A FORTNIGHT ago, Nicholas Rhea wrote about coaching, especially its last days in Yorkshire, and Chris Lloyd “looked back” to visits to the region by Charles Dickens (D&S Times, Nov 18).

These two items might be married, as it were, by recalling the many references to coach travel in Dickens’ novels, most notably The Pickwick Papers.

But it is in an obscure report written as a journalist that one of Dickens’ most memorable pieces of writing about coaching can be found. The sudden collapse of the hitherto huge industry through the advent of railways greatly fascinated Dickens, and in his magazine The Uncommercial Traveller in 1863 he described visiting a near-deserted coaching inn, searching in vain for a surviving coach builder (all the while imagining that peeling church bells were saying ‘What’s-be-come-of-the-coaches’) and finally interviewing a turnpike keeper.

Now eking out a living as a cobbler, this worthy was adamant he had the answer to revive his trade. Dickens asked him how, and their exchange went as follows: “Lay a toll on everything as comes through; lay a toll on walkers. Lay another toll on them as stays at home.”

“Would the last remedy be fair?”

“Fair? Them as stops at home could come through if they liked, couldn’t they?”

“Say they could.”

“Toll ’em. If they don’t come through, it’s their look out. Anyways – toll ’em!”

Dickens concluded: “Finding it was as impossible to argue with this financial genius as if he had been the Chancellor of the Exchequer I passed on meekly.”

Harry Mead, Great Broughton