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That was from the Journal of the Society of Arts. Two points arise. Dog-collar’d does not mean ‘like a clergyman’, for Church of England priests had hardly begun to wear back-to-front collars in 1857. They came from Rome, which is odd to think when contemplating Dr Ian Paisley. The OED records dog-collar in the churchy sense only from 1861. The omnibus dog-collar is clerical in the clerkly sense. Trollope, in The Three Clerks (1858), repeatedly jokes about fashionably tight collars.
Anyway, what is a knife-board, which originally formed part of the phrase, but has dropped out? It is a board used when cleaning knives, and the OED records it from 1829. I should think the word was used before. On early omnibuses, upstairs (outside), a double bench ran down the spine of the vehicle, and soon acquired the nickname. It must have taken some sitting.
Our phrase was preserved beyond its due lifetime, perhaps, by its adoption in court as an exemplification of the ‘reasonable man’. This was taken not to be some uomo universale, but the man in the street or on the omnibus. Lord Bowen is reported to have used the phrase in 1903, but he couldn’t have because he died in 1894.
I have heard that the Plough at Clapham, from which omnibuses used to leave, has been rudely renamed the Goose and Granite.
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