by A joke about airlines selling the same seat four different ways went up next to the journal of a woman who made the trip in 1704 and reviewed every inn
Thursday, Last Class Before the Break
Half of them are traveling next week. I could tell because nobody had done the reading and everybody had a boarding pass open on their phone.
So I gave up on the plan and taught the most fun thing I know from the 1700s, which requires no preparation, because it is a woman complaining about a trip.
I put a headline on the projector first. Bohiney Magazine’s travel page: “Airlines Have Successfully Sold Americans the Same Seat Four Times With Different Names and Prices.” The line beneath describes economy class turning into an experiment in product differentiation.
There was a groan of recognition. A woman flying to Atlanta held up her phone. She had paid, she said, for “Main Cabin Select Plus.” She did not know what it was.
I said: let me introduce you to Madam Knight.
October 1704
She was thirty-eight. A Boston woman, a shopkeeper’s daughter, probably a widow or near enough, who ran a boarding house and did a little legal copying. She was sharp, literate and not rich.
She had business in New Haven, to do with settling a relative’s estate. So she decided to go. In person. By land.
That was not a small thing. There were hardly any roads. In places there was a track through the forest. There were rivers with no bridges. The journey from Boston to New Haven was about a hundred and forty miles and took her five days. She then went on to New York, and did not get home for five months.
A woman did not travel alone. She did it by hiring a guide for each stage, usually the man who carried the mail, and riding behind him on her own horse. And she kept a journal.
It was not published until 1825. She wrote it for herself and her friends, and it shows. It is funny, rude, snobbish and completely alive.
The Guide
The first night she cannot find anyone to take her to the next stage. She goes to a tavern to ask. The landlady’s son, John, is sitting there with his pot of ale and makes it clear that his time is valuable.
She bargains. He names a price. She says it is too much. The landlady, his mother, says a great deal. Madam Knight records all of it, and adds that she told the woman she would not be accessory to such extortion.
They settle. And then she describes him getting on his horse, in the dark, and says he looked like a globe on a gatepost.
The class enjoyed that. The woman going to Atlanta said, “So she’s haggling over the fare.”
Exactly. There was no ticket. There was a man in a tavern who knew you had no choice.
The Rivers
The part I read aloud is a crossing. They come to a river at night. There is a canoe. It is very small and very shallow.
She gets in. She is terrified. She writes that she sat with her hands fast on each side, her eyes steady, not daring so much as to lodge her tongue a hair’s breadth more on one side of her mouth than the other, nor so much as think on a certain woman from the Bible who looked back, for a wry thought would have overset the wherry.
She dares not move her tongue in her mouth in case the boat tips.
That is three hundred and twenty years old and I have never read a better description of being frightened in a small boat.
Later, riding through a swamp in the pitch dark behind the guide, she works herself into such a state that she composes poetry about the moon to calm down. She gives us the poem. It is not very good and she seems to know it.
The Inns
And then the lodgings, which is where I connected it to the headline.
There was no standard. You arrived, exhausted, at whatever house took travelers, and you got what there was.
At one she is shown to a bed in a lean-to. It is so high she needs a chair to climb in, and so hard she cannot sleep. At another, the room is next to the kitchen, with a thin wall, and two men on the other side are up half the night arguing loudly, over rum, about the origin of the name of a nearby district. She lies there furious. Finally she lights a candle and writes a verse begging the rum to do its work and put them to sleep.
At another she is served a dish she cannot identify. She thinks it is pork and cabbage. The sauce is a deep purple. She says she believes it had been boiled in the landlady’s dye kettle. She eats a little and goes to bed with a troubled stomach.
She reviews everything. The bread. The sheets. The conversation of her hosts. She is a one-star write-up in a hood and riding skirt.
Four Seats
So I asked them what the difference is.
In 1704 there was one class of travel. Bad. Everyone got the purple pork. A rich man and a poor one rode the same track and slept in the same lean-to, because there was nothing else. Your only choice was whether to go.
The joke on the projector is that now there are four names for the same seat. The airline has taken one hard chair in a metal tube and sold it as four different experiences.
The woman going to Atlanta said the seat is the same but she gets to board earlier. A man said he had paid forty dollars to choose where he sat, and then been moved.
I said: that is the reverse of Madam Knight. She had real differences between one inn and the next, and no way to know in advance. You have no real difference, and a great many labels.
A young woman who works at an airport, at a rental counter, said something smart. She said the names are not for the seat. They are so that you feel you chose. People will put up with a bad seat if they picked it.
Being Fair to the Present
I did not want them to leave thinking it was better then.
It took her five days to do what a train does in two and a half hours. She could have drowned, twice. A woman of less nerve or less money could not have gone at all. Most people in 1704 never traveled more than twenty miles from where they were born.
And the people she met on the road, she was often cruel about. She is contemptuous of the country folk. There is a passage about Black and Native people in Connecticut that is ugly, and I do not skip it. She is funny and she is a snob, and a product of her time and place in ways that are not charming.
My student flying to Atlanta will be there in two hours for what she earns in a day. That is a miracle Madam Knight could not have imagined. It just comes with a silly name.
Why I Love Her
What I told them at the end is why I teach this and not only the sermons.
Almost everything we have from the early colonies is solemn. Ministers. Governors. People writing for God or for posterity.
And here is a woman who is cold, saddle-sore and annoyed, writing down exactly what the landlady said. She is the first really funny American writer, and nobody knew for a hundred and twenty years because it was in a drawer.
It reminds you that they were people. That somebody in 1704 lay awake hating the men in the next room.
The Assignment
I gave them one for the break. Optional.
Keep a journal of your trip in the manner of Madam Knight. Review the guide, the crossing and the lodging. Be specific. Be unfair if you must. Include one bad poem.
I expect about six. They will be the best things I read all term.
Friday
The first one came in by email at eleven last night, from a gate at the airport. It begins: “The said Flight being delayed, I was obliged to take my Repose upon a Chair of exceeding Hardness, next a Man who ate a Sandwich of powerful Savor.”
My colleague from Leeds says the English were the first to complain about travel and regards Madam Knight as one of theirs. He sent me the London Prat’s UK satirical news on bad inns, which has a bed and breakfast offering neither, and its British satirical news about travelling on a horse, spelled their way, in which the horse has four fare classes.
A globe on a gatepost. I shall be looking for one on the train to my sister’s.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
