DICKENSIAN INNS

The knowledge Dickens possessed of inns, old and new, was, as already said, remarkable. His education in this sort began early. From his early years in London, at the blacking factory, when he sampled the “genuine stunning” at the “Red Lion,” Parliament Street, through his experiences as a reporter of election speeches in the provinces, when long coach journeys presented a constant succession of inns and posting-houses, circumstances made him familiar with every variety of house of public entertainment; and afterwards, as novelist, he enlarged upon inns from choice, realising as he did that in those days romance had its chief home at them.

Dickensian inns, as treated of in this chapter, are those houses, other than the inns of Pickwick, associated with Dickens personally, or through his novels. It is hardly necessary to add at this day, that either association is assiduously cultivated, and that we have almost come to that dizzy edge of things where, in addition to the inns Dickens is certainly known to have mentioned or visited, those he would have treated of or stayed at, had he known better, will come under review, together with a further paper on the inns he did not immortalise, and why not.

When Dickens first visited Bath, in May, 1835, as a reporter, he stayed, according to tradition, at the humble “Saracen’s Head,” in Broad Street, and there also, according to tradition, he was assigned a humble room in an outhouse down the yard. A dozen times, if we may believe a former landlady’s story, he went with lighted candle across the windy yard to his bedroom; a dozen times, the wind puffed it out, and he never uttered a mild d——! It is a remarkable instance of restraint, likely to remain in the recollection of any landlady.

The “Saracen’s Head” cherishes these more or less authentic recollections, and you are shown, not only the room, but the “very bedstead”—a hoary four-poster—upon which Dickens slept; and if you are very good and reverent, and sufficiently abase yourself before the spirit of the place, you will be allowed to drink out of the very mug he is said to have drunk from and sit in the identical chair he is supposed to have sat in; and accordingly, when Dickensians visit Bath they sit in the chair and drink from the mug to the immortal memory, and do not commonly stop to consider this marvellous thing: that the humble, unknown reporter of 1835 should be identified by the innkeeper of that era with the novelist who only became famous two years later.

Going by the Glasgow Mail to Yorkshire in January, 1838, in company with “Phiz,” Dickens acquired the local colour for Nicholas Nickleby. We hear, in that story, how the coach carrying Nicholas, Squeers, and the schoolboys down to Dotheboys Hall, dined at “Eaton Slocomb,” by which Eaton Socon, fifty-five miles from London, on the Great North Road, is indicated. There, in that picturesque village among the flats of Huntingdonshire, still stands the charming little “White Horse” inn, which in those days, with the long-vanished “Cock,” divided the coaching business on that stage.

THE “WHITE HORSE,” EATON SOCON.

Grantham does not figure largely in the story, in whose pages the actual coach journey is lightly dismissed. There we find merely a mention of the “George” as “one of the best inns in England”; but in his private correspondence he refers to that house, enthusiastically, as “the very best inn I have ever put up at”: and Dickens, as we well know, was a finished connoisseur of inns.

The “George” at Grantham is typically Georgian: four-square, red-bricked and prim. It replaced a fine mediÆval building, burnt down in 1780; but what it lacks in beauty it does, according to the testimony of innumerable travellers, make up for in comfort. At the sign of the “George,” says one, “you had a cleaner cloth, brighter plate, higher-polished glass, and a brisker fire, with more prompt attention and civility, than at most other places.”

From Grantham to Greta Bridge was, in coaching days, one day’s journey. There the traveller of to-day finds a quiet hamlet on the banks of the romantic Greta, but in that era it was a busy spot on the main coaching route, with two large and prosperous inns: the “George” and the “New Inn.” The “New Inn,” where Dickens stayed, is now a farmhouse, “Thorpe Grange” by name; while the “George,” standing by the bold and picturesque bridge, has itself retired from public life, and is now known as “the Square.” Under that name the great, unlovely building is divided up into tenements for three or four different families.

THE “GEORGE,” GRETA BRIDGE.

From Greta Bridge Dickens proceeded to Barnard Castle, where he and Phiz stayed, as a centre whence to explore Bowes, that bleak and stony-faced little town where he found “Dotheboys Hall,” and made it and Shaw, the schoolmaster, the centre of his romance. The “Unicorn” inn at Bowes is pointed out as the place where the novelist met Shaw, afterwards drawing the character of “Squeers” from his peculiarities. The rights and the wrongs of the Yorkshire schools, and the indictment of them that Dickens drew, form still a vexed question. Local opinion is by no means altogether amiably disposed towards the memory of Dickens in this matter; and although those schools were gravely mismanaged, we must not lose sight of the fact that this expedition undertaken by Dickens was largely a pilgrimage of passion, in which he looked to find scandals, and did so find them. To what extent, for the sake of his “novel with a purpose,” he dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of the wrongs he found must ever be a subject for controversy.

The course of Nicholas Nickleby brings us, in Chapter XXII., to the long tramp undertaken by Nicholas and Smike from London to Portsmouth, on “a cold, dry, foggy morning in early spring.” They made Godalming the first night, and “bargained for two humble beds.” The next evening saw them well beyond Petersfield, at a point fifty-eight miles from London, where the humble “Coach and Horses” inn stands by the wayside, and is perhaps the inn referred to by Dickens. The matter is doubtful, because, although the story was written in 1838, when the existing road along the shoulder of the downs at this point had been constructed, with the present “Coach and Horses” beside it, replacing the older inn and the original track that still goes winding obscurely along in the bottom, it is extremely likely that Dickens described the spot from his childish memories of years before, when, as a little boy, he had been brought up the road with the Dickens family, on their removal from Landport. At that time the way was along the hollow, where the “Bottom” inn, or “Gravel Hill” inn, then stood, in receipt of custom. The house stands yet, and is now a gamekeeper’s cottage.

THE “COACH AND HORSES,” NEAR PETERSFIELD.

Whichever of the two houses we choose, the identity of the spot is unassailable, because, although in the story it is described as twelve miles from Portsmouth, and is really thirteen, no other inn exists or existed for miles on either side. The bleak and barren scene is admirably drawn: “Onward they kept with steady purpose, and entered at length upon a wide and spacious tract of downs, with every variety of little hill and plain to change their verdant surface. Here, there shot up almost perpendicularly into the sky a height so steep, as to be hardly accessible to any but the sheep and goats that fed upon its sides, and there stood a huge mound of green, sloping and tapering off so delicately, and merging so gently into the level ground, that you could scarce define its limits. Hills swelling above each other, and undulations shapely and uncouth, smooth and rugged, graceful and grotesque, thrown negligently side by side, bounded the view in each direction; while frequently, with unexpected noise, there uprose from the ground a flight of crows, who, cawing and wheeling round the nearest hills, as if uncertain of their course, suddenly poised themselves upon the wing and skimmed down the long vista of some opening valley with the speed of very light itself.

“BOTTOM” INN.

“By degrees the prospect receded more and more on either hand, and as they had been shut out from rich and extensive scenery, so they emerged once again upon the open country. The knowledge that they were drawing near their place of destination gave them fresh courage to proceed; but the way had been difficult and they had loitered on the road, and Smike was tired! Thus twilight had already closed in, when they turned off the path to the door of a road-side inn, yet twelve miles short of Portsmouth.

“‘Twelve miles,’ said Nicholas, leaning with both hands on his stick, and looking doubtfully at Smike.

“‘Twelve long miles,’ repeated the landlord.

“‘Is it a good road?’ inquired Nicholas.

“‘Very bad,’ said the landlord. As, of course, being a landlord, he would say.

“‘I want to get on,’ observed Nicholas, hesitating. ‘I scarcely know what to do.’

“‘Don’t let me influence you,’ rejoined the landlord. ‘I wouldn’t go on if it was me.’”

And so here they stayed the night, much to their advantage.

The “handsome hotel,” “between Park Lane and Bond Street,” referred to in Chapter XXXII. of Nicholas Nickleby, cannot be identified: there are, and long have been, so many handsome hotels in that region. It was in the coffee-room of this establishment that Nicholas encountered Sir Mulberry Hawk; and the description of the affair brings back the memory of a state of things long past. The “Coffee-room” with its boxes partitioned off, no longer exists; there are no such things as those boxes anywhere now, except perhaps in some old-fashioned “eating-houses.” But in that period of which Dickens wrote, the “coffee-room” of an hotel was an institution not so very long before copied from the then dead or fast-expiring “Coffee Houses” of the eighteenth century: once—in the days before clubs—the meeting-places of wits and business men. The Coffee House had been the club of its own particular age, and as there are nowadays clubs for every class and all professions, so in that period there were special Coffee Houses for individual groups of people, where they read the papers and learned the gossip of their circle.

Inns and hotels copied the institution of a public refreshment-room that would nowadays be styled the restaurant, and transferred the name of “Coffee-room,” without specifically supplying the coffee; which, to be sure, was a beverage fast growing out of fashion, in favour of wines, beer, and brandy and water. No one drank whisky then.

Fashions in nomenclature linger long, and even now in old-established inns and hotels, the Coffee-room still exists, but has paradoxically come to mean a public combined dining- and sitting-room for private guests, in contradistinction from the Commercial-room, to which commercial travellers resort, at a recognised lower tariff.

There are inns also in Oliver Twist; not inns essential to the story, nor in themselves prepossessing, but, in the case of the “Coach and Horses” at Isleworth, remarkably well observed when we consider that the reference is only in passing. Indeed, the topographical accuracy of Dickens, where he is wishful to be accurate, is astonishing. The literary pilgrim sets out to follow the routes he indicates, possibly doubtful if he will find the places mentioned. There, however, they are (if modern alterations have not removed them), for Dickens apparently visited the scenes and from one eagle glance described them with all the accuracy of a guide-book.

Thus, Bill Sikes and Oliver, trudging from London to Chertsey, where the burglary was to be committed, and occasionally getting a lift on the way, are set down from a cart at the end of Brentford. At length they came to a public-house called the “Coach and Horses”; a little way beyond which another road appeared to turn off. And here the cart stopped.

THE “COACH AND HORSES,” ISLEWORTH.

One finds the “Coach and Horses,” sure enough, at the point where Brentford ends and Isleworth begins, by the entrance to Sion Park, and near the spot where the road branches off to the left. The “Coach and Horses” is not a picturesque inn. It is a huge, four-square lump of a place, and wears, indeed, rather a dour and forbidding aspect. It is unquestionably the house of which Dickens speaks, and was built certainly not later than the dawn of the nineteenth century. In these latter days the road here has been rendered somewhat more urban by the advent of the electric tramway; but I have in my sketch of the scene taken the artistic licence of omitting that twentieth-century development, and, to add an air of verisimilitude, have represented Sikes and Oliver in the act of approaching. The left-hand road beyond leads to a right-hand road, as in the story, and this in due course to Hampton.

The most interesting Dickensian inn, outside the pages of Pickwick, is the “Maypole,” in Barnaby Rudge.

There never existed upon this earth an inn so picturesque as that drawn, entirely from his imagination, by Cattermole, to represent the “Maypole.” You may seek even among the old mansions of England, and find nothing more baronial. The actual “Maypole”—when found—is a sad disappointment to those who have cherished the Cattermole ideal, and there is wrath and indignation among pilgrims from over-seas when they come to it. This, although natural enough, is an injustice to this real original, which is one of the most picturesque old inns now to be found, and is not properly to be made little of because it cannot fit an impossible artistic fantasy.

I have hinted above that the “Maypole” requires some effort to find, and that is true enough, even in these days when the England of Dickens has been so plentifully elucidated and mapped out and sorted over. The prime cause of this incertitude and boggling is that there really is a “Maypole” inn, but at that very different place, Chigwell Row, two miles distant from Chigwell and the “King’s Head.” Many years ago, the late James Payn wrote an amusing account—as to whose entire truth we cannot vouch—of his taking a party of enthusiastic American ladies in search of this scene of Barnaby Rudge. They drove about the forest seeking (such was their ignorance) the “Maypole,” and not the “King’s Head”; and found it, in a low and ugly beerhouse from which drunken beanfeasters waved inviting pots of beer. Eventually they left the forest convinced that the inn Dickens described was a sheer myth.

If the “King’s Head” of fact—“such a delicious old inn opposite the churchyard,” as Dickens wrote of it to Forster—is not so wonderful an old house as the “Maypole” of fiction and of Cattermole’s picturesque fancy, we must, at any rate, excuse the artist, who was under the necessity of working up to the fervid description of it with which the story begins: “An old building, with more gable-ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag chimneys, out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes, imparted to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables, gloomy, ruinous, and empty. The place was said to have been built in the days of King Henry the Eighth; and there, was a legend, not only that Queen Elizabeth had slept there one night while upon a hunting excursion, to wit, in a certain oak-panelled room with a deep bay-window, but that next morning, while standing upon a mounting-block before the door, with one foot in the stirrup, the virgin monarch had then and there boxed and cuffed an unlucky page for some neglect of duty.”

THE “KING’S HEAD,” CHIGWELL, THE “MAYPOLE” OF BARNABY RUDGE.Passing the references to sunken and uneven floors and old diamond-paned lattices, with another to an “ancient porch, quaintly and grotesquely carved,” which does not exist, we come to a description of dark red bricks, grown yellow with age, decayed timbers, and ivy wrapping the time-worn walls,—all figments of the imagination.

The real “Maypole,” identified with the “King’s Head” at Chigwell, in Epping Forest, is not the leastest littlest bit like that. The laziest man on the hottest day could easily count its gables, which number three large ones[17] and a small would-be-a-gable-if-it-could, that looks as though it were blighted in its youth and had never grown to maturity. The front of the house is not of red brick, and never was: the present white plaster face being a survival of its early years; while the front of the ground-floor is weather-boarded.

But it is a delightful old house, in a situation equally delightful, standing opposite the thickly wooded old churchyard of Chigwell, just as described in the story; the sign—a portrait head of Charles the First—projecting from an iron bracket, and the upper storeys of the inn themselves set forward, on old carved oak beams and brackets. There is no sign of decay or neglect about the “King’s Head.”

In Martin Chuzzlewit the literary annotator and professor of topographical exegesis finds an interesting problem of the first dimensions in the question, “Where was the ‘Blue Dragon’ of that story situated?” It is a matter which, it is to be feared, will never be threshed out to the satisfaction of all seekers after truth. “You all are right and all are wrong,” as the chameleon is supposed to have said when he heard disputants quarrelling as to whether he was green or pink; and then turned blue, to confound them. But the chameleon, in this instance, is no more: and we who have opinions may continue, without fear, to hold them.

Well, then: in the third chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit we are particularly introduced to an inn, the subject of an earlier allusion in those pages, the “Blue Dragon,” near Salisbury. In what direction it lay from that cathedral city we are not told—whether north, south, east, or west; and we only infer from incidents of the story, in which the inn is brought into relation with the London mail and coaching in general, that the “Blue Dragon” was at Amesbury, eight miles to the north of Salisbury, by which route the famous “Quicksilver” Exeter mail to and from London went, in the old coaching days, avoiding Salisbury altogether. The course of the narrative, the situation of an old mansion on the Wilsford road near Amesbury—generally pointed out as Pecksniff’s home—and the position of Amesbury, all seem at the first blush to point to that fine old inn, the “George” at Amesbury, being the original of the “Blue Dragon”; and this old inn certainly was not only a coaching-house, but was what another claimant to the honour of being the real true original of the “Blue Dragon”—the “Green Dragon” at Alderbury—could never have been: a hostelry with accommodation sufficient for postchaise travellers such as old Martin Chuzzlewit and Mary.

THE “GREEN DRAGON,” ALDERBURY.

The “George” at Amesbury is a house of considerable size and architectural character, and its beauties might fitly have employed the pencils of Pecksniff’s pupils, had that great and good man condescended to notice anything less stupendous than cathedrals, castles, and Houses of Parliament. As it was, however, the architectural studies of his young friends were made to contemplate nothing meaner than “elevations of Salisbury Cathedral from every possible point of sight,” and lesser things were passed contemptuously by. (Chap. I.)

The “George,” after the fine old church—that church in which Tom Pinch played the organ—is the chief ornament of Amesbury, and that it was the inn meant by Dickens when he wrote Martin Chuzzlewit is in the village an article of faith which no visitor dare controvert or dispute in any way on the spot. Like the small boys who do not say “Yah!” and are not courageous enough to make grimaces until safely out of arm’s reach, we only dare dispassionately discuss the pros and cons when out of the place. It were not possible on the spot to object, “Yes, but,” and then proceed to argue the point with the landlord, who confidently shows you old Martin Chuzzlewit’s bedroom and a room with a descent of one step inside, instead of the “two steps on the inside so exquisitely unexpected that strangers, despite the most elaborate cautioning, usually dived in, head first, as into a plunging-bath.”

THE “GEORGE,” AMESBURY.

But the truth is, like many another literary landmark, the “Blue Dragon” in Martin Chuzzlewit is a composite picture, combining the features of both the “George” at Amesbury, eight miles to the north of Salisbury, and those of the “Green Dragon” at Alderbury, three miles to the south. Nay, there were not so long ago at Alderbury those who remembered the picture-sign of the “Green Dragon” there, which doubtless Dickens saw in his wanderings around the neighbourhood. “A faded and an ancient dragon he was; and many a wintry storm of rain, snow, sleet, and hail had changed his colour from a gaudy blue to a faint lack-lustre shade of grey. But there he hung; rearing in a state of monstrous imbecility on his hind-legs; waxing with every month that passed so much more dim and shapeless that as you gazed at him on one side of the sign-board it seemed as if he must be gradually melting through it and coming out upon the other.” (Chap. III.)

The sign has long since been replaced by the commonplace lettering of the present day, but it was then, in Dickens’s own words, “a certain Dragon who swung and creaked complainingly before the village ale-house door,” a phrase which at once shows us that if by the “Blue Dragon” of the story the “George” at Amesbury was intended to be described, that was a derogatory description of the fine old hostelry.

This brings us to the chief point upon which the validity of this claim of the “Green Dragon” at Alderbury must rest. Dickens distinctly alludes to the “Blue Dragon” as a “village ale-house,” and such it is and has ever been; while to the “George” at Amesbury that description cannot even now justly apply, and certainly it could never in coaching times, when in the heyday of its prosperity, have been so fobbed off with such a phrase. Moreover, we will do well to bear in mind that old Chuzzlewit and his companion did not put up at the inn—this “village ale-house”—from choice. The gentleman was “taken ill upon the road,” and had to seek the first house that offered.

Those curious in the byways of Dickens topography will find Alderbury three miles from Salisbury, on the left-hand side of the Southampton road. Half a mile from it, on the other side of the way, stands “St. Mary’s Grange,” a red-brick building in a mixed Georgian and Gothic style, built by Pugin, and locally reputed to be the original of Mr. Pecksniff’s residence: a circumstance which may well give us pause and opportunity for considering whether Dickens had that distinguished architect in his mind when creating the character of his holy humbug.

INTERIOR OF THE “GREEN DRAGON,” ALDERBURY.

The “Green Dragon,” which we have thus shown to have, at the least of it, as good a title as the “George” at Amesbury to be considered the original of the house kept by the genial Mrs. Lupin, friend of Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley, and Martin Chuzzlewit in particular, and of her fellow-creatures in general, does not directly face the highway, but is set back from it at an angle, behind a little patch of grass. It is pre-eminently rustic, and is even more ancient than the casual wayfarer, judging merely from its exterior, would suppose; for a fine fifteenth-century carved stone fireplace in what is now the bar parlour bears witness to an existence almost mediÆval. It is a beautiful, though dilapidated, work of Gothic art of the Early Tudor period, ornamented with boldly carved crockets, heraldic roses, and shields of arms, and is worthy of inspection for itself alone, quite irrespective of its literary interest.

A London inn intimately associated with Martin Chuzzlewit finally disappeared in the early part of 1904, when the last vestiges of the “Black Bull,” Holborn, were demolished. The “Black Bull,” in common with the numerous other old inns of Holborn, in these last few years all swept away, stood just outside the City of London, and was originally, like its neighbours, established for the accommodation of those travellers who, in the Middle Ages, arrived too late in the evening to enter the City. At sundown the gates of the walled City of London were closed, and, unless the traveller was a very privileged person indeed, he found no entrance until the next morning, and was obliged to put up at one of the many hostelries that sprang up outside and found their account in the multitude of such laggards by the way. The old “Black Bull,” after many alterations, was rebuilt in a very commonplace style in 1825, and in later years it became a merely sordid public-house, with an unlovely pile of peculiarly grim “model” dwellings in the courtyard. In spite of those later changes, the great plaster effigy of the Black Bull himself, with a golden girdle about his middle, remained on his bracket over the first floor window until the house was pulled down, May 18th, 1904.

SIGN OF THE “BLACK BULL,” HOLBORN.

An amusing story belongs to that sign, for it was, in 1826, the subject of a struggle between the landlord, one Gardiner, on the one side and the City authorities on the other. The Commissioner of Sewers served a notice upon Gardiner, requiring him to take his bull down, but the landlord was obstinate, and refused to do anything of the kind, whereupon the Commissioner assembled a storming-party of over fifty men, with ladders and tackle for removing the objectionably large and weighty effigy. No sooner, however, had the enemy begun their preparations, when, to their astonishment, and to that of the assembled crowds, the bull soared majestically and steadily to what Mrs. Gamp would doubtless have called the “parapidge.” Arrived there he displayed a flag with the bold legend, “I don’t intrude now.”

Some arrangement was evidently arrived at, for the bull occupied its original place, above the first-floor window over the archway, for the whole of the seventy-eight years between 1826 and 1904.

The house is referred to in Martin Chuzzlewit as the “Bull,” and is the place to which Sairey Gamp repaired from Kingsgate Street to relieve Betsy Prig in the nursing of the mysterious patient. She found it “a little dull, but not so bad as might be,” and was “glad to see a parapidge, in case of fire, and lots of roofs and chimley-pots to walk upon.”

There are no greatly outstanding inns to be found in Bleak House, the “Dedlock Arms,” really the “Sondes Arms” at Rockingham, being merely mentioned. On the other hand, in David Copperfield we find the “Plough” at Blundeston mentioned, and that hotel at Yarmouth whence the London coach started: only unfortunately it is not possible to identify it, either with the “Crown and Anchor,” the “Angel,” or the “Star.”

In Parliament Street, Westminster, until 1899, stood the “Red Lion” public-house, identified with the place where David Copperfield (Chapter IX.) called for the glass of the “genuine stunning.” The incident was one of Dickens’s own youthful experiences, and is therefore to be taken, together with much else in that story, as autobiography.

“I was such a child, and so little, that frequently when I went into the bar of a strange public-house for a glass of ale or porter, to moisten what I had had for dinner, they were afraid to give it me. I remember, one hot evening, I went into the bar of a public-house, and said to the landlord:

“‘What is your best—your very best ale a glass?’ For it was a special occasion, I don’t know what. It may have been my birthday.

“‘Twopence-halfpenny,’ says the landlord, ‘is the price of the Genuine Stunning ale.’

“‘Then,’ says I, producing the money, ‘just draw me a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.’

“The landlord looked at me in return over the bar, from head to foot, with a strange smile on his face; and instead of drawing the beer, looked round the screen, and said something to his wife. She came out from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying me.... They served me with the ale, though I suspect it was not the Genuine Stunning; and the landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door of the bar, and bending down, gave me my money back, and gave me a kiss that was half-admiring and half compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.”

The “Blue Boar” in Whitechapel is referred to, and the “County Inn” at Canterbury, identified with the “Fountain,” where Mr. Dick slept. The “little inn” in that same city, where Mr. Micawber stayed, and might have said—but didn’t—that he “resided, in short, ‘put up,’” there, is claimed to be the “Sun,” but how, of all the little inns of Canterbury—and there are many—the “Sun” should so decisively claim the honour is beyond the wit of man to tell. It is an old, old inn that, rather mistakenly, calls itself an “hotel,” and the peaked, red-tiled roof, the projecting upper storey, bracketed out upon ancient timbers, are evidence enough that it was in being many centuries before the foreign word “hotel” became acclimatised in this country. One may dine, or lunch, or tea at the “Sun,” in the ghostly company of Mr. and Mrs. Micawber, but although warm culinary scents may be noticed with satisfaction by the hungry pilgrim, he misses the “flabby perspiration on the walls,” mentioned in the book. True, it is a feature readily spared.

In the Uncommercial Traveller a reference to the “Crispin and Crispianus,” at Strood, is found. It is a humble, weather-boarded inn, whose age might be very great or comparatively recent. But, whatever the age of the present house, there has long been an inn of the name on this spot, the sign being referred back to St. Crispin’s Day, October 25th, 1415, when Agincourt was fought and won. The sign is, however, doubtless far 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 at Soissons, in A.D. 287. The sanctity and benevolence of St. Crispin are said to have been so great that he would steal leather as material for shoes for the poor; for which, did he live in our times, he would still be martyred—in a police-court, to the tune of several months’ imprisonment.

THE “CRISPIN AND CRISPIANUS,” STROOD.

The picture-sign of the “Crispin and Crispianus” is said to be a copy of a painting in the church of St. PantalÉon at Troyes, and certainly (but chiefly because of much varnish, and the dust and grime of the road) looks very Old-Masterish. The two saints, seated uncomfortably close to one another, and looking very sheepish, appear to be cutting out a piece of leather to the order of an interesting and gigantic pirate.

A mysterious incident occurred in 1830 at this house, in the death of a man who had acted as ostler at the coaching inns of Rochester and Chatham, and had afterwards tramped the country as a hawker. He lay here dying, in an upper room, and told the doctor who was called to him the almost incredible story that he was really Charles Parrott Hanger, Earl of Coleraine, and not “Charley Roberts,” the name he had usually been known by for twenty years. Although his life had been so squalid and apparently poverty-stricken, he left £1,000 to his son, Charles Henry Hanger.

The “Crispin and Crispianus,” in common with most other erstwhile humble inns, has experienced a social levelling-up since the time when Dickens mentioned it as a house where tramping tinkers and itinerant clock-makers, coming into Strood “yonder, by the blasted ash,” might lie. In these times, when the blasted dust of the Dover road is the most noticeable feature, and a half-century has effected all manner of wonderful changes, tramps and their kin find no harbourage at the old house, whose invitation to cyclists and amateur photographers sufficiently emphasises its improved status.

In Great Expectations is found a notice of the “Cross Keys,” Wood Street, Cheapside, a coaching inn abolished in the ’70’s; but it is merely an incidental reference, on the occasion of Pip’s coming to London by coach from Rochester. The inns of that story are, indeed, not well seen, and although that little boarded inn at Cooling, the “Horseshoe and Castle,” is identified as the “Three Jolly Bargemen” of the tale, you can find in those pages no illuminating descriptive phrase on which to put your finger and say, conscientiously, “Found!”

Only at the close of the story, where, in Chapter LIV., Pip is endeavouring to smuggle the convict, Magwitch, out of the country, down the Thames, do we find an inn easily identified. That is the melancholy waterside house below Gravesend, standing solitary on a raised bank of stones, where Pip lands: “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.” Outside there was mud: mud and slimy stones, and rotten, slimy stakes sticking out of the water, and a grey outlook across the broad river.

This describes the actual “Ship and Lobster” tavern, on the shore at Denton, below Gravesend, to which you come past the tramway terminus, down a slummy street chiefly remarkable for grit and broken bottles, then across the railway and the canal and on to the riverside where, in midst of the prevalent grittiness that is now the most outstanding natural feature, stands the inn, in company with the office of an alarming person who styles himself “Explosive Lighterman,” at Denton Wharf.

There are even fewer inns to be found in Our Mutual Friend, where, although the “Red Lion” at Henley is said to be the original of the up-river inn to whose lawn Lizzie drags the half-drowned Wrayburn, we are not really sure that Henley actually is indicated. That mention of a lawn does not suffice: many riverside inns have lawns. In short, the edge of Dickens’s appreciation of inns was growing blunted, and he took less delight, as he grew older, in describing their peculiarities. His whole method of story-telling was changed. Instead of the sprightly fancy and odd turns of observation that once fell spontaneously from him, he at last came to laboriously construct and polish the action and conversation of a novel, leaving in comparative neglect those side-lights upon localities that help to give most of his writings a permanent value.

Apart from the novels, we have many inns associated with Dickens by tradition and in his tours and racily descriptive letters; and there, at any rate, we find him, when not overweighted with the more than ever elaborated and melodramatic character of his plots, just as full of quaint, fanciful, and cheerful description as ever.

THE “SHIP AND LOBSTER.”

His tours began early. So far back as the autumn of 1838 Dickens and Phiz took holiday in the midlands, coming at last to Shrewsbury, where they stayed at the “Lion,” or rather in what was at that time an annexe of the “Lion,” and has long since become a private house. Writing to his elder daughter, Dickens vividly described this place: “We have the strangest little rooms (sitting-room and two bedrooms together) the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand. The windows bulge out over the street, as if they were little stern windows in a ship. And a door opens out of the sitting-room on to a little open gallery with plants in it, where one leans over a queer old rail.”

Mr. Kitton[18] states: “This quaint establishment, alas! has been modernised (if not entirely rebuilt) since those days, and presents nothing of the picturesqueness that attracted the author of Pickwick.” But that is by no means the case. It stands exactly as it did, except that since the business of the “Lion” has decreased, it no longer forms a part of that great hostelry.[19] The blocked-up communicating doors between the two buildings may still be seen on the staircase of the “Lion,” and the little house does still bulge over the pavement and closely resemble the stern of an old man-o’-war.

The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, a light-hearted account of a tour taken by Dickens and Wilkie Collins in 1857, begins with the travellers being set down by the express at Carlisle, and ends, after many wanderings in Cumberland and Lancashire, at Doncaster. It is largely an account of inns, including the “Queen’s Head,” Hesket Newmarket, in Cumberland, now a private house; and the “King’s Arms,” Market Street, Lancaster, pulled down in 1880. The “King’s Arms” was, from the exterior, commonplace personified, but within doors you were surrounded by ancient oaken staircases, mahogany panelling, and, according to Dickens, mystic old servitors in black; and doubtless were so encompassed with mysteries and forebodings that when you retired to rest—not being able in such a house to merely “go to bed”—in one of the catafalque-like four-posters, you immediately leapt between the sheets and drew the clothes over your head, in fear of ghosts; dreaming uncomfortably that you were dead and lying in state, and waking with a terrific start in the morning, at the coming of the hot water and the tap at the door, with the dreadful impression that the Day of Judgment was come and you summoned to account before the Most High. These being the most remarkable features of the “King’s Arms” at Lancaster, it is perhaps not altogether strange that the house was at length demolished and replaced by an uninteresting modern hotel, with no associations—and no ghosts.

THE “LION,” SHREWSBURY, SHOWING THE ANNEXE ADJOINING, WHERE DICKENS STAYED.

A weird story was told of the old inn, by which it seems that a young bride was poisoned there, in a room pointed out as the “Bride’s Chamber,” the criminal being duly hanged at Lancaster gaol. In memory of this traditional romance, it was the custom to serve the incoming guests with a piece of bride-cake. They might also, if they liked, sleep in the very identical ancient black oak four-poster, in the room where the tragedy took place; but, although there was sufficient eagerness to see it in daylight, no very great competition was ever observed among guests for the honour of occupying—we will not say sleeping in—that tragical couch. Dickens himself, however, lay in it, and seems to have slept sufficiently well; greatly, we may suppose, to his disappointment.

Among those inns that no Dickensian neglects is “Jack Straw’s Castle,” on Hampstead Heath, a house as commonplace and as little like any castle of romance as it is possible to conceive. How else could it be? It was built as a private residence in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and, with various additions and alterations, each one vulgarising the house a step further, it now is little better than a London “public.” The Dickensian association is here a personal one, and somewhat thin at that. It does not form a scene in any one of his stories, but was a house he sometimes affected in his suburban walks. In 1837 we find him writing to that “harbitrary gent,” Forster, inviting him to a winter’s walk across the Heath, and adding, “I knows a good ’ous there where we can have a red-hot chop for dinner and a glass of good wine.” “This,” says Forster, “led to our first experience of ‘Jack Straw’s Castle,’ memorable for many happy meetings in coming years.”

How do myths germinate and sprout? Are they invented, or do they spring spontaneously into being? Two myths cling to “Jack Straw’s Castle”: the one that it stands upon the site of a fort thrown up by that peasant leader in the reign of Richard the Second; the other that Dickens not only visited the house, but often stayed there, a chair called “Dickens’s Easy Chair” being shown in what is represented as having been his bedroom. The Great Dickens Legend is now well on its way, and the inns “where he stayed” will at no distant day match the apocryphal “Queen Elizabeth’s Bedrooms” that amaze the historical student with their number.

“JACK STRAW’S CASTLE.”

The “Jack Straw” legend is old, although by no means so old as the house. It is probable that the house was built on the site of some ancient earthwork, but that might have been either much older or much later than Jack Straw; and in any case history has nothing to say about the spot.

The first reference to the inn by its present name appears to be in the report of a horse-race on the Heath in 1748. In the same year an allusion to it in Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe speaks merely of “The Castle.”

The illustration printed here shows the bow-window of a good many years ago, a somewhat picturesque feature now abolished in favour of an ugly modern front.