Edith Wharton loved the "motor" but never lost her nostalgia for the horse drawn vehicles of her youth.
A passage in A Backward Glance (1932) conveys the novelty and thrill of her virgin voyage.
"There were no motors in 1903; but as a toy for the rich they were beginning to appear. My old friend George Meyer was the owner of a magnificent specimen. I had never been in a motor before, and could hardly believe that we were to do the run from Rome to Caprarola and back (fifty miles each way) in an afternoon. The car was probably the most luxurious, and certainly one of the fastest, then procurable; but that meant only a sort of high-perched phaeton without hood or screen, or any protection from the wind. I had the high seat like a coachman's box. Off we tore across the Campagna, over humps and bumps, through ditches and across gutters, windswept, dust-enveloped, I clinging to my sailor hat. I spent the next days in bed, fighting an acute laryngitis. In spite of this I swore then and there that as soon as I could make money enough, I would buy a motor, and having a delicate throat, scoured the country in the hottest weather swaddled in a stifling hood with a mica window, till some benefactor of the race invented the wind-screen and made motoring an unmixed joy."
The early twentieth-century "motor" was hectic, prone to breakdowns, and erratic. In contrast, the vehicles of Newport, Rhode Island of Wharton's aristocratic youth were dignified and stately, as much for display as for utility. "Young ladies, married or single, expected to be taken for an afternoon drive by the master of the house. The vehicles of the fashionable young men were either dog-carts (drawn by a pair driven tandem) or a high four-wheeled conveyance called a T-cart, which was drawn by one big stepper, while the older men drove handsome phaetons with a showy pair, and an impressive groom with folded arms in the rumble. Carriages, horses, harness and grooms were all of the latest and most irreproachable cut, and Bellevue Avenue was a pretty scene when the double line of glittering vehicles and showy horse-flesh paraded between green lawns and scarlet geranium borders."
"Dog-cart?" "Phaeton?" T-cart?" What do these words signify? And moreover, what the heck was a daumont, "preceded by outriders, which swayed gracefully on its big C-springs to the rhythm of four high-stepping and highly-groomed horses, a postilion on one of the leaders, and two tremendous footmen perched high at the back."
For more philosophizing on these nineteenth-century horse drawn conveyances, click here.
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