To the hotel next morning Mr. Grewgious went faithfully to time with Mr. Crisparkle, who had followed Rosa up from Rochester as fast as he could. Soon also Tartar arrived. After a long consultation between them about Mr. Landless and the use Tartar’s chambers could be put to for certain spying purposes, Tartar took Rosa and Mr. Grewgious for a row up the river. Apartments ultimately being found for Rosa elsewhere, she left Wood’s Hotel, and no further reference is made to it in the book.
In 1898 Furnival’s Inn was demolished with its hotel. Upon its site now stand an insurance company’s huge premises.
In Chapter XV, detailing Neville Landless’s long tramp from Cloisterham, we are told that he stopped at the next road-side tavern to refresh. Dickens describes it in the following words:
“Visitors in want of breakfast—unless they were horses or cattle, for which class of guests there was preparation enough in the way of water-trough and hay—were so unusual at the sign of the Tilted Wagon that it took a long time to get the wagon into the track of tea and toast and bacon; Neville, in the interval, sitting in a sanded parlour, wondering in how long a time after he had gone the sneezy fire of damp fagots would begin to make somebody else warm. Indeed, the Tilted Wagon was a cool establishment on the top of a hill, where the ground before the door was puddles with damp hoofs and trodden straw; where a scolding landlady slapped a moist baby (with one red sock on and one wanting) in the bar; where the cheese was cast aground upon a shelf in company with a mouldy table-cloth and a green-handled knife in a sort of cast-iron canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumbs over its shipwreck in another canoe; where the family linen, half-washed and half dried, led a public life of lying about; where everything to drink was drunk out of mugs, and everything else was suggestive of a rhyme to mugs: the Tilted Wagon, all these things considered, hardly kept its painted promise of providing good entertainment for man and beast.”
Mr. Edwin Harris, in his guide to Dickensian Rochester, has identified the Coach and Horses on the top of Strood Hill as the original of the Tilted Wagon.
The Travellers’ Twopenny, where the boy deputy was a “man-servant,” as he explained to Jasper, was originally the White Duck, and afterwards Kit’s lodging-house, and stood in the Maidstone Road at Rochester. It degenerated into a crazy wooden sort of cheap public-house, and was not demolished before it was necessary. On its site now stands a business warehouse.
The Crozier, the “Orthodox Hotel,” where Datchery lodged in the same city, was the Crown, and is dealt with in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick.”
In the late autumn of 1857, Dickens and Wilkie Collins started “on a ten or twelve days’ expedition to out-of-the-way places, to do (in inns and coast corners) a little tour in search of an article and in avoidance of railroads.” Their selection was the Lake District, but the outcome of their expedition was not one article merely but a series of five under the title ofThe Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, written in collaboration. The two idle apprentices were Francis Goodchild andThomas Idle, the first name being the pseudonym of Dickens.
These misguided young men, they inform us in the narrative, “were actuated by the low idea of making a perfectly idle trip in any direction. They had no intention of going anywhere in particular; they wanted to see nothing; they wanted to know nothing; they wanted to learn nothing; they wanted to do nothing. They wanted only to be idle ... and they were both idle in the last degree.” In that spirit they set forth on their journey.
Carrock Fell, Wigton, Allonby, Carlisle, Maryport, Hesket Newmarket, were all visited in turn, and the adventures of the twain in these spots duly set forth in the pages of the book. In due course they came to Lancaster, and, the inn at that town being the most important of the tour, we deal with it first.
The travellers were meditating flight at the station on account of Thomas Idle being suddenly filled with “the dreadful sensation of having something to do.” However, they decided to stay because they had heard there was a good inn at Lancaster, established in a fine old house; an inn where they give you bride-cake every day after dinner. “Let us eat bride-cake,” they said,“without the trouble of being married, or of knowing anybody in that ridiculous dilemma.” And so they departed from the station and were duly delivered at the fine old house at Lancaster on the same night.
This was the King’s Arms in the Market Street, the exterior of which was dismal, quite uninviting, and lacked any sort of picturesqueness such as one associates with old inns; but the interior soon compensated for the unattractiveness of the exterior by its atmosphere, fittings and customs. Being then over two centuries old, it had allurement calculated to make the lover of things old happy and contented. “The house was a genuine old house,” the story tells us, “of a very quaint description, teeming with old carvings, and beams, and panels, and having an excellent staircase, with a gallery or upper staircase cut off from it by a curious fence-work of old oak, or of old Honduras mahogany wood. It was, and is, and will be, for many a long year to come, a remarkably picturesque house; and a certain grave mystery lurking in the depth of the old mahogany panels, as if they were so many deep pools of dark water—such, indeed, as they had been much among when they were trees—gave it a very mysterious character after nightfall.”
A terrible ghost story was attached to the house concerning a bride who was poisoned there, and the room in which the process of slow death took place was pointed out to visitors. The perpetrator of the crime, the story relates, was duly hanged, and in memory of the weird incident bride-cake was served each day after dinner.
The complete story of this melodramatic legend is narrated to Goodchild by a spectre in the haunted chamber where he and his companion had been writing.
Dickens wove into the story much fancy and not a little eerieness, and it is said that the publicity given to it inHousehold Words, in which it first appeared, created so much interest that the hotel was sought out by eager visitors who love a haunted chamber. As this was situated in an ancient inn with its antique bedstead all complete, to say nothing of the curious custom of providing bride-cake at dinner in memory of the unfortunate bride, the King’s Arms, Lancaster, discovered its fame becoming world-wide instead of remaining local.
At the time of the visit of Dickens and Wilkie Collins to this rare old inn, the proprietor was one Joseph Sly, and Dickens occupied what he termed the state bedroom, “with two enormous redfour-posters in it, each as big as Charley’s room at Gads Hill.” He described the inn as “a very remarkable old house ... with genuine rooms and an uncommonly quaint staircase.” A certain portion of the “lazy notes” for the book were, we are told, written at the King’s Arms Hotel.
THE KING’S ARMS, LANCASTERDrawn by L. Walker
On their arrival, Dickens and Collins sat downto a good hearty meal. The landlord himself presided over the serving of it, which, Dickens writes in a letter, comprised “two little salmon trout; a sirloin steak; a brace of partridges; seven dishes of sweets; five dishes of dessert, led off by a bowl of peaches; and in the centre an enormous bride-cake. ‘We always have it here, sir,’ said the landlord, ‘custom of the house.’ Collins turned pale, and estimated the dinner at half a guinea each.”
Mr. Sly became quite good friends with the two distinguished novelists, and cherished with great pride the signed portrait of Dickens which the author ofPickwickpresented him with. He left the old place in 1879 and it was soon afterwards pulled down and replaced by an ordinary commercial hotel. Although the bride-cake custom was abandoned, and the haunted chamber with its fantastic story swept away, it is interesting to know that the famous oak bedstead, in which Dickens himself slept, was acquired by the Duke of Norfolk.
Mr. Sly, who died in 1895, never tired of recalling the visit of the two famous authors. He took the greatest pride in his wonderful old inn, and found real delight in conducting visitors over the building and telling amusing stories about Dickens andWilkie Collins. Indeed, he was so proud of the association that he obtained Dickens’s permission to reprint those passages ofThe Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprenticesrelating to the hostelry, in pamphlet form, with an introductory note saying, “The reader is perhaps aware that Mr. Charles Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins, in the year 1857, visited Lancaster, and during their sojourn stayed at Mr. Sly’s King’s Arms Hotel.”
There is a further association with the inn and Dickens to be found in “Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions.” We find it recorded there that Doctor Marigold and his Library Cart, as he called his caravan, “were down at Lancaster, and I had done two nights’ more than the fair average business (though I cannot in honour recommend them as a quick audience) in the open square there, near the end of the street where Mr. Sly’s King’s Arms and Royal Hotel stands.”
“Doctor Marigold” was published in 1865, seven years after Dickens’s visit. But he not only remembered the King’s Arms, but also Mr. Sly, the proprietor, who thus became immortalised in a Dickens story. Mr. Sly evidently was a popular man in the town, and his energy and good nature were much appreciated. That this was so, the following paragraph bears witness:
It is recorded as an historical fact that, on the marriage of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, the demonstration made in Lancaster exceeded any held out of the Metropolis. The credit of this success is mainly due to Mr. Sly, who proposed the programme, which included the roasting of two oxen whole, and a grotesque torchlight procession. The manner in which the whole arrangements were carried out was so satisfactory to the inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood that, at a meeting held a short time after the event, it was unanimously resolved to present Mr. and Mrs. Sly with a piece of plate, of a design suitable to commemorate the event. The sum required was subscribed in a few days, the piece of plate procured, and the presentation was made in the Assembly Rooms on the 9th of November by the High Sheriff, W. A. F. Saunders, Esq., of Wennington Hall, in the presence of a numerous company.
In its palmy days the King’s Arms was a prominent landmark for travellersen routeto Morecambe Bay, Windermere, the Lakes, and Scotland. It was erected in 1625, and in the coaching era was the head hotel in the town for general posting purposes, and was the most suitable place for tourists to break their journey goingNorth, or in returning. Consequently, it was one of the most important in the North of England.
The inn the two idle apprentices entered at Hesket Newmarket “to drink whiskey and eat oat-cake” is not named, but it has been identified with a house which is no longer an inn. At the time of the story it was called the Queen’s Head, and was quite a prominent hostelry in the town, the innkeeper of which is described as having “a ruddy cheek, a bright eye, a well-knit frame, an immense hand, a cheery, outspeaking voice, and a straight, bright, broad look. He had a drawing-room, too, upstairs, which was worth a visit to the Cumberland Fells.”
“The ceiling of this drawing-room,” we are further told, “was so crossed and re-crossed by beams of unequal lengths, radiating from a centre, in a corner, that it looked like a broken starfish. The room was comfortably and solidly furnished with good mahogany and horsehair. It had a snug fireside, a couple of well-curtained windows, looking out upon the wild country behind the house. What it most developed was an unexpected taste for little ornaments and knick-knacks, of which it contained a most surprising number,” which Dickens goes on to describe in his own whimsical manner.
Hesket has not altered very much, we understand, since those days, and the inn itself remains, not as an inn, but as a private house, and the room where the oat-cake and whiskey were served still has its crossed and re-crossed beams of unequal length.
From this inn, and under the guidance of the landlord, the two idle apprentices mounted Carrock—with what disastrous effects to Mr. Idle on the way down, readers of the story well know.
On again reaching the inn, under uncomfortable circumstances, they remained only a few hours, and continued the tour to Wigton in a covered carriage. Here, Mr. Idle was “melodramatically carried to the inn’s first floor and laid upon three chairs.” The King’s Arms is said to be the Wigton inn referred to, but no details are given of it in the book.
Their next halting place was Allonby, where they put up at the Ship. Thomas Idle, we are informed, “made a crab-like progress up a clean little bulk-headed staircase, into a clean little bulk-headed room, where he slowly deposited himself on a sofa, with a stick on either hand of him, looking exceedingly grim,” and both partook of dinner. The little inn is described asdelightful, “excellently kept by the most comfortable of landladies and the most attentive of landlords.” It still exists, and, “as a family and commercial hotel and posting-house commanding extensive views of the Solway Firth and the Scottish Hills,” is apparently little altered since Dickens and Collins visited it. Its Dickensian associations are cherished by the owner to-day, who shows with pride the room occupied by the two literary giants.
After their visit to Lancaster, already referred to, the two idle apprentices went on to Doncaster, and arrived there in the St. Leger Race week. They put up at the Angel Hotel, where they had secured rooms, which Dickens described as “very good, clean and quiet apartments on the second floor, looking down into the main street.” His own room was “airy and clean, little dressing-room attached, eight water-jugs ... capital sponge bath, perfect arrangement, exquisite neatness.”
Doncaster during the race week is described as a collection of mad people under the charge of a body of designing keepers, horse-mad, betting-mad, vice-mad. But the two novelists managed to find it enticing enough to remain there a week.
The Angel Hotel was often called the Royal because Queen Victoria stayed there in 1851. It was built in 1810, has always been a celebrated hotel, and was a busy coaching-inn in those days. It remains much as it was when Thomas Idle lay in the room for a week with his bad ankle and his friend Francis Goodchild went roaming around the city with his usual observant eyes.
Sketches by Boz and The Uncommercial Traveller
THE GOAT AND BOOTS—THE BLUE LION AND STOMACH WARMER—THE RED HOUSE—THE FREEMASONS’ TAVERN—THE EAGLE—OFFLEY’S—THE RAINBOW—THE ALBION—THE FLOWER-POT—THE BULL’S HEAD—THE DOLPHIN’S HEAD—THE LORD WARDEN HOTEL—THE CRISPIN AND CRISPIANUS
InDickens’s minor writings there are mentioned many inns, taverns and coffee-houses, some merely fictitious with fanciful names, others whose fame has been recorded in the social history of their times.Sketches by Bozis fairly well supplied in this respect, but none of them is described at any length; indeed, scarcely anything but the names are mentioned, and those only in passing. In the second chapter of “Our Parish,”we are introduced to the new curate who became so popular with the ladies that their enthusiasm for him knew no bounds. It culminated, we are told, when “he spoke for one hour and twenty-five minutes at an anti-slavery meeting at the Goat and Boots.” A proposal was forthwith set on foot to make him a presentation, and this, in the shape of a splendid silver ink-stand engraved with an appropriate inscription, was publicly handed to him at a special breakfast at the aforementioned Goat and Boots, “in a neat little speech by Mr. Gubbins, the ex-churchwarden, and acknowledged by the curate in terms which drew tears into the eyes of all present—the very waiters melted.”
The Goat and Boots was no doubt a highly respectable hostelry, but its whereabouts is “wropped in mystery.” So is the Blue Lion and Stomach Warmer, except that we are told that it was at Great Winglebury, and we know that Great Winglebury was a fictitious name for Rochester. But which was the inn that received this whimsical name at the hands of the novelist under whose roof Horace Hunter penned his challenge to that base umbrella-maker Alexander Trott, we are unable to state. On the other hand, the Winglebury Arms where Alexander Trott wasstaying at the time was the Bull Hotel, Rochester.[3]The Red House, Battersea, casually mentioned in the chapter on “The River” as the “Red-us,” was a popular tavern and tea-gardens in those days and notorious for its pigeon-shooting; indeed, tradition has it that it took the lead in the quality and quantity of the sport, and that the crack shots assembled there to determine important matches. It was also famous as the winning-post of many a boat race from Westminster Bridge, and was the place “where all the prime of life lads assembled,” the joy and fun of which is vividly described by Dickens in the chapter referred to. It was a red-bricked building, and a prominent landmark of what was then known as Battersea Fields, the one-time scene of many a duel.
The Cross Keys mentioned in the chapter on “Omnibuses” we have already referred to when dealing withGreat Expectations; whilst for particulars of the Golden Cross, the busy coaching-inn mentioned in “Hackney Coach Stands,” and in “Early Coaches,” we must refer the reader to “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick.”
The Freemasons’ Tavern in the chapter on “Public Dinners” does not receive much attentionfrom Dickens. He is describing the public dinner given in aid of the “Indigent Orphans Friends’ Benevolent Institution,” and no reference beyond the use of the name is made to the building itself. The tavern still stands to-day, and no doubt more glorious in its splendour than it was on the occasion of the public dinner Dickens refers to. It is used to-day for similar purposes, the ceremony and atmosphere at which being little changed from what it was then. It is interesting to note that in the same building a farewell dinner was given Dickens on the eve of his departure for America in 1867, with Lord Lytton in the chair.
The chapter devoted to the story of Miss Evans and the Eagle, recalls the notorious tavern immortalised in the famous jingle:
Up and down the City Road,In and out the Eagle,That’s the way the money goes—Pop goes the weasel!
and the chronicle of Miss Jemima Evans’s visit to the highly famed pleasure-resort will contribute more towards retaining the Eagle on the recording tablets of history than the contemporary rhymster’s poetic effort. It was in 1825 that the Eagle Tavern turned its saloon into what was the forerunner of the music hall, and was the makingof many a well-known singer. It was to this gay spot in London that Mr. Samuel Wilkins took Miss Jemima Evans, with whom he “kept company.” They were joined in the Pancras Road by Miss Ivins’s lady friend and her young man. We do not attempt to identify the Crown where they stayed on the way to taste some stout, and are content with the knowledge that they reached the rotunda where the concert was held, and to remind our readers of the impression it had on Miss J’mima Ivins and Miss J’mima Ivins’s friend, who both exclaimed at once “How ’ev’nly!” when they were fairly inside the gardens. Dickens’s description of the place will convey some idea of its splendour:
“There were the walks, beautifully gravelled and planted—and the refreshment boxes, painted and ornamented like so many snuff-boxes—and the variegated lamps shedding their rich light upon the company’s heads—and the place for dancing ready chalked for the company’s feet—and a Moorish band playing at one end of the gardens—and an opposition military band playing away at the other. Then, the waiters were rushing to and fro with glasses of negus, and glasses of brandy and water, and bottles of ale, and bottles of stout; and ginger-beer was going offin one place, and practical jokes were going off in another; and people were crowding to the door of the Rotunda; and, in short, the whole scene was, as Miss J’mima Ivins, inspired by the novelty, or the stout, or both, observed, ‘One of dazzling excitement.’ As to the concert room, never was anything half so splendid. There was an orchestra for the singers, all paint, gilding, and plate-glass; and such an organ!... The audience was seated on elevated benches round the room, and crowded into every part of it; and everybody was eating and drinking as comfortably as possible.”
THE EAGLE TAVERN PLEASURE GARDENSFrom an old Print
What happened to our friends there, and how the trouble over the waistcoat and whiskers was adjusted, is not our business here. The printed account must be read elsewhere. But we have quoted what is perhaps one of the best pictures of this famous resort extant.
Ultimately, the Rotunda was turned into the Grecian Theatre, and was not demolished until 1901. By then, of course, the real glory of the Eagle had departed and succeeding generations of Jemima Evanses and their young men friends had sought other glittering palaces for their pleasures.
There are two taverns mentioned in the followingparagraph appearing in the chapter on Mr. John Dounce:
“There was once a fine collection of old boys to be seen round the circular table at Offley’s every night, between the hours of half-past eight and half-past eleven. We have lost sight of them for some time. There were, and may be still for aught we know, two splendid specimens in full blossom at the Rainbow Tavern in Fleet Street, who always used to sit in the box nearest the fire-place, and smoked long cherry-stick pipes which went under the table with the bowls resting on the floor.”
Offley’s, long ago demolished, was a noted tavern in its day, and, according to Timbs, enjoyed great and deserved celebrity, though short-lived. It was situated at No. 23 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, and its fame rested on Burton ale and the largest supper-room in the neighbourhood. It had a certain dignity about it, and eschewed “pictures, placards, paper-hangings, or vulgar coffee-room finery,” in order that its customers should not be disturbed in their relish of the good things provided. Of these good things may be mentioned Offley’s chop, which was thick and substantial. The House of Commons chop was small and thin, and HonourableMembers sometimes ate a dozen at a sitting. “Offley’s chop was served with shalots shred and warmed in gravy, and accompanied by nips of Burton ale, and was a delicious after-theatre supper.” There was a large room upstairs with wines really worth drinking, and withal Offley’s presented a sort of quakerly plainness, but solid comfort. There was singing by amateurs one day a week, and, to prevent the chorus waking the dead in their cerements in St. Paul’s churchyard opposite, the coffee-room window was double.
Upon other evenings, there came to a large round table (a sort of privileged place) a few well-to-do, substantial tradesmen from the neighbourhood, and this was the little coterie to which Dickens refers.
The Rainbow, also mentioned in the quotation above, was the second house in London to sell coffee and was at one time kept by a Mr. Farr, who was prosecuted for the nuisance caused by the odious smell in the roasting of the berry. In later years (about 1780) the tavern was kept by Alexander Moncrieff, grandfather of the author of “Tom and Jerry,” and was known as the Rainbow Coffee-House. In those days the coffee-room had a lofty bay-window at the south end, looking into the Temple; the room was separated from thekitchen only by a glazed partition. In the bay was a table for the elders, amongst whom doubtless were the “grand old boys” Dickens speaks of as being always there, puffing and drinking away in great state. Everybody knew them, and it was supposed by some people that they were both “immortal.”
In the chapter “Making a Night of It,” we learn that Mr. Potter, in his “rough blue coat with wooden buttons, made upon the fireman’s principle, in which, with the addition of a low-crowned, flower-pot, saucer-shaped hat,” created no inconsiderable sensation at the Albion in Little Russell Street, and divers other places of public and fashionable resort.
“Making a Night of It” is no doubt mainly reminiscent of a merry evening in the business life of Dickens, and possibly the Albion was one of the favourite resorts of his, and of his co-clerk, Potter. In their day, the Albion was favoured by the theatrical profession and all those associated with things theatrical, and also by those young men who hung on the skirts of actors.
Dickens used the Albion in the ’fifties. In a letter to W. H. Wills (1851) there are instructions to order a plain cold supper at Simpson’s, the Albion, by Drury Lane Theatre, for the nextplay night. “I would merely have cold joints, lobsters, salad, and plenty of clean ice,” he says. “Perhaps there might be one hot dish, as broiled bones. But I would have only one, and I would have it cheap.” The play referred to was “Not so Bad as we Seem,” which Dickens and his friends were rehearsing for the Guild of Literature and Art. The supper was to be paid for at so much per head, “not including wines, spirits or beers, which each gentleman will order for himself.”
Mr. Percy FitzGerald tells of another evening when Dickens took his friends to the Albion. It was the occasion of Hollingshead’s revival of “The Miller and his Men,” and Dickens was determined to be there. He gave a little dinner party at “the good old Albion,” and all were in great spirits, seated in one of the “boxes” or eating pews as they might be called, and then crossed over the Drury Lane Theatre afterwards.
In the chapter devoted to “Mr. Minns and his Cousin,” in giving instructions as to the best way for Mr. Augustus Minns to get to Mr. Budden’s in Poplar Walk, the latter says, “Now mind the direction; the coach goes from the Flower Pot in Bishopsgate Street, every half-hour. When the coach stops at the Swan, you’ll see, immediately opposite you, a White House.”
The Flower Pot was a coaching inn of some distinction in those days, for not only did the coaches ply between it and the north-east of London, but the inn was also the starting point of the Norwich coach and others to the eastern counties. The Swan was at Stamford Hill, and, beyond that it was the scheduled stopping-place for coaches, to and from London, we can find no record of its history.
The innumerable references to inns and taverns inThe Uncommercial Travellerare for the most part purely imaginary. Even when it is clear that Dickens is describing something he actually saw and experienced, he has taken the precaution, in this book, to disguise the inn’s name and whereabouts. There are several such in the chapter entitled “Refreshments for Travellers,” a chapter made up of a series of complaints and adverse criticisms verging on the brink of libel. For instance:
“Take the old-established Bull’s Head with its old-established knife-boxes on its old-established sideboards, its old-established flue under its old-established four-post bedsteads in its old-established airless rooms, its old-established frouziness upstairs and downstairs, its old-established cookery, and its old-established principles ofplunder. Count up your injuries, in its side-dishes of ailing sweetbreads in white poultices, of apothecaries’ powders in rice for curry, of pale stewed bits of calf ineffectually relying for an adventitious interest on forcemeat balls. You have had experience of the old-established Bull’s Head stringy fowls, with lower extremities like wooden legs sticking up out of the dish; of its cannibalistic boiled mutton, gushing horribly among its capers, when carved; of its little dishes of pastry—roofs of spermaceti ointment erected over half an apple or four gooseberries. Well for you if you have yet forgotten the old-established Bull’s Head fruity port; whose reputation was gained solely by the old-established price the Bull’s Head put upon it, and by the old-established air with which the Bull’s Head set the glasses and d’oyleys on, and held that Liquid Gout to the three-and-sixpenny wax candle, as if its old-established colour hadn’t come from the dyers.”
Had that inn been properly named at the time, the proprietor’s ire would have been raised, with serious consequences.
Then there is the chapter on “An Old Stage-Coaching House,” whose title seemed to augur well for our purpose. Yet, although it is interesting as picturing the decay of coaching and how itresulted on a coaching town, there is nothing by which we can fix the name of the town, and so identify the Dolphin’s Head there. It had been a great stage-coaching town in the great stage-coaching times, and the ruthless railways had killed and buried it. That is all we are told about its whereabouts.
“The sign of the house was the Dolphin’s Head. Why only head I don’t know; for the Dolphin’s effigy at full length, and upside down—as a dolphin is always bound to be when artistically treated, though I suppose he is sometimes right side upward in his natural condition—graced the sign-board. The sign-board chafed its rusty hooks outside the bow-window of my room, and was a shabby work. No visitor could have denied that the dolphin was dying by inches, but he showed no bright colours. He had once served another master; there was a newer streak of paint below him, displaying with inconsistent freshness the legend, ByJ. Mellows.
“Pursuing my researches in the Dolphin’s Head, I found it sorely shrunken. When J. Mellows came into possession, he had walled off half the bar, which was now a tobacco shop with its own entrance in the yard—the once glorious yard where the post-boys, whip in hand and alwaysbuttoning their waistcoats at the last moment, used to come running forth to mount and away. A ‘Scientific Shoeing-Smith and Veterinary Surgeon’ had further encroached upon the yard; and a grimly satirical Jobber, who announced himself as having to let ‘A neat one-horse fly, and a one-horse cart,’ had established his business, himself, and his family, in a part of the extensive stables. Another part was lopped clean off from the Dolphin’s Head, and now comprised a chapel, a wheelwright’s, and a Young Men’s Mutual Improvement and Discussion Society (in a loft); the whole forming a back lane. No audacious hand had plucked down the vane from the central cupola of the stables, but it had grown rusty and stuck at Nil: while the score or two of pigeons that remained true to their ancestral traditions and the place had collected in a row on the roof-ridge of the only outhouse retained by the Dolphin, where all the inside pigeons tried to push the outside pigeon off. This I accepted as emblematical of the struggle for post and place in railway times.”
There are, however, at least three inns we have been able to trace: the Blue Boar, London (dealt with in a previous chapter), the Crispin and Crispianus at Strood, and The Lord WardenHotel at Dover. The latter is referred to in the chapter entitled “The Calais Night Mail” as follows:
“I particularly detest Dover for the self-complacency with which it goes to bed. It always goes to bed (when I am going to Calais) with a more brilliant display of lamp and candle than any other town. Mr. and Mrs. Birmingham, host and hostess of the Lord Warden, are my much esteemed friends, but they are too conceited about the comforts of that establishment when the Night Mail is starting. I know it is a good house to stay at, and I don’t want the fact insisted upon in all its warm bright windows at such an hour. I know The Warden is a stationary edifice that never rolls or pitches, and I object to its big outline seeming to insist upon that circumstance, and, as it were, to come over me with it, when I am reeling on the deck of the boat. Beshrew the Warden likewise for obstructing that corner, and making the wind so angry as it rushes round. Shall I not know that it blows quite soon enough without the officious Warden’s interference?”
The Lord Warden was evidently built on the site of the Ship, as we have already noted in the chapter devoted toA Tale of Two Cities.
The Crispin and Crispianus at Strood ismentioned in the chapter on “Tramps.” The tramp in question is a clockmaker, who, having repaired a clock at Cobham Hall, and paid freely for it, says, “We should be at liberty to go, and should be told by a pointing helper to keep round over yonder by the blasted oak, and go straight through the woods till we should see the town lights right before us.... So should we lie that night at the ancient sign of the Crispin and Crispianus, and rise early next morning to be betimes on tramp again.”
The Crispin and Crispianus is a very old-fashioned inn still standing just outside Strood. It is a long building with an overhanging upper floor built with wood. How long the present house has existed we cannot tell, but its hanging sign speaks of St. Crispin’s Day, 1415, and it is said that it may probably have had its origin from the Battle of Agincourt fought on that day. Mr. Harper thinks the sign older than that, and probably was one of the very many religious inn-signs designed to attract the custom of thirsty wayfarers to Becket’s shrine.
The brothers Crispin and Crispian were members of a noble family in ancient Rome, who, professing Christianity, fled to Gaul and supported themselves by shoemaking in the town of Troyes. They suffered martyrdom in Soissons in A.D. 287. The sign represents the patron saints of the shoemaking fraternity, as these holy brothers are designated, at work on their cobblers’ bench, and is understood to have been faithfully copied from a well-known work preserved to this day at the church of St. Pantaleon at Troyes.
THE CRISPIN AND CRISPIANUSDrawn by C. G. Harper
The inn’s interior is typical of those to be found in country villages, with its sanded floor of the parlour, and wooden settles with arms at each corner. One of these corners is said to have been the favourite seat of Dickens, for it is known that he sometimes called at the inn as he drew near the end of one of his long walks, either alone or with friends, for refreshments. It was an inn, as he said elsewhere, that no thirsty man was known to pass on a hot summer’s day.
Christmas Stories and Minor Writings
THE MITRE INN—THE SALISBURY ARMS—THE PEAL OF BELLS—THE NUTMEG-GRATER—THE DODO—THE PAVILIONSTONE HOTEL—HEN AND CHICKENS—THE SWAN
Inthe First Branch of “The Holly Tree,” inChristmas Stories, there are many inns far and wide referred to, and reminiscences associated with each recalled. These reminiscences may be personal to Dickens or merely of an imaginary nature. The Holly Tree Inn itself is real enough, and has been identified as the George, Greta Bridge, referred to in our chapter onNicholas Nickleby. There is no doubt, either, that the inn in the cathedral town where Dickens went to school was the Mitre Inn at Chatham. “It was the inn where friends used to put up,” he says, “and where we used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and to be tipped. It had anecclesiastical sign—the Mitre—and a bar that seemed the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord’s daughter to distraction—but let that pass. It was in that inn that I was cried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight. And though she had been, that Holly Tree night, for many a long year where all tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.”
THE MITRE INN, CHATHAMFrom an engraving
The Mitre Inn and Clarence Hotel still exists at Chatham, very much as it was in Dickens’s childhood days when his family lived in OrdnanceTerrace. It was kept in those days by a Mr. Tribe, who was a friend of John Dickens, and the two families met there and enjoyed many friendly evenings when Dickens and his sister, as he has told us, mounted on a dining-table for a stage, would sing some old sea-songs together. He had a clear treble voice then, but, recalling these incidents many years afterward, said, “he must have been a horrible little nuisance to many unoffending grown-up people who were called upon to admire him.”
The Mitre Inn was described in 1838 as being the Manor House, and the first posting-house of the town. It is also on record that, at the close of the eighteenth century, Lord Nelson used to reside there when on duty at Chatham, and that the room he occupied was known as “Nelson’s Cabin” till recent times. William the Fourth, when Duke of Clarence, used to stay there, hence the added word of Clarence to the sign.
The Salisbury Arms at Hatfield where Mr. and Mrs. Lirriper went upon their wedding-day, “and passed as happy a fortnight as ever happy was,” adjoined the little post-office there, and now exists as a private house. Mr. Lirriper’s youngest brother also had a sneaking regard for the Salisbury Arms, where he enjoyed himself for thespace of a fortnight and left without paying his bill, an omission Mrs. Lirriper rectified in the innocent belief that it was fraternal affection which induced her unprincipled brother-in-law to favour Hatfield with his presence.
It is believed that Dickens and Phiz stayed the night of October the 27th, 1838, at the Salisbury Arms, when they made their excursion to the West Country.
The scene of the first four chapters of “A Message from the Sea,” is laid in “Steepways, North Devon, England,” the name Dickens gives to Clovelly, and the story opens with a faithful and unmistakable description of one of the most beautiful and quaintest villages in England. To it comes Captain Jorgan to unravel a sea mystery, but no reference is made to his staying at the inn there. The task he has set himself, however, eventually takes him to another adjacent village, which Dickens calls Lanrean. There he puts up at the King Arthur’s Arms, to identify which we must first identify Lanrean. That Dickens had a certain village near Clovelly in mind, there is little doubt, for he and Wilkie Collins, who collaborated in writing the story, went there for the purpose. Their description of Clovelly being so accurate and meticulous, it is only naturalthat Lanrean has a prototype, and, if found, the original of King Arthur’s Arms would be forthcoming.
The original of the Peal of Bells, the village ale-house, in “Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” on the other hand, has been discovered, for Mr. Traveller seeking Mr. Mopes the Hermit, naturally had to go where Mr. Mopes the Hermit located himself. This we know to have been near Stevenage, and F. G. Kitton identified the ale-house as the White Hart there, where Dickens called on his way to see Lucas, the original of Mr. Mopes, to enquire of the landlord, old Sam Cooper, the shortest route to his “ruined hermitage” some five miles distant.
No particular coffee-houses were, we suspect, intended for the Slamjam Coffee-House or the Admiral Nelson Civic and General Dining Rooms, mentioned in “Somebody’s Luggage”; nor can we hope to identify the George and the Gridiron, where the waiters supported nature by what they found in the plates, “which was, as it happened, and but too often thoughtlessly, immersed in mustard,” or what was found in the glasses, “which rarely went beyond driblets and lemons.”
No name either is given to the inn in “Mugby Junction” where the traveller arrived at pastthree o’clock on a tempestuous morning and found himself stranded. Having got his two large black portmanteaux on a truck, the porter trundled them on “through a silent street” and came to a stop. When the owner had shivered on the pavement half an hour, “what time the porter’s knocks at the inn door knocked up the whole town first, and the inn last, he groped his way into the close air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.”
It is known that Mugby stood for Rugby, but that is all. The particular shut-up inn, if it ever had any original, has not, so far as we are aware, been discovered.
InA Christmas Carolwe are told that Scrooge “took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s book, went home to bed.”
There were many taverns in the city of London at which Scrooge might have dined, and it may be that Baker’s Chop-House in Change Alley, as has been suggested, was the one he chose. It is no longer a chop-house, having a year or so backbeen taken over by a city business company, and the building added to their premises. But it had been for a century or more a noted city chop-house, where, up to the last, meals were served on pewter plates, and other old-time customs were retained. It was one of those city houses, of which some still exist happily, where the waiters grow old in the service of their customers. Baker’s had at least one such waiter, known familiarly as James, who pursued his calling there for thirty-five years, and became famous by having his portrait painted in oils and hung in the lower room, where it remained until the end of the career of the house as a tavern. Perhaps old Scrooge was one of his special customers.
The Nutmeg-Grater, the inn kept by Benjamin Britain in “The Battle of Life,” has no real prototype, but such an inn as described would entice any country rambler into its cosy interior. It was “snugly sheltered behind a great elm tree, with a rare seat for idlers encircling its capacious bole, addressed a cheerful front towards the traveller, as a house of entertainment ought, and tempted him with many mute but significant assurances of a comfortable welcome. The ruddy sign-board perched up in the tree, with its golden letters winking in the sun, ogled the passer-by,from among the leaves, like a jolly face, and promised good cheer. The horse trough, full of clear, fresh water, and the ground below it sprinkled with droppings of fragrant hay, made every horse that passed prick up his ears. The crimson curtains of the lower rooms, and the pure white hangings in the little bedrooms above, beckoned Come in! with every breath of air. Upon the bright green shutters, there were golden legends about beer and ale, and neat wines, and good beds, and an affecting picture of a brown jug frothing over at the top. Upon the window-sills were flowering plants in bright red pots, which made a lively show against the white front of the house; and in the darkness of the doorway there were streaks of light, which glanced off from the surface of bottles and tankards”——
An ideal picture of an inn any traveller would love to encounter and sample.
Reprinted Pieceswould form a happy hunting-ground for tracking down inns and public-houses mentioned in its pages if one were so minded. Few of them would prove to be of any importance if discovered, but the task would have its excitement and interest.
Take for instance the chapter devoted to the Detective Police. No doubt the taverns used bythe criminals which the police had to visit were real houses, as the detectives whom Dickens interviewed were real persons. In this chapter alone there is the Warwick Arms, through which, and the New Inn near R., Tally-Ho Thompson the horse stealer was tracked and captured; the “little public-house” near Smithfield, used by journeymen butchers, and those concerned in “the extensive robberies of lawns and silks”; and the Setting Moon in the Commercial Road, where Simpson was arrested in a room upstairs.
Then there is the extinct inn, the Dodo, in one of the chiefest towns of Staffordshire—the pivot of the chapter on “A Plated Article.” Which is the town, and which is the inn referred to, we know not. But Dickens’s description of it is very minute:
“If the Dodo were only a gregarious bird,” he says, “if he had only some confused idea of making a comfortable nest, I could hope to get through the hours between this and bedtime, without being consumed by devouring melancholy. But the Dodo’s habits are all wrong. It provides me with a trackless desert of sitting-room, with a chair for every day in the year, a table for every month, and a waste of sideboard where a lonely Chinavase pines in a corner for its mate long departed, and will never make a match with the candlestick in the opposite corner if it live till Doomsday. The Dodo has nothing in the larder. Even now I behold the Boots returning with my sole in a piece of paper; and, with that portion of my dinner, the Boots, perceiving me at the blank bow-window, slaps his leg as he comes across the road, pretending it is something else. The Dodo excludes the outer air. When I mount up to my bedroom, a smell of closeness and flue gets lazily up my nose like sleepy snuff. The loose little bits of carpet writhe under my tread, and take wormy shapes. I don’t know the ridiculous man in the looking-glass, beyond having met him once or twice in a dish-cover—and I can never shavehimto-morrow morning! The Dodo is narrow-minded as to towels; expects me to wash on a freemason’s apron without the trimming: when I ask for soap, gives me a stony-hearted something white, with no more lather in it than the Elgin marbles. The Dodo has seen better days, and possesses interminable stables at the back—silent, grass-grown, broken-windowed, horseless. This mournful bird can fry a sole, however, which is much. Can cook a steak, too, which is more. I wonder where it gets its sherry? If I wereto send my pint of wine to some famous chemist to be analysed, what would it turn out to be made of? It tastes of pepper, sugar, bitter-almonds, vinegar, warm knives, any flat drinks, and a little brandy. Would it unman a Spanish exile by reminding him of his native land at all? I think not. If there really be any townspeople out of the churchyards, and if a caravan of them ever do dine, with a bottle of wine per man, in this desert of the Dodo, it must make good for the doctor next day!”
If the Dodo is undiscoverable, the same need not be said of the Pavilionstone Hotel, because we know that Dickens gave that name to the town of Folkestone, in the chapter entitled “Out of Town.” The lion of Pavilionstone, he tells us, is its great hotel, and one sees at once how he manufactured the name, for its hotel was, and is to-day, called the Pavilion.
“A dozen years ago, going over to Paris by South-Eastern Tidal Steamer,” the narrative goes on, “you used to be dropped upon the platform of the main line Pavilionstone Station (not a junction then) at eleven o’clock on a dark winter’s night, in a roaring wind; and in the howling wilderness outside the station was a short omnibus which brought you up by the forehead the instantyou got in at the door; and nobody cared about you, and you were alone in the world. You bumped over infinite chalk, until you were turned out at a strange building which had just left off being a barn without having quite begun to be a house, where nobody expected your coming, or knew what to do with you when you were come, and where you were usually blown about, until you happened to be blown against the cold beef, and finally into bed. At five in the morning you were blown out of bed, and after a dreary breakfast, with crumpled company, in the midst of confusion, were hustled on board a steamboat, and lay wretched on deck until you saw France lingering and surging at you with great vehemence over the bowsprit.”
THE LORD WARDEN HOTEL, DOVERSeepage 253
THE PAVILION HOTEL, FOLKESTONEFrom old Engravings
This was written in 1855, and even by then Dickens had to admit that things had changed considerably for the better.
“If you are going out to Great Pavilionstone Hotel, the sprightliest porters under the sun, whose cheerful looks are a pleasant welcome, shoulder your luggage, drive it off in vans, bowl it away in trucks, and enjoy themselves in playing athletic games with it. If you are for public life at our great Pavilionstone Hotel, you walk into that establishment as if it were your club; andfind ready for you your news-room, dining-room, smoking-room, billiard-room, music-room, public breakfast, public dinner twice a day (one plain, one gorgeous), hot baths and cold baths. If you want to be bored, there are plenty of bores always ready for you, and from Saturday to Monday in particular you can be bored (if you like it) through and through. Should you want to be private at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, say but the word, look at the list of charges, choose your floor, name your figure—there you are, established in your castle, by the day, week, month, or year, innocent of all comers or goers, unless you have my fancy for walking early in the morning down the groves of boots and shoes, which so regularly flourish at all the chamber doors before breakfast that it seems to me as if nobody ever got up or took them in....
“A thoroughly good inn, in the days of coaching and posting, was a noble place. But no such inn would have been equal to the reception of four or five hundred people, all of them wet through, and half of them dead sick, every day in the year. This is where we shine, in our Pavilionstone Hotel....”
The hotel has, alas, made way for something still more imposing. Its extensive red-brickbuilding, containing hundreds of rooms, with its spacious gardens in front, would both astonish and disappoint the novelist if he saw it to-day, for there is no doubt that he was very fond of its predecessor, very frequently used it, and found hearty welcome there.
The hotel is again referred to in the sketch entitled “A Flight” in the same volume, where, however, he calls it the Royal George Hotel.
In the volume ofMiscellaneous Papersthere is one describing a visit to Birmingham and Wolverhampton, under the heading of “Fire and Snow.” At the latter town Dickens stayed at the Swan, which he says “is a bird of a good substantial brood, worthy to be a country cousin of the hospitable Hen and Chickens, whose company we have deserted for only a few hours, and with whom we shall roost again at Birmingham to-night.”
The Hen and Chickens here referred to was an hotel Dickens knew very well indeed. Apart from his books, Birmingham is very closely connected with Dickens himself and the various schemes he embarked upon for the welfare of others. He visited it on several occasions, either for the purpose of public reading from his works, to give theatrical performances for charity, or to appearat some national function associated with the city. These visits were spread over the whole of his life, the last occasion being on the 7th of January, 1870, when he presented the prizes to the students of the Birmingham and Midland Institute.
During his stay in the city, Dickens usually put up at the Old Royal Hotel in Temple Row, or at the Hen and Chickens in New Street, and it may be assumed that he knew both hotels well. Only the former, however, is made the scene of an incident in his novels, and that is, when it is introduced intoThe Pickwick Papers.[4]He visited Birmingham some dozen times from 1840 to 1870, and on most of the early occasions it is believed that he stayed at the Old Royal Hotel. But during his later visits he made the Hen and Chickens Hotel his headquarters. He was there in Christmas week, 1853, for the series of readings from his books, and before he left the city he and his friends were entertained at breakfast at the hotel, and a presentation was made to Mrs. Dickens.
He was a guest there again in 1861, and on the occasion wrote his autograph in the album of the proprietress, dated “Last day of the year 1861.”
For some reason he does not describe the hotel in the same manner as he does the Swan at Wolverhampton. The latter, he tells us, “has bountiful coal-country notions of firing, snug homely rooms; cheerful windows looking down upon the clusters of snowy umbrellas in the market-place.... Neat, bright-eyed waitresses do the honours of the Swan. The Swan is confident about its soup, is troubled with no distrust concerning codfish, speaks the word of promise in relation to an enormous chine of roast beef.... The Swan is rich in slippers—in those good old flip-flap inn-slippers which nobody can keep on, which knock double knocks on each stair as their wearer comes downstairs, and fly away over the banisters before they have brought him to level ground.”
There are many other hotels and taverns mentioned in this collection ofMiscellaneous Papers, but usually only by name, the mere list of which would serve no purpose.
Those already touched upon or dealt with at length in the course of the present volume practically exhaust the subject, from which it will be seen how overwhelmingly attracted Dickens was to every kind of house of refreshment and in every thing relating thereto. The works of noother author of genius provide so much material for such a purpose, and no other writer has treated the subject with so much healthy realism, so much refreshing good nature and humour, or with such expressions of genuine joy.