Come Here To Me!

This Dublin Penny Journal scene shows a Sedan chair at College Green.

Thankfully, sedan chairs have long vanished from the streets. I saw one recently at a museum in Edinburgh, and it really is difficult to picture a time when they were a common sight on the streets of British cities. Essentially a sedan chair was a chair or windowed cabin, which would be carried by at least two porters through the streets. You could say that these were human taxis in their day.

In his study of Irish tourism between 1750-1850, W.H.A Williams noted that in 1771 sedan chairs “outnumbered licensed carriages in Dublin, to the benefit of the Dublin Lying-In Hospital, which had been granted a duty on the chairs. The use of sedan chairs persisted in the largest Irish cities into the 1830s.” The process of licensing the chairs is made clear in this brief piece from the front page of the Freeman’s Journal in 1786:

Front page of Freeman’s Journal, April 25th 1786

Thanks to the licensing process, we are able to see just where the owners of sedan chairs lived, and Peter A.Clarke researched this in the study Two Capitals: London and Dublin, 1500-1840. Based on the 1785 returns, it is evident that “over two-thirds of the holders of sedan chair licenses were members of the titled nobility”, going on to write that “the licensees lived for the most part in Henrietta Street, Rutland Square, Sackville Street, St.Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square”. These were among the wealthiest streets and squares of eighteenth century Dublin, popular with parliamentarians and other elites.

Colonel Henry Luttrell was assassinated while traveling in a sedan chair in Dublin on 22 October 1717, by a “band of ruffians” according to the Biographical Peerage of Ireland, which was printed in 1817. Frank Hopkins writes about this in his book Rare Old Dublin: Heroes, Hawkers and Hoors. Luttrell was a figure who had deserted from the army of the Catholic James II to fight alongside Williamite forces following the Siege of Limerick in 1690. None too popular then amongst Catholics, he was murdered when travelling between a Cofffee House on Cork Hill and his lofty residence on Stafford Street.

Illustration of a sedan chair in the eighteenth century (wiki)

In a talk given on ‘Early Dublin Transport’ in 1938 for the Old Dublin Society, A.M Fraser detailed how in 1779 there were actually more hackney coaches in Dublin, in proportion to its size, than were to be found in London, and likewise with sedan chairs. She also noted that the revolutionary Lord Edward Fitzgerald was conveyed to Dublin Castle in a sedan chair following his capture in 1798. This is also found in Thomas Moore’s account of the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, where it’s noted that “from Thomas Street he was conveyed, in a sedan chair, open at the top, to the Castle, where the papers found upon him, – one of them confirming the line of advance upon Dublin, from the county of Kildare, were produced and verified.”

The capture of Lord Edward Fitzgerald, before he was taken to Dublin Castle.

Only last December, an interesting find at a Dublin auction house brought sedan chairs back into public discourse in Dublin. Michael Parsons wrote in The Irish Times that:

A rare book published in 1788, which has turned up at Mealy’s auction, contains a list of private sedan chair owners in Georgian Dublin, published to pressure them into paying annual charges.

More than two centuries later, the book reveals that some of the city’s wealthiest residents were “in arrears” and were being carried about without having paid their annual licence fee.

Many names of the rich and powerful in Dublin were contained within that book, some of which can be read in The Irish Times article here.

An article in the same paper from 1910 looking back on the earliest forms of public transport in Dublin noted that “the hazard on Rutland Square, opposite the Presbyterian Church, is called ‘The Chair’, as it was originally one of the stands which the sedan chair proprietors occupied.”

It was undoubtedly the rise of the hackney carriage in the nineteenth century which brought about the demise of the sedan chair in British cities. What a sight they must have been in eighteenth century Dublin however, carrying the rich to and from their coffee houses, and revolutionaries to Dublin Castle!