What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom, likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.
The preceding passage is from Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities Chapter 3, I do not get the use of " what" before Time. Please explain.
The short answer is that it means "For how long", it's invented by Dickens, and he is purposefully not using normal English sentence structure, so there's little for a language learner to learn.
But in case you want want more detail...
Both "sentences" in that paragraph are just fragments, not sentences at all.
He does this to evoke a scene without naming a subject or having a main verb. It's just a scene of a mail coach moving on a bumpy road, and he's inviting the reader to imagine how long it took.
The sentence fragment that follows the one you're asking about is also a question-fragment-sentence mix. It includes the word "likewise", to signal the reader he's using the same non-standard structure again.
The second fragment is even more poetic and harder to parse. It's difficult to find a straightforward meaning, but it paints a picture, and invites the reader to imagine the people watching the mail coach pass by.
He returns to normal sentences in the paragraph after.
