JACK STRAW’S CASTLE, as it was in 1835Drawn by L. Walker from an old engraving
Apart, however, from its literary associations, Jack Straw’s Castle has a romantic history. It is generally agreed that its name is derived from that of the notorious peasant leader of the rising in the reign of Richard II. And this may be so in spite of the fact that its present designation is not older than the middle of the eighteenth century.
The Peasants’ Revolt took place in 1381, and we are told that it is more than likely that the Hampstead villeins took part in the famous march to London. One authority says that “the St. Albans men, in their advance to join Jack Straw at his headquarters at Highbury, might or might not have passed through Hampstead. If acontingent of adherents was ready to join them at Hampstead, they probably took the village into their route, especially as it would give them particular pleasure to make an offensive demonstration against the Knights Hospitallers, who had a temple there and were the objects of bitter hatred. The attack of the mob upon the house of the Knights Hospitallers at Highbury is a well-known incident of the rising. Whether they visited Hampstead or not, they passed at no great distance from it—near enough to bring the Hampstead villeins within their influence. May it not be that the events of these few days provided the reason for the local name of Jack Straw’s Castle? The mere fact of there being Hampstead sympathisers with Jack Straw who held their meetings at a certain house would be sufficient excuse to gain that house the title of Jack Straw’s Castle.”
Sir Walter Besant thought that, although there is no direct evidence of Jack Straw being connected with the hostelry named after him, “it is quite possible that the Heath formed a rendezvous for the malcontents of his time.” In early days there had been an earthwork on the site, which might have given rise to the name “Castle.” Referring to this point, ProfessorHales, who leans to the opinion that Jack Straw was no more than a generic appellation, and instances the fact of there being an inn called Jack Straw’s Castle in a village near Oxford, says: “‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ is so commanding and important that there can be little doubt there would be erected upon it some kind of earthwork or fort at a very early period. Traces of both the Neolithic and the Bronze Age man have been found on and near the Heath, and, possibly enough, both these races raised or held on the spot some rude fortification which subsequent times would call a ‘Castle.’ This being so, we have only to infer, from facts already stated, that the place was used as a tryst for the local partisans of Jack Straw to arrive at the origin of the name of ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’—that is, the Castle of the Jack Strawites.”
To-day, Jack Straw’s Castle is the favoured resort of the district, and perhaps the Dickens traditions act as the strongest lodestone to visitors, and do more to sustain its popularity than any others. At any rate, the Dickensian pilgrim on his ramble through Hampstead places great store on Jack Straw’s Castle for the simple and justifiable reason that it had such attractions for the great novelist.
The “little, dirty, tumble-down public-house” at the foot of Hungerford Stairs, where the Micawber family were lodged the night before their departure for Australia, was called the Swan. It was there at the time Dickens worked in the factory as a boy, and appears in contemporary pictures of Hungerford Stairs. The Micawbers occupied one of the wooden chambers upstairs, with the tide flowing underneath. We read that Betsey Trotwood and Agnes were there, “busily making some little extra comforts in the way of dress for the children. Peggotty was quietly assisting with the old insensible work-box, yard measure, and bit of wax candle before her that had outlived so much.” In that ramshackle old inn was enacted that last wonderful scene with Mr. Micawber, when he insisted on making punch in England for the last time. Having obtained the assurance that Miss Trotwood and Miss Wickfield would join him in the toast, he “immediately descended to the bar, where he appeared to be quite at home; and in due time returned with a steaming jug,” and quickly served out the fragrant liquid in tin mugs for his children, and drank from his own particular pint pot himself.
There are three other inns calling for brief reference. The Gray’s Inn Coffee-House, whereDavid Copperfield stayed on his return from abroad, was first mentioned inThe Old Curiosity Shop, and is dealt with in our chapter devoted to that book; the Golden Cross at Charing Cross, a prominent feature in Chapter XIX, is commented upon at length in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick”; and the coffee-house in Doctors’ Commons where Mr. Spenlow conducted David Copperfield to discuss a certain delicate matter (Chapter XXXVIII) demolished in 1894.
Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times
SOL’S ARMS—THE DEDLOCK ARMS—THE LONDON COFFEE—HOUSE—PEGASUS’ ARMS—ETC.
Thereare very few inns of any importance mentioned inBleak House, and only one that plays any prominent part in the story. The one at Barnet, where Esther Summerson hired the carriage to drive to Mr. Jarndyce’s house, was no doubt meant to be the Red Lion, and is dealt with in the first chapter of the present volume; while the White Horse Cellar, where she alighted on her entry into London from Reading, claims attention in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick.”
Of the two other taverns, Sol’s Arms, where the inquest on Nemo was held, and the Dedlock Arms at Chesney Wold, the former is the chief.
The original of Sol’s Arms was the old Ship Tavern which once stood at the corner ofChichester Rents off Chancery Lane. It is first referred to in Chapter XI as the place of the coroner’s inquest. “The coroner is to sit in the first-floor room at the Sol’s Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place twice a week, and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of professional celebrity, faced by Little Swills the comic vocalist.... The Sol’s Arms does a brisk stroke of business all the morning.”
According to Allbut, Dickens took the name from a tavern in the Hampstead Road where the harmonic meetings of the Sol’s Society were held, and it certainly seems that he adapted its characteristics to the Ship.
At the appointed hour the coroner arrived, and was conducted by the beadle and the landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, “where he puts his hat on the piano, and takes a Windsor chair at the head of the long table, formed of several short tables put together, and ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by the pots and glasses. As many of the jury as can crowd together at the tables sit there. The rest get among the spittoons and pipes, or lean against the piano.”
All in readiness, the famous inquest on Nemo, with poor Joe as a witness, took place, after whichthe Sol’s Arms gradually “melts into the shadowy night, and then flares out of it strong in gas.”
That was a special event for the Sol’s Arms, which generally speaking was just a tavern frequented by lawyers’ clerks and the inhabitants of Chichester Rents and its neighbourhood. It, no doubt, was Krook’s habitual place of call, it certainly was patronized by Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, and Mr. Guppy must often have looked in; but its chief claim to fame was its being the meeting place of the Harmonic Company, of whom Little Swills was so distinguished a member.
Although Chichester Rents, which exists to-day, is not the same Chichester Rents as when the Old Ship Tavern was there, and Krook lived there, with Miss Flite as a lodger, one is easily reminded of these things, and of the inquest, of Poor Joe, and of the great Little Swills, when one wanders through this district of Dickens Land.
It is common knowledge that Chesney Wold, the country seat of the Dedlocks of the story, was Rockingham Castle, the home of the Hon. Richard Watson and Mrs. Watson, to whom Dickens dedicatedDavid Copperfield. There is, therefore, no difficulty in tracing the Dedlock Arms. The village of Chesney Wold was the village of Rockingham. In Rockingham is an old inn bearingthe date of 1763, known as Sonde’s Arms, which stands for the Dedlock Arms of the story.
Little Dorritis almost as devoid of reference to inns and taverns that count asBleak House. In few cases the references are as a rule but passing ones. Perhaps the most interesting is to the Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill, where Arthur Clennam stayed, for it remains almost as it was in those days.
In the third chapter of the first book, Dickens gives one of those telling pen-pictures of London for which he had no rival. It is of rather a dull and doleful hue, and depicts the aspect the city presents on a Sunday: “gloomy, close and stale.” Arthur Clennam had just arrived from Marseilles by way of Dover and its coach “The Blue-Eyed Maid,” and “sat in the window of a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in lowspirits, Theywon’tcome, theywon’tcome, theywon’tcome! At the five minutes it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair. ‘Thank heaven!’ said Clennam when the hour struck, and the bell stopped.”
THE LONDON COFFEE HOUSE, LUDGATE HILLFrom an old Engraving
The particular coffee-house in whose window Clennam sat was the famous old London Coffee-House, and the particular church whose bells prompted his reflections, so microscopically described by the novelist, must have been St. Martin’s next door. There can be little doubt of this, for we are told that Clennam “sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old places of imprisonment.... Presently the rain began to fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster.”
That “public passage opposite” must have been what is now the entrance to Ludgate Square.
With these facts to guide us, we can supply the name and location of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. It exists to-day, nestling close to St. Martin’s Church, on the west side, and, but for the substitution of a plate-glass shop-front, is to all intents and purposes unchanged in its outward appearances from what it was when Clennam sat in meditation at one of its windows.
The illustration from an old engraving by S. Jenkins, after a drawing by G. Shepherd, shows the coffee-house and church as they were in 1814; and, if comparison of the picture of the former building is made with the present structure, it will be seen that it is practically identical, except so far as the ground floor is concerned.
The house was first opened as a coffee-house in 1731 by one James Ashley, and its vast cellars stretched under Ludgate Hill to the foundations of the city walls. In those days, it was “within the Rules of the Fleet Prison, and was noted for the sales held there of booksellers’ stocks and literary copyrights,” and used to afford hospitality to the juries from the Old Bailey sessions when they disagreed. The grandfather of John Leech, the illustrator ofA Christmas Carolwas the landlord of the tavern for some years, and later the father of the famousPunchartist became thetenant, and filled it with the merry crowd associated with Mr. Punch’s early days. Leech was followed as landlord by Mr. Lovegrove from the Horn Tavern in Doctors’ Commons.
There is a casual mention of the famous old George Inn in the Borough High Street, in Chapter XXII of Book 1 ofLittle Dorrit, where Tip Dorrit is spoken of as going into the inn to write a letter; and also passing references to Garraway’s and the Jerusalem Coffee-House, as occasional resorts of Mr. Flintwinch. Full details concerning the George and Garraway’s will be found in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick.”
The Jerusalem Coffee House was one of the oldest in the city of London, and was famous for its news-rooms, where merchants and captains connected with the commerce of India, China and Australia could see and consult the files of all the most important papers from those countries, as well as the chief shipping lists.
The hotel in Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, where Mr. Dorrit stayed when he reached London from the Continent, was probably Mivart’s, and is dealt with in the chapter devoted to Nicholas Nickleby.
Coketown, ofHard Times, is generally supposed to be Manchester. We suspect it to be a compositepicture, with a good deal of Preston in it, and other manufacturing towns as well. It is not possible, therefore, to identify the one or two inns which figure in the story.
The hotel where Mr. James Harthouse stayed when he went there with an introduction to Mr. Bounderby might be any hotel in any town; and there seems no means of tracing the original of the “mean little public-house with red lights in it” at Pod’s End, where Sissy Jupe brought Gradgrind and Bounderby. Dickens describes it “as haggard and as shabby as if, for want of custom, it had itself taken to drinking and had gone the way all drunkards go, and was very near the end of it.”
The name he gives to the public-house was the Pegasus’ Arms. The Pegasus’ leg, he informs us, might have been more to the purpose; but, underneath the winged horse upon the sign-board, the Pegasus’ Arms was inscribed in Roman letters. Beneath that inscription, again, in a flowing scroll, the painter had touched off the lines:
Good malt makes good beer,Walk in, and they’ll draw it here;Good wine makes good brandy,Give us a call, and you’ll find it handy.
These lines were taken from an old inn-sign, the Malt Shovel, which once stood at the foot of Chatham Hill.
A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations
THE ROYAL GEORGE, DOVER—YE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE—THE THREE JOLLY BARGEMEN—THE CROSS KEYS, WOOD STREET—HUMMUM’S, COVENT GARDEN—THE SHIP AND LOBSTER, GRAVESEND—THE FOX UNDER THE HILL, DENMARK HILL
Notwithstandingthe fact thatA Tale of Two Citiesis to some persons Dickens’s best book, or the one that many prefer to any other, it is the most barren for our purpose. Apart from the fact that its scenes are laid chiefly in another country, those that concern our own supply little enough material in the way of taverns that can be identified.
In Chapter IV of Book 1, Dickens gives a fine description of the London Mail Coach’s journey to Dover, but no incident associated with an inn is touched upon on the way, and not until thejourney is terminated at Dover is an inn mentioned by name.
“When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon,” we are told, “the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach door, as his custom was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey from London in winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous traveller upon.”
Here Mr. Lorry, the only passenger left, shaking himself of straw, alighted from the coach and engaged a room for the night, where he awaited the arrival of Lucy Manette for the momentous interview which was to terminate in their voyage to Calais.
We cannot, however, discover that there was any hotel with the name of the Royal George in Dover at that or any other period; but Robert Allbut, hunting for one to serve its purpose, hit upon the King’s Head Hotel, which he says was the old coaching-house for the London Mail, and therefore must have been the hostelry Dickens had in mind. Other authorities mention the Ship, long since disappeared, upon whose site now stands the Lord Warden Hotel, where Dickens often stayed himself, and occasionally mentions in his writings. Taking into consideration the date ofthe story, one may rightly assume that the Ship was the hotel at which Mr. Lorry’s coach deposited him. It was the Ship no doubt that Byron sang of in the following verse:
Thy cliffs, dear Dover! harbour and hotel;Thy custom-house, with all its delicate duties;Thy waiters running mucks at every bell;Thy packets, all whose passengers are bootiesTo those who upon land or water dwell;And last, not least, to strangers uninstructed,Thy long, long bills, whence nothing is deducted.
But it has long ago gone, and in its place the fashionable Lord Warden now stands.
Ye Old Cheshire Cheese, that popular tavern in Fleet Street, was never, we believe, ever mentioned in any one of Dickens’s books by name, nor can we discover that it was alluded to or described even under an assumed name. It is known that he visited it, and the menu card bearing a picture of what is known as Dr. Johnson’s room, with Dickens and Thackeray seated at the table presided over by the shade of the lexicographer itself, is familiar to visitors.
THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE
Dickens students, however, are of opinion that the Cheshire Cheese is the tavern where Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton dined after the trial at the Old Bailey, described in ChapterIV of Book 2. The evidence offered for this is as follows:
Darnay tells Carton that he is faint for want of food.
“Then why the devil don’t you dine? I dined myself while those numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to—this, or some other.” “Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well in,” replied Carton.
“Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate Hill to Fleet Street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here they were shown a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton sat opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port before him, and his full half-insolent manner upon him.”
The Cheshire Cheese no doubt was the tavern Dickens was thinking of when he wrote the foregoing passages. It certainly was the resort of the literary and legal professions in those days, as it has been since. It is too well known to warrant any detailed account of it here. Besides, its two-and-a-half-century history is too packed with anecdote and story to allow of adequate description in our limited space. An excellent book is issuedby the proprietors fully dealing with its past, and copiously illustrated.
There seems to be a growing desire on the part of Dickens students to prove that Cooling, the hamlet in Kent near to Gads Hill is not the spot where are laid certain scenes ofGreat Expectations, in spite of the fact that Dickens told Forster it was. We do not propose to argue the matter here. The chief point at issue seems to be that there is no blacksmith’s forge at Cooling, whereas there is at Chalk and at Hoo, two other villages in the district that claim the honour. Yet at Chalk there are no “graveyard lozenges,” but at Hoo we believe there happens to be both lozenges in the churchyard and a forge in the village.
On the other hand, we are told therewasa blacksmith’s forge at Cooling in Dickens’s time. If, therefore, we accept Cooling as Joe Gargery’s village, the Horseshoe and Castle Inn there would stand for the Three Jolly Bargemen where Joe Gargery and Pip used to while away certain hours of the evening, as described in Chapter X of the book.
It is first referred to on the occasion when Pip had promised “at his peril” to bring Joe home from it. “There was a bar at the JollyBargemen,” Pip tells us, “with some alarmingly long chalk scores in it on the wall at the side of the door” which seemed never to be paid off. They had been there ever since he could remember, and had grown more than he had. There was a common-room at the end of the passage with a bright large kitchen fire, where Joe smoked his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle. It was here that Pip again encountered his convict who stirred his drink with the file Pip had borrowed for him earlier in the story, and where he was presented with a shilling wrapped in “two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle markets in the country.”
It is the scene of many incidents in the story. Indeed, it was the meeting place of all the men of the village, to whom Mr. Wopsle read the news round the fire, and where all the gossip of the district was retailed.
The Horseshoe and Castle is a typical village inn, in all appearances like a doll’s house, built of wood in a quite plain fashion, lying a little back from the road. It was in this inn that Mr. Jaggers unexpectedly appeared one day enquiring for Pip, which ultimately resulted in the change in Pip’s fortune and his journey to London.
Pip’s journey from “our town,” as he calls it, to the Metropolis, was, we read, “a journey of about five hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse stage-coach by which I was passenger got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.”
This incident of the early life of Pip, related in 1860, was a reminiscence of Dickens’s early childhood, which he recalls inThe Uncommercial Traveller, when he tells us that, as a small boy, he “left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in the land,” and he left it in a stage-coach. “Through all the years that have since passed,” he goes on, “have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed—like game—and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.... The coach that carried me away was melodiously called Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson at the coach office up street.” In speaking of Dullborough and “our town,” it is known that Dickens was referring to Rochester.
The Cross Keys was a notable coaching inn of those days, and the Rochester coaches started and ended their journey there. It was demolishedover fifty years ago. Although Dickens does not give us one of his pleasant pen-pictures of it, he refers to it occasionally in other of his stories, such asLittle DorritandNicholas Nickleby.
Another one-time famous London inn, referred to inGreat Expectations, but no longer existing, is Hummum’s, in Covent Garden.
When Pip received that note one evening on reaching the gateway of the Temple, warning him not to go home, he hired a chariot and drove to Hummum’s, Covent Garden. He spent a very miserable night there. In those times, he tells us, “a bed was always to be got there at any hour of the night, and the chamberlain, letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the candle next in order on his shelf, and showed me straight into the bedroom next in order. It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the back, with a despotic monster of a four-post bed in it, straddling over the whole place, putting one of its arbitrary legs into the fire-place, and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.”
He goes on to wail of his doleful night. The room smelt of cold soot and hot dust, the tester was covered in blue-bottle flies, which he thought must be lying up for next summer. “When I hadlain awake a little while, those extraordinary voices, with which silence teems, began to make themselves audible. The closet whispered, the fire-place sighed, the little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers.”
He then thought of the unknown gentleman who once came to Hummum’s in the night and had gone to bed and destroyed himself and had been found in the morning weltering in his blood. Altogether a dismal, doleful and miserable experience of Hummum’s. But no doubt Pip’s liver or nerves were the cause of it, not the hotel.
Another reference to it is made inSketches by Bozin the chapter describing the streets in the morning. Speaking of the pandemonium which reigns in Covent Garden at an early hour after daybreak, the talking, shouting, horses neighing, donkeys braying, Dickens says “these and a hundred other sounds form a compound discordant enough to a Londoner’s ears, and remarkably disagreeable to those of country gentlemen who are sleeping at Hummum’s for the first time.”
There is an hotel standing in Covent Garden with the same name to-day, but, although it is on the same spot, it is not the Hummum’s of whichPip speaks. That was demolished long ago, and was the scene of a marvellous ghost story told in Boswell’s Johnson concerning Parson Ford.
The Ship at Gravesend, mentioned as the waterside inn where Pip and his assistants managed to row the convict Magwitch, with the idea of smuggling him out of the country, is known as the Ship and Lobster.
THE SHIP AND LOBSTER, GRAVESENDDrawn by C. G. Harper
Having run alongside a little causeway made of stones, Pip left the rest of the occupants of the boat and stepped ashore, and found the light they had observed from the river to be in the window of a public-house. “It was a dirty place enough,and I daresay not unknown to smuggling adventurers; but there was a good fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and bacon to eat and various liquors to drink. Also there were two double-bedded rooms—‘such as they were,’ the landlord said.... We made a very good meal by the kitchen fire, and then apportioned the bedrooms.... We found that the air was carefully excluded from both as if air was fatal to life; and there were more dirty clothes and bandboxes under the beds than I should have thought the family possessed. But we considered ourselves well off, notwithstanding, for a more solitary place we could not have found.”
Outside this inn Magwitch was again captured, and transferred to a galley, where Pip eventually joined him and accompanied him to his destination.
Dickens knew Gravesend well, and his description of the Ship and Lobster is a faithful one. It is situated on the shore at Denton, a village adjoining the town, not far from the official Lighterman’s at Denton Wharf. At one time it flourished as a popular tea-garden resort.
There are two other inns in the book that must not be overlooked. The Blue Boar at Rochester,where Pip stayed when he visited his old town, which was the Bull Inn there, and is dealt with in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick”; and the tavern where Wemmick’s wedding-breakfast was held. This is said to be the Fox under the Hill, nearly at the top of Denmark Hill. It is now a modern public-house, but sixty or seventy years ago it was an old wayside inn—a pleasant little tavern, and a favourite resort, especially on Sunday evenings in the summer, for the youthful population of Walworth and Camberwell.
We close this chapter with the brief account of the festive occasion:
“Breakfast had been ordered at a pleasant little tavern, a mile or so away upon the rising ground beyond the green[2]and there was a bagatelle board in the room, in case we should desire to unbend our minds after the solemnity. It was pleasant to observe that Mrs. Wemmick no longer unwound Wemmick’s arm when it adapted itself to her figure, but sat in a high-backed chair against the wall, like a violoncello in its case, and submitted to be embraced as that melodious instrument might have done. We had an excellent breakfast, and, when anyone declined anything on the table, Wemmick said, ‘Provided bycontract you know; don’t be afraid of it!’ I drank to the new couple, drank to the Aged, drank to the Castle, saluted the bride at parting, and made myself as agreeable as I could.”
Our Mutual Friend
THE SIX JOLLY FELLOWSHIP-PORTERS—THE THREE MAGPIES—THE SHIP, GREENWICH—THE WHITE LION—THE ANGLERS’ INN—THE EXCHEQUER COFFEE-HOUSE
Theoutstanding tavern inOur Mutual Friendis that with the pleasant-sounding name of The Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, the favoured resort of Rogue Riderhood, Gaffer Hexam, and their boon companions, which is so closely associated with the unravelling of the mystery of John Harmon. It exists to-day as the Grapes, and continues to be the favoured resort of river watermen whose business keeps or brings them to the picturesque Reach.
When Dickens was engaged on his book, it is said that he wrote some chapters in a house adjoining the Grapes, overlooking the river. The Dropsical Tavern, as he calls it, was then knownas the Bunch of Grapes, which, by a process of clipping, became first the Grapes Inn, and then finally the Grapes, by which it is known at the present time. Its front entrance is at 76 Narrow Street, Limehouse, and occupies little more space (as noted by the novelist) than to allow for its front door. Although the front of the building has been modernised, it still remains as narrow and tall as when Dickens likened it to “a handle of a flat iron set upright on its broadest end.” The inn has been very little altered in other respects since he so minutely described it. Certainly, an ordinary public-house bar has cut off a portion of the original bar, and, if in those days “the available space in it was not much larger than a hackney-coach,” its area is even smaller to-day, but yet quite comfortable enough to “soften the human breast.”
It is in describing this bar that Dickens gives the clue to the identification of the tavern. “No one,” he says, “could have wished the bar bigger, that space was so girt in by corpulent little casks, and by cordial bottles radiant with fictitiousgrapes in bunches, and by lemons in nets, and by biscuits in baskets, and by polite beer-pulls that made low bows when customers were served with beer ... and by the landlady’s own small tablein a snugger corner near the fire....” Many of these alluring etceteras have given place to others, perhaps less enticing, and among those that have gone are the cordial bottles with the “grapes in bunches” on them. We have learned, however, from the present genial hostess, Mrs. Higgins, that at one time, not only did the cordial bottles bear the engraved sign of a bunch of grapes, but certain of the windows also were so embellished, and it was only a few years ago, when the front was altered, that these disappeared.
It is not, however, necessary merely to rely on this piece of identification to assure us that the Grapes Inn was the original of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, for a visit to it with Chapter VI ofOur Mutual Friendfor a guidance leaves no doubt in the mind. Therein we read that “the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, already mentioned as a tavern of a dropsical appearance, had long settled down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house. Externally, it was a narrow, lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, witha crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; indeed, the whole house, inclusive of the complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended over the water, but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all.”
That is how Dickens describes the river frontage of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, and his words apply just as accurately to the Grapes Inn. As one stands on the crazy wooden verandah, which is reached from the foreshore by steep wooden steps, one can call to mind the scene in the book describing Gaffer Hexam landing the “found drowned,” and then, by turning into the “tap and parlour” behind, “which gave on to the river, and had red curtains to match the noses of the regular customers,” one finds oneself in the room where the inquest on John Harmon was held, with Gaffer Hexam as witness before the coroner’s jury, Mr. Mortimer Light wood as “eminent solicitor,” and Mr. Inspector watching the proceedings on behalf of the Home Office. The room is not used for such purposes to-day, but is put to the more pleasant one of social intercourse between workers on the great waterway during and after their labours, who, if you are so disposed,will welcome you there, and discourse on the mystery of tides and ships. If you accept them as fellow-creatures you may be invited to a game of darts, meanwhile regaling yourself with the modern substitutes for “those delectable drinks” known in the days when Miss Abbey Potterson reigned supreme on her throne as sole proprietor and manager of the Fellowship-Porters, as Purl, Flip, and Dog’s Nose. These watermen reach this haven, if the tide is out, by means of the wooden steps; when the tide is high and the house is “all but afloat,” the small row-boats are brought into use and the occupants approach the inn like veritable gondoliers and moor their craft outside whilst they refresh themselves within.
THE GRAPES INN, LIMEHOUSEPhotograph by T. W. Tyrrell
Beyond this room is the small one which served as Miss Abbey Potterson’s haven. “This haven,” Dickens says, “was divided from the rough world by a glass partition and a half-door with a leaden sill upon it for the convenience of resting your liquor; but over this half-door the bar’s snugness so gushed forth that, albeit customers drank there standing, in a dark and draughty passage where they were shouldered by other customers passing in and out, they always appeared to drink under an enchanting delusion that they were in the bar itself.”
The glass partition and the half-door, over which Gaffer Hexam is seen leaning in Marcus Stone’s picture in the book, is still there, but is not now used for the same purpose. It is the private entrance to the back of the modern public bar.
What Dickens said of the antiquity of the Fellowship-Porters is true of the Grapes Inn. “The wood forming the chimney-pieces, beams, partitions, floors, and doors of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters seemed in its old age fraught with confused memories of its youth. In many places it had become gnarled and riven, according to the manner of old trees; knots started out of it, and here and there it seemed to twist itself into some likeness of boughs. In this state of second childhood, it had an air of being in its own way garrulous about its early life. Not without reason was it often asserted by the regular frequenters of the Porters that, when the light shone full upon the grain of certain panels, and particularly upon an old corner cupboard of walnut wood in the bar, you might trace little forests there, and tiny trees like the parent tree in full umbrageous leaf.” Unfortunately, most of these oak panels and beams are now hidden from view by varnished match-boarding, but some of the panels and some of thebeams remain exposed to confirm Dickens’s fanciful picture.
Miss Abbey Potterson, the mistress of this establishment, was “a tall, upright, well-favoured woman, though severe of countenance, and had more the air of a schoolmistress than mistress of the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters.” Here she ruled supreme, and at the closing time she ordered one after the other to leave with such admonitions as “George Jones, your time is up! I told your wife you should be punctual,” and so all wished Miss Abbey good night and Miss Abbey wished good night to all. She knew how to manage the rough class of river-men who frequented her house, and was the more respected for it. “Being known on her own authority as Miss Abbey Potterson,” Dickens tells us, “some waterside heads, which (like the water) were none of the clearest, harboured muddled motions that, because of her dignity and firmness, she was named after, or in some sort related to, the Abbey at Westminster. But Abbey was only short for Abigail, by which name Miss Potterson had been christened at Limehouse Church some sixty years and odd before.”
Without recording all the references in the book to the Fellowship-Porters, we note that, towardsthe end of it, John and Bella paid an official visit to the police station and visited afterwards the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters with Mr. Inspector for purposes of identification. During this visit, Mr. Inspector gives this very good character to the inn, “a better-kept house is not known to our men. What do I say? Half so well a kept house is not known to our men. Show the Force the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters, and the Force—to a constable—will show you a piece of perfection.” This, no doubt, was Dickens’s own opinion, too.
The Grapes to-day serves the same purpose as did the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters in the story, and is of as good repute. It is the house of call of the watermen from the river in the day-time and from the road after work is done, and it seems to be conducted by the present hostess much as it was by Miss Abbey Potterson, not so rigidly perhaps, but with the same good-natured friendliness which is reflected in the attitude and behaviour of all the frequenters. There does not even seem the necessity for a Bob Glibbery; at any rate, we have not met his successor on the occasions of our visits there. Nor does his room down “towards the bed of the river,” where he was ordered to proceed to his supper, exist at the present time. That must have been somewhere contiguous to the secret smuggling arches which ran under the building from the river, now filled in.
LIMEHOUSE REACHDrawn by L. Walker
The Grapes Inn is a place to visit. If one can choose a fine summer’s evening to sit under “the corpulent windows” on the “crazy wooden verandah” and watch the busy river with its myriads of craft floating by, one can enjoy the view and atmosphere much as did Whistler, Napier Hemy, and Dickens himself.
In J. Ashby Sterry’s “A River Rhymer,” is a set of verses entitled “Down Limehouse Way,” two of which may be appropriately quoted here:
Close by I mind an inn you’ll find,Where you will not refuseTo rest a bit, as there you sit,And gaze on river views—’Tis very old—with windows bold,That bulges o’er the tide;Whence you can spy ships passing byOr watch the waters glide!You can sit in the red-curtained bayAnd think, while you’re puffing a clay,’Tis no indecorumTo drink sangarorum—While musing down Lime’us way!You’ll find this spot—now does it notRecall and keep aliveThe varied crew Charles Dickens drewIn eighteen sixty-five?Here Hexam plied his trade and died,And Riderhood conspired;While things they’d pop at Pleasant’s shop,When cash might be required!Here under Miss Abbey’s firm sway,Who made all her clients obey,Was ruled with discretionAnd rare self-possessionThe “Porters” down Lime’us way!
The name of the Fellowship-Porters which Dickens adopted for the sign of Miss Abbey Potterson’s public-house was that of one of the old City Guilds. For over 800 years the City of London successfully claimed and exercised the sole right to unload grain vessels arriving in the Thames, and realised enormous revenues from the privilege. In 1155, the Guild or Brotherhood of Fellowship-Porters was incorporated and a charter was granted. It was reincorporated in 1613, and appointed by the City to carry or store corn, salt, coals, fish, and fruit of all kinds.
The Fellowship-Porters at one time numbered 3,000 members, and the Guild had the power granted by act of Council in 1646 to choose twelve rulers, the Lord Mayor and Aldermen reservingthe right to appoint one of the number. The company had a hall of its own which stood near to the Waterman’s Hall in St. Mary’s Hill, Billingsgate, but had no livery or arms, and ranked the nineteenth in the order of procedure. Membership carried with it the freedom of the City by payment of £2 18s. 6d., and five guineas to Fellowship Hall—these fees being demanded before they could work as dock labourers. When Millwall Docks were built, the City challenged the docks on the matter of their privilege, and the case went to the Law Courts. It was then discovered that the Charter could not be produced, it having been destroyed by the Great Fire of London, so it was supposed. This blow ruined the Guild, and some thirty years ago the organization was wound up, the then present members being deprived of work, pensions, and everything else their Charter entitled them to as Freemen of the City.
Another notable tavern inOur Mutual Friendis the Ship, at Greenwich, where two memorable little dinners were given. The first was the occasion when, Bella Wilfer having been presented with a purse and a fifty-pound bank-note by Mr. Boffin, took her dear old father, the cherub, to Greenwich by boat on a secret expedition, as she called it, and entertained him to dinner there.
First calling for her father at his City office, where the messenger described her to her father as “a slap-up gal in a bang-up chariot,” she handed him the purse with instructions, not to be disregarded, to “go to the nearest place where they keep everything of the very very best, ready made; you buy and put on the most beautiful suit of clothes, the most beautiful hat, and the most beautiful pair of bright boots (patent leather, Pa, mind!) that are to be got for money; and you come back to me.” After half an hour he came back “so brilliantly transformed that Bella was obliged to walk round him in ecstatic admiration twenty times before she could draw her arm through his and delightfully squeeze it.”
She then ordered him to “take this lovely woman out to dinner.” The question came, “Where shall we go, my dear?” “Greenwich!” said Bella valiantly. “And be sure you treat this lovely woman with everything of the best.” And off they went in quest of the boat to take them down the river, and eventually arrived at the Ship Tavern. The little expedition down the river to reach it, we are told, “was delightful, and the little room overlooking the river into which they were shown for dinner was delightful.Everything was delightful. The park was delightful, the lunch was delightful, the dishes of fish were delightful, the wine was delightful. Bella was more delightful than any other item in the festival.” And, as they sat together looking at the ships and steamboats making their way to the sea with the tide that was running down, “the lovely woman imagined all sorts of voyages for herself and Pa.” So enchanted did Pa become that he was as willing “to put his head into the Sultan’s tub of water as the beggar-boys below the window were to puttheirsin the mud”; and so the happy moments flew by and the time came to ring the bell, and pay the waiter, and return to London.
Later on in the same identical room in the same identical tavern overlooking the Thames, the same delightful couple, with John Rokesmith, partook of another delightful dinner. Earlier in the day Bella Wilfer had become Mrs. John Rokesmith and celebrated the event with breakfast at Bella’s cottage at Blackheath, and with a dinner at the Ship Tavern later, Bella’s father being the only other guest.
“What a dinner! Specimens of all the fishes that swim in the sea surely had swum their way to it, and, if samples of the fishes of divers coloursthat made a speech in the ‘Arabian Nights,’ and then jumped out of the frying pan, were not to be recognised, it was only because they had all become of one hue by being cooked in the batter among the whitebait. And the dishes being seasoned with Bliss—an article which they are sometimes out of at Greenwich—were of perfect flavour, and the golden drinks had been bottled in the golden age and hoarding up their sparkles ever since.”
The whole function was a sheer delight, a crowning success; but the full appreciation of its charm cannot be indicated by short quotations; it must be read in detail to be thoroughly enjoyed. The scene inspired J. Ashby Sterry to again drop into poetry:
A wedding banquet here must dwellWithin one’s brightest recollection;Where Bella, John and Pa, as well,Made merry o’er the choice refection!The sparkling wine, the happy pair,With all their aged affection;The bland “Archbishop’s” tender care,And Rumpty Wilfer’s smart oration!—A scene where fun and pathos blend,With all the heart and truth that lendA charm unto “Our Mutual Friend!”
Alas! the tavern in which these happy hours were spent is a thing of the past, but its prosperous and palmy days are recorded in Time’s annals.
THE SHIP HOTEL, GREENWICHDrawn by L. Walker
In the days when Greenwich was famous for its whitebait dinners, the town was noted for its hotels overlooking the waterside. The chief of these was the Ship, whilst another notable one was the Trafalgar, hard by, patronised by members of the Cabinet of the day, who led the fashion in these functions; it being “the correct thing” then, when a little special festivity was forward, to resort to one of these inns at Greenwich for the purpose, it is not surprising to learn that on several occasions Dickens and his literary and artistic coterie followed the custom by arranging social gatherings in celebration of some event connected with one of the company either at the Ship or the Trafalgar. As early as 1837 we find him suggesting Greenwich for a friendly meeting-place.
But there were two very noteworthy occasions associated with Dickens when Greenwich was selected for jovial and pleasant parties of close friends. The first of these took place on the novelist’s return from America in 1842, when a few of his kindred spirits adopted this method for welcoming him back to England. Among thecompany were Talfourd, Tom Hood, Monckton Milnes, B. W. Procter, D. Maclise, R.A., Clarkson Stanfield, R.A., Captain Marryat, “Ingoldsby” Barham, George Cruikshank, and John Forster. “I wish you had been at Greenwich the other day,” he wrote to Felton, “where a party of friends gave me a private dinner; public ones I have refused. C—— was perfectly wild at the reunion, and, after singing all manner of marine songs, wound up the entertainment by coming home (six miles) in a little open phaeton of mine,on his head, to the mingled delight and indignation of the metropolitan police. We were very jovial, indeed.”
On the other occasion Dickens was the instigator of the feast. This was in 1843, when, on the retirement of John Black from the editorial chair of the oldChronicle, the novelist arranged a dinner in honour of his old friend at Greenwich, on the 20th of May. Dickens ordered all things to perfection and the dinner succeeded in its purpose, as in other ways, quite wonderfully, Forster tells us. Among the entertainers were Sheil and Thackeray, Fonblanque and Charles Buller, Southwood Smith and William Johnson Fox, Macready and Maclise, as well as Forster and Dickens.
These dinners took place at the Ship or the Trafalgar, both well known to the novelist, as was Greenwich generally, for he frequently refers to the ancient town and its customs in his writings.
The Ship Tavern was originally built with a weather-board front, overlooking the river. But, about the middle of the last century, the newer and much handsomer structure as seen in our illustration, was erected upon the site of the original one, and its pretty garden was the scene of many gay parties, whilst its rooms often rang with merriment from the festive diners. After the waning of the fashion for whitebait banquets, it long maintained its popularity with visitors to the Thames historic town.
Our Mutual Friendis essentially a story of the Thames, and certainly the inns and taverns of the book are either on the water’s edge or in close proximity to it. The two already dealt with are below London Bridge, in the midst of the busy traffic of trade, whilst the remainder are situated in its more picturesque district where pleasure is sought.
It will be recalled that, when Mrs. Boffin and the secretary set out in search of the charming orphan recommended by the Rev. Frank Milvey,they hired a phaeton and made their way to the abode of Mrs. Betty Higden in whose care was the child. They discovered that old lady in complicated back settlements of “Muddy Brentford,” and, having left their equipage at the sign of the Three Magpies, continued their quest on foot. A second visit to Brentford is recorded later in the book, on which occasion a carriage was ordered, for Bella and Sloppy were also of the party. “So to the Three Magpies as before; where Mrs. Boffin and Miss Bella were handed out, and whence they all went on foot to Mrs. Betty Higden’s.”
No other allusion to the inn is made than the bare mention of the name; but the original inn to which Dickens alludes undoubtedly is the Three Pigeons, that ancient hostelry at Brentford whose history is associated with Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and their contemporaries, many of whom referred to it in their plays and essays. In Goldsmith’sShe Stoops to Conquer, it will be remembered, Tony Lumpkin sings a song in praise of it, whilst two scenes of the comedy take place in the inn.
Lowen, a leading actor in Shakespeare’s company, we are told, kept the inn at the time, and Shakespeare personally instructed him in HenryVIII. It was a well-known coaching inn then, and at one time its stables occupied several acres.
In 1905 it was partially reconstructed, and in 1916 it was closed under order of the licensing justices of Middlesex.
THE RED LION HOTEL, HAMPTONDrawn by C. G. Harper
In the chapter describing the flight of Betty Higden we are told that her pilgrimage took her through Chertsey, Walton, Kingston, and Staines, and so on to her journey’s end. One day she was sitting in a market-place on a bench outside an inn. Here she became nervous of those whoquestioned her, and determined to move on. As she left the spot she had looked over her shoulder before turning out of the town, and had seen the “sign of the White Lion hanging across the road, and the fluttering market booths and the old grey church, and the little crowd gazing after her, but not attempting to follow her.”
Although the name of this town is not mentioned, there is no doubt that the description is of Hampton, and that the inn is the Red Lion, whose picturesque sign still spans the street, with the view of the “old grey church” behind it.
The scenes of the fourth book bring us to the district of Henley, although the name is never mentioned and the locks and inns are given fictitious names. But it has not been difficult to locate the spots from the novelist’s accurate descriptions. The only inn which plays an important part in the unravelling of the story in this neighbourhood is given the name of the Anglers’ Inn. All authorities identify this as the Red Lion, Henley. It was here that Eugene Wrayburn found accommodation when in pursuit of Lizzie Hexam. The inn is on the west bank of the river and north of the bridge, and, being a favourite resort of anglers, the name Dickens gives it is appropriate enough. It was to this inn thatLizzie Hexam brought the apparently lifeless body of Eugene Wrayburn after her brave rescue of it from the water, following the murderous attack on him by Bradley Headstone.
“She rowed hard—rowed desperately, but never wildly—and seldom removed her eyes from him in the bottom of the boat.... The boat touched the edge of the patch of inn lawn sloping gently to the water. There were lights in the windows, but there chanced to be no one out of doors. She made the boat fast, and again by main strength took him up, and never laid him down until she laid him down in the house.”
This patch of green lawn sloping gently to the river coincides with that of the Red Lion, Henley. It was also in this inn, some weeks later, that Lizzie and Eugene were married. It was still uncertain if he would recover, and, in conformity with his wish, the ceremony was performed round his bed, the Rev. Frank Milvey officiating, Bella and her husband, Mortimer Lightwood, Mrs. Milvey and Jenny Wren being in attendance.
The Red Lion is a famous old coaching-inn, as well as a fishing and boating one of renown. It is not only very old but large. Standing by the bridge in prominent fashion it appeals to the eye at once:
’Tis a finely toned, picturesque, sunshiny, place,Recalling a dozen old stories;With a rare British, good-natured, ruddy-hued face,Suggesting old wines and old Tories.
to quote once more from Ashby Sterry’s rhymes.
It was on a window in this old inn that Shenstone the poet scratched with a diamond about 1750 that celebrated stanza of his:
Who’er has travelled life’s dull round,Where’er his stages may have been,May sigh to think how oft he foundThe warmest welcome at an inn;
—at least, so tradition has it. But Mr. Charles G. Harper thinks it doubtful, and feels that the Henley referred to by historians must have been Henley-in-Arden.
There is one inn mentioned in the book which has not, that we are aware of, been identified. It is the Exchequer Coffee-House, Palace Yard, Westminster, the address given by Mr. Julius Handford to Mr. Inspector on the occasion when he viewed the body of the drowned man (Bk. 1, Chapter III).
The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
WOOD’S HOTEL, FURNIVAL’S INN—THE TILTED WAGON—THE TRAVELLERS’ TWOPENNY—THE CROZIER, CLOISTERHAM—THE KING’S ARMS, LANCASTER—THE SHIP, ALLONBY—THE ANGEL, DONCASTER, AND OTHERS
Itis a curious fact that Wood’s Hotel, one of London’s old-time inns which must have been familiar to Dickens in his very early days—even before he commenced writing hisPickwick Papers—did not furnish a scene in any of his books until it figured inEdwin Drood, his last.
As early as 1834, when on the staff of the “Morning Chronicle,” Dickens lived at 13 Furnival’s Inn, and in the following year moved to No 15, where he commencedThe PickwickPapers, and where he took to himself a wife and where his first child was born.
During these days Wood’s Hotel occupied the north side of the quiet quadrangle of Furnival’s Inn, and Dickens must have known it well. It was a staid and respectable house with an air about it of domestic comfort, suitable for country visitors, and where, we are informed, family prayers, night and morning, were included in the accommodation.
Its stately building of four stories had dignity added to it by the four tall white stone pillars in the centre portion of the front reaching to the third floor. Although stolid-looking, it was not aggressively so, nor was it altogether unpicturesque, with its grass plot immediately before the entrance, encircling a statue of the founder of the inn, surrounded by white posts connected by chains.
Its imposing appearance from without reflected the comforts which the inside of a reputable family hotel is expected to provide. At such an hotel one would naturally look for courteous attention from waiters and chambermaids, and good meals cleanly served, and at Wood’s no disappointment in these respects was experienced. Indeed, Dickens conveys that idea in referring to it inEdwin Drood.
Entering through the archway of Furnival’s Inn, the hotel caught the eye immediately, and acted as a relief to the straight, angular, and flat appearance of the buildings which formed the once famous quadrangle so intimately associated with Dickens.
It is believed by some, and was definitely stated to be a fact by a writer in the American magazine, the “Cosmopolitan,” for May, 1893, and again by a writer in the “Middlesex and Hertfordshire Notes and Queries,” July, 1895, that Dickens in his bachelor days had apartments on the second floor of the hotel in the right-hand corner, and that in the latter years of its existence the walls of this same room were decorated with pictures of scenes and characters from his works.
We have, however, been unable to find any authority for this statement. But it is quite possible that he frequented the hotel, and we may even assume that he and his friends, Hablôt K. Browne and Robert Young, who occupied rooms in Furnival’s when they were executing engravings for Pickwick, would perhaps chat over details in a snug room in the hotel, when they would be joined by their other friend and engraver, Finden.
Bearing all these ideas in mind, it is certainly a little strange that Dickens waited for his lastbook before he introduced the hotel into his writings.
In that book we are told that Mr. Grewgious crossed over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn from Staple Inn opposite for his dinner “three hundred days in the year at least,” and after dinner crossed back again. On one occasion, a very important interview between him and Edwin Drood took place in his chambers, and Edwin was pressed to stay for a meal. “We can have dinner in from just across Holborn,” Grewgious assured him, and Bazzard, his clerk, was not only invited to join them, but asked if he would mind “stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in materials for laying the cloth.... For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made dish that can be recommended and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton) and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare—in short, we’ll have whatever there is on hand.”
Bazzard, after bringing out the round table, accordingly withdrew to execute the orders. His return with the waiters gives Dickens an opportunity for one of his humorous descriptivepassages which we make no excuse for quoting in full:
“Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters—an immovable waiter, and a flying waiter; and the three brought in with them as much fog as gave a new roar to the fire. The flying waiter, who had brought everything on his shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while the immovable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him. The flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and the immovable waiter looked through them. The flying waiter then flew across Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the joint and the poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was discovered from time to time that the immovable waiter had forgotten them all. But, let the flying waiter cleave the air as he might, he was always reproached on his return by the immovable waiter for bringing fog with him and being out of breath. At the conclusion of the repast, by which time the flying waiter was severely blown, the immovable waiter gathered up the table-clothunder his arm with a grand air, and, having sternly (not to say with indignation) looked on at the flying waiter while he set clean glasses round, directed a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious, conveying: ‘Let it be clearly understood between us that the reward is mine, and thatnilis the claim of this slave,’ and pushed the flying waiter before him out of the room.”
Thus the waiters of Wood’s Hotel, which was the name of the hotel referred to, although not mentioned by Dickens. Later in the book, we get a more intimate association with it. After the murder of Edwin Drood, Rosa Bud hurriedly takes coach from Rochester and presents herself to her guardian in his chambers. She is tired and hungry, naturally, and Grewgious, concerned for her welfare, asks her what she will take after her journey. “Shall it be breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea or supper?” he enquires.
“Your rest, too, must be provided for,” he went on; “and you shall have the prettiest chamber in Furnival’s. Your toilet must be provided for, and you shall have everything that an unlimited head chambermaid—by which expression I mean a head chambermaid not limited as to outlay—can procure.”
WOOD’S HOTEL, FURNIVAL’S INNDrawn by L. Walker
“Rosa thanked him, but said she could only take a cup of tea. Mr. Grewgious, after several times running out, and in again, to mention such supplementary items as marmalade, eggs, watercresses, salted fish, and frizzled ham, ran across to Furnival’s without his hat, to give his various directions. And soon afterwards they were realised in practice, and the board was spread.”
After a friendly chat over tea, he escorted her to her rooms. He “helped her to get her hat onagain, and hung upon his arm the very little bag that was of no earthly use, and led her by the hand (with a certain stately awkwardness, as if he were going to walk a minuet) across Holborn, and into Furnival’s Inn. At the hotel door, he confided her to the unlimited head chambermaid, and said that while she went up to see her room he would remain below, in case she should wish it exchanged for another, or should find that there was anything she wanted.”
Rosa’s room was airy, clean, comfortable, almost gay. The Unlimited had laid in everything omitted from the very little bag (that is to say, everything she could possibly need) and Rosa tripped down the great stairs again, to thank her guardian for his thoughtful and affectionate care of her.
“‘Not at all, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, infinitely gratified; ‘it is I who thank you for your charming confidence and for your charming company. Your breakfast will be provided for you in a neat, compact, and graceful little sitting-room (appropriate to your figure) and I will come to you at ten o’clock in the morning. I hope you don’t feel very strange indeed in this strange place.’
“‘Oh no, I feel so safe!’
“‘Yes, you may be sure that the stairs are fireproof,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘and that any outbreak of the devouring element would be perceived and suppressed by the watchmen.’”
Having seen Rosa comfortably settled, he left her, assuring the night porter as he went that, “if someone staying in the hotel should wish to send across the road to me in the night, a crown will be ready for the messenger.”