In the animated journey, from Bristol to Birmingham, the travellers stopped at various posting-houses where the mercurial Sawyer would insist on getting down to lunch, dine, or otherwise refresh—his friends being always ready to comply after a little decent hesitation. It was thus that they drew up at The Bell at Berkeley Heath, which our writer presently sketches. It will be seen there is more of the drink at the Bell than of the Bell itself. It is, indeed, no more than coecum nomen—much as though we read the name at the end of “Bradshaw”—yet, somehow, from the life and movement of the journey, it offers a sort of attraction: it seems familiar, and we have an interest in it. The Bell now “goes on,” as the proprietor tells me. There are travellers who come there and drink Boz’s health in the snug parlour. It is, in fact, a Pickwickian Inn, and is drawn within the glamour of the legend, and, what a marvel! the thing is done by the magic of those three or four lines. “The Bell,” says Mrs. Hooper, “lies back on the main road from Bristol to Gloucester, and is just nineteen miles from Bristol. It is a rambling old house and a good deal dilapidated, and of good age.”

With this meagre record it yet offers such Pickwickian interest that, not many months ago, a photograph was taken of it which was engraved for the Daily Graphic. There is no Mr. Pickwick’s room to be shown, as undoubtedly there would be had that gentleman only stayed the night there; but he only lunched and then went forward. There is a mistiness as to whether the Pickwickians sat in the public coffee-room or had a private “settin’-room.” It was to a certainty the coffee-room, as they only stayed a short time. So the proprietor, with a safe conscience, might exhibit “the room where Mr. Pickwick lunched.” On the face is imbedded a tablet bearing the date 1729, and there is an ancient farmer close by who was born in “The Bell” in the year 1820. If we lend ourselves properly to the delusion, he might recall Mr. Pickwick’s chaise drawing up full sixty years ago. “Ay, I mind it well. I were joost then fifteen. A stoutish gent in gaiters—might ’ave been a bishop—and sich a lively young chap as wos with him, full o’ spirits, chucking a’ the gurls under the chins. And their sarvant! O he were one. Sam, he were caa’d—I moind that—Sam Summut. And they caa’d for the best o’ everythin’, and took away wi’ them a lot, Madeary, and wot not,” and so on.

II.—The Greyhound, Dulwich

Mr. Pickwick, as we know, at the close of his wanderings retired to this tranquil and pleasant suburb—then much more retired than it is now. In accordance with his habit of enshrining his own personal sympathies in his writing, Boz was, as it were, conveying that it was such a sequestered spot as he himself would choose under similar conditions. Last year (1898), the interesting old road-side Inn, The Greyhound, was levelled—an Inn to which Mr. Pickwick must have found his way in the dull evening to drink “cold Punch” or preside at the club which he most certainly—if we know him well—must have founded. A wealthy gentleman of social tastes, and with a love for tavern life, would have no difficulty in establishing a new Pickwick Club.

At the Greyhound, nigh a century ago, there was actually a club which entertained Tom Campbell, Mark Lemon, Byron’s tutor, and many more. Boz himself, we are told, used to find his way there with Theodore Hook, Moore, and others. Boz, therefore, must have regarded this place with much favour, owing to his own experiences of it—and to have selected it for his hero’s tranquil old age shows how high a place it had in his memory. The description is charming and brings this sylvan retreat to which we have walked many a time perfectly before us.

This taste for surrounding himself with persons of lower degree—such as were the rank and file—was curiously enough shared by Mr. Pickwick’s predecessor, Dr. Johnson, who, when he found the Literary Club somewhat too much of a republic, and getting “out of hand,” established a social meeting at the Essex Head Club—in the street of that name, off the Strand—composed in the main of respectable tradesmen, who would listen obsequiously. Thus, it may be repeated, does the same sort of character develop invariably on the same lines, and thus did Mr. Pickwick unconsciously follow in the footsteps of the “great Lexicographer.”

III.—Grimaldi the Younger

As I was the first to point out, the powerful “Stroller’s Tale” of which Boz himself thought so highly, was founded on the career of the unfortunate son of the great Grimaldi. The story is related by “Dismal Jemmy,” the actor, who, in the tale itself, is called Hutley, and it corresponds in all its details with Grimaldi’s history. He died in September, 1832, nearly four years before Pickwick was thought of, but Boz had learned the incident long before the Grimaldi MSS. were given him to edit, and I am inclined to think he must have learned them from his friend Harley who was intimate with the Grimaldis. In the memoirs it is stated that Gledinning, a Printer, was sent by the father to his son’s dying bed, and he was probably the Hutley of the Stroller’s Tale, and, perhaps, the person who brought old Grimaldi the news of his death. We are told in the “Tale” that he had an engagement “at one of the Theatres on the Surrey side of the water,” and in the memoirs we find that he was offered “an engagement for the Christmas at the Coburg.” There his death is described:—“He rose in bed, drew up his withered limbs—he was acting—he was at the Theatre. He then sang some roaring song. The walls were alive with reptiles, frightful figures flitted to and fro . . . His eyes shone with a lustre frightful to behold, the lips were parched and cracked, the dry, hard skin glowed with a burning heat, and there was an almost unearthly air of wild anxiety in the man’s face.” Hutley also describes how he had to hold him down in his bed. Compare with this the account in the memoirs—“his body was covered with a fearful inflammation—he died in a state of wild and furious madness, rising from his bed, dressing himself in stage costume to act snatches of the parts, and requiring to be held down to die by strong manual force.” This dreadful scene took place at a public house in Pitt Street, out of Tottenham Court Road.

“The man I speak of,” says Boz in the story, “was a low, pantomime actor and an habitual drunkard. In his better days he had been in the receipt of a good salary. His besetting sin gained so fast on him that it was found impossible to employ him in the situations in which he really was useful.” In the “memoirs” this is more than supported: “The man who might have earned with ease and comfort from six to seven hundred a year, was reduced to such a dreadful state of destitution and filth . . . In fact, at one time, it was thought he might have succeeded his father.”

It is quite plain, therefore, that Boz was recalling this tragic episode. Boz remarks that pantomime actors—clowns and others “either die early or, by unnaturally taxing their bodily energies, lose prematurely their physical powers.” This was what occurred to Grimaldi, the father, whose curious decay he was to describe later in the memoirs. It may be added that there is an Alderman Harmer, Hatton Garden, mentioned in the memoirs, with whom Grimaldi pÈre had some dealings; and, long after, this name was introduced by Boz into “Our Mutual Friend.”