The Thrill of the Chaise: Gendering the Phaeton in Eighteenth-Century Literary and Satirical Culture, c.1760–1820

Deidre Lynch in The Economy of Character argues that the “new ‘world of moving objects’ was one in which new forms for imagining and enforcing social division were requisite” and eighteenth-century writers therefore depicted characters that illustrated new forms of gendered and class-based social organisation. This chapter takes a very literal interpretation of Lynch’s observation. It examines how new, moving objects, carriages, and especially new carriage types, such as phaetons, were deployed in literary and visual culture to inform characters’ personal qualities. Writers and satirists used phaetons’ material characteristics, it argues, to construct and reflect the personal qualities of characters. Carriage design was therefore influential in fashioning the different characters and caricatures of both male and female ‘phaeton-drivers’ in literary and satirical culture in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The chapter explores how the danger and risk of coach travel was associated with the masculine attributes of bravery and daring, and how this was materialised in phaeton’s specific design and use. The chapter does this by analysing how the material form of phaetons themselves was adapted to suit gender norms and roles, with the introduction of dangerous ‘high-flying’ phaetons for men and low, pony-drawn ones for women—dubbed ‘Ladies’ Phaetons’. The chapter examines how writers and satirists characterised and critiqued men’s behaviour through ‘dangerous-driving’ as a marker of elite masculinity.