Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Hard Times

SOL’S ARMS—THE DEDLOCK ARMS—THE LONDON COFFEE—HOUSE—PEGASUS’ ARMS—ETC.

There are very few inns of any importance mentioned in Bleak House, and only one that plays any prominent part in the story. The one at Barnet, where Esther Summerson hired the carriage to drive to Mr. Jarndyce’s house, was no doubt meant to be the Red Lion, and is dealt with in the first chapter of the present volume; while the White Horse Cellar, where she alighted on her entry into London from Reading, claims attention in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick.”

Of the two other taverns, Sol’s Arms, where the inquest on Nemo was held, and the Dedlock Arms at Chesney Wold, the former is the chief.

The original of Sol’s Arms was the old Ship Tavern which once stood at the corner of Chichester Rents off Chancery Lane. It is first referred to in Chapter XI as the place of the coroner’s inquest. “The coroner is to sit in the first-floor room at the Sol’s Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place twice a week, and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of professional celebrity, faced by Little Swills the comic vocalist.... The Sol’s Arms does a brisk stroke of business all the morning.”

According to Allbut, Dickens took the name from a tavern in the Hampstead Road where the harmonic meetings of the Sol’s Society were held, and it certainly seems that he adapted its characteristics to the Ship.

At the appointed hour the coroner arrived, and was conducted by the beadle and the landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, “where he puts his hat on the piano, and takes a Windsor chair at the head of the long table, formed of several short tables put together, and ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by the pots and glasses. As many of the jury as can crowd together at the tables sit there. The rest get among the spittoons and pipes, or lean against the piano.”

All in readiness, the famous inquest on Nemo, with poor Joe as a witness, took place, after which the Sol’s Arms gradually “melts into the shadowy night, and then flares out of it strong in gas.”

That was a special event for the Sol’s Arms, which generally speaking was just a tavern frequented by lawyers’ clerks and the inhabitants of Chichester Rents and its neighbourhood. It, no doubt, was Krook’s habitual place of call, it certainly was patronized by Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, and Mr. Guppy must often have looked in; but its chief claim to fame was its being the meeting place of the Harmonic Company, of whom Little Swills was so distinguished a member.

Although Chichester Rents, which exists to-day, is not the same Chichester Rents as when the Old Ship Tavern was there, and Krook lived there, with Miss Flite as a lodger, one is easily reminded of these things, and of the inquest, of Poor Joe, and of the great Little Swills, when one wanders through this district of Dickens Land.

It is common knowledge that Chesney Wold, the country seat of the Dedlocks of the story, was Rockingham Castle, the home of the Hon. Richard Watson and Mrs. Watson, to whom Dickens dedicated David Copperfield. There is, therefore, no difficulty in tracing the Dedlock Arms. The village of Chesney Wold was the village of Rockingham. In Rockingham is an old inn bearing the date of 1763, known as Sonde’s Arms, which stands for the Dedlock Arms of the story.

Little Dorrit is almost as devoid of reference to inns and taverns that count as Bleak House. In few cases the references are as a rule but passing ones. Perhaps the most interesting is to the Coffee-House on Ludgate Hill, where Arthur Clennam stayed, for it remains almost as it was in those days.

In the third chapter of the first book, Dickens gives one of those telling pen-pictures of London for which he had no rival. It is of rather a dull and doleful hue, and depicts the aspect the city presents on a Sunday: “gloomy, close and stale.” Arthur Clennam had just arrived from Marseilles by way of Dover and its coach “The Blue-Eyed Maid,” and “sat in the window of a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They won’t come, they won’t come, they won’t come! At the five minutes it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair. ‘Thank heaven!’ said Clennam when the hour struck, and the bell stopped.”

THE LONDON COFFEE HOUSE, LUDGATE HILL
From an old Engraving

The particular coffee-house in whose window Clennam sat was the famous old London Coffee-House, and the particular church whose bells prompted his reflections, so microscopically described by the novelist, must have been St. Martin’s next door. There can be little doubt of this, for we are told that Clennam “sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old places of imprisonment.... Presently the rain began to fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster.”

That “public passage opposite” must have been what is now the entrance to Ludgate Square.With these facts to guide us, we can supply the name and location of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. It exists to-day, nestling close to St. Martin’s Church, on the west side, and, but for the substitution of a plate-glass shop-front, is to all intents and purposes unchanged in its outward appearances from what it was when Clennam sat in meditation at one of its windows.

The illustration from an old engraving by S. Jenkins, after a drawing by G. Shepherd, shows the coffee-house and church as they were in 1814; and, if comparison of the picture of the former building is made with the present structure, it will be seen that it is practically identical, except so far as the ground floor is concerned.

The house was first opened as a coffee-house in 1731 by one James Ashley, and its vast cellars stretched under Ludgate Hill to the foundations of the city walls. In those days, it was “within the Rules of the Fleet Prison, and was noted for the sales held there of booksellers’ stocks and literary copyrights,” and used to afford hospitality to the juries from the Old Bailey sessions when they disagreed. The grandfather of John Leech, the illustrator of A Christmas Carol was the landlord of the tavern for some years, and later the father of the famous Punch artist became the tenant, and filled it with the merry crowd associated with Mr. Punch’s early days. Leech was followed as landlord by Mr. Lovegrove from the Horn Tavern in Doctors’ Commons.

There is a casual mention of the famous old George Inn in the Borough High Street, in Chapter XXII of Book 1 of Little Dorrit, where Tip Dorrit is spoken of as going into the inn to write a letter; and also passing references to Garraway’s and the Jerusalem Coffee-House, as occasional resorts of Mr. Flintwinch. Full details concerning the George and Garraway’s will be found in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick.”

The Jerusalem Coffee House was one of the oldest in the city of London, and was famous for its news-rooms, where merchants and captains connected with the commerce of India, China and Australia could see and consult the files of all the most important papers from those countries, as well as the chief shipping lists.

The hotel in Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, where Mr. Dorrit stayed when he reached London from the Continent, was probably Mivart’s, and is dealt with in the chapter devoted to Nicholas Nickleby.

Coketown, of Hard Times, is generally supposed to be Manchester. We suspect it to be a composite picture, with a good deal of Preston in it, and other manufacturing towns as well. It is not possible, therefore, to identify the one or two inns which figure in the story.

The hotel where Mr. James Harthouse stayed when he went there with an introduction to Mr. Bounderby might be any hotel in any town; and there seems no means of tracing the original of the “mean little public-house with red lights in it” at Pod’s End, where Sissy Jupe brought Gradgrind and Bounderby. Dickens describes it “as haggard and as shabby as if, for want of custom, it had itself taken to drinking and had gone the way all drunkards go, and was very near the end of it.”

The name he gives to the public-house was the Pegasus’ Arms. The Pegasus’ leg, he informs us, might have been more to the purpose; but, underneath the winged horse upon the sign-board, the Pegasus’ Arms was inscribed in Roman letters. Beneath that inscription, again, in a flowing scroll, the painter had touched off the lines:

Good malt makes good beer,
Walk in, and they’ll draw it here;
Good wine makes good brandy,
Give us a call, and you’ll find it handy.These lines were taken from an old inn-sign, the Malt Shovel, which once stood at the foot of Chatham Hill.