With regard to the other four-wheeled carriages, we have now arrived at a period when it is almost impossible to speak at any length of each particular kind.[56] For in the first place such a classification as I have used to describe the older vehicles must to a large extent break down, and in the second place, from the time when the great exhibitions did so much to make the manufacturers of all nations familiar with each other’s work, nearly every coachbuilder of standing has produced one model, if not more, peculiar to itself. So, in the middle of last century, you had carriages which approximated to the barouche, yet which had been evolved indirectly from so different a vehicle as the phaeton. You saw carriages, obviously dissimilar in appearance, yet bearing, to the layman, the same name. You had new combinations of perches and springs. And carriages were being exported from one country to be improved upon the lines most suitable to the roads and tastes of another.
Of all these carriages perhaps the two which deserve most mention are the _landau_ and the _victoria_, both open carriages, which can be closed at will.
The _landau_, as I have said, had originally been a coach made to open. At the beginning of the century it had hardly been so popular as the _landaulet_, but at this time it underwent several improvements at the hands of Mr. Luke Hopkinson, a celebrated coachbuilder of Holborn. It was Hopkinson who first built what was known as a _briska-landau_, but he chiefly concerned himself not so much with the shape of the carriage-body as with the hood. He built his new landaus in such a way as to allow the hood to be folded, so that it lay horizontally at the back of the seat. At the same time the floor and the seats were raised so as to make the whole carriage a far more spacious and comfortable vehicle than had been possible when the hood could not be completely opened.[57] And with the hood entirely “down” you had practically the landau of to-day, possibly the commonest carriage on the road. Nearly every “fly” which so often is to be seen standing rather forlornly outside the village station as your train thunders past is a landau modelled on Hopkinson’s designs. He was not, however, the only coachbuilder whose attention was being given to this useful carriage. Of one of the new landaus built by other firms a trade journal of the day observed with some truth that “its graceful outline and roominess” made it “the very beau-ideal of vehicular luxury.” And as the years passed the landau in its several varieties increased in popularity. Improvements tended almost solely in the direction of lightness. The Report on the carriages at the exhibition of 1862 pays particular attention to the landau. “The demand for them,” it runs, “has ... increased. They are well suited to the variable climate of the British Isles, as they can readily be changed from an open to a closed carriage and vice versa.” At a later exhibition—in 1885—the landau[58] had become so popular that there was actually shown one, built for the Earl of Sefton, suited to the capabilities of a single horse. This was an important departure from tradition which seems to have shocked some of the old-fashioned designers. “That an established house with an aristocratic connection,” lamented one trade paper at the time, “should exhibit a landau for one horse would have been considered incredible twenty years ago.” No doubt this was true, but people persisted in their desire for light carriages, and a one-horse landau was the natural outcome. At a later date there was a tendency to alter the shape of the body. Hitherto this had generally been angular; now the lines became curving, the body, looked at from the side, forming the arc of a huge circle. Such a carriage was known as the _canoe landau_. To-day the canoe bodies, both in England and abroad, are made rather deeper than at the time of their introduction, but the square shape still persists. If there is one English vehicle which may be called the favourite carriage it is surely the landau.