The fare system itself almost invited arguments. In 1889 the official scale ran like this:
One mile, or part of a mile: 1 shilling Each extra half mile: 6 pence Waiting time: 6 pence per quarter hour
Luggage outside: 2 pence per article Luggage inside: 1 penny each Midnight to six a.m.: add sixpence to the whole fare A shilling in say 1890 would be worth about £8 today. To put it in perspective, about 4 shillings in the 1890s would be a day’s wages for a labourer. So hansoms were really for the middle classes and up. Bankers, governesses, Army men—exactly the sort of people who turn up on Holmes’s doorstep in hansoms. You rarely find a cab in the stories being used by the working poor. They walked or took the penny ‘bus. Cabmen had their own slang. “Dry turn” meant coming back without a fare. “Doing a bilk” meant being cheated. Tricks went both ways: passengers who ducked into pubs and slipped out the back, or drivers who dawdled near midnight to get the higher night rate. One pamphlet from the 1870s tells of a trickster known to every cab rank: he’d ride a short distance, hop into a pub, and vanish. The cabmen cursed him, but in a way they admired his persistence. One imagines many untold cases of clients arriving at Baker Street in hansoms; Their entrances are always the same: the rattle outside, the bell, the anxious figure ushered in. The hansom is literally the stagecoach of drama, carrying people from London’s chaos into Holmes’s chamber. Real life cases echo it too. In 1872 Franz Müller, the German tailor who murdered Thomas Briggs on the railway, was tracked partly through his cab journeys. London newspapers often carried reports of passengers being robbed in or after taking a hansom. Pickpockets sometimes leaned into the open front while the cab was stopped in traffic; in other cases, cabmen themselves were accused of driving passengers to dark alleys where accomplices waited. In 1874, The Times reported a case of a barrister being robbed of his watch by two men who sprang onto the hansom as it turned into a side street. Moreover, not all cabmen were honest. The Illustrated Police News in the 1870s ran frequent stories of cabmen assaulting drunken passengers, overcharging fares, or even stealing luggage. One notorious 1880s case involved a cabman who picked up a woman late at night, then assaulted her on a quiet road; he was later identified in court by the distinctive number on his licensed badge. Hansoms were private, but that privacy cut both ways. Oscar Wilde once joked that they were the only place a young man could whisper to a lady without interruption, but others pointed out that they were equally good for a pickpocket’s knife. Theatre nights showed the hansom at its best and worst. Outside the Lyceum or Drury Lane, whole lines of them waited, horses steaming in the cold, drivers shouting for custom. Ladies in jewels and gentlemen in opera cloaks tumbled in, and off they went. But those same scenes were notorious for quarrels, drunks, and the occasional theft. The police courts heard the cases with weary familiarity: “Cabman accused of insulting behaviour,” “Passenger refusing to pay.” It was all part of the texture of London life. By the first decade of the twentieth century, though, the hansom was dying. The motor cab appeared in 1907, and within a few years the horse cab was a rarity. Old drivers watched the change with bitterness. One man told a journalist in 1912: “We were kings once. The horse was our mate, the street our home. Now we are relics.” And yet in the imagination, they never died. Even in the later Holmes stories, where a “motor cab” creeps in, readers picture the old two-wheeled hansom, Holmes leaning forward with his chin on his hands, Watson beside him, the city flashing past the little windows. The hansom fits Holmes’s character—quick, discreet, able to vanish into the fog. So the next time you open one of the stories and hear that rattle outside Baker Street, picture it: the horse pawing at the stones, the driver hunched in his cape, the little trapdoor open for instructions. You climb in, the whip cracks, and off you go through the lamplit streets. The hansom may be gone, but in Holmes’s London it will always be waiting at the kerb.