Where the park-wall of Easton Neston ends, Towcester—“vulgo Tosseter,” as Ogilby says, on the Towe, and once the Lactodorum of the Romans—begins. It is not the best of beginnings, or one calculated to favourably impress the stranger with the town. On the left hand rises a terrace of dingy brick houses, whose age is certified by the inscription, “Jubilee Row, 1809”; their height masked by the raising of the road in front, in Telford’s improvements of 1820, their social status evident in the notice on their frontages, “Lodgings for Travellers”—tramping travellers being understood. Beyond, Towcester unwinds its one long street of brick, stone, and plaster, with roofs, tiled, slated, and thatched: a very miscellaneous street. Among the houses, ancient, modern, and middle-aged; among the few dignified old stone mansions of golden russet stone, and the older, but more familiar, gabled plastered houses, that nod as though they could tell a thing or two worth the hearing; among these and the less interesting brick dwellings stand the Bickerstaff Almshouses, “rebuilt in the year 1815,” brick themselves and wholly uninteresting, except for the tablet preserved from the older buildings:—

Only when the Town Hall is reached, at a considerable distance along this street, may we fairly claim to have entered Towcester. All this hitherward part is outside the pale, as it were, and looked down upon, contemned, and sniffed at. It can only be looked down upon in a social, ungeographical sense, for Towcester from end to end is flat; but those who would sniff corporeally as well as mentally will not go unrewarded, considering that the gas-works occupy a very prominent position here. The Town Hall, built in 1866, when the flighty and Mansard-roofy French Renaissance was the architectural craze of the moment, turns its back to this quarter and shoulders the broad street into the semblance of a narrow lane, emphasising the difference between these social strata.

Emerging from this narrow way, a broad street of inns and shops expands. On the left is the “Talbot,” an old inn with modern front, and with a long perspective of stables vanishing down its yard into the dim distance. The “Talbot,” it is thought, owes its present name to that Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, who fought and died in the Battle of Northampton, eight miles away, in 1460. As the “Tabard,” it was purchased in 1440 by Archdeacon Sponne, a charitable Rector of Towcester, who gave it to the town, its rent to go in relief of taxation, toward paving, “or for other uses.” The good Archdeacon lies, under a gorgeous monument, in the church, and a fragment of stained glass bearing his shield of arms, with his name, “William Sponne” underneath, still remains in one of the windows of the “Talbot.” In what was once, in coaching days, the taproom, but now a store for empty boxes and such lumber, a relic of old times is left, in the wide stone chimney-piece carved with the figure of that old English hound, something between a foxhound and blood-hound—the talbot. Beside it is the date, 1707, together with the initials, “T.O.” and “G.S.” The story that Dean Swift halted often at the old house on his many journeys is likely enough, and a chair, said to have been used by him, is still a cherished relic.

But another, and equally famous, hostelry claims attention. The “Pomfret Arms,” as it is now named, is the old coaching inn once known as the “Saracen’s Head,” the inn where Mr. Pickwick stayed the night after the wet post-chaise journey from Birmingham. “Dry postboys” and fresh horses had been procured on the way, at the usual stages at Dunchurch and Daventry; but as, “at the end of each stage it rained harder than it had done at the beginning,” Mr. Pickwick wisely decided to halt at Towcester, together with those undesirable companions of his, Bob Sawyer and Ben Allen.

“There’s beds here,” said Sam Weller, “everything clean and comfortable. Very good little dinner, sir, they can get ready in half an hour—pair of fowls, sir, and a weal cutlet; French beans, ’taturs, tarts, and tidiness. You’d better stop vere you are, sir, if I might recommend.”

At the moment when this conference was proceeding in the rain, the landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” himself appeared, “to confirm Mr. Weller’s statement relative to the accommodations of the establishment, and to back his entreaties with a variety of dismal conjectures regarding the state of the roads, the doubt of fresh horses being to be had at the next stage, the dead certainty of its raining all night, the equally moral certainty of its clearing up in the morning, and other topics of inducement familiar to innkeepers.”

When the decision to stay was arrived at, “the landlord smiled his delight,” and issued orders to the waiter. “Lights in the Sun, John; make up the fire; the gentlemen are wet,” he cried anxiously; although doubtless, if the gentlemen had gone forward, they might have been drowned for all he cared.

“This way, gentlemen,” he continued; “don’t trouble yourselves about the postboy”—who, poor devil, must have been wet through several times over—“I’ll send him to you when you ring for him, sir.”

And so the scene changes, from the rain-washed road to a cosy room, with a waiter laying the cloth for dinner, a cheerful fire burning, and the tallies lit with wax candles; “everything looked (as everything always does in all decent English inns) as if the travellers had been expected, and their comforts prepared for, days beforehand.”

Upon this picture of ease at one’s inn descended the atrabilious rival editors of the Eatanswill Gazette and the Eatanswill Independent, the organs respectively of “blue” and “buff” shades of political opinion. Both Pott of the Gazette, and Slurk of the Independent found the rival sheet lying on the tables of the inn; but what either of the editors, or their newspapers, were doing in Northamptonshire (Eatanswill being an East Anglian town generally identified as Ipswich) is not clearly specified. Even in these days Suffolk newspapers are not found at Towcester.

Slurk retired to the kitchen when the inn was closed for the night, to drink his rum and water by the fire, and to enjoy the bitter-sweet luxury of sneering at the rival print; but as it happened, Mr. Pickwick’s party, accompanied by Pott, also adjourned to that culinary shrine, to smoke a cigar or so before bed. How the rival editors—the “unmitigated viper” and the “ungrammatical twaddler”—met and presently came from oblique taunts to direct abuse of one another, and thence to blows, let the pages of the Pickwick Papers tell.

The inn itself stands the same as ever, at the end of Towcester’s long street; but the sign, long since changed, owes its present style to the Earls of Pomfret, of whom the fifth and last died in 1867. The somewhat severe frontage, in the golden-brown ferruginous local stone, is the same as when Dickens knew it, and if the kitchen of that time has now become the bar and the room called the “Sun” cannot with certainty be identified, the old coach-archway through the centre of the building into the stable-yard remains, as do the alcoves above, containing white plaster statuettes of two very scantily draped classic deities—Venus and Mars perhaps. They still tell at Towcester the tale of an old landlady—Mrs. Popple—coming new to the house, and asking the old ostler what “those disgraceful things” were.

“They carls ’em Junus and Wenus,” he said, “but I don’t rightly knaw the history on ’em; but there, mum, you’ll find arl about ’em in the Bible.”