
Luke Batterham
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LADY CAROLINE AND THE HACKNEY: the Hackney Coach might be thought of as an essential prop for the Regency rake. It plays an important part in the famous episode when Lady Caroline – wife of a respected politician and future Prime Minister – was in full pursuit of the 'Mad, bad and dangerous to know' Lord Byron. In the episode when she dressed up as a page in order to gain entrance to Byron's lodgings, she had to be smuggled out via a hackney (an episode described in lurid detail but the supposedly shocked John Cam Hobhouse's diary, see by Peter Cochran, Byron and Hobby-O: Lord Byron's Relationship with John Cam Hobhouse, 2010, p. 8). It was also of course not just a means of escape, but the location of the assignation itself, as Byron reminded another friend when defending Don Juan: 'Could any man have written it – who has not lived in the world? – and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach?' (Douglas Kinnaird, 26 October 1819, Marchand, Letters, vi, p. 232).