During the long eighteenth century thousands of men and women made their way from the British Isles to the East Indies. Most were appointees and licensees of the East India Company: factors, company and free merchants or military men and their wives and daughters. A few arrived in the East Indies through routes unregulated by the East India Company and established themselves as traders, shopkeepers, soldiers of fortune and providers of services from hairdressing to portraiture to the expatriate communities. It was on the entrepreneurship, experiences and ambitions of these sojourners that British India was to be built. Without them, there would have been no India to substitute for the loss of the American colonies. There would have been no jewel in the British imperial crown.

The provincial origins, motivations and activities of these sojourners have been largely ignored in the history of the empire and emergence of the global world. Our understanding of the global world and imperial expansion has been principally framed by one of three concerns: the evolution and operations of the East India Company; the establishment and dynamics of British rule in India through the development of British official families; and cultural and political impacts of Anglo-Indian families, particularly nabobs. Those narratives situate eighteenth-century sojourners to the East Indies from the British Isles as either part of an emerging company state, servants pursing the interests and logics of a transnational company or part of a national imperial project in which Britain's empirebuilding was inextricably entwined with nation-building. Either way, the experiences, origins and motivations of eighteenth-century sojourners have been considered primarily within the interface between the global and the national.

Similarly, histories of regional and provincial change have given almost no attention to the East Indies. Yet the men and women who ventured to the East Indies came from somewhere, and that somewhere was, for many, the provincial world. Counties beyond London, provincial towns and rural villages made an enormous commitment of human, financial and social capital to ventures in the East Indies. For instance, the British Library India Office Family Search Index identifies close to a hundred men from Yorkshire over the long eighteenth century appointed or licensed by the East India Company. Similar numbers of entries are identified as originating from Devon and Lancashire.

Since Philippe Aries's groundbreaking work in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the history of childhood, historians have paid attention to boyhood in early modern times. Initially the approach chiefly concerned the education of boys, formal and informal. In my work in the early 1980s I argued that Tudor and Stuart education was regarded primarily as a tool to prepare both boys and girls for their roles in adult life. The relationship between parents and sons was considered by historians in general principally through the evidence provided by books of advice to sons. Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage, drawing upon a wealth of sources, made bold assertions about the changing nature of family bonds over the centuries. Then came the important work of Linda Pollock, who studied in more detail the actual relationships that parents enjoyed with both sons and daughters.

The growing emphasis in the period after 1980 on the history of women diverted historians momentarily from the subject of men. It was not long, however, before a discipline obsessed with the issue of early modern patriarchy turned its collective mind to the issue of how males were prepared for patriarchal roles. This, in its turn, was followed by detailed and subtle work on manhood, following on from the suggestion by Linda Pollock that male relationships with other men within the family were all important. Simple models of patriarchy proposed by earlier historians were challenged. Elizabeth Foyster pinpointed the construction of manhood in early modern England, explaining in the meantime the relevance of their sexual relationships, and also of the reputation of their wives and daughters to this process. Alexandra Shepard showed that not all men were born to be patriarchs and discussed how men fitted into various categories that stood in different relationships to patriarchy. Karen Harvey continued the discussion for a later period. Most of this work concentrated upon the middling ranks of society. A collection of primary sources has furthered our understanding of elite manhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The chapters in this part of the book make a contribution to these debates. Chapter 15 considers in detail the ways in which Sir Thomas Temple sought to educate his eldest sons for manhood and for a future as patriarchs and masters of estates.

Sir Thomas's hopes for ‘educating’ Peter to be what he considered to be a worthy heir who would protect his inheritance for successive generations of Temples were dashed by Peter's resolve to live a very different kind of life from that of his father and especially his grandfather before him. On the surface at least, Sir Thomas's plans were more readily taken on board by his third son, also, confusingly, named Thomas Temple and known within the family from 1633 as Rev. Doctor Temple. Thomas junior not only went to university, took a degree and entered clerical orders but also studied the law and became, in effect, his father's legal expert. Thomas Temple junior achieved an estate through becoming a beneficed clergyman (with its famed freehold). A fourth son, Miles, served apprenticeship. Thomas junior and Miles Temple, whom we met briefly in the introduction to this book, had different destinies from either Sir Thomas Temple's heir or his spare, although there is little information to settle the question of whether it was their personal characteristics and aptitudes, and their parents’ financial and social position as well as their position in the family, that shaped their futures.

Relationships with younger sons, with the sole exception of younger sons who eventually inherited their father's estate owing to the mortality of an elder brother, have received little scholarly attention. It has become a truism to state that younger sons were destined for a career as a clergyman or a merchant. Joan Thirsk wrote a stimulating essay on the position of younger sons in English society and this was followed by a brief but exceptionally interesting piece by Linda Pollock in History Today. Joan Thirsk's emphasis was upon the resentment of angry young men directed against the system and against their fathers and elder brothers as encapsulating that system's perceived injustices; Linda Pollock provided a valuable corrective – pointing out that younger sons were not neglected either by their parents or by their older siblings, that the services they performed for the heir and for their family in general were highly valued by all concerned, and, even more importantly, that they accepted and did not rail against the system of primogeniture.

Intergenerational conflict in the early modern period has received some welcome attention from historians. For example, Lawrence Stone and Barbara Harris both pointed to the many arguments that focused on finance. Recently Carole Levin has examined the dreams of early modern parents who penned autobiographical documents as well as manuals of dream interpretation. In Thomas Hill's The Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams (published in London in 1576) one dream depicts a father being consumed by his children. Levin sees this as revealing ‘one of the most intense sites of cultural anxiety …: conflicts between parents and children’. She concludes, however, that parents’ actual dreams not only revealed this fear of the power of surviving children but also anxiety about illness and death; dreams of children about their parents reflected pain and guilt; and amidst it all the dreams ‘testified to deep affection’. The transition from childhood to adulthood was tense in the past as it is often today and valuable work has been done in this area also. The Temples’ complex relationships with their sons, and especially their two eldest – Sir Peter and Sir John – show how such tensions lingered into mature manhood.

Sir Alexander Denton beinge at Stowe with Sir Peter, Sir Peter complayned, and alleadged his want of Armes to be caused by my Mr [Sir Thomas Temple]

Sir Thomas's ‘education’ of Sir Peter was interrupted by a series of family quarrels, one or more of which resulted in major court cases. In order to appreciate the severity of the problem it is necessary to understand its origins. The story of Sir Thomas and Lady Hester's strained relations with Peter is relatively well known although its interpretation is problematic. Nevertheless, there is certainly evidence to indicate that the couple viewed Peter as a ‘problem’. According to Thomas, Peter had always been wayward. In his teens he was already seeking loans where he could to support him in London. Worse still, he was being interviewed in the Star Chamber in 1612 for his part in the manslaughter of Thomas Pilkington by Sir Edward Peyto and his servant Peter Peyto. Sir Thomas and Lady Hester were more than anxious to see him settle down with a wife but a few matches did not materialize.

There is abundant evidence that Lady Hester played an important role in the years including and following 1629. After Thomas's accident, John Rous offered his mother-in-law advice on what she needed to do when acting on Sir Thomas's behalf in legal matters. There is once more occasional written evidence that Hester acted as Thomas's filing clerk and aide-mémoire. For instance, in 1630 Thomas recorded that she had reminded him of debts owing to him: ‘[margin: To my wife the Lady Hester Temple] Memorandum delivered to her of which she told me & I remembred not 2 statutes which mr Edw Ewer acknowledged to me Sir Tho Temple & other obligacons which & howe manye she remembreth not.’ And again she served to remind him of the existence of a lease: ‘memorandum my wife putt me in minde of a lease to me Sir T Sir Ro: Hide made of Holloway Grange rendring yearely 70li, which I delivered & lent to my daughter the Lady Ashcombe to answere the sherife of Oxfordshere whereupon remayneth dew to me in her hands & dew arrerages of rent, but when I delivered it query [margin: My daughter the Lady Ayschcombe].’

In 1630 Sir Thomas deployed his wife and Robert Smith to renew the valuable lease he had of Tingewick fish pools from New College, Oxford. Probably on this occasion she sent George Rouce, to inquire about the status of the lease. His letter makes clear Lady Hester's capacity as Sir Thomas's agent. Sir Thomas had Hester search for documents in one or more of the studies he maintained in each of their residences during this period – Wolverton and Burton Dassett – and follow his detailed instructions in respect of them: ‘Quere for thob [the obligation] I thinck I Sir T. saw on my study at Wolverton to put downe his Quernes in Lutterworth & then being found to deliver to my said wife to be shewed in Easter Terme 1631 by mr W. Lenthall in Theschequer [the Exchequer] at the hearing of mr Tho: Incelye.’

Spring 1631 saw Sir Thomas asking Hester to search for his unfinished will.

In addition to the formal acknowledgements made separately I am enormously grateful to Peter Sowden, Commissioning Editor for Boydell & Brewer, who not only accepted this book for publication but also was tremendously understanding as personal circumstances beyond my control created untold delays, and for supporting me throughout with his enthusiasm. I thank Rebecca Cribb for guiding the book through the press.

In preparing the book I realized the need both for genealogical information and for illustrations demonstrating the types of sources used and the problems involved. Because of the cost of artwork, I could not include as many family trees as I would have wished. In preparing the genealogies and related information I have been bound by the limitations of the software I used. For instance, although I was able to use terms such as ‘about’, ‘circa’, fl., and ‘after’ in the database of individuals such uncertainties do not appear in the resulting trees and reports. I have tried to be as accurate as possible but the reader is advised to treat the ancestry trees as provisional. I have included several family trees and other genealogical information for the reader's reference. There were similar constraints on the presentation of illustrative material. I am so grateful to Martin Fiennes of Broughton Castle, SHPT/Stowe School and Henry E. Huntington Library not only for permission to publish images of items in their possession but also for waiving fees. The illustrations I have chosen demonstrate important points made in the text. I could have presented more images of documents but some of the candidates for inclusion were too illegible or faded for successful reproduction. The reader may require a magnifying glass to read some of the documents, just as I did when I read them! I decided also to reproduce the direct quotations from documents with the original spellings, making minimal changes such as extension of common contractions and abbreviations in the interests of readability. I am forever in debt to Sian Lewis who designed the artwork for the family trees, and to Tony Carr who helped to prepare the index.

As I write this preface I am come directly from another lengthy research trip to the Huntington.

The case of Peter the Lunatic, Sir Thomas Temple's youngest brother, commands our attention here. This chapter attempts several things. Firstly it seeks to establish the nature of Peter's malady, how it would have been regarded by contemporaries, and the various problems posed by Peter's care. Secondly, it examines how he was cared for. Thirdly, it considers the implications of his care for his eldest brother Sir Thomas and his wife Lady Hester, for his own wife Katherine, and for his other siblings. While in no way disagreeing with the perspectives adopted by previous historians or their conclusions, the emphasis here is upon the demands sibling care could make upon families with many other calls upon their time and energy from the simple nuclear family. In this specific case any difficulties were compounded because Peter's care became the subject of litigation. I give considerable detail regarding the course of the legal case in order to emphasize both its tortuous and complex nature, and the problems an incomplete record presents for the historian seeking to describe what happened. I have also touched upon the methodological issues involved in using evidence provided by court cases, and further attention is accorded this in future chapters.

My brother Peter's malady: ‘It is the very error of the moon, She comes more nearer earth than she was wont And makes men Mad’

The bald facts about Peter's life are these: he was born in 1589, the fifth son of John Temple Esquire and his wife Susanna Spencer Temple. This was about three years after John's heir Thomas married Hester. Following John Temple's death in 1603, Peter, then about 13, lived at Stowe with his widowed mother, although he was educated at Winchester College and then served in the retinue of the Earl of Northampton. Peter's expenses were paid by his eldest brother, Thomas, sometimes through the agency of older brothers Sir Alexander and William or that of Hester. In 1614 he was sent home very ill to his mother Susan (Spencer) Temple. In December of that same year he married Katherine Kendall, daughter of a clergyman, and the two had several children, born between then and the 1630s. A mythology has since arisen surrounding this Peter Temple, which requires closer scholarly examination.

Although the widowhood of Dame Hester Temple necessarily did not occur within the marital partnership with Thomas, it seems appropriate to include a short chapter treating it within the context of that relationship and that with her children, grandchildren and servants. Indeed, Hester's married life until her husband's death usefully may be viewed as an apprenticeship for her life as his widow.

Historians and the history of widowhood

Scholars writing about medieval and early modern England have adopted varying approaches to and views on the subject of widowhood. For example, Joel T. Rosenthal, on the basis of research into the percentage of peers summoned to Parliament between 1399 and 1500 who left widows (68 per cent), argued that support of these women constituted a huge drain on the resources of great estates, and led to the extinction of many peerages; Barbara Harris, however, argued that most aristocratic widows profitably managed their jointure estates, on death distributed their wealth amongst family members, and ‘collectively their activity ensured the survival and continued prosperity of their class’. In my own earliest work on the subject of widows, in 1982 and 1983, the emphasis was laid upon the fact that during widowhood married women were at their most powerful. Certainly it was during widowhood that women from all social classes gained an independent legal identity, and often exercised power and authority as heads of household where there was no adult male heir. Even when only briefly widowed, such women would often seek to protect the interests of themselves and their children before remarrying. On average, at any one time, 20 per cent of households in an English community were headed by widows. This said, I, among others, have come to realize that widowed women were also extremely vulnerable. They were frequently subject to pressure from male kin, for example. Yet at the same time they were often dependent upon close male kin of their birth families for protection against marauding attacks by a deceased husband's male relatives. Garthine Walker, in an insightful study of ‘crime and the early modern household’, has observed that when a woman's wealth and household position were changed through death or otherwise, the hierarchy of family relationships was destabilized ‘in distressing ways’.

Infrastructure and the structure of the novel

The novel form that develops in Britain in the eighteenth century is deeply connected to mobility. The journey motif had long been an organising principle for extended prose narratives, with so many of the texts regarded as precursors to the novel tradition, such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) or Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) explicitly linked to travel. As the prose form developed, the journey became a powerful trope for understanding how novels functioned, differentiating them from other literary forms. However, mobility was far more than a trope; in a period defined by Britain's first great transport revolution, the way people started to move through the nation shaped novels, altering the mapping of stories, modifying genres, and changing the way language was used. The novel emerged partly in response to the need to understand a society on the move in ways that were unthinkable to writers of an earlier generation. In the process, the changing dynamics of mobility helped to determine its narratives in profound ways.

The novel in Britain developed during a juncture point in the nation's history, when the balance between the two essential social divisions of space – pathways and settlements – started to tip irresistibly towards the former as roads, canals, and communication networks criss-crossed the landscape. Britain in the long eighteenth century was increasingly characterised by the ethos of circulation and an investment in connective systems, which contested an older social order based on stasis. Rosalind Williams argues that

Modernity perhaps most reveals itself in this reversal, where rapid transport and information flows create a fractured experience, and this can be traced to the transport revolution, circa 1700–1830, which turned Britain into a nation in motion. Mobility saturated all areas of life, with Sara Landreth observing that ‘writers attempted to answer some of their most pressing questions in terms of motion. Motion was everywhere in Enlightenment texts: not just in treatises about physics, but also in sermons, periodicals, encyclopaedias, and epistolary novels.’

A general picture of the quality of the relationship the Temples maintained with their daughters and granddaughters is elusive. This chapter concentrates on the daughters, daughters-in-law and grandchildren of Thomas and Hester Temple.

There was a realm of difference between the behaviour prescribed by puritan preachers for unmarried women and that practised in families. It is much simpler to discover what the conduct literature contained than to access the behaviour that was actually prevalent. Even more so is it difficult to demonstrate any socio-economic or religious distinctions in behaviour over a chronological spectrum: there is a danger that we perceive a static situation when, in reality, there was change over time.

The data regarding as yet unmarried daughters and granddaughters in the Temple connection is relatively sparse though often informative. There are a number of letters from both unmarried and married daughters to their parents. These seem to have been preserved not as treasured mementoes of parent/child relations but as containing useful information. Those that have survived are often difficult to interpret, given poor handwriting, idiosyncratic spelling and especially the damage suffered over the centuries. The spelling and punctuation reproduced in quotations from their letters illustrate this problem. For the most part additional information has to be derived from stray mentions in account books, memorandum books and papers, court cases, bills (which normally supply little information about the emotional attachment that may have existed) and other people's letters. With minor exceptions it is not possible to say how the Temples related to their very young children, either male or female. It is slightly easier to establish their attitude to older Temple children and teenagers. There is also the question of whether parents’ attitudes towards and expectations of their daughters and granddaughters changed when they entered the married state. Moreover, it would be interesting to examine in detail the attitude of daughters (and sons and in-laws) to their parents. Occasionally we can approach these issues laterally – through, for example, the letters of sons-in-law. Such requires extreme caution. No correspondence is transparent and the meaning of a letter's contents is yet more obscured when the information is at second-hand. I offer no apology for the speculative nature of some parts of this chapter but I remind the reader to approach it with caution. Where the meaning is ambiguous, I have quoted the evidence at length.

If one visits Stowe House today, little attention is given to the Temples who owned the land before Cobham. It is assumed, probably correctly, that visitors are interested not in the history of the Temples but in the heritage represented by the grand eighteenth-century mansion and particularly its gardens. No apology is made for concentrating here upon the internal mechanics of family life among the Temples who preceded Cobham and, indeed, Sir Richard Temple the 3rd Baronet of Stowe, as seen through their archival and largely manuscript remains. Since the groundwork done by E.F. Gay and Godfrey Davies in the first half of the twentieth century, the early Temple family has been little studied, despite voluminous archival remains. This micro-history is intended to provide an essential counterweight to the fashionable thematic macro-histories, which cover broad chronologies and large geographical areas. Historians need both if they are to understand past societies on their own terms. The study of detailed case histories such as this should allow the historian to place ‘examples’ or ‘case studies’ in the proper context that supplies meaning. The book is principally concerned with establishing why family mattered to the Temples, the differing roles played by family members, and the linked issue of how the Temples conducted their personal family relationships within and outwith the household.

While the reader will not find here a chronological narrative of the lives of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Temples of Stowe, they will nonetheless learn a good deal about the way in which they lived. A serious attempt is made also to relate these findings about the Temples to a number of debates and areas of interest in modern scholarship. The subjects of kinship and family have received important attention from other historians, historical demographers and historical sociologists. Not least, family historians have suggested the relevance of their work to continuity and change within the state itself. In particular, evidence from the courts has been used to show how the ordering of family life was negotiated through litigation. But we must walk before we can run. A micro-history of the early modern family will afford a valuable corrective to these macrostudies: there is a need for both. The book is principally concerned with Sir Thomas and Lady Hester Temple and their roles and relationships. This first part consists of three chapters.

In this chapter the focus is upon the Temple connection. Only a knowledge of the Temples’ past will enable the reader to understand their present in the period 1570 to 1660. This knowledge leads us to comprehend many of the relationships which the Temples formed and maintained with others. This said, the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Temples made other, newer friendships which were important to them. The terms ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’ are used to refer to people with whom the Temples had close associations marked by liking, affection or loyalty and also to those who were their allies, patrons and/or supporters. These relationship characteristics frequently overlapped.

The chapter does not attempt to mention all members of the Temple connection – that would be a huge task and create a mammoth narrative. Additionally we should approach with due caution any attempt to define precisely the nature of some of these relationships and their repercussions. One should not assume that because individuals knew one another or moved in the same social circles there was a close relationship which influenced their behaviour or fortunes. Moreover, as observed earlier, the Temple archive is insufficiently comprehensive to enable us to create a complete picture with any confidence. Instead, these pages introduce only those individuals and groups within the Temples’ social ‘reach’ who were important in our story of the Temples, their roles and active relationships.

To recap briefly, historians for some time have been aware of kin connections in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society. As long ago as 1975 Anthony Fletcher concluded from an examination of Nicholas Assheton's Journal for 1617–18 that 30 per cent of people Assheton met were kin and 40 per cent of those he simply mentioned. Miriam Slater opined, ‘in this society it was the family, defined here as the parents and their children, who together with the kin were the brokers of access to opportunities of all kinds, whether educational or career, and especially of marriage’. Ian Archer's analysis of Pepys's social network revealed that, even within London, kin outside his immediate household formed a significant part of his male and female interactions. The importance of kin has, however, been much debated and contested.

While scholars have studied the lives of single women in the early modern period, historians rarely discuss relations between parents and daughters, married and unmarried. Relationships with married daughters have fared particularly badly although specialist monographs on particular families have sometimes considered them. Elizabeth Foyster has argued that parents remained involved in the lives of their adult children. Amy Froide has indicated that single women frequently ‘remained for a good portion, if not all, of their lives’ within their natal family. She has demonstrated, using an impressive variety of sources, that the bond between mother and unmarried daughters was particularly strong although not always amicable. Relations with fathers appear to have been more difficult but this could have been because of the nature of the evidence, deriving as it did from court depositions concerned with conflict over plans for arranged marriages. Most of Froide's examples are drawn from the eighteenth century, which makes a study of such relations in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries especially useful.

The archives permit us to explore only certain aspects of Hester and Thomas's interactions with their daughters. Records of various kinds survive regarding life stages such as birth, baptism and marriage. Some letters survive from daughters to their mother. Apart from this there is occasional mention of daughters in correspondence and other documentation such as Sir Thomas Temple's accounts and notebooks. Court papers have proved especially helpful. Daughters-in-law and granddaughters also figure in the archive, albeit less prominently. The archive has permitted consideration of female wards who, in this case, formed part of the family. I have described the cases of Anne Andrewes and of Dorothy and Mary Lee in some detail, and used direct quotation, in these chapters simply because so little is known about the treatment of daughters and female wards, and about the procedures followed in the courts.

The first two chapters in this part proffer an overview. The sources have been supplemented by work on the Temple connection and genealogy, which has revealed a few surprises, and several unanswered questions, which may in time be answered by further research by scholars. The first chapter examines issues surrounding matchmaking, marriage, childbearing and early child care. The second discusses the nature of the relationship between the Temples and individual daughters.

1885 – C. W. Bardsley:

1965 – E. Hughes:

1981 – J. V. Beckett:

The East Indies became enmeshed in Cumbrian life in the eighteenth century with well over 400 Cumbrian men and women identified as directly involved in East Indies trade, the East India Company or East Indies sojourns. They were connected to, and supported by, many more Cumbrians. This chapter analyses the characteristics of the Cumbrians involved in the East Indies encounter, the structure of their relationships, and heralds the continuities as well as the heterogeneity of their East Indies encounters. It starts with a chronological overview of the context in which Cumbrians were operating, focusing on the alignment between the numbers of Cumbrian men appointed and licensed by the East India Company, the changing operations of the East India Company, and events shaping the British Isles in the global world.

The second section focuses on the patterns of encounter, compares rates of Cumbrian involvement in the East Indies with other counties, and explores the social characteristics and place origins of enumerated Cumbrian men. The social structure of Cumbria's encounter with the East Indies is uncovered by a systematic mapping of the networks between East Indies-involved families. The final section presents six chronologically arranged biographical narratives that highlight the way in which the pursuit of success in the East Indies comprised profound and persistent continuities, despite the social heterogeneity of Cumbrian sojourners, the diversity of their trajectories and outcomes for their families, and the chronological stretch of the long eighteenth century.

The glory of motion

Early novelists such as Daniel Defoe and Henry Fielding were concerned with issues of pace, in terms of how readers either skimmed or carefully considered their work, and how their characters moved through the landscape. Defoe contrasts a mad scramble on a strand in Robinson Crusoe with a Journal account of the same event, written from the comfort of a table and chair. Fielding promises to write a story that will sometimes seem to stand still, sometimes seem to fly, while depicting the different types of travel experienced by Tom Jones as he either moves painstakingly through country byways, or bowls along the turnpiked postroads to London. Smollett, after 20 years of modifying picaresque, ramble, and chivalric traditions, patterns the journey of Humphry Clinker according to the different rates of progress experienced by tourist, explorer, and traveller. However, it is only with Laurence Sterne and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67) that a physical sense of speed enters the novel.

The first injection of speed into narrative can be pinpointed quite accurately. Between January 1761, when volumes III and IV were published, and December of the same year, Tristram has an epiphany on the road between Stamford and Stilton that he believes will change his writing for ever. Right at the start of the next instalment, volume V, he declares his unease at rehearsing old ideas culled from earlier books. His vow to swap his library for new material is inspired by the excitement of a rapid coach journey. As he prepares to shock the world with a chapter on whiskers, Tristram claims that his originality is the result of the sensation of speed, which convinced him to write in a new way rather than go on at the old ‘pettifogging rate’. Tristram declares