-vous, a tête-à-tête’, she protests, ‘it’s a crime!’37 In the early twentieth century, this view would be parodied in Paul Margueritte’s ‘Le Fiacre vert’ (1909), a story in which an adulterous couple returns to Paris in a jolting and filthy hired coach, which ‘smells of tobacco, alcohol and crime with a hint of nastiness’. Disgusted, the lover fixates on a blood-like stain on the doormat and imagines the slumbering drunkards, prostitutes, and thieves who have passed through the fiacre before him. Meanwhile, the unfaithful wife, nauseated by the lurching, opens the window and ‘vomits her adultery, pale as if she were going to die’.38

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Often, however, the fiacre with lowered blinds is treated more playfully as a space of ‘rolling pornography’.39 In 1888, Paul Alexis published a stanza representing the vehicle as a bedroom on wheels and its driver as a prostitute: Le portière de nos voitures S’ouvre à tous comme leur boudoir. Et moi, comme ces créatures, J’appelle… et je fais le trottoir.40 [The door of our coaches Opens to everyone as their boudoir And I, like those creatures, I call out… and I work the streets.]

This association was echoed in the popular culture of the period, which celebrated the fiacre as a space for lovers in ditties such as Xanxof’s ‘Le Fiacre’ (1888) and Arthur Lamy and Charles Pourny’s ‘Le Fiacre jaune’ (1882) or in vaudevilles such as Émile de Najac and Albert Millaud’s Le Fiacre 117 (1886).41 In Chap. 6, we saw a number of similar jokes, but it is interesting to note that early texts about the omnibus contrast its erotic possibilities with those of the fiacre. A clerk in Alexandre Tardif’s ‘Scènes de Paris’ (1829), after taking omnibuses with a grisette and running into his father and her mother, decides that the fiacre is preferable for there ‘you lower the blinds… you are at home… And consequently, you can do anything you want’.42 In the poem ‘Les Omnibus: conte véridique, dédié aux cochers de fiacres’ (1828), a bourgeois father is warned against ‘the fatal omnibus’ where ‘a daring lover’ might press his daughter’s knees or pass her ‘an amorous message’. Even his wife is vulnerable: ‘If madam herself… here suspension points’. The fiacre, in contrast, is the ideal place for a rendez-­ vous with a woman of easy virtue: ‘it is mysterious, / One travels at one’s ease with a pretty nymph’.43 Whereas the omnibus is identified with female vulnerability—the dangers of the public sphere for the housewife—the fiacre is associated with male pleasure: it is a private space in which to consort with a prostitute. What distinguished the omnibus from the hired coach was thus its public nature and the heterogeneity of its passengers, which made it a space more apt for initial encounters than for the consummation of affairs.

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Machines of Terror The omnibus was introduced just a few years before the first passenger trains, which began in 1830 in England (the Liverpool and Manchester Railway) and in 1832 in France (the Saint-Étienne to Andrézieux line).44 Like the omnibus, the railroad was celebrated as a force that reduced distances and brought people together. In an 1893 text, Georges Bouret compares the function of the omnibus—‘the link among Parisians of the two rives’—with that of the railway, ‘the bond among nations’.45 But where the emphasis in omnibus texts lies on the encounter among social classes—the omnibus as a symbol of equality—the railroad is represented as facilitating encounters among cultures. Connecting distant cities and countries, it is a symbol of a progress, enlightenment, and modernity that overcomes national boundaries and foments cultural exchange.46 In his poem ‘La Locomotive’ (1855), Maxime du Camp represents the train as a force that will ‘unify nations’ and ‘demolish the barriers that are raised on frontiers’, and Benjamin Gastineau in La Vie en chemin de fer (1861) anticipates that ‘vapour will create a new humanity’ by ‘crossing human races’ and intermingling ‘the blood of all peoples’.47 As distance ceased to be an obstacle, the world seemed to contract, converging on the centre: Heinrich Heine imagined that ‘the mountains and forests of all countries were advancing on Paris’.48 Early passengers were often disoriented by the train’s speed, which was at least three times faster than the traditional stagecoach.49 Unlike the omnibus, which ‘enables you to appreciate the gradual dawning of rurality as you leave town’, observed a British writer in 1851, ‘the railway flies away with you as the Roc did with Hassan of Balsora, and drops you into the country with a plump’.50 This velocity transformed passengers’ visual experience, reducing their perception of detail in the foreground.51 As a character in Nikolai Leskov’s story ‘The Pearl Necklace’ (1885) observes, the modern traveller ‘cannot gather any strong impressions; there’s no time and nothing for him to observe’.52 In the introduction to Felix Holt (1866), George Eliot expresses a nostalgia for a slower form of observation: Posterity may be shot, like a bullet through a tube, by atmospheric pressure, from Winchester to Newcastle: that is a fine result to have among our hopes; but the slow, old fashioned way of getting from one end of our country to the other is the better thing to have in the memory. The tube-journey can never lend much to picture and narrative; it is as barren as an exclamatory

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O! Whereas, the happy outside passenger, seated on the box from the dawn to the gloaming, gathered enough stories of English life, enough of English labours in town and country, enough aspects of earth and sky, to make episodes for a modern Odyssey.53

Stagecoach travellers could observe the foreground in detail and felt themselves to be part of it. The railway experience, in contrast, severed the link between the passenger and the outside world.54 Whereas the stagecoach is a space of stories and storytelling, the train seems antithetical to narrative. Passengers were also confronted with the phenomenon of motion parallax in which fixed objects close to the train seem to move faster than distant ones. As Anne Green observes, in many descriptions ‘it is not the traveller who moves away from his or her surroundings, but rather the familiar surroundings that desert the traveller as they disappear into the distance’.55 The lyric voice of Ramón de Campoamor’s poem ‘El tren expreso’ (1871), for example, observes that ‘The things that we look at, / turn back the moment we pass; / and as the train goes forward / it seems that they are retracing our steps’.56 Other writers describe the experience as one of sensory overload. Reporting on the opening of a northern railroad in Spain in 1864, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer laments the impossibility of capturing in prose ‘the rapidity with which objects and the thoughts that they inspired wounded the eyes and the imagination’. Ultimately, he must resign himself to offering ‘notes […] unstitched, incorrect, almost without a connection’.57 This distorted and fragmentary perception, however, could also facilitate a more poetic or philosophical view of the world. Gastineau, for example, celebrates the endless succession of ‘scenes’ that passengers glimpse from the train: ‘visions that disappear almost as soon as they appear’. To appreciate them, one must have what he calls the ‘synthetic philosophy of the glance’, an ability to take in the big picture.58 This sense of a fragmented experience also appears in omnibus texts, but where the variation in the latter derives from the entrances and exits of the passengers, the focus in train texts lies on the ever-changing landscape and rapid shift in images. The social experience of railway travel was also quite different from that of the omnibus. As in diligences, train passengers were segregated on trains and in waiting areas in stations. Whereas first-class passengers rode in semi-private compartments that resembled the coupé of a diligence (and at times even in their own carriages strapped to empty wagons), lower-class passengers occupied larger collective spaces, at times without seats or even

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a roof, that were often convivial and raucous. This segregation, Michael Freeman argues, may have served ‘to enhance class consciousness’ in the period.59 The train was almost certainly experienced as a more homogeneous space than the omnibus. In a 1906 text, a French observer would contrast the railway in which passengers tended to come from the ‘same milieu’ with the omnibus, which offered a more ‘faithful image of a nation’.60 Although the railways and diligences were both commonly used for long-distance travel, the sociability of the spaces was not the same. In literary accounts, strangers generally do not strike up conversations as readily on trains as on stagecoaches.61 Collective conversations such as those of Balzac’s Un début dans la vie or Ricard’s La Diligence are relatively rare in railroad texts. Nevertheless, train literature does at times represent tête-à-­ têtes and encounters of surprising intimacy. In a Maupassant story, a nursemaid whose bosom aches from an excess of milk allows a construction worker, who has not eaten in two days, to suck from her breasts. Where in omnibus texts passengers look away in embarrassment from nursing mothers, Maupassant’s work, set in a resplendent Italian spring and titled ‘Idylle’ (1884), evokes a beautiful intimacy and solidarity among peasants.62 In a more comic story from 1885, Maupassant imagines a priest helping a female passenger to give birth on a train while ordering the adolescent boys in his charge to look out the window.63 Sometimes writers even represent sexual acts in train compartments. Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (1885) features an ‘awkward, violent coupling’ between newlyweds on a railroad journey, and in Théodore de Banville’s story ‘La Dame anglaise’ (1885), the title character gives herself in a train compartment to a young doctor whom she has just met.64 Even when there is no sexual contact, a man and a woman travelling alone in a compartment could give rise to suspicions. In Emilia Pardo Bazán’s novel Un viaje de novios (1881), a bride and groom taking a train from Spain to France just after their wedding are separated by a mishap. A young man who enters their compartment converses with the bride and gradually an intimacy develops between them. But although their encounter is entirely innocent, her husband later abandons her when he learns of her pregnancy as he believes the child was conceived during his absence. Like the fiacre, the train compartment is an intimate space that is highly suspect in the nineteenth-century imagination. The enclosed nature of the space could lead to intimacy but also to anxiety. Unlike modern trains, nineteenth-century European railroad carriages were divided into small compartments seating four to six people

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which did not communicate with one another. The only exit was a door to the outside, which was opened only at stations. Railway compartments were thus ideal for locked-room mysteries. Several prominent railway murders—the Poinsot case in France (1860) and the Briggs case in England (1864)—reinforced anxieties about travelling in isolation with complete strangers, but Europeans were reluctant to adopt the larger, open carriages of American trains.65 Eventually, side corridors were installed to permit movement between carriages and greater surveillance, but the spectre of the train murderer would continue to haunt the imagination. The most famous literary evocation of these fears is Émile Zola’s novel La Bête humaine (1890), which features a killing partly based on the Poinsot case. Murders, in contrast, are relatively rare in omnibus and tram texts, and when they do occur, the weapon must be discreet enough to escape other passengers’ notice: for example, the poisoned pin in Fortuné de Boisgobey’s Le Crime de l’omnibus (1881).66 Passengers feared not only the enclosed compartments but also the machine itself, which was associated with danger and violence. As Schivelbusch argues, the noise, vibrations, and sensation of ‘being confined in a fast-moving piece of machinery without being able to influence it’ was the closest many bourgeois came to an ‘industrial experience’.67 From the outset, the mechanical nature of the train produced apprehension. An early publicity poem for Shillibeer’s omnibuses proclaimed that unlike the Greenwich Rail-Road, his vehicles would ‘neither blow-up nor explode like a mine’.68 Similarly, a French caricature from 1856 contrasts the slow, jolting experience of the extinct coucou with the breakneck speed of the train, which lands one ‘twenty years too early in Hell’.69 Images such as John Leech’s ‘The Railway Juggernaut of 1845’ and George Cruikshank’s ‘The Railway Dragon’ similarly represent the train as a monster that destroys everything in its path.70 The railway accident and the runaway train were constant anxieties of the period and often used as plot devices to eliminate characters (e.g., Wilkie Collins’  No Name, 1862; Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, 1862), to punish sinners (e.g., Dickens’ Dombey and Son, 1848; Ellen Wood’s East Lynne, 1860), or as a means of suicide (e.g., Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, 1877). Zola’s La Bête humaine famously ends with the image of a driverless train hurtling forward on the path to annihilation. Characters about to be run over by a train appeared as well in popular theatre. Nicholas Daly has pointed to a number of sensational British plays in which heroes come to the rescue of victims tied to railway tracks who are about to be crushed by oncoming

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trains. The motif, he suggests, represents the victory of man over machine.71 The destructive potential of train drivers and locomotive mechanics was another common motif. La Bête humaine, Jules Clarétie’s novel Le Train 17 (1877), and Edmond Lepelletier’s story ‘L’Œil en haut’ (1890) all feature love triangles involving cuckolded railway workers who seek vengeance on the tracks.72 Medical treatises of the period warned about the impact of train travel, with its anxieties, vibrations, and constant visual stimuli, on the spine (‘railway spine’) and the nervous system more generally.73 Tales of neuroses in train compartments abound in the nineteenth century. Paul Margueritte’s story ‘La Sonnette d’alarme’ (1893) offers a wrenching account of the growing anxiety of a train passenger travelling alone. Initially, he feels a sense of vertigo seeing the ‘trees and the embankments fleeing in the opposite direction’, then feeling spied upon by passengers in other compartments, he begins to entertain ‘unhealthy’ thoughts, and finally he imagines himself rolling towards an abyss. In the end, he cannot resist the temptation of sounding the alarm.74 The most famous victim of such nervous agitation is the protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), who attributes his decision to murder his wife, whom he suspects of infidelity, to the ‘exciting’ effect of train travel on the imagination.75 Nicholas Daly has drawn an interesting connection between the experience of railroad travel and the sensational novel, which plays on this type of nervous energy and often features train accidents in its plots.76 The train also lent itself to Gothic narratives. The enclosed compartments, the eeriness of the night train, and anxieties about the machinery made it an ideal space for sinister and supernatural stories. In ‘El tren expreso’, Campoamor compares the ceiling of the carriage to ‘the lid of a tomb’ and evokes the ‘Horrifying lamentations of the machine / which add terror and delirium / to all those mysterious limbos!’77 Many train stories involve ghosts or preternatural apparitions. In Amelia B. Edwards’ ‘The Four-Fifteen Express’ (1866), the protagonist encounters in a train an acquaintance who turns out to have been murdered several weeks before.78 Train ghosts could also point to the future. The title character of Dickens’ story ‘The Signalman’ (1866) sees a series of apparitions that anticipate train accidents, including his own death in the dénouement. The train signal, central to Dickens’  tale, also generated Gothic tales. In Georges Rodenbach’s story ‘Suggestion’ (1899), the red light inspires a husband to murder his wife by suggesting the image of blood, and in André Godard’s tale ‘Le Point rouge’ (1892), a young man

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who lives in the forest is so mesmerised by the signal that he is tempted to derail a train although at the last minute he relents and places himself on the tracks instead.79 With a few exceptions such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Green Tea’ (1872), omnibus tales generally lack the Gothic overtones, nervousness, and violence of railroad literature. The difference between the literary treatment of the two forms of transportation is clear in Annie French Hector’s Which Shall It Be? (1866), which includes both omnibus and train episodes. Early in the novel, the heroine, the orphaned Madeline, coincides on an omnibus with a shabbily dressed but well-bred old man who seems ‘vaguely familiar’. When he asks her name, he seems surprised by her answer, but soon she has to change lines, and they go their separate ways.80 Later, Madeline becomes a governess for a wealthy family and is pursued by a neighbouring aristocrat, who wants her to become his mistress and pleads his case in a railroad carriage. As in various texts mentioned above, the train is associated with illegitimate desire. Madeline rejects his advances and decides to earn her living as a music teacher and singer in London where she moves in with a friend. One day, Madeline sits on an omnibus across from a rugged-looking man who has ‘nothing of the conventional gentleman about him, but no one could fancy him low-born or an upstart’.81 As in the earlier episode, the man encountered on the omnibus is a gentleman who has come down in the world. When Madeline discovers that her wallet has been stolen, he pays her fare. Sometime later, he visits her, and it is revealed that he is a distant relative of her friend. He starts to visit more frequently, and Madeline begins to fall in love with him. In the dénouement, their fortunes are reversed. The old man from the first omnibus dies leaving a large inheritance to Madeline, who turns out to be his relative. In the meantime, the man from the second encounter loses his fortune and resolves to go to Australia to restore it. Just as he is about to leave, however, he saves Madeline from a former suitor, who attempts to push her to her death from a train. The novel ends with Madeline marrying her rescuer. The plot, thus, creates an opposition between the railroad, a space of violence and inappropriate advances, and the omnibus, which serves as the instrument of Providence connecting the heroine to the family she has lost (the old man) and the family she will form (with her future husband). By transitioning from the omnibus to the train and back again, Mrs Alexander allows her heroine to dip her toe into the world of the sensational novel but ultimately to re-enter the ‘small world’ of domestic fiction.

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‘The Moles’ Road’ In today’s cities, the bus is often associated with the metro. Unlike trains, which generally follow timetables, have first and second classes, and often require time-specific tickets, the modern bus and Underground dispense with schedules, use tickets valid at any time, and do not segregate passengers. In many cases, moreover, the two services are controlled by the same transit authority and allow transfers between them at no extra cost. In the nineteenth century, however, the Underground was seen as an extension not of the omnibus (still dependent on animal traction) but rather of the train. Referred to as the ‘Metropolitan Railway’, the London Underground (inaugurated in 1863) was conceived of as a subterranean train system.82 The poem ‘The Omnibus: A Satire’ (1865) makes this logic clear: humbled by the glorious omnibuses, ‘jobbing Railways, […] Smitten with shame, hide, fuming, “Under-Ground”’.83 This representation of a humiliated ‘Metropolitan’, however, does not entirely reflect nineteenth-century attitudes. Unlike modern subways, the early Underground separated first-, second-, and third-class passengers (a uniform fare was introduced only in 1900 when the Central Line inaugurated the ‘twopenny Tube’). It was often, therefore, considered a more elegant way to travel than the omnibus. In G. E. Mitton’s novel A Bachelor Girl in London (1898), an ‘effete’, wealthy character confesses to the heroine that he has never taken an omnibus, although he has used the Underground.84 The former was generally perceived as a more democratic space: an 1891 essay contrasts the omnibus, which ‘recognizes no distinctions of class, other than the broad one of human nature—dogs being rigidly excluded’, with the Metropolitan Railway, with its ‘assumption of superior wealth’.85 This sense of exclusion is clear as well in a Punch cartoon, which represents a first-class carriage that has been taken over by lower-class revellers. The caption reads: ‘Our Artist vouches that the Sketch is—as he himself nearly was—“taken from life,” and thinks that, if this happens every evening, life at night on the “Underground,” between South Kensington and Addison Road, must be unpleasantly lively!’.86 The low-born merrymakers are clearly intruding on an exclusive, upper-class space. Whereas omnibus texts often focus on cases of extreme poverty, they are generally isolated figures and do not represent a threatening or invasive underclass. When they do depict interlopers from other classes, they are generally not the poor but rather slumming aristocrats such as the Duchesse de Berry who was reported to have taken one of the early conveyances on a lark.87

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Although it had a more elite status than the omnibus, the Metropolitan was perceived as a darker, more sinister space because of its association with the Underworld of the city. When the excavations for the tunnels began in London, many worried that the service would compromise the foundations of buildings, real estate values (‘rents and ceilings both may drop’), and residents’ peace with its ‘subterranean rumbling’.88 In an 1862 text, for example, an omnibus conductor offers a litany of complaints about the Underground including ‘floods from the main’, ‘engines bursting and maiming others’, and ‘houses falling down in the dead of night’ upon their sleeping occupants.89 Early observers also expressed concern about the poorly ventilated tunnels with their sulphurous fumes: in an 1872 text, Pierre Véron fears ‘asphyxiating’ in ‘tubes of stone’.90 Others worried about contamination from the sewage system, particularly after the excavations for the Underground caused the collapse of the Fleet sewer in 1862. Frequently, the space was identified with rodents and other gutter fauna: Véron called the system ‘the moles’ road’, and in a British caricature, an omnibus driver refers to passengers coming up from the Underground as ‘rats’.91 Although the early Metropolitan often passed through cuttings or under glass canopies, which introduced light and air, a sense of darkness and foreboding pervades this literature. References to the Underworld and Dante’s Inferno abound: ‘on the District Rail’, observed a comic poet, ‘Mephitic vapours counterfeit the clime  / of Hades’.92 This sense of the Metropolitan as a dangerous, foreboding, and suffocating space  is reflected in the violent Gothic plots set within it. Dion Boucicault’s melodrama After Dark (1868) and the 1890 story ‘On the Underground’ (1890) feature characters bound to the tracks and saved from being crushed to death by oncoming Underground trains only at the last minute.93 Various texts, moreover, feature murders in the compartments. In C.  Haddon Chambers’  ‘An Underground Tragedy’ (1886), a man stabs a passenger who is riding alone in a first-class compartment and then escapes; his motive is simply to prove that it is possible to commit murder on the Metropolitan.94 In Baroness Orczy’s ‘The Mysterious Death on the Underground Railway’ (1901), the killing takes place in front of other passengers, as a husband touches his wife’s hand while wearing a ring with a poisoned needle, a plot that recalls Boisgobey’s Le Crime de l’omnibus.95 John Oxenham’s ‘A Mystery of the Underground’ (1897), which featured a serial murderer who killed passengers on Tuesdays, actually led to a decrease in the number of fares on the District Line on that day

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of the week: as Oxenham notes, ‘travel on the Underground is less attractive than of yore, and the homely bus is rising in public estimation’.96 Other texts echo the fears, common in train texts, of collisions, runaway vehicles, or explosions. In E. A. Bennett’s ‘The Inner Circle Express’ (1900), a driver, suffering from an influenza-induced lunacy, drives his train at breakneck speed ignoring all signals; only a last-minute intervention by a friend prevents a catastrophic crash.97 In the 1880s and 1890s, after the Underground was subject to several Fenian bomb attacks, the spectre of terrorism would also haunt the space. In the story ‘By the Underground Railway’ (1886), the narrator evokes passengers’ anxieties during this ‘season of explosions’. When he notes a ‘suspicious-looking individual’ carrying a canvas bag, he becomes convinced that he is a ‘dynamite conspirator’, and later, when the train crashes, he assumes that he is the victim of a bombing.98 The Underground was generally perceived as an impersonal, alienating, and abstract experience. Unlike surface trains and omnibuses, in which passengers could rely on familiar sites or landmarks to orient themselves, Underground passengers were often confused by the tunnels and stations, which were almost identical. The seated flânerie represented in omnibus texts was impossible in this homogeneous space cut off from the exterior world. Whereas one ‘travels’ on the omnibus, observed Octave Uzanne in 1900, one ‘circulates’ on the metro, ‘carried away’ as if in a ‘pneumatic machine’.99 This view is echoed in an article published in 1902 after the discontinuation of a Parisian omnibus line: The Metropolitan, if you will, is prose, dense and rectilinear prose, going straight to its destination without stopping to pick the rhetorical flowers scattered along the route; you arrive, dazed, suffocating, blinded, but you arrive. The omnibus was full of relative poetry […] The sleepy trot of the horses listlessly cradled reverie; your eyes wandered gently over the crowd of strollers; you saw trees and the great blue sky; you breathed pure air.100

The absence of a view intensified passengers’ awkwardness; they could look only at one another or at the advertisements that increasingly cluttered the space. An 1881 essay lamented that the Metropolitan had corrupted manners and ‘severed the old ties’ that characterised the old-fashioned omnibus: ‘The nervous rush, the banging of carriage doors, the shriek of the whistle, are a sorry exchange for the leisurely bumping, packed six of a side, over four miles of a roughish road, with companions

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all known by sight, if not by name, to each other’.101 Whereas the discomforts of the omnibus were once compensated by the familiarity and cordiality of the passengers, the Underground is a space of sensory shocks and abuse in which people think only of themselves. This sense of distorted social relationships is clear in the 1871 caricature ‘The Course of True Love on the Underground’, which ‘illustrates the Evanescence of the Tender Passion and the Rapidity of the Metropolitan Railway’. Over the course of the strip, a man courts a female passenger and avows his passion in a conversation that is constantly interrupted by the stations called out along the way: He.   Must my burning flame be pump’d on By a calculating    —Porter. Brompton! She.   Nay, good sir, do not despair, Time will bring with it        —Por. Sloane Square!

The violence of the man’s passion is underscored by an image of the train’s engine placed directly above the words ‘burning flame’. When the woman reaches her destination, however, the lovers part ways and ‘have never seen one another since, and never wish to’.102 As we have seen, omnibus texts also represent fleeting encounters, but where the protagonists of such stories generally express a longing for a connection that will never form, the Underground caricature recounts the beginning, development, and end of a passion in fast forward. The emphasis here lies on the violence of the desire (reflected in the fire of the engine) and the velocity of the movement, which accelerates the normal course of human relations. Like train stories, Underground narratives underscore violence, speed, and the dangers of the machine and tap into the Gothic imagination. The disconnect from the city above and the associations with the Underworld, moreover, lead to a sense of a dehumanised inferno.

Steamboat Romance A final form of transportation, which appears somewhat less frequently in nineteenth-century literature, is the steamboat or bateau-mouche, which is generally evoked as a space of romantic or poetic reverie and often associated with spring. In the first chapter of Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), Frédéric Moreau encounters Madame Arnoux for the first time in 1840 on a steamboat travelling from Paris to Montereau. The

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young mother appears as an ‘apparition’, the ribbons of her hat ‘palpitating’ in the wind, her figure ‘thrown into relief against the background of the blue air’.103 Frédéric is immediately fascinated by her dark complexion, which suggests an exotic origin, and later observes her gazing into space as a harpist regales her with an Oriental romance. Madame Arnoux, who resembles ‘the women of romantic books’, seems to alter his perception of the world: ‘The universe had just become larger. She was the luminous point where all things converged: and cradled by the movement of the vessel, his eyelids half closed, he abandoned himself to a dreamy and infinite joy’.104 Though simply connecting Paris to a provincial town, the steamboat is the site of an exotic reverie that seems to open a much broader world. A similar romantic quality pervades Maupassant’s story ‘Au printemps’ (1881) in which the narrator eyes a charming working girl on a bateau-­ mouche. The text emphasises the idyllic weather of the first spring day after a long, hard winter: ‘A warm peace hovered in the atmosphere, and a murmur of life seemed to fill the space’.105 Before the narrator can act on his desire, however, a fellow passenger taps him on the shoulder and recounts his own experience a year earlier on a similarly glorious spring day on which he fell under the spell of an enticing seamstress on a bateau-­ mouche. Only after marrying her did he discover the full extent of her vulgarity and narrowmindedness. In the end, the passenger grabs the narrator to keep him from following the girl and making the same mistake. The story echoes the myth of Odysseus and the sirens, but the restraint in this case is not self-imposed. As in the passenger’s tale, the boat is often a space for romantic reveries that are later debunked. In the story ‘A Steam-Boat Romance’ (1838), for example, a girl who has ‘accustomed herself to depend for daily food and excitement upon the pages of romance’ meets an attractive young man on a steamboat who is similarly deluded. On disembarking, however, she realises that her knight in shining armour is merely a precentor with illusions of grandeur.106 Similarly, in Ernest d’Hervilly’s comic vignette ‘Les Voix exterieures’ (1870), a young man, who is identified as the ‘interior voice’ in an allusion to Victor Hugo’s poetry collection Les Voix intérieures (1837), engages in a romantic reverie on an omnibus about a young woman he once met on a steamboat on the Thames. His thoughts are interrupted by the vacuous chatter of the bourgeois passengers around him: the ‘exterior voices’ of the title.107 The omnibus in this case serves as

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a prosaic space—an intrusive ‘reality’—in which the romantic daydream born on the steamboat is deflated. Often, the boat is represented as a space for contemplating beauty. An 1881 poem by François Coppée, for example, uses pictorial language to describe the landscape glimpsed from a bateau-mouche: Tell me frankly if you’ve not seen True motifs for painting, of an unexpected charm, Emerging from the fog, which the sun disperses, Where father Corot would have smoked his pipe.

As the emphasis on the effects of fog and light in this passage suggests, Coppée associates the bateau-mouche with the techniques of the plein-air school: the boat is the ‘joy of impressionists’.108 A striking example of the riverboat as a space for aesthetic reverie is ‘A Lost Masterpiece: A City Mood, Aug. 1893’, a story published in the Yellow Book in 1894 by the ‘New Woman’ writer George Egerton.109 At its beginning, the narrator, a struggling writer whose gender is not specified, returns from a trip to the country on a riverboat from which she or he observes the city, still influenced by the rural atmosphere. As critics have noted, the protagonist, who is ‘filled with a happy-go-lucky insouciance that made walking the pavements a loafing in Elysian fields’, is defined as a flâneur/flâneuse.110 Taking in the smallest details of scene, the narrator feels an artwork being born within, which is evoked through the metaphor of weaving: ‘delicate inner threads were being spun into a fanciful web’; an elf was ‘throwing out tender mimosa-like threads of creative fancy’; and the work promised to ‘reveal the golden threads in the sober city woof’.111 The river boat is a space in which metaphors are created and in which nature and city are woven together. Seen from the vessel, the factory chimneys resemble ‘obelisks rearing granite heads heavenwards!’112 After disembarking, however, the narrator takes an omnibus, which almost immediately deflates this vision. Looking out the window, he or she observes a woman walking quickly along the sidewalk whose presence begins to ‘tangle the threads’ of the riverboat vision.113 Her ‘black eyes’, which ‘stare boldly through her kohl-tinted lids’, and her ‘tight skirt shortened to show her great splay feet’ suggest that the woman walking the street is in fact a streetwalker.114 The narrator begins to feel exasperated with the other passengers whose exits and entrances continually halt the omnibus allowing the woman to catch up with it.

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Whereas the riverboat is a space of lyrical images and meaningfulness— a sphere in which the bleak reality of the city and industry is viewed from a distance and softened in a poetic vision—the omnibus is a space of excessive proximity in which the vulgar details of urban life are all too visible. Here the metaphors of the riverboat are replaced by the inescapable image of the prostitute’s feet, whose movements ‘trample a rare little mind-being unto death’.115 The woman foils not only the narrator’s poetic project but also any attempt at creating meaning. Notably, the woman on the sidewalk is defined as a ‘foreign element’ and later as a ‘feminine presentment of the wandering Jew, a living embodiment of the ghoul-like spirit that haunts the city and murders fancy’.116 The prostitute is an element that cannot be assimilated and that resists the narrator’s attempts to naturalise the urban space in the riverboat reverie. Whereas the steamboat allowed the city to be appreciated from a poetic remove, the omnibus thrusts the protagonist into an uncomfortable proximity with its heterogeneity. The literature of omnibus and tram differs in many ways from that of other forms of transportation. The short trajectories of the vehicles and the heterogeneity of the passengers generally did not favour the lengthy collective conversations and storytelling that typify diligence and stagecoach narratives. Although omnibus texts sometimes represent passengers as a community, they are generally regulars who share a commute and often remain quite mysterious to one another despite repeated encounters over long periods of time. The shared meals and accommodations of stagecoach travel and the long hours in the carriage make possible deeper and more lasting social bonds and more extended interactions. Given its more public nature, the omnibus lacks the intimacy of the fiacre and train compartment. While the omnibus and tram are often represented as sites of flirtation, erotic titillation, and even solicitation, they are very rarely sites of consummation. Omnibus texts tend to represent the starting point rather than the end point of desire. As the omnibus and early tram relied on horse traction, they did not generate anxieties of explosion or suffocation and therefore rarely inspired the Gothic plots that are common in the literature of the train and Underground. The concerns expressed in omnibus literature relate instead to the threat of being contaminated or somehow declassed or to a feeling of awkwardness and alienation: the omnibus is often represented as a space of uncomfortable silence in which passengers struggle to decipher one another based on visual clues.

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When omnibus texts focus on the exterior world, they lack both the disorienting perception (motion parallax) of railway literature and the romantic or aestheticising perspective of steamboat tales. The omnibus passenger is more immersed in the cityscape, and the sites and monuments he observes are often familiar spaces imbued with historical significance. Given the slow pace of the vehicles and the density of the metropolis, moreover, omnibus texts tend to focus much more on the odd juxtapositions of the urban landscape. The poetry that emerges from this perspective is not the distanced idealisation of the steamboat but rather a whimsical ricocheting between internal and external stimuli and from one image to another.

Notes 1. ‘The Patent Omnibus’, The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, 25 April 1840, 277. 2. ‘Gallery of Comicalities. No. XCI. Paddington Lads, or Omnibus versus Stage Coach’, Bell’s Life in London, 21 February 1830, n.p. 3. D. Ramée, La Locomotion (Paris: Amyot, 1856), 166. 4. Édouard Monnais, ‘Promenades extérieures et Banlieue’ in Nouveau tableau de Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris: Mme Charles-Béchet, 1835), 165–66. 5. L. Couailhac, ‘Le Cocher de coucou’ in Les Français peints par eux-mêmes (Paris: L. Curmer, 1840), II, 145. 6. Maurice Alhoy, ‘Le Coucou’ in Le Musée pour rire (Paris: Aubert, 1840), III, no. 112, n.p.; Achille Jubinal, ‘Le Conducteur de coucou’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris, Ladvocat, 1834), XIV, 315–52. 7. Honoré de Balzac, Un début dans la vie (Paris: Dumon, 1844), I, 132, 177. 8. H Balzac, Un début, I, 133. Balzac’s novel is a reworking of his sister Laure Surville’s story Un voyage en coucou, first published in 1854 (L’IsleAdam: Éd. de Saint-Mont, 2008). 9. Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz (London: Chapman and Hall, 1895), 102. 10. Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 102. See also  Préal, ‘Le Code de l’omnibus’, L’Ami de la maison, 6 March 1856, 138. 11. Ramón de Mesonero Romanos, Escenas matritenses (Madrid: Ignacio Boix, 1845), 210–11. 12. Pierre de Marivaux, La Voiture embourbée (Amsterdam: Compagnie, 1715). The closest that I have found to this in an omnibus narrative is Clara de Chatelain’s ‘The Snowed-Up Omnibus’, in which passengers take turns telling stories in a provincial omnibus during a snow storm. Interestingly, some of these tales are attributed to other authors. The

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snowed-up omnibus becomes in this way an omnibus in the literary sense: an anthology.  Reynold’s Miscellany, 19 December 1868, 1–5, and 26 December 1868, 17–23. 13. C.W., ‘Omnibuses as a School of Manners’, The Leisure Hour, February 1886, 135. 14. Anne Green, Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (London: Anthem, 2011), 54. 15. Édouard Gourdon, La Physiologie de l’omnibus (Paris: Terry, [1841–42]); Physiologie des diligences et des grandes routes (Paris: Terry, 1842). 16. For an example of a gradual (though unsuccessful) courtship, see ‘Le Voyage en turgotine’ in Auguste Filon’s Contes en centenaire (Paris: Hachette, 1889), 293–315. The turgotine was a type of diligence introduced by Baron Turgot in the eighteenth century. 17. Mariano José de Larra, Artículos sociales, políticos y de crítica literaria, ed. Juan Cano Ballesta (Madrid: Alhambra, 1982), 391–92. 18. ‘Les Mansardes de Paris’, L’Universel: journal littéraire illustré, no. 2, 1877, 10. 19. Auguste Ricard, La Diligence ou le Coupé, l’Intérieur, la Rotonde et la Banquette (Paris: Lecointe, 1833), I, 161. 20. Guy de Maupassant, Boule de suif (Paris: Paul Ollendorff, 1907). 21. Abbé Tiberge (pseudonym of Hippolyte Regnier d’Estourbet), Louisa ou les Douleurs d’une fille de joie (Paris: Delangle, 1830), I, 23–43. 22. Charles Dupeuty, Frédéric De Courcy, and Hippolyte Espérance, Les Omnibus ou la Revue en voiture, vaudeville en quatre tableaux (Paris: J.-N. Barba, 1828), 18–19. 23. Le Triomphe des omnibus: poème héroï-comique (Paris: Ambroise Dupont, 1828). Another comic poem from 1828 represents a collision between an omnibus and a fiacre, which leads to a brawl. E. Ch…x, ‘Les Omnibus: conte véridique, dédié aux cochers de fiacre’, L’Observateur, 27 April 1828, 241–43. 24. Dupeuty et al., Les Omnibus, 38. 25. The narrator of Émile Dartès’ ‘Madeleine-Bastille’, for example, opposes a six-sous omnibus fare from the Gare de Lyon to Madeleine with a forty-­ sous fiacre ride. Contes en omnibus (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1894), 163. 26. Louis Huart, ‘Les Voitures publiques’ in Nouveau tableau de Paris au XIXme siècle (Paris: Mme Charles-Béchet, 1834), IV, 161–81. 27. ‘A Rambler in London: XXIII.—On a ’Bus’, The Speaker, 18 October 1890, 432. 28. The Omnibus: A Satire (London: Trubner, 1865), 8. 29. Amy Levy, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verses (London: T.  Fisher Unwin, 1889), 22. 30. Lucien Descaves, ‘En tramway’, Gils Blas, 12 December 1893, 1.

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31. Dartès, Contes en omnibus, 163. 32. Louis Ulbach, Guide sentimental de l’étranger dans Paris (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1878), 59. 33. Alexandre Dumas père, ‘Le Cocher de cabriolet’ in Paris, ou le Livre des Cent-et-un (Paris: Ladvocat, 1831), II, 251–52. See also ‘Léonard le cocher’ in X.-B. Saintine’s Contes de toutes les couleurs (Paris: L. Hachette, 1861), 3–111. 34. Henry Beauchamp, The Interesting Adventures of a Hackney Coach (London, S. Hood, 1813), ii. 35. Auguste Ricard, Le Cocher du fiacre (Paris: Lecointe et Durey, 1828). For another example, see Benjamin and Ruben, Le Cocher du fiacre: melodrame en trois actes (Paris: Pollet, 1825). 36. Dominick LaCapra, ‘Madame Bovary’ on Trial (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1982), 48. 37. Dartès, Contes en omnibus, 229. 38. Paul Margueritte, La Lanterne magique (Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie, 1909), 269–70. 39. Henry Buguet, Au bureau des omnibus, saynète pour tous (Paris: Tresse, 1882), 5. 40. Trublot (pseudonym of Paul Alexis), ‘À Minuit’, Le Cri du peuple, 4 February 1888, n.p. 41. Xanxof (pseudonym of Léon-Albert Fourneau), Chansons parisiennes. Le Fiacre (histoire vraie) (Paris: G. Ondet, 1892); Arthur Lamy and Charles Pourny, ‘Le Fiacre jaune! Chansonnette’ (Paris: P.  Feuchot, [1882]); Émile de Najac and Albert Millaud, Le Fiacre 117, comédie en 3 actes (Paris: Librairie théâtrale, 1886). 42. Alexandre Tardif, Scènes de Paris (Paris: Guéry, 1829), 78. 43. ‘Les Omnibus: conte véridique, dédié aux cochers de fiacre’, L’Observateur, 27 April 1828, 243. 44. On representations of the railways in literature, see Chap. 1, fn 22. 45. Georges Bouret, En omnibus, parisienneries (Paris: l’Encrier, 1893), 8. 46. Anne Green, Changing France, 36. 47. Maxime du Camp, Les Chants modernes (Paris: M.  Lévy, 1855), 303; Benjamin Gastineau, La Vie en chemin de fer (Paris: E. Dentu, 1861), 112. 48. Cited in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railroad Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: U of California P, 1986), 37. 49. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 33–34. 50. ‘The Palace of Flowers’, Household Words, 26 April 1851, 117. 51. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 63. 52. Cited in Nina Lee Bond’s doctoral thesis ‘Tolstoy and Zola: Trains and Missed Connections’ (Columbia University, 2001), 1.

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53. George Eliot, Felix Holt, The Radical (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1866), 5–6. 54. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 63. 55. Green, Changing France, 58. 56. Ramón de Campoamor, Obras completas (Madrid: F.  González Rojas, 1903), VIII, 34. 57. Gustavo Adolfo  Bécquer, ‘Caso de ablativo’,  El Contemporáneo, 21 August 1864, n.p. 58. Gastineau, Vie en chemin de fer, 31, 32. 59. Michael Freeman, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999), 116. 60. G.  Labadie-Lagrave, ‘En omnibus à Londres’,  Figaro, 3 February 1906, 4. 61. E. Soulé, ‘Des voyages en chemin de fer’ in Congrès médical de France (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1866), 830. 62. Guy de Maupassant, ‘Idylle’, Gil Blas, 12 February 1884, 1–2. 63. Guy de Maupassant, ‘En wagon’, Gil Blas, 24 March 1885, 1. 64. Théodore de Banville, ‘La Dame anglaise’, Gil Blas, 3 July 1885, n.p. 65. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 80–85. 66. Fortuné de Boisgobey, Le Crime de l’omnibus: 1881 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2005). Two notable exceptions are William Le Queux’s The Temptress (London and New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1895) in which the heroine, finding herself alone in an omnibus with her victim, stabs him to death and makes a quick escape and Harold Begdie’s ‘The Murder in the Omnibus’ (London Magazine, June 1904), in which a female passenger murders a man with a dagger. 67. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 78, 122. 68. ‘Shillibeer’s Original Omnibus, versus the Greenwich Rail-Road’ (London: Howlett and Brimmer, n.d.), n.p. 69. Marcelin and Ch. Philipon, ‘Dialogue des morts et des vivants’, Le Charivari, 4 April 1871, n.p. 70. John Leech, ‘The Railway Juggernaut of 1845’, Punch, 26 July 1845, 47; George Cruikshank, ‘The Railway Dragon’ in George Cruikshank’s TableBook (London: George Bell & Sons, 1878), 255. 71. Nicholas Daly, ‘Blood on the Tracks: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses’, Victorian Studies 42:1 (1998–99): 47–76. 72. Émile Zola, La Bête humaine (Paris: G.  Charpentier and E.  Fasquelle, 1893); Jules Clarétie, Le Train 17 (Paris: Dentu, 1877); Edmond Lepelletier, ‘L’Œil en haut’, Le Petit Parisien—Supplément littéraire illustré, 4 May 1890, 5–6. 73. Schivelbusch, Railway Journey, 116–18. See, for example, William Acton, ‘The Influence of Railway Travelling on Public Health: Personal

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Experiences of an Habitual Traveller’, The Lancet, 22 February 1862, 210–11. 74. Paul Margueritte, La Mouche (Paris: Lecène, Oudin et Cie, 1893), 68, 72. 75. Leo Tolstoy, The Kreutzer Sonata, trans. Isai Kamen (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 65. 76. Nicholas Daly, ‘Railway Novels: Sensation Fiction and the Modernization of the Senses’, ELH 66:22 (1999): 468. 77. Campoamor, Obras completas, VIII, 29, 24. 78. Amelia B.  Edwards, ‘The Four-Fifteen Express’, Every Saturday, 22 December 1866, 755–63. 79. Georges Rodenbach, Le Rouet des brumes (Paris: E. Flammarion, n.d.), 81–91; André Godard, ‘Le Point rouge’, Le Petit Parisien, 14 August 1892, 262. 80. Mrs Alexander (pseudonym of Annie French Hector), Which Shall It Be? (New York: Henry Holt, 1874), 32. 81. Mrs Alexander, Which Shall It Be?, 236. 82. Haewon Hwang, London’s Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840–1915 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013), 76. 83. The Omnibus: A Satire, 6. 84. G. E. Mitton, A Bachelor Girl in London (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1898), 77. 85. ‘Society in an Omnibus’, Hearth and Home, 1 October 1891, 637. 86. ‘First-Class Underground Study’, Punch, 25 September 1886, 148. 87. For examples of aristocrats on the omnibus, see Maurice Alhoy, ‘Tribulations des omnibus: Complet!!!’ in Le Musée pour rire (Paris: Aubert, 1839), II, no. 71, n.p.; ‘Les Panoramas—Les Omnibus—Les Vidanges de Paris’, Petites chroniques de la science, September 1861, 295–97; ‘A Tale of Terror’, Judy, 15 April 1874, 259, 262; and Kasabal, ‘Madrid’, La Ilustración ibérica, 30 July 1892, 482. 88. ‘The Tube by a Bilious ’Bus Driver’, Fun, 2 February 1901, 58. 89. ‘How I Lost my Train’, The Leisure Hour, 2 January 1862, 6–7. 90. Pierre Véron, ‘Courrier de Paris’, Le Monde illustré, 23 March 1872, 179. 91. Véron, ‘Courrier de Paris’, 179; ‘Complimentary to Travellers by the Underground’, Fun, 8 July 1865, 71. 92. ‘Fragment of an Epic of the Underground’, Punch, 20 January 1904, 38. On the metaphor of the Underworld, see David Welsh, Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2011), 16–78; and David L. Pike, Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2005) and Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007).

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93. Dion Boucicault, After Dark: A Drama of London Life in 1868 (New York: De Witt, n.d.); ‘On the Underground’, The London Reader, 17 May 1890, 79–80. 94. C. Haddon Chambers, ‘An Underground Tragedy’, Belgravia, December 1886, 205–18. 95. Baroness Orczy, The Old Man in the Corner (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908), 100–16. 96. ‘A Mystery of the Underground’ in Murder on the Railways, ed. Peter Haining (London: Orion, 1988), 271. On the drop in Tuesday passengers, see David Ashford, London Underground: A Cultural Geography (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013), 14. 97. E.  A. Bennett, ‘The Inner Circle Express’, Hearth and Home, 29 November 1900. 98. ‘By the Underground Railway’, Temple Bar, August 1886, 496–508. 99. Octave Uzanne, ‘Omnibus de Paris’, Le Monde moderne, January-June 1900, 494. 100. Lucien Victor-Meunier, ‘Le Balai’, Le Rappel, 5 September 1902, n.p. 101. ‘The Manners of the Omnibus’, The Saturday Review, 20 August 1881, 231–32. 102. ‘The Course of True Love on the Underground’, Judy, 29 November 1871, 50. 103. Gustave Flaubert, L’Éducation sentimentale (Paris: Michel Lévy frères, 1870), I, 7. 104. Flaubert, Éducation sentimentale, I, 15. 105. Guy de Maupassant, La Maison Tellier (Paris: Victor Hazar, 1881), 251. 106. ‘A Steam-Boat Romance’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 20 October 1838, 307–8. 107. Ernest d’Hervilly, ‘Les Voix extérieures’, L’Éclipse, 30 January 1870, 2. 108. François Coppée, ‘Le Bateau-mouche’, Le Petit Journal, 28 September 1881, 3. 109. George Egerton (pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright), ‘A Lost Masterpiece: A City Mood’, The Yellow Book, April 1894, 189–96. 110. Egerton, ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, 190. On this story, see Bryony Randall, ‘George Egerton’s “A Lost Masterpiece”: Inspiration, Gender, and Cultural Authority at the Fin de Siècle’ in New Women Writers, Authority and the Body, eds. Melissa Purdue and Stacey Floyd  (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 2; Tina O’Toole, ‘The New Woman Flâneuse or Streetwalker: George Egerton’s Urban Aestheticism’ in Reconnecting Aestheticism and Modernism: Continuities, Revisions, Speculations, eds. Bénédicte Coste, Catherine Delyfer and Christine Reynier (New York: Routledge, 2017), 21–22. 111. Egerton, ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, 190, 191, 193.

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112. Egerton, ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, 191. 113. Egerton, ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, 194. 114. Egerton, ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, 194, 196. Tina O’Toole and Kate Krueger describe the figure as a New Woman, and Ana Parejo Vadillo calls her a ‘flâneuse/streetwalker’. Nevertheless, there is no evidence that she is a New Woman, and she seems too hurried to be engaged in  flânerie. O’Toole, ‘The New Woman Flâneuse’, 22; Kate Krueger Henderson, ‘Mobility and Modern Consciousness in George Egerton’s and Charlotte Mew’s Yellow Book Stories’, English Literature in Transition, 54:2 (2011): 191; Ana Parejo Vadillo, Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 24–25. 115. Egerton, ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, 196. 116. Egerton, ‘A Lost Masterpiece’, 194, 196.

Index

A About, Edmond, 19, 146 Académie Française, 34, 154 accidents, 24, 63, 64, 326, 328–29, 337, 338 Adélaïde de France, 134 Adelaide, Queen Consort (Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen), 117, 122 adultery, 175, 184–85, 248, 332, 338 Albert, Prince Consort (Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha), 124 Album zutique, 147–49, 161, 162 Alexander, Mrs, see French, Annie Hector Alexis, Paul, 333 Alhoy, Maurice, 78, 325 Alkan, Charles-Valentin, 29 Allais, Alphonse, 31, 92, 162, 305–6 Allard, Renée, 96, 261–65 animalisation, 78, 79, 254–6 Arène, Paul, 306–8 Armes, William, 251–2 Armstrong, Florence C., 239, 284 Arnault, Antoine-Vincent, 6

asalto del tranvía, 50 Asmodeus, 302, 320 Auriol, Georges, 151 Austen, Jane, 234 Automaton (steam omnibus), 22 Autopsy (steam omnibus), 22, 117 B Bacon, Henry, 152–53 Bagehot, William, 157–58 Balzac, Honoré de, 77, 295, 325–27, 330, 336 Banville, Théodore de, 336 Barbier, Henri Auguste, 150 barricades, 113, 143–46, 150, 156, 307 Barthe, Félix, 134, 139 Barthes, Roland, 15 bateau-mouche, 343–44 Batignolles-Clichy-Odéon line, 81–82, 147, 177, 178, 231–32 Baudelaire, Charles, 283, 287, 313 Baudin, Alphonse, 146, 170

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 E. Amann, The Omnibus, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18708-7

355

356 

INDEX

Baudry, Stanislas, 20–21, 38–39 bazaar, metaphor of, 75–76 Bécquer, Gustavo Adolfo, 335 Begdie, Harold, 350 Benjamin (pseudonym of Joseph Germain Mathieu Roubaud), 135–38 Bennett, E. A., 342 Benthamite radicals, 167 Bérardi, Léon, 208–9 Bernadille (pseudonym of Victor Fournel), 81, 316 Berry, duchesse de (Marie-Caroline des Bourbons-Siciles), 340 Bersier, Marie, 10, 11, 274, 290 Berthoud, Samuel-Henry, 9, 80–81, 99, 280 Besnard, Éric, 281 bitricycle, 26 Bofill, Pedro, 98, 311, 312 Boieldieu, François-Adrien, 20 Boisgobey, Fortuné de, 82, 84, 94, 337, 341 Bonaparte, Louis (Napoleon III), 140, 146 book, metaphor of, 10–11, 212 Boucicault, Dion, 341 Bouret, Georges, 177, 231–32, 234, 334 Braddon, Mary Elizabeth, 337 Bramley, Frank, 167 Briggs murder, 337 Brooks, Maria Matilda, 71 Brougham, Henry, 117 Bruno, Camille, 231 bureaucracy, 162–63 bureau d’omnibus, 49, 50, 178, 183, 242 C cabriolet, 330–32 See also cocher de cabriolet and hired coach

cad, see omnibus conductor Cadol, Édouard, 175 cadran, 56, 152 Calonne, F. de, 154 Campoamor, Ramón de, 335, 338 Cane, Gustave, 3 Canler, Louis, 57 Carey, Rosa Nouchette, 175 Caricature, La, 130–35, 138–39 Carlos IV (king), 309 carosses à cinq sols, 30, 43, 152 Carré, Fabrice, 178–79 Catholic Emancipation, 115–16, 117, 127 Catholic Relief Act, 115, 116 Caveau, Le (singing society), 154, 155 Cavia, Mariano de, 280 censorship, 134 Cerda, Emilio de la, 233 Certeau, Michel de, 113 Cham (pseudonym of Amédée de Noé), 56, 61, 72, 107, 171 Chambers, Charles Haddon, 341 Champsaur, Félicien, 188 char de l’état, 13, 114, 135, 138, 140, 141, 150 charity, 98, 100, 262–64, 272–75, 297 Charivari, Le, 130, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 140, 141, 142, 151, 203, 204, 205, 206 Charles X (king), 138, 142, 144 Charte, see Charter of 1814 or Charter of 1830 Charter of 1814, 142, 143, 326 Charter of 1830, 129, 133 Chatelain, Clara de, 296, 297, 347, 348 Chat Noir, 180 chemin de fer à l'américain, 27 See also tram Chenevière, Adolphe, 6, 269–70 Chesson, Julia E., 284 Chevalier, Jean, 43

 INDEX 

chiromancy, 290 Clapham omnibus, man on the, 158–60, 165–66 Clarétie, Jules, 338 Claus, Camille, 186 Cobbett, William, 167 cocher de cabriolet, 36, 331–32 cocher de fiacre, 36, 330–32 Colet, Louise, 154 Collins, Lord (Richard Henn Collins), 160, 166 Collins, Wilkie, 9, 211–13, 287, 288, 313, 337 commonplaces/commonplaceness, 6, 33, 45–74, 97, 158–59, 176–90, 192, 225, 239, 280, 294 Commune, see Paris Commune communism, 146 Compagnie Générale des Omnibus (CGO), 7, 25, 26, 47, 49, 50, 151, 161, 162 confusing letter system of, 46–47 resistance to innovation, 26 as symbol of tyranny, 151 Compagnie Générale des Omnibus de Londres, 26 conductors, 1, 23, 32, 47–48, 50–51, 52, 56–57, 59, 76, 84, 122, 143–44, 151, 160–61, 163, 185, 189, 259–60, 301–2, 318 behaviours/practices of, 1, 23, 47–48, 50–51, 52, 56–57, 65, 67, 84, 122, 127, 160–61 erotic experience of, 185, 189, 244 speech/jargon of, 23, 24, 47, 51, 59, 61, 63, 72, 120, 289 Conyngham, Lady Elizabeth (mistress of George IV), 115 Coolus, Romain, 314–15 Coppée, François, 3, 98, 147, 148, 161, 162, 191, 260–61, 268, 277, 303, 304, 313, 314, 345

357

correspondance, 21–22 double meaning of, 178–79, 241, 313 Costello, Louisa Stuart, 29, 30 Couailhac, Louis, 325 coucou, 64, 137, 325, 337, 347 associated with equality, 326 as erotic space, 325 literature of, 324–26, 347 coup de l’omnibus, 183, 231, 243 coup d’état of 2 December 1851, 146 Courteline, Georges, 96, 162, 164, 165 Crimean War, 23–24, 157 crinoline skirts, 58, 85–86, 107, 108, 185 Cruikshank, George, 100, 337 Cuzieu, Hector de, 154 Cythera, see omnibus of Cythera D dames blanches, 20, 21, 23, 33, 77, 143 Dante Alighieri, 45, 46, 209, 341 Darasse, P., 232 D’Arcy, Ella, 198–9 d’Argout, Count (Antoine Maurice Apollinaire d’Argout), 134, 139 Dartès, Émile, 227–28, 296, 298, 331, 332, 348 Daudet, Alphonse, 71, 282 Daumier, Honoré, 49, 51, 69, 71, 90, 317 Davray, Jules, 182 Debelleyme, Louis Marie, 20 defamiliarisation, 55, 162, 303–4, 311, 312 Degas, Edgar, 283 Delaqys, Georges, 192–94, 197 Delavau, Guy, 20 Delestre, Jean-Baptiste, 288

358 

INDEX

Demesse, Henri, 189 Derby Dilly, 124 Desbarolles, Adolphe, 290 Descaves, Lucien, 288, 290, 331 Deschaumes, Edmond, 316 d’Hébécourt, G. L., 164–65 d’Hervilly, Ernest, 34–35, 36, 197–198, 216, 344–45 Dickens, Charles, 23, 24, 59, 91, 287, 299, 326, 330, 337, 338 differentiation, loss of, 114, 154, 155, 156 diligence(see also stagecoach), 30, 124, 152, 327, 328, 329, 330, 335 compartments of, 328, 329 diligencia, 326, 327–28 See also stagecoach direct participation, 12, 263 disabilities, 202–3 disengaged observation, 12, 266 Disraeli, Benjamin, 157, 167 doubles, narratives about, 225–29, 248 Dowie, Ménie Muriel, 249 Doyle, John, see HB drivers, 188, 189, 239 erotic experience of, 188–89 Drumont, Édouard, 314 du Camp, Maxime, 63, 334 du Maurier, Georges, 50 Dudley, Vere, 96, 287–88, 290, 314 Dumas, Alexandre (père), 331–32 dummy daddle dodge, 57 E eavesdropping, 268, 294–98, 314 Edwards, Amelia B., 338 Eekhoud, Georges, 259–60 Egerton, George, 345–46 Egley, William Maw, 52, 53, 128, 129, 251, 252, 302 elections of 1835, 122

elections of 1841, 125 elections of 1871, 141 Eliot, George, 33, 334, 335 Emancipation, see Catholic Emancipation Emy, Henry, 47, 48 Entreprise Générale des Omnibus (EGO), 20–23 Era (steam omnibus), 22, 117 Étienne, Joseph, 257–58, 264, 268, 273 etiquette, see omnibus, etiquette on exterior focus, 188, 279, 280, 281, 282, 284–87, 302–12, 321 F Fain, baron de, 134 false coins, motif of, 56 fare, see omnibus, fare Fau, Fernand, 50 Faure, Élise, 88 femme fatale, 209–12 Fenians/Fenianism, 342 Ferdinand VII (king), 230 Fernández Flores, Isidro, 85 Fernández y González, Manuel, 100, 103 Ferrand, Emma, 274–75 Ferrieux, Eugène, 281 Fertiault, Julie, 272, 274, 275 fiacre, 36–37, 77, 283, 330–33 as an erotic space, 332–33 literature of, 330–33 See also cocher de fiacre filou, 56, 57 flamenco-mania, 265 flaneur/flânerie, 8, 11, 29, 31, 85, 201, 238, 268, 280, 282–87, 291, 294, 295, 296, 298, 317, 342, 345, 353 Flaubert, Gustave, 154, 332, 343–44

 INDEX 

fleeting, 11, 190–202, 215, 216, 284, 292, 297–298, 343 Fleet sewer collapse, 341 Flesselles, comtesse de (pseudonym), 282 Fonblanque, Albany, 120 Foresta, Adolfo de, 28 Fouinet, Ernest, 9–10, 12, 29, 53, 55, 63, 73, 84, 91, 152, 191–92, 282, 307–8 Fournel, Victor, see Bernadille Fourrier, Eugène, 162–63 Franco-Prussian War, 146, 148, 149, 309, 329–30 French, Annie Hector, 233–34, 339 Fresne, baronne de, 94, 183 Friès, Charles, 152 Frontaura, Carlos, 9, 98, 228–29, 279, 283, 290–91, 295, 296, 297 G Galipaux, Félix, 299 Gall, Paul, 189 garden seats, 51, 87–89, 284, 285, 287 associated with New Woman, 88–89, 235, 236, 338, 249, 250, 284 Gastaldy, Achille, 244 Gastineau, Benjamin, 334, 335 Gautier, Théophile, 313 Gavarni, Paul, 203–7, 209, 224 George IV (king), 115, 116, 118, 119 Germain, Auguste, 271, 275 Gibbons, William, 62, 63, 74 Girardin, Delphine de, 29, 30, 37, 282, 288, 289 Gissing, George, 285–86 Gladstone, William Ewart, 127–29, 166, 167 Godard, André, 338–39

359

Godoy, Manuel, 309 Gollan, Eliza Margaret Jane, 213–14, 215, 299 Goncourt, Jules and Edmond de, 31, 78, 149, 204, 210–11, 220 gothic, 73, 210, 214, 323, 338, 339, 341, 343 Gourdon, Édouard, 30, 45, 61, 145, 184, 191, 202, 225, 226, 310, 311, 327, 328 Graham, Sir James, 125 Grandville (pseudonym of Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), 68, 78, 79, 106, 130–35, 137, 139, 140, 185–86, 254, 255, 256 Grant, C.J., 121–22 Greenwich stagecoach, 324 Grey, Earl (Charles Grey), 117, 124 Griveau, Lucien, 10, 273–74, 293, 314 Guizot, François, 139 H hackney carriage, 330 hackney coach, 21, 39, 167, 330, 332 See also hired coach Hadol, Paul, 141–42 Halévy, Ludovic, 149 Hamilton, Helen, 318 Hancock, Walter, 22 hansom cab, 330, 331 See also hired coach Haussman, Georges Eugène, 25 HB, 117–27, 129, 130, 135, 165, 166, 167 Heath, William, 114–16, 139, 169 Heine, Henrich, 334 Hermann-Paul, René Georges, 4–5 heterogeneity, see omnibus, as heterogeneous space

360 

INDEX

hired coach, 15, 21, 36–37, 39, 167, 283, 330–33 literature of, 330–33 See also cabriolet; fiacre; hackney carriage; hansom cab and omnibus, competition with hired coaches Hoey, Frances Cashel, 159, 222, 223 hommes-sandwich, 49–50 Hopkins, Manley, 190, 192 Horace, 77, 145, 179 horsecar, see tram Huart, Louis, 29, 77, 90, 91, 331 Hugo, Victor, 61, 145, 146, 313, 314, 322, 344 Hume, Joseph, 120, 167 Hunt, Leigh, 33, 58, 291 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 186, 189, 304–5 hypnotism, see omnibus, hypnotism on I illegible stories, 195, 202–15, 216, 217, 218, 221, 222, 235, 240, 241, 269 impériale, 9, 11, 22, 23, 25, 50, 51, 61, 63, 65, 78, 87–88, 92, 98–99, 103, 150, 152, 177, 183, 184, 184, 281, 283, 284, 302–6, 307, 313, 314 sociability of, 98, 99 as space of voyeurism, 177, 302–7 women on, 87, 88, 89, 103, 108, 184, 184, 234–41, 284–85 impressionism, 345 inequality, 206, 260–64, 268–72, 304 interior focus, 11, 134–37, 251–76, 279, 287–303, 311 inverted stories, 234–40 Irish Reform Act, 124 Irish Registration Bill, proposal for, 124 iterative stories, 215–24

J jardineras, 62 John Bull (character), 115, 116, 118, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 127 Johnson, Samuel, 33 Joliet, Charles, 206–7 jolting, see omnibus, jolting of Joy, George William, 71 Jubinal, Achille, 325 July Monarchy, 129, 130, 135, 137, 139, 140, 143, 144 K Kahn, Gustave, 87, 291 Karr, Alphonse, 76–77 Kent, Duchess of (Victoria of Saxe-­ Coburg-­Saalfeld), 123 Kitt, 177, 302 knife-board, 23, 40, 51, 68, 79, 84, 159, 302, 303, 304, 310 Kock, Paul de, 2, 65, 69, 94, 152, 171 L La Jeunesse, Ernest, 306 Lafayette, marquis de, 132 Lamy, Arthur, 333 Lane, Annie, 85, 156 Lapoulide, Juan, 266–68 large world, 12, 83, 90, 93, 94, 97, 98, 101, 190, 192, 194, 195, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 204, 205, 206, 213, 214, 215, 217, 222, 223, 225, 226, 228, 229, 230, 231, 234, 240, 241, 247, 261, 262, 274, 285, 294, 296, 297, 298 Larra, Mariano José de, 327 Lasserre, 281 Lauréal, Marie de, 31 Le Fanu, Sheridan, 74, 339 Le Gallienne, Richard, 289

 INDEX 

Le Petit, Alfred, 180–81 Le Queux, William, 350 Le Roux, Hugues, 290 Le Vavasseur, Gustave, 64 Leake, Mrs Percy (Desirée Mary Leake), 100–1 Lee, F.G., 283 Leech, John, 2, 56, 57, 337 Leighton, John, 88–89 Lemonnier, Camille, 219–22, 223, 240, 248 Lepelletier, Edmond, 338 Lesage, Alain-René, 302 Leskov, Nikolai, 334 Levy, Amy, 249–50, 284, 331 Leyva y Vizcarro, N. de, 200–2 London General Omnibus Company (LGOC), 27 López, Ernesto, 268–70 Loring, J., 226–27 Lorrain, Jean, 255–56, 258–59, 266, 276 Loubat, Alphonse, 27 Louis Napoleon I, see Bonaparte, Louis Louis-Philippe (king), 129–40, 143, 144, 165, 166, 168 Lovy, Jules, 10 Luc, Désiré, 185 M macadamisation, 59 mail coach, 16, 114, 117, 127, 166 malle-poste, 137 Malot, Hector, 186–87, 215–16 Marc, Gabriel, 225–26, 228 Maret, Henri, 283–84, 288, 289, 304 Margueritte, Paul, 58, 163, 186, 193–95, 253–54, 255, 256, 276, 332, 338 Marie, Adrien, 55

361

Marivaux (pseudonym of Pierre Carlet), 326–27 Martignac, Jean-Baptiste de, 142 Maupassant, Guy de, 59–60, 64, 84, 98–99, 150–51, 165, 185, 217–19, 221, 222, 223, 240, 253, 255, 256, 281, 303, 304, 329–30, 336, 344 Mazinghien, Georges, 192, 194 McLean, Thomas, 114, 116, 117 McQuire, T.C., 160 Melbourne, Viscount (William Lamb), 122, 123 Méral, Auguste, 288 Mérat, Albert, 257, 258, 264, 268, 273 Mérimée, Prosper, 332 Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de, 326 metaphorai/metaphorein, 113 Métropolitain (Paris), 7 Metropolitan Railroad, see Underground Michel, Eugène, 92, 199, 289–90 Mikhaël, Ephraïm, 312 Mill, James, 167 Mill, John Stuart, 265 Millaud, Albert, 333 Miraben, Gabrielle, 101 Mirbeau, Octave, 49, 151–52, 162 Mitton, Geraldine Edith, 40, 237–38, 340 Monjot, Marie de, 82 monopoly, see Compagnie Générale des Omnibus (CGO) and omnibus companies, consolidation into monopoly Montalivet, Camille de, 134 Montorgueil, Georges, 17 Moore, Henry Charles, 70 Morgan, Alfred, 127–29, 157, 166, 167 Morin, Maud, 234

362 

INDEX

motion parallax, 335 museum, metaphor of, 9, 10, 11, 12, 98 My Secret Life, 187 N Najac, Émile de, 333 Nantes, omnibus in, 20 Napoleon I, 307, 309 Napoleon III, see Bonaparte, Louis Newcastle, duke of (Henry Pelham-­ Clinton), 117 New Woman, 84, 88, 213, 234–40, 249–50, 345–46, 353 Nine August, 139 Noah’s ark, metaphor of, 49, 75, 78, 255 Nombela, Julio, 268–69, 270, 271, 308–9 Noury, Gaston, 179 nursing (business practice), 24 O obesity, 52–53 O’Connell, Daniel, 122, 123, 124, 125 Odéon, Théâtre de l,’ 35–36, 147–48, 161–62 Odysseus, 344 omnibus advertising on, 58, 71 as aesthetic metaphor, 32–37, 113 aesthetic perception of city on, 310–11 alienation on, 54, 90–93, 102, 192, 199, 251, 262, 285, 326 as anachronism or regression, 19, 30–31, 164 associated with Charter, 142–43

associated with popular literature, 36–37 associated with realism, 33–34, 113 associated with romanticism, 21, 32–33, 113 associated with vaudeville, 9–10, 37 auditory experience of, 58–59, 294–298 as civilising force, 102–3, 156, 270–71 class composition of, 77–82, 128, 156–57, 331 claustrophobia of, 4, 52, 58, 252 as comic space, 45 as communal space, 6, 11, 12, 83, 94, 99–100, 260, 261, 264, 270–72, 274, 299–300, 346 competition with hired coaches, 21, 36–37, 142, 143, 330–31 competition with stagecoaches, 324 as decentralising force, 3–4 as de-civilising force, 101–2, 267 as dehumanising, 65, 160–63, 165, 193, 253–54 dimensions of, 51, 68 drunkards on, 59, 71 erotic motifs about, 3, 162, 175–90, 302–3, 327, 333 etiquette on, 79, 84, 94–96, 102, 236 etymology of word, 75, 94, 101, 152 exclusions of, 76–77, 152 in extreme weather, 49, 60–61, 72, 75, 84 fare, 21, 22, 23–24, 25, 52–53, 56–57, 76, 77, 78, 152, 229, 230–33, 348 as form of flânerie (see flaneur/flânerie) as form of tourism, 280–82 guidebooks, 281, 316

 INDEX 

health effects of, 60–3, 73 as heterogeneous space, 4, 75–76, 82, 251–52, 268, 290, 291, 296, 297, 303, 308, 336 hypnotism on, 187, 244 as illegible space, 3, 11, 196, 202–15, 216, 217, 218, 221, 222, 235, 240, 241, 269, 291–94, 302, 319, 323 innovations in, 22–23 introduction of, 3, 20–21, 28 jolting of, 22, 31, 50, 62–63, 65, 92, 193–94, 253, 307, 315 as legible space, 3, 11, 81, 212, 224, 287–91, 294, 304 as lucrative investment, 21 mental impact of, 63, 73 as modernity, 19, 28, 30, 64, 77, 146 murder on, 94, 337, 350 nicknames of, 62, 78 nursing mothers on, 85, 257, 262, 273, 296 olfactory experience of, 59–60 other meanings of word, 80, 179–80, 242 overcrowding, 4–5, 51–54, 151 pace, 28–29, 31–32, 33, 42, 45, 117, 120, 122, 307–8, 334 payment systems, 50, 56, 161 precursors of, 30, 39 as private space, 4, 6, 85–87, 93–101, 103, 213, 217 as prosaic space, 13, 175, 345, 344–45, 346 as public space, 4, 6, 32, 85–87, 93–101, 103, 150, 176, 199, 202, 212, 216, 234, 248, 260, 270, 273, 274, 296, 333, 346 role in expansion of city (see urban expansion)

363

routes, 47, 162–63 scarcity of vehicles, 49–50, 151 snobbery about, 78–80, 271 as source of chaos, 15, 29–30 as source of inspiration, 313–15 as source of order, 4, 32, 156 as space for people watching, 287–294 as space of learning, 83, 106, 271–72 as space of philosophy, 155–56, 192, 279, 293–94, 306–8 steam-propelled (see steam omnibuses) as symbol of absurdity, 160–66 as symbol of bourgeois apathy, 149 as symbol of death, 113, 180–82 as symbol of equality, 53, 76, 140, 152–53, 155, 156–57, 171, 334, 340 as symbol of republic, 140–42, 144, 145, 146, 150–51 as symbol of revolution, 13, 78, 113, 114, 142–46, 156, 165, 207, 276 as symbol of tyranny, 151, 165, 166 as symbol of world or life, 113 theft on (see thieves/theft on the omnibus) use in barricades (see barricades) use in pedagogical texts, 282 visual experience inside, 58 women on, 82–89, 94, 106, 234–41, 284–85 See also conductors; dames blanches; drivers; omnibus passengers and pirate omnibuses omnibus companies competition among, 21–22, 23–24, 78, 120–23, 127, 135, 143 consolidation into monopoly, 7, 25–26, 46–47, 162

364 

INDEX

omnibus conductor, 122, 214, 318, 322, 341 omnibus of Cythera, 178–9 omnibus of state, 13, 113–42, 144, 145, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169 omnibus passengers as average citizens, 114, 157–59, 165, 173 as symbol of common sense, 160 identified with public opinion, 96, 157–59 speech of, 289, 295–96 See also regulars and omnibus, class composition of omnibus racing, 24, 40, 123, 124, 125, 127, 135, 238 omnibus roof, see garden seats, impériale and knife-board omnibus station, see bureau d’omnibus omnibus strikes, 62 Orczy, Baroness of (Emma Orczy), 341 Ortega y Gasset, José, 319 Ossorio y Bernard, Manuel, 154 Oxenham, John, 341–42 P Palmerston, Lord (Henry John Temple), 77, 157, 173 panorama, metaphor of, 9, 11, 284, 286 Panthéon-Courcelles line, 152, 163–64, 283 Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 81, 100, 154, 262–63, 264, 265, 269, 270, 336 Paris Commune, 141, 142, 149–50, 307 Paris insurrection of 1832, 129, 132, 144–45 Parville, Henri de, 73 Pascal, Blaise, 30

Paul, Adrien, 84, 223 pear (as symbol of Louis-Philippe), 130, 132, 134, 135, 138, 139 Pecqueur, Constantin, 102–3, 153 Peel, Sir Robert, 115, 117–20, 122, 125, 167 Pépin, Alphonse, 130 Pérez de la Greda, Andrés, 84 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 71, 97 Pérez Nieva, Alfonso, 195–97, 296 Perrin, Maximilien, 78 phalansterianism, 145 Philipon, Charles, 130, 135, 139 physiognomy, 10, 81, 266, 272, 281, 288, 290 Picón, Jacinto Octavio, 207–8, 209 Pietri, Pierre Marie, 25 pirate omnibuses, 24–25 pisteur d’omnibus, 191 Pi y Arsuaga, Francisco, 265–66, 268, 268, 271 plongeur, 302 Pocock, Isaac, 90 Poinsot murder, 337 Polish insurrection of 1830–1831, 132, 139 Pollard, James, 40 Ponchon, Raoul, 147, 161–62, 166 Pourny, Charles, 333 poverty, 251–76 grotesque representation of, 252–56 spiritualisation/aestheticisation of, 256–60, 264 président, 55, 69 Prim, Juan, 308, 309 projection of narrative, 98, 193, 196–98, 226, 240, 255–56, 305 prostitute/prostitution, 79, 107, 154, 178–84, 188, 231, 234, 304–5, 329–30, 333, 345, 346 Pückler-Muskau, Hermann von, 9–10

 INDEX 

Q Queneau, Raymond, 6 Querlon, Pierre de, 31 Quesnel, Charles, 186 R racing, see omnibus racing Raffaelli, Jean-François, 178 Raffet, Denis-Auguste-Marie, 66 railroad, see train railway spine, 63, 338 Ramsay, Grace, 157 Raymond Emmeline, 75, 319 Rebell, Hugues, 187–88 recurrent, see iterative stories Reform Bill of 1832, 117, 127 Reform Bill of 1867, 127 Reform Bill of 1884, 127 Regnier d'Estourbet, Hippolyte, 79, 104, 330 regulars, 12, 157–60, 215–24, 299–302, 315, 346 revolution, 13, 113, 114, 142–46, 149–51, 156, 165, 168, 207, 276 revolutionary sexennium, see sexenio revolucionario Revolution of 1789, 26, 78, 135, 271 Revolution of 1830, 57, 129, 130, 132, 139, 143, 144, 145, 150, 329 Revolution of 1848, 145 Revolution of 1868, 228, 309 Ribalta, Aurelio, 200–2, 217, 231 Ricard, Auguste, 328–29, 330, 332, 336 Ricard, Jules, 202 Rice, Thomas, 122 Richepin, Jean, 35–36, 290 Riddell, Charlotte, 37

365

Rigaud, Lucien, 183, 191 Rimbaud, Arthur, 146–49, 161, 165 ripperts or riper, 28, 80 riverboat, see steamboat Robert Macaire (character), 154 Robida, Albert, 61, 150, 188, 307, 308 Rodenbach, Georges, 338 Rogier, Arnould, 313 romanticism, see omnibus, associated with romanticism Romieu, Auguste, 94, 96 Rondelet, Auguste, 83 rotten boroughs, 117 Ruskin, John, 33–34 Russell, Lord John, 125 S Saavedra, Jorge de, 230–31 Sahib (pseudonym of Louis Ernest Lesage), 98, 99, 177, 302 Saint-Sénac, 246, 247, 311–12 Saint-Simonianism, 145 Sala, George Augustus, 23, 60, 291–92, 320 Sand, George, 33 Sanderson, John, 22, 45, 54, 63, 90 Saphcla, Clément, 248 Scott, Walter, 20, 33 Second, Henri, 62, 233 Segovia Rocaberti, Enrique, 310 sensational novel, 338, 41 Sepúlveda, Enrique, 264–65, 266, 267, 268, 271 sexenio revolucionario, 154, 228, 308, 309 Sharp, Evelyn, 235–37 Shillibeer, George, 21, 24, 77, 114, 324, 337 siege of Paris (1870–71), 146–48

366 

INDEX

Simmel, Georg, 92–93, 97, 100 Simms, William Gilmore, 155–56, 166 small world, 12, 83, 90, 93, 97, 199–200, 201, 205, 206, 212–215, 217, 222, 224, 228, 229, 230, 231, 232, 241, 247, 248, 261–62, 263, 274, 285–86, 296, 298–99, 325, 329, 342, 343 snails on the omnibus, motif of, 1–6 Soullier, Charles, 140–41, 146 Soult, Jean-de-Dieu, 139 sound off, 11, 92–98, 100, 190–203, 211, 215, 226, 240, 252–58, 260–61, 262–65, 273, 274, 287–94, 299, 311, 324, 326 sound on, 11, 94–98, 100, 144, 150, 199–205, 212, 215, 220, 226, 235–36, 240, 260–65, 268, 289, 294–298, 309, 311, 314, 327 stagecoach, 16, 30, 124, 324–30, 334, 335 as erotic space, 327–28 literature of, 326–30 storytelling on, 326–27, 335 See also diligence and diligencia Stanley, Lord (Edward Smith-Stanley), 124, 125 Starr, Sidney, 284–85 steamboat, 343–47 as romantic space, 343–47 steam omnibuses, 22, 117, 119–20 Stendhal (pseudonym of Henri Beyle), 156–57 strapontin, 54, 55, 140 suburbs, development of, see urban expansion Sue, Eugène, 19 Surville, Laure, 347 Symons, Arthur, 286–87, 293 Syrett, Netta, 224

T Talleyrand (Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord), 139 Tardif, Alexandre, 90, 333 terrorism, see Fenians/Fenianism Texier, Edmond, 170 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 79 theatre, metaphor of, 9–10, 12, 224 Thiers, Adolphe, 139 thieves/theft on the omnibus, 56–58, 70, 122, 209, 230, 233, 246, 247, 291, 292, 330 ticking clock, 190, 193, 194, 202, 215, 298 Tolstoy, Leo, 337, 338 topos, 15 train (see also motion parallax and railway spine), 19, 27, 31, 57, 63, 84, 106, 334–39 anxiety on, 336–37 class composition of, 335, 336 as destructive force, 337, 338 as erotic space, 336, 339 as gothic space, 338–39 introduction of, 27, 334 literature of, 334–39 murder on, 337 segregation into classes, 335–36 sociability of, 336 speed, 334–35 as symbol of modernity, 19 tram auditory experience of, 59 as civilising force, 102, 103 class composition of, 80–81 derailments, 64 electrification of, 7, 64 as erotic space or setting for love stories, 185–86, 187, 188, 190, 194–97, 200–2, 207–8, 226–29, 230, 233

 INDEX 

as form of flânerie (see flaneur/flânerie) as form of tourism, 281–82 introduction of, 7, 27–28 lack of gallantry on, 50 open trams (see jardineras) overcrowding on, 54 snobbery about, 80 social experience of, 93, 95–100 as space for aesthetic impressions, 310–12 as space of historical reflection, 308–9 as space of social observation, 252, 255–56, 258, 261–69, 271, 277, 295, 296 as symbol of equality, 153–54, 207–9 as symbol of revolution, 153–54, 308–9 theft, 57 women on, 83–84, 88 See also asalto del tranvía; conductors; drivers and tramway jaune tramway jaune, 184–85 transactional stories, 229–34, 249, 339 Traviès de Villers, Charles Joseph, 138–40, 169 tricycle, 22, 144 turgotine, 340 U Ulbach, Louis, 9, 65, 101, 145, 177, 188, 216–17, 285, 333 umbrella (as symbol of Louis-­ Philippe), 132, 133, 137, 168 Underground, 7, 27, 340, 341, 342, 343, 351 as destructive force, 342 as extension of the railroad, 340 as gothic space, 341, 343

367

literature of, 7, 340, 341, 342, 343 murder on, 341, 342 segregated compartments of, 340 sociability of, 342, 343 as Underworld, 341, 351 Union parisienne de la presse, 142 urban expansion, 3, 25, 27, 89, 90 urban planning, 25 Uzanne, Octave, 31, 81, 281, 291, 302, 342 V Varennes, Edmond de, 209–10, 212 vaudeville, see omnibus, associated with vaudeville Vendée, royalist insurrection in the, 129 Verlaine, 290 Verne, Jules, 280, 281 Vernier, Charles, 86 Véron, Pierre, 51, 142, 176, 188, 303, 341 Victoria (queen), 123, 124, 127 Viennet, Jean-Pons-Giullaume, 132 Villebrune, Jacques, 292, 293 Virmaître, Charles, 178, 180, 183 voyeurism, 302–6 W Wandering Jew, 142, 330, 331, 346 Wellington, Duke of (Arthur Wellesley), 115, 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125 Wells, H.G., 34 Whitman, Walt, 313 Willette, Adolphe, 180, 182 William IV (king), 117, 121, 122, 123 Willy (pseudonym of Henry Gauthier-­Villars), 162, 163, 282–83, 284

368 

INDEX

Wilson, William, 263–64, 275 Woestyn, Eugène, 254–55, 256 Wolff, Sir Henry Drummond, 246 women, see garden seats, associated with New Woman; impériale, women on; omnibus, women on Wood, Ellen, 337 Wotton, Mabel E., 234–35 X Xanxof, 333

Y Yates, Edmund, 159 Youatt, Elizabeth, 271–72, 275 Z Zaccone, Pierre, 328 Zéro, Paul, 154, 155 Zola, Émile, 28, 64, 248, 337 zooming in, 12, 252, 257–59, 262–65, 273, 292, 293 zooming out, 12, 252–56