A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations

THE ROYAL GEORGE, DOVER—YE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE—THE THREE JOLLY BARGEMEN—THE CROSS KEYS, WOOD STREET—HUMMUM’S, COVENT GARDEN—THE SHIP AND LOBSTER, GRAVESEND—THE FOX UNDER THE HILL, DENMARK HILL

Notwithstanding the fact that A Tale of Two Cities is to some persons Dickens’s best book, or the one that many prefer to any other, it is the most barren for our purpose. Apart from the fact that its scenes are laid chiefly in another country, those that concern our own supply little enough material in the way of taverns that can be identified.

In Chapter IV of Book 1, Dickens gives a fine description of the London Mail Coach’s journey to Dover, but no incident associated with an inn is touched upon on the way, and not until the journey is terminated at Dover is an inn mentioned by name.

“When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon,” we are told, “the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach door, as his custom was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey from London in winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous traveller upon.”

Here Mr. Lorry, the only passenger left, shaking himself of straw, alighted from the coach and engaged a room for the night, where he awaited the arrival of Lucy Manette for the momentous interview which was to terminate in their voyage to Calais.

We cannot, however, discover that there was any hotel with the name of the Royal George in Dover at that or any other period; but Robert Allbut, hunting for one to serve its purpose, hit upon the King’s Head Hotel, which he says was the old coaching-house for the London Mail, and therefore must have been the hostelry Dickens had in mind. Other authorities mention the Ship, long since disappeared, upon whose site now stands the Lord Warden Hotel, where Dickens often stayed himself, and occasionally mentions in his writings. Taking into consideration the date of the story, one may rightly assume that the Ship was the hotel at which Mr. Lorry’s coach deposited him. It was the Ship no doubt that Byron sang of in the following verse:

Thy cliffs, dear Dover! harbour and hotel;
Thy custom-house, with all its delicate duties;
Thy waiters running mucks at every bell;
Thy packets, all whose passengers are booties
To those who upon land or water dwell;
And last, not least, to strangers uninstructed,
Thy long, long bills, whence nothing is deducted.

But it has long ago gone, and in its place the fashionable Lord Warden now stands.

Ye Old Cheshire Cheese, that popular tavern in Fleet Street, was never, we believe, ever mentioned in any one of Dickens’s books by name, nor can we discover that it was alluded to or described even under an assumed name. It is known that he visited it, and the menu card bearing a picture of what is known as Dr. Johnson’s room, with Dickens and Thackeray seated at the table presided over by the shade of the lexicographer itself, is familiar to visitors.

THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE

Dickens students, however, are of opinion that the Cheshire Cheese is the tavern where Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton dined after the trial at the Old Bailey, described in Chapter IV of Book 2. The evidence offered for this is as follows:

Darnay tells Carton that he is faint for want of food.

“Then why the devil don’t you dine? I dined myself while those numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to—this, or some other.” “Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well in,” replied Carton.

“Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate Hill to Fleet Street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here they were shown a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton sat opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port before him, and his full half-insolent manner upon him.”

The Cheshire Cheese no doubt was the tavern Dickens was thinking of when he wrote the foregoing passages. It certainly was the resort of the literary and legal professions in those days, as it has been since. It is too well known to warrant any detailed account of it here. Besides, its two-and-a-half-century history is too packed with anecdote and story to allow of adequate description in our limited space. An excellent book is issued by the proprietors fully dealing with its past, and copiously illustrated.

There seems to be a growing desire on the part of Dickens students to prove that Cooling, the hamlet in Kent near to Gads Hill is not the spot where are laid certain scenes of Great Expectations, in spite of the fact that Dickens told Forster it was. We do not propose to argue the matter here. The chief point at issue seems to be that there is no blacksmith’s forge at Cooling, whereas there is at Chalk and at Hoo, two other villages in the district that claim the honour. Yet at Chalk there are no “graveyard lozenges,” but at Hoo we believe there happens to be both lozenges in the churchyard and a forge in the village.

On the other hand, we are told there was a blacksmith’s forge at Cooling in Dickens’s time. If, therefore, we accept Cooling as Joe Gargery’s village, the Horseshoe and Castle Inn there would stand for the Three Jolly Bargemen where Joe Gargery and Pip used to while away certain hours of the evening, as described in Chapter X of the book.

It is first referred to on the occasion when Pip had promised “at his peril” to bring Joe home from it. “There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen,” Pip tells us, “with some alarmingly long chalk scores in it on the wall at the side of the door” which seemed never to be paid off. They had been there ever since he could remember, and had grown more than he had. There was a common-room at the end of the passage with a bright large kitchen fire, where Joe smoked his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle. It was here that Pip again encountered his convict who stirred his drink with the file Pip had borrowed for him earlier in the story, and where he was presented with a shilling wrapped in “two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle markets in the country.”

It is the scene of many incidents in the story. Indeed, it was the meeting place of all the men of the village, to whom Mr. Wopsle read the news round the fire, and where all the gossip of the district was retailed.

The Horseshoe and Castle is a typical village inn, in all appearances like a doll’s house, built of wood in a quite plain fashion, lying a little back from the road. It was in this inn that Mr. Jaggers unexpectedly appeared one day enquiring for Pip, which ultimately resulted in the change in Pip’s fortune and his journey to London.Pip’s journey from “our town,” as he calls it, to the Metropolis, was, we read, “a journey of about five hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse stage-coach by which I was passenger got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.”

This incident of the early life of Pip, related in 1860, was a reminiscence of Dickens’s early childhood, which he recalls in The Uncommercial Traveller, when he tells us that, as a small boy, he “left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in the land,” and he left it in a stage-coach. “Through all the years that have since passed,” he goes on, “have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed—like game—and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.... The coach that carried me away was melodiously called Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson at the coach office up street.” In speaking of Dullborough and “our town,” it is known that Dickens was referring to Rochester.

The Cross Keys was a notable coaching inn of those days, and the Rochester coaches started and ended their journey there. It was demolished over fifty years ago. Although Dickens does not give us one of his pleasant pen-pictures of it, he refers to it occasionally in other of his stories, such as Little Dorrit and Nicholas Nickleby.

Another one-time famous London inn, referred to in Great Expectations, but no longer existing, is Hummum’s, in Covent Garden.

When Pip received that note one evening on reaching the gateway of the Temple, warning him not to go home, he hired a chariot and drove to Hummum’s, Covent Garden. He spent a very miserable night there. In those times, he tells us, “a bed was always to be got there at any hour of the night, and the chamberlain, letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the candle next in order on his shelf, and showed me straight into the bedroom next in order. It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the back, with a despotic monster of a four-post bed in it, straddling over the whole place, putting one of its arbitrary legs into the fire-place, and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.”

He goes on to wail of his doleful night. The room smelt of cold soot and hot dust, the tester was covered in blue-bottle flies, which he thought must be lying up for next summer. “When I had lain awake a little while, those extraordinary voices, with which silence teems, began to make themselves audible. The closet whispered, the fire-place sighed, the little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers.”

He then thought of the unknown gentleman who once came to Hummum’s in the night and had gone to bed and destroyed himself and had been found in the morning weltering in his blood. Altogether a dismal, doleful and miserable experience of Hummum’s. But no doubt Pip’s liver or nerves were the cause of it, not the hotel.

Another reference to it is made in Sketches by Boz in the chapter describing the streets in the morning. Speaking of the pandemonium which reigns in Covent Garden at an early hour after daybreak, the talking, shouting, horses neighing, donkeys braying, Dickens says “these and a hundred other sounds form a compound discordant enough to a Londoner’s ears, and remarkably disagreeable to those of country gentlemen who are sleeping at Hummum’s for the first time.”

There is an hotel standing in Covent Garden with the same name to-day, but, although it is on the same spot, it is not the Hummum’s of which Pip speaks. That was demolished long ago, and was the scene of a marvellous ghost story told in Boswell’s Johnson concerning Parson Ford.

The Ship at Gravesend, mentioned as the waterside inn where Pip and his assistants managed to row the convict Magwitch, with the idea of smuggling him out of the country, is known as the Ship and Lobster.

THE SHIP AND LOBSTER, GRAVESEND
Drawn by C. G. Harper

Having run alongside a little causeway made of stones, Pip left the rest of the occupants of the boat and stepped ashore, and found the light they had observed from the river to be in the window of a public-house. “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.... We made a very good meal by the kitchen fire, and then apportioned the bedrooms.... We found that the air was carefully excluded from both as if air was fatal to life; and there were more dirty clothes and bandboxes under the beds than I should have thought the family possessed. But we considered ourselves well off, notwithstanding, for a more solitary place we could not have found.”

Outside this inn Magwitch was again captured, and transferred to a galley, where Pip eventually joined him and accompanied him to his destination.

Dickens knew Gravesend well, and his description of the Ship and Lobster is a faithful one. It is situated on the shore at Denton, a village adjoining the town, not far from the official Lighterman’s at Denton Wharf. At one time it flourished as a popular tea-garden resort.

There are two other inns in the book that must not be overlooked. The Blue Boar at Rochester, where Pip stayed when he visited his old town, which was the Bull Inn there, and is dealt with in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick”; and the tavern where Wemmick’s wedding-breakfast was held. This is said to be the Fox under the Hill, nearly at the top of Denmark Hill. It is now a modern public-house, but sixty or seventy years ago it was an old wayside inn—a pleasant little tavern, and a favourite resort, especially on Sunday evenings in the summer, for the youthful population of Walworth and Camberwell.

We close this chapter with the brief account of the festive occasion:

“Breakfast had been ordered at a pleasant little tavern, a mile or so away upon the rising ground beyond the green[2] and there was a bagatelle board in the room, in case we should desire to unbend our minds after the solemnity. It was pleasant to observe that Mrs. Wemmick no longer unwound Wemmick’s arm when it adapted itself to her figure, but sat in a high-backed chair against the wall, like a violoncello in its case, and submitted to be embraced as that melodious instrument might have done. We had an excellent breakfast, and, when anyone declined anything on the table, Wemmick said, ‘Provided by contract you know; don’t be afraid of it!’ I drank to the new couple, drank to the Aged, drank to the Castle, saluted the bride at parting, and made myself as agreeable as I could.”