David Copperfield

THE ROYAL HOTEL, LOWESTOFT—THE PLOUGH, BLUNDERSTONE—THE VILLAGE MAID, LOUND—THE YARMOUTH INNS—THE BLUE BOAR—THE RED LION—TWO CANTERBURY INNS—THE PIAZZA HOTEL—JACK STRAW’S CASTLE—THE SWAN, HUNGERFORD STAIRS—AND OTHERS

Before Dickens commenced to write David Copperfield, he visited all the districts of its early scenes to obtain local colour, and to learn something of the geography of Blunderstone, Lowestoft and Yarmouth. He was a guest of Sir Morton Peto’s at Somerleyton and was invited there ostensibly to see Lowestoft, a town then just emerging into prominence as a watering-place, in the hope that he might introduce it into one of his books. On another occasion he, with John Leech and Mark Lemon, visited Yarmouth and stayed at the Royal Hotel on the Marine Parade. He either did not care very much for Lowestoft, or else found that Yarmouth was more suitable to the purpose of his book, for we only find one small incident in it associated with the first-named town.

This occurred on one autumn morning when Mr. Murdstone took little David on to the saddle of his horse and rode off with him to Lowestoft to see some friends there with a yacht. “We went to an hotel by the sea, where two gentlemen were smoking cigars in a room by themselves,” says David. “Each of them was lying on at least four chairs and had a large rough jacket on. In a corner was a heap of coats and boat-cloaks, and a flag, all bundled up together.”

Here Mr. Murdstone was chaffed about David, whom his friends referred to as “the bewitching Mrs. Copperfield’s incumbrance,” and he warned them to take care as “somebody’s sharp.” “Who is?” asked Quinion. “Only Brooks of Sheffield,” replied Mr. Murdstone, which caused much amusement, and whenever any reference was made to David he was always styled “Brooks of Sheffield.” Sherry was ordered in with which to drink to Brooks, and David was made to partake of the wine with a biscuit, and drink to the toast of “Confusion to Brooks of Sheffield.”

After this incident they all walked about the cliffs, looked at things through a telescope, and then returned to the hotel to an early dinner, and David and his future father-in-law afterwards wended their way back to Blunderstone.

The hotel in which all this took place was probably the Royal, which stands to-day facing the pier and harbour, but it has evidently been rebuilt, or very much altered structurally.

Blunderstone has a village ale-house called the Plough, from which started Barkis the carrier on his daily trip to Yarmouth. David speaks of this inn, and pictures the parlour of it as the room where “Commodore Trunnion held that club with Mr. Pickle.” It is still a comfortable ale-house and a centre of attraction to visitors of the unspoiled village where David was born.

On the occasion of David’s drive in the carrier’s cart to Yarmouth for a stay with Daniel Peggotty in order to be out of the way for his mother’s marriage to Mr. Murdstone, we are introduced to the road between the village and the famous seaside town, so frequently used by Barkis and so often referred to in the course of the story.

THE PLOUGH INN, BLUNDERSTONE

THE BUCK INN

THE DUKE’S HEAD

YARMOUTH
Photographs by T. W. Tyrrell

The first halt was made at a public-house where a long wait occurred whilst a bedstead was delivered there. This inn was probably the Village Maid, at Lound, a name that may also have suggested that of the Willing Mind, the public-house where Mr. Peggotty went occasionally for short spells, as he put it to Mrs. Gummidge. But no public-house with that name, or anything like it, existed in Yarmouth, and it must, therefore, be assumed that no particular one was intended.

Arriving at Yarmouth, David found Ham awaiting him at the public-house which was the stopping place of the Blunderstone carrier. Although Dickens does not mention its name, the Buck Inn undoubtedly was the identical house where Barkis came to a halt on such occasions, and it still exists in the Market Square. At the end of his visit, David, arm-in-arm with Little Em’ly, made for the same inn once again to meet Barkis for the homeward journey in his cart.

The inn, however, at Yarmouth which has more importance attaching to it than any other is that where David met the friendly waiter whilst waiting for the coach to take him to London, and where he procured the sheet of paper and ink-stand to write his promised note to Clara Peggotty assuring her that “Barkis is willing.”

There is little doubt that the inn referred to here was the Duke’s Head. It was the principal coaching inn of the town, and we know that Dickens knew it well. On his arrival there in Barkis’s cart, David observed that “the coach was in the yard shining very much all over, but without any horses to it as yet; and it looked in that state as if nothing was more unlikely than its ever going to London.” To the coffee-room, which was a long one with some maps in it, David was conducted by William the waiter, who assisted him to get through his meal, and told him the horrible tale of the man who died from drinking a glass of ale that was too old for him. But that incident of David and the friendly waiter is too well known to need recapitulation here.

Before leaving Yarmouth, there is one more inn that claims attention. When David and Steerforth later on in the story visited the Peggottys, the hotel they stayed at has been identified as the Star Hotel, an old mansion, with moulded ribbed ceilings and the sides of the rooms panelled with oak. It has been added to since those days, but the old part still remains. It was in this house that Miss Mowcher was first introduced into the story.

It is also believed that the Feathers at Gorleston is the “decent ale-house” on the road to Lowestoft where David Copperfield, as stated in Chapter XXXI, stopped to dine, when out for a walk whilst on a visit to Yarmouth.

But let us return to David on the coach waiting to start for Salem House, Blackheath, via London. Having suffered a good deal of chaff from the maids and others over the huge dinner he was supposed to have eaten, the coach started on its journey, during which the jokes about his appetite continued. He reached his destination at last, having approached London “by degrees, and got, in due time, to the inn in the Whitechapel district,” he says, “for which we were bound. I forget whether it was the Blue Bull or the Blue Boar; but I know it was the Blue Something, and that its likeness was painted up on the back of the coach.” Here, more solitary than Robinson Crusoe, he went into the booking-office, and, “by invitation of the clerk on duty, passed behind the counter, and sat down on the scale at which they weighed the luggage.” Thus he waited until called for by Mr. Mell, when the clerk “slanted me off the scale, and pushed me over to him, as if I were weighed, bought, delivered, and paid for.”

This inn was the Blue Boar, an old coaching inn long demolished, where the daily coach from Yarmouth made its halting place. There is still a relic of it in the shape of a sculptured effigy of a boar, with gilded tusks and hoofs, built into the wall of a tobacco factory marking the site of the inn.

In Chapter XI of the book, describing David’s start in life on his own account, there are one or two inns and taverns mentioned where he partook of meals and other refreshment. He tells us he had “a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house opposite our place of business, called the Lion, or the Lion and something else that I have forgotten.” This has not definitely been identified, but may have been the White Swan at Hungerford Stairs, referred to later. On another occasion he went into a public-house one hot evening and said to the landlord, “What is your best—your very best—ale a glass?” “Twopence-halfpenny is the price of the Genuine Stunning ale,” was the reply. “Then,” says I, producing the money, “just draw me a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.” Having served him, the landlord invited his wife to join him in surveying the little customer 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.”

This incident actually occurred to Dickens himself when a lad in the blacking factory, for he has admitted it to be so, in his own words, recorded in Forster’s “Life,” Book 1, Chapter XI. He there states that on the occasion in question he “went into a public-house in Parliament Street, which is still there, though altered, at the corner of the short street leading into Cannon Row.” The public-house where it took place was the Red Lion at 48 Parliament Street, and is situated at the corner of Derby Street. There is a Red Lion public-house there to-day—not the same one Dickens visited—that was demolished in 1899—but on the same spot. It is more pretentious than the old one, but keeps its red lion rampant as a sign, and has a bust of the novelist, standing within a niche in the front of the building as a hall-mark of its Dickensian association.

The “little public-house close to the river, with an open space before it, where some coal-heavers were dancing,” referred to in the same chapter, was the Fox under the Hill[1] in the Adelphi.

There are two inns in Canterbury associated with the book, the county inn where Mr. Dick stayed when on his visits to David Copperfield every alternate Wednesday, and the “little inn” where Mr. Micawber stayed on his first and subsequent visits to the ancient city.

The county inn was without doubt the Royal Fountain Hotel in St. Margaret’s Street, for it was invariably referred to in the coaching days as the county inn of the city, in the same manner that David speaks of it in the seventeenth chapter of David Copperfield, where he tells us that he “saw Mr. Dick every alternate Wednesday when he arrived by stage-coach at noon, to stay until next morning.... Mr. Dick was very partial to gingerbread. To render his visits more agreeable, my aunt had instructed me to open a credit for him at a cake shop, which was hampered with the stipulation that he should not be served with more than one shilling’s worth in the course of any one day. This, and the reference of all his little bills at the county inn where he slept, to my aunt, before they were paid, induced me to suspect that he was only allowed to rattle his money, and not to spend it.”

On these occasions, Mr. Dick would be constantly in the company of David, and on the Thursday mornings he would accompany him from the hotel to the coach office before going back to school. And so the Royal Fountain Hotel has added to its traditions that of being the hotel where Mr. Dick slept. Dickens does not describe it in detail, and does not even refer to it again in the book; but on the 4th of November, 1861, which he describes as a “windy night,” Dickens himself stayed there after giving a reading of David Copperfield at the theatre. Writing to his daughter Mamie on that date he says, “a word of report before I go to bed. An excellent house to-night, and an audience positively perfect. The greatest part of it stalls, and an intelligent and delightful response in them, like a touch of a beautiful instrument. ‘Copperfield’ wound up in a real burst of feeling and delight.”

This letter was headed “Fountain Hotel, Canterbury.” Dickens visited the city again in the summer of 1869, driving there from Gads Hill with some American friends, and made the Fountain Hotel his halting place, whilst he and his companions explored the city. They drove into Canterbury just as the bells of the cathedral were ringing for afternoon service, George Dolby informs us, and “turned into the by-street in which the Fountain Hotel is situated, where the carriages and horses were to be put up,” and where the party took tea prior to starting back for home.

“The inns in England are the best in Europe, those in Canterbury are the best in England, and the Fountain wherein I am now lodged as handsomely as I were in the King’s palace, the best in Canterbury.” So wrote the Ambassador of the Emperor of Germany to his master on the occasion of his visit to this country to attend the marriage ceremony of Edward the First to his second Queen, Margaret of France, in Canterbury Cathedral on the 12th of September, 1299.

The Royal Fountain Hotel, as it is now called, is one of the oldest inns in England; indeed, it is so old as to claim that the wife of Earl Godwin, when she came to meet her husband on his return from Denmark in the year 1029, stayed there. It also claims to have been the temporary residence of Archbishop Lanfranc whilst his palace was being built in 1070; and there is a legend associated with it that the four knights who murdered Thomas À Becket made it their rendezvous in 1170.To-day the inn still retains its old-world atmosphere, although certain of its apartments and appurtenances have been made to conform to modern requirements. Its passages and stairs are narrow and winding, antique furniture, brasses, and copper utensils are in great evidence, and the huge kitchen with its wide fire-place and open chimney still reminds us of the old days. Upstairs is a spacious room measuring some forty or fifty feet in length, in the centre of which is one of those priceless tables made in separate pieces going the whole length of the room, looking, when we last saw it, with scores of chairs set around it, like a gigantic elongated board-room table waiting for a meeting to begin. This room is used for banquets, and often the Mayor holds his official dinners there. But it would seem that the chief claimants to its use is “The Canterbury Farmers’ Club and East Kent Chamber of Agricultural Commerce,” for its walls are covered with portraits in oils of some of the past presidents, whilst a long list of them dating from 1855-1919 hangs in a prominent position.

The “little inn” where Mr. and Mrs. Micawber stayed on the occasion when they thought it was so advisable that they should see the Medway in the hope of finding an opening in the coal trade for Mr. Micawber is the Sun Inn in Sun Street, once the stopping-place for the omnibus which plied between Canterbury and Herne Bay.

It will be remembered that David was taking tea with the Heeps when suddenly Mr. Micawber appeared. David, rather apprehensive of what his old friend might say next, hurried him away by asking, “Shall we go and see Mrs. Micawber, sir?” and they both sallied forth, Mr. Micawber humming a tune on the way. “It was a little inn where Mr. Micawber put up, and he occupied a little room in it, partitioned off from the commercial room, and strongly flavoured with tobacco smoke. I think it was over the kitchen, because a warm greasy smell appeared to come up through the chinks of the floor, and there was a flabby perspiration on the walls. I know it was near the bar, on account of the smell of spirits and jingling of glasses. Here, recumbent on a sofa, underneath a picture of a race-horse, with her head close to the fire and her feet pushing the mustard off the dumb-waiter at the other end of the room, was Mrs. Micawber.”

Undaunted by the fact that his resources were extremely low, Mr. Micawber pressed David to dine with him, and the repast was accordingly arranged. David describes it as “a beautiful little dinner. Quite an elegant dish of fish; the kidney end of a loin of veal, roasted; fried sausage-meat, a partridge, and a pudding. There was wine and there was strong ale; and after dinner Mrs. Micawber made us a bowl of hot punch with her own hands. Mr. Micawber was uncommonly convivial.... He got cheerfully sentimental about the town and proposed success to it, observing that Mrs. Micawber and himself had been made extremely snug and comfortable.... As the punch disappeared, Mr. Micawber became still more friendly and convivial. Mrs. Micawber’s spirits becoming elevated, too, we sang ‘Auld Lang Syne.’... In a word, I never saw anybody so thoroughly jovial as Mr. Micawber was, down to the very last moment of the evening, when I took a hearty farewell of himself and his amiable wife.”

“The Little Inn” Canterbury
Drawn by F. G. Kitton

The “little inn” is the scene of another incident in the book, as narrated in Chapter LII, where Uriah Heep is exposed. David, Mr. Dick, Traddles, and Betsey Trotwood are invited down to Canterbury “to assist at an explosion.” Arriving by the Dover Mail, they all put up at this inn on the recommendation of Mr. Micawber, and there awaited his arrival. It is recorded that they got into the hotel with some trouble in the middle of the night, and “went shivering at that uncomfortable hour” to their respective beds, through various close passages, “which smelt as if they had been steeped for ages in a solution of soup and stables.” In the morning David took a stroll, and states how he “looked at the old house from the corner of the street ... the early sun was striking edgewise on its gables and lattice-windows, touching them with gold, and some beams of its old peace seemed to touch my heart.”They all breakfasted together, full of anxiety and impatience for Mr. Micawber’s appearance, which was punctually timed at the first chime of the half-hour.

This “little inn,” with its gables and lattices telling of its age, still occupies the angle of the peaceful streets close to the Cathedral Close. But Dickens’s designation of it is hardly fitting, for it is quite a commodious building with stabling for about a dozen horses. It is, perhaps, a trifle smaller than when Dickens knew it, for the rooms on the ground-floor corner and one side are used as a jeweller’s and a butcher’s shop respectively.

The inn still boasts of its “splendid accommodation for all,” and is determined that its identification with Dickens should not be overlooked. On one side of the building is a hanging sign bearing the words:

The Sun Inn
Built 1503
The “Little Inn”
of Dickens Fame

whilst in case this should be missed by pilgrims, it has, painted up on the wall the other side:

Sun Hotel
Formerly known as
“The Little Inn”
Made famous by
Chas. Dickens
in His Travels Thro’ Kent
Built 1503

It would seem that the proprietor who was responsible for these words was a little uncertain of the exact association of his “Little Inn” with Dickens. But, being determined to receive some of the reflected glory of the novelist’s fame, and evidently ignorant of the book in which his “Little Inn” figured, played for safety in the use of a general, rather than a specific phrase.

The inn is worth a visit, for it is still quaint, attractive, and picturesque. Although actually built, as we are told, in 1503, we understand that it was altered in the seventeenth century. Anyway, it is sufficiently old to be in keeping with its ancient surroundings.

Turning to London, there is the Piazza Hotel in Covent Garden, mentioned by Steerforth in Chapter XXIV, where he was going to breakfast with one of his friends, which was no doubt the well-known coffee-house at the north-eastern angle of Covent Garden Piazza. It was the favourite resort of the actors and dramatists of the period. Sheridan and John Kemble often dined together in its coffee-room, and there is a record of them disagreeing on a certain matter. Sheridan, in a letter replying to one from Kemble, told him he attributed his letter “to a disorder which I know ought not to be indulged. I prescribe that thou shalt keep thine appointment at the Piazza Coffee-House to-morrow at five, and, taking four bottles of claret instead of three, to which in sound health you might stint yourself, forget that you ever wrote the letter, as I shall that I ever received it.”

Dickens stayed there himself in 1844 and again in 1846, two letters from him to his wife being dated from there.

The Piazza facade where stood the coffee-house was taken down to build the Floral Hall, which is reputed to have been modelled on the Crystal Palace.

In Chapter XXXV, David Copperfield, after a plunge in the old Roman bath in Strand Lane, went for a walk to Hampstead, and got some breakfast on the Heath. The inn where he took his repast, although not named, no doubt was Jack Straw’s Castle. This is the only allusion to the famous hostelry in Dickens’s books that we know of, but the novelist frequented it in his earlier writing years, when he was very fond of riding and walking, and indulged those forms of recreation to his profit during that hard-worked period of his literary career.

In those brilliant days of Pickwick he would wander in all directions out of the London streets, and invite Forster to accompany him on these jaunts by sending him brief commands to join him. One of these ran: “You don’t feel disposed, do you, to muffle yourself up and start off with me for a good brisk walk over Hampstead Heath? I know a good ’ous where we can have a red-hot chop for dinner, and a glass of good wine.” And off they went, leading, as Forster says, to their “first experience of Jack Straw’s Castle, memorable for many happy meetings in coming years.”

On another occasion, whilst writing The Old Curiosity Shop, Maclise accompanied them, but this time they drove to the Heath and then walked to the “Castle.” Here Dickens read to his friends a number of the new story. Again, in 1844, he wrote: “Stanfield and Mac have come in, and we are going to Hampstead to dinner. I leave Betsey Prig as you know, so don’t you make a scruple about leaving Mrs. Harris. We shall stroll leisurely up, to give you time to join us, and dinner will be on the table at Jack Straw’s at four.” A few months later, it is recorded, they dined there again, and it is evident that the old inn was a favourite haunt of the novelist on such occasions, and the Dickens traditions have so clung to it that during the flight of time they have become, as such traditions do, somewhat exaggerated. To-day, visitors are not only shown the chair he sat on, but have pointed out to them the bedroom he used to sleep in. There is no record, however, that he ever stayed the night there, or any reason for believing that he did, seeing how easy it was for him and his friends to get there and back from town. But Jack Straw’s Castle has good reasons for being proud of its literary associations; for, in addition to those of Dickens and his famous friends, such names as Washington Irving, Thackeray, Du Maurier, Lord Leighton, and a host of others may be mentioned as frequenting it. To say nothing of the fact that “The Castle” is mentioned in Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe.

JACK STRAW’S CASTLE, as it was in 1835
Drawn by L. Walker from an old engraving

Apart, however, from its literary associations, Jack Straw’s Castle has a romantic history. It is generally agreed that its name is derived from that of the notorious peasant leader of the rising in the reign of Richard II. And this may be so in spite of the fact that its present designation is not older than the middle of the eighteenth century.

The Peasants’ Revolt took place in 1381, and we are told that it is more than likely that the Hampstead villeins took part in the famous march to London. One authority says that “the St. Albans men, in their advance to join Jack Straw at his headquarters at Highbury, might or might not have passed through Hampstead. If a contingent of adherents was ready to join them at Hampstead, they probably took the village into their route, especially as it would give them particular pleasure to make an offensive demonstration against the Knights Hospitallers, who had a temple there and were the objects of bitter hatred. The attack of the mob upon the house of the Knights Hospitallers at Highbury is a well-known incident of the rising. Whether they visited Hampstead or not, they passed at no great distance from it—near enough to bring the Hampstead villeins within their influence. May it not be that the events of these few days provided the reason for the local name of Jack Straw’s Castle? The mere fact of there being Hampstead sympathisers with Jack Straw who held their meetings at a certain house would be sufficient excuse to gain that house the title of Jack Straw’s Castle.”

Sir Walter Besant thought that, although there is no direct evidence of Jack Straw being connected with the hostelry named after him, “it is quite possible that the Heath formed a rendezvous for the malcontents of his time.” In early days there had been an earthwork on the site, which might have given rise to the name “Castle.” Referring to this point, Professor Hales, who leans to the opinion that Jack Straw was no more than a generic appellation, and instances the fact of there being an inn called Jack Straw’s Castle in a village near Oxford, says: “‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ is so commanding and important that there can be little doubt there would be erected upon it some kind of earthwork or fort at a very early period. Traces of both the Neolithic and the Bronze Age man have been found on and near the Heath, and, possibly enough, both these races raised or held on the spot some rude fortification which subsequent times would call a ‘Castle.’ This being so, we have only to infer, from facts already stated, that the place was used as a tryst for the local partisans of Jack Straw to arrive at the origin of the name of ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’—that is, the Castle of the Jack Strawites.”

To-day, Jack Straw’s Castle is the favoured resort of the district, and perhaps the Dickens traditions act as the strongest lodestone to visitors, and do more to sustain its popularity than any others. At any rate, the Dickensian pilgrim on his ramble through Hampstead places great store on Jack Straw’s Castle for the simple and justifiable reason that it had such attractions for the great novelist.The “little, dirty, tumble-down public-house” at the foot of Hungerford Stairs, where the Micawber family were lodged the night before their departure for Australia, was called the Swan. It was there at the time Dickens worked in the factory as a boy, and appears in contemporary pictures of Hungerford Stairs. The Micawbers occupied one of the wooden chambers upstairs, with the tide flowing underneath. We read that Betsey Trotwood and Agnes were there, “busily making some little extra comforts in the way of dress for the children. Peggotty was quietly assisting with the old insensible work-box, yard measure, and bit of wax candle before her that had outlived so much.” In that ramshackle old inn was enacted that last wonderful scene with Mr. Micawber, when he insisted on making punch in England for the last time. Having obtained the assurance that Miss Trotwood and Miss Wickfield would join him in the toast, he “immediately descended to the bar, where he appeared to be quite at home; and in due time returned with a steaming jug,” and quickly served out the fragrant liquid in tin mugs for his children, and drank from his own particular pint pot himself.

There are three other inns calling for brief reference. The Gray’s Inn Coffee-House, where David Copperfield stayed on his return from abroad, was first mentioned in The Old Curiosity Shop, and is dealt with in our chapter devoted to that book; the Golden Cross at Charing Cross, a prominent feature in Chapter XIX, is commented upon at length in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick”; and the coffee-house in Doctors’ Commons where Mr. Spenlow conducted David Copperfield to discuss a certain delicate matter (Chapter XXXVIII) demolished in 1894.