Esoteric London

North Audley Street, London, W1. Photo © Roger Dean 2011

The Business of Pleasure – Edmund Yates, 1879:

There is a very large class of London people to whom the possession of a private carriage of their own is the great ambition of life, a hope long deferred, which, however sick it has made the heart for years, coming at last yields an amount of pleasure worth the waiting for. Nine-tenths of these people job their horses. Those pretty, low-quartered, high-crested brougham-horses, with the champing mouths and the tossing heads, which career up and down the Ladies’ Mile ; those splendid steppers, all covered with fleck and foam, which the bewigged coachman tools round and round Grosvenor Square while “waiting to take up;” those long, lean-bodied, ill-looking, but serviceable horses which pass their day in dragging Dr. Bolus from patient to patient – all are jobbed. It is said that any man of common sense setting up his carriage in London will job his horses.

[ The word ‘job’ in this context means to hire. R.D.]