The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices

WOOD’S HOTEL, FURNIVAL’S INN—THE TILTED WAGON—THE TRAVELLERS’ TWOPENNY—THE CROZIER, CLOISTERHAM—THE KING’S ARMS, LANCASTER—THE SHIP, ALLONBY—THE ANGEL, DONCASTER, AND OTHERS

It is a curious fact that Wood’s Hotel, one of London’s old-time inns which must have been familiar to Dickens in his very early days—even before he commenced writing his Pickwick Papers—did not furnish a scene in any of his books until it figured in Edwin Drood, his last.

As early as 1834, when on the staff of the “Morning Chronicle,” Dickens lived at 13 Furnival’s Inn, and in the following year moved to No 15, where he commenced The Pickwick Papers, and where he took to himself a wife and where his first child was born.

During these days Wood’s Hotel occupied the north side of the quiet quadrangle of Furnival’s Inn, and Dickens must have known it well. It was a staid and respectable house with an air about it of domestic comfort, suitable for country visitors, and where, we are informed, family prayers, night and morning, were included in the accommodation.

Its stately building of four stories had dignity added to it by the four tall white stone pillars in the centre portion of the front reaching to the third floor. Although stolid-looking, it was not aggressively so, nor was it altogether unpicturesque, with its grass plot immediately before the entrance, encircling a statue of the founder of the inn, surrounded by white posts connected by chains.

Its imposing appearance from without reflected the comforts which the inside of a reputable family hotel is expected to provide. At such an hotel one would naturally look for courteous attention from waiters and chambermaids, and good meals cleanly served, and at Wood’s no disappointment in these respects was experienced. Indeed, Dickens conveys that idea in referring to it in Edwin Drood.Entering through the archway of Furnival’s Inn, the hotel caught the eye immediately, and acted as a relief to the straight, angular, and flat appearance of the buildings which formed the once famous quadrangle so intimately associated with Dickens.

It is believed by some, and was definitely stated to be a fact by a writer in the American magazine, the “Cosmopolitan,” for May, 1893, and again by a writer in the “Middlesex and Hertfordshire Notes and Queries,” July, 1895, that Dickens in his bachelor days had apartments on the second floor of the hotel in the right-hand corner, and that in the latter years of its existence the walls of this same room were decorated with pictures of scenes and characters from his works.

We have, however, been unable to find any authority for this statement. But it is quite possible that he frequented the hotel, and we may even assume that he and his friends, HablÔt K. Browne and Robert Young, who occupied rooms in Furnival’s when they were executing engravings for Pickwick, would perhaps chat over details in a snug room in the hotel, when they would be joined by their other friend and engraver, Finden.

Bearing all these ideas in mind, it is certainly a little strange that Dickens waited for his last book before he introduced the hotel into his writings.

In that book we are told that Mr. Grewgious crossed over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn from Staple Inn opposite for his dinner “three hundred days in the year at least,” and after dinner crossed back again. On one occasion, a very important interview between him and Edwin Drood took place in his chambers, and Edwin was pressed to stay for a meal. “We can have dinner in from just across Holborn,” Grewgious assured him, and Bazzard, his clerk, was not only invited to join them, but asked if he would mind “stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in materials for laying the cloth.... For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made dish that can be recommended and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton) and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare—in short, we’ll have whatever there is on hand.”

Bazzard, after bringing out the round table, accordingly withdrew to execute the orders. His return with the waiters gives Dickens an opportunity for one of his humorous descriptive passages which we make no excuse for quoting in full:

“Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters—an immovable waiter, and a flying waiter; and the three brought in with them as much fog as gave a new roar to the fire. The flying waiter, who had brought everything on his shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while the immovable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him. The flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and the immovable waiter looked through them. The flying waiter then flew across Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the joint and the poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was discovered from time to time that the immovable waiter had forgotten them all. But, let the flying waiter cleave the air as he might, he was always reproached on his return by the immovable waiter for bringing fog with him and being out of breath. At the conclusion of the repast, by which time the flying waiter was severely blown, the immovable waiter gathered up the table-cloth under his arm with a grand air, and, having sternly (not to say with indignation) looked on at the flying waiter while he set clean glasses round, directed a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious, conveying: ‘Let it be clearly understood between us that the reward is mine, and that nil is the claim of this slave,’ and pushed the flying waiter before him out of the room.”

Thus the waiters of Wood’s Hotel, which was the name of the hotel referred to, although not mentioned by Dickens. Later in the book, we get a more intimate association with it. After the murder of Edwin Drood, Rosa Bud hurriedly takes coach from Rochester and presents herself to her guardian in his chambers. She is tired and hungry, naturally, and Grewgious, concerned for her welfare, asks her what she will take after her journey. “Shall it be breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea or supper?” he enquires.

“Your rest, too, must be provided for,” he went on; “and you shall have the prettiest chamber in Furnival’s. Your toilet must be provided for, and you shall have everything that an unlimited head chambermaid—by which expression I mean a head chambermaid not limited as to outlay—can procure.”

WOOD’S HOTEL, FURNIVAL’S INN
Drawn by L. Walker

“Rosa thanked him, but said she could only take a cup of tea. Mr. Grewgious, after several times running out, and in again, to mention such supplementary items as marmalade, eggs, watercresses, salted fish, and frizzled ham, ran across to Furnival’s without his hat, to give his various directions. And soon afterwards they were realised in practice, and the board was spread.”

After a friendly chat over tea, he escorted her to her rooms. He “helped her to get her hat on again, and hung upon his arm the very little bag that was of no earthly use, and led her by the hand (with a certain stately awkwardness, as if he were going to walk a minuet) across Holborn, and into Furnival’s Inn. At the hotel door, he confided her to the unlimited head chambermaid, and said that while she went up to see her room he would remain below, in case she should wish it exchanged for another, or should find that there was anything she wanted.”

Rosa’s room was airy, clean, comfortable, almost gay. The Unlimited had laid in everything omitted from the very little bag (that is to say, everything she could possibly need) and Rosa tripped down the great stairs again, to thank her guardian for his thoughtful and affectionate care of her.

“‘Not at all, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, infinitely gratified; ‘it is I who thank you for your charming confidence and for your charming company. Your breakfast will be provided for you in a neat, compact, and graceful little sitting-room (appropriate to your figure) and I will come to you at ten o’clock in the morning. I hope you don’t feel very strange indeed in this strange place.’

“‘Oh no, I feel so safe!’“‘Yes, you may be sure that the stairs are fireproof,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘and that any outbreak of the devouring element would be perceived and suppressed by the watchmen.’”

Having seen Rosa comfortably settled, he left her, assuring the night porter as he went that, “if someone staying in the hotel should wish to send across the road to me in the night, a crown will be ready for the messenger.”

To the hotel next morning Mr. Grewgious went faithfully to time with Mr. Crisparkle, who had followed Rosa up from Rochester as fast as he could. Soon also Tartar arrived. After a long consultation between them about Mr. Landless and the use Tartar’s chambers could be put to for certain spying purposes, Tartar took Rosa and Mr. Grewgious for a row up the river. Apartments ultimately being found for Rosa elsewhere, she left Wood’s Hotel, and no further reference is made to it in the book.

In 1898 Furnival’s Inn was demolished with its hotel. Upon its site now stand an insurance company’s huge premises.

In Chapter XV, detailing Neville Landless’s long tramp from Cloisterham, we are told that he stopped at the next road-side tavern to refresh. Dickens describes it in the following words:“Visitors in want of breakfast—unless they were horses or cattle, for which class of guests there was preparation enough in the way of water-trough and hay—were so unusual at the sign of the Tilted Wagon that it took a long time to get the wagon into the track of tea and toast and bacon; Neville, in the interval, sitting in a sanded parlour, wondering in how long a time after he had gone the sneezy fire of damp fagots would begin to make somebody else warm. Indeed, the Tilted Wagon was a cool establishment on the top of a hill, where the ground before the door was puddles with damp hoofs and trodden straw; where a scolding landlady slapped a moist baby (with one red sock on and one wanting) in the bar; where the cheese was cast aground upon a shelf in company with a mouldy table-cloth and a green-handled knife in a sort of cast-iron canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumbs over its shipwreck in another canoe; where the family linen, half-washed and half dried, led a public life of lying about; where everything to drink was drunk out of mugs, and everything else was suggestive of a rhyme to mugs: the Tilted Wagon, all these things considered, hardly kept its painted promise of providing good entertainment for man and beast.”Mr. Edwin Harris, in his guide to Dickensian Rochester, has identified the Coach and Horses on the top of Strood Hill as the original of the Tilted Wagon.

The Travellers’ Twopenny, where the boy deputy was a “man-servant,” as he explained to Jasper, was originally the White Duck, and afterwards Kit’s lodging-house, and stood in the Maidstone Road at Rochester. It degenerated into a crazy wooden sort of cheap public-house, and was not demolished before it was necessary. On its site now stands a business warehouse.

The Crozier, the “Orthodox Hotel,” where Datchery lodged in the same city, was the Crown, and is dealt with in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick.”

In the late autumn of 1857, Dickens and Wilkie Collins started “on a ten or twelve days’ expedition to out-of-the-way places, to do (in inns and coast corners) a little tour in search of an article and in avoidance of railroads.” Their selection was the Lake District, but the outcome of their expedition was not one article merely but a series of five under the title of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, written in collaboration. The two idle apprentices were Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, the first name being the pseudonym of Dickens.

These misguided young men, they inform us in the narrative, “were actuated by the low idea of making a perfectly idle trip in any direction. They had no intention of going anywhere in particular; they wanted to see nothing; they wanted to know nothing; they wanted to learn nothing; they wanted to do nothing. They wanted only to be idle ... and they were both idle in the last degree.” In that spirit they set forth on their journey.

Carrock Fell, Wigton, Allonby, Carlisle, Maryport, Hesket Newmarket, were all visited in turn, and the adventures of the twain in these spots duly set forth in the pages of the book. In due course they came to Lancaster, and, the inn at that town being the most important of the tour, we deal with it first.

The travellers were meditating flight at the station on account of Thomas Idle being suddenly filled with “the dreadful sensation of having something to do.” However, they decided to stay because they had heard there was a good inn at Lancaster, established in a fine old house; an inn where they give you bride-cake every day after dinner. “Let us eat bride-cake,” they said, “without the trouble of being married, or of knowing anybody in that ridiculous dilemma.” And so they departed from the station and were duly delivered at the fine old house at Lancaster on the same night.

This was the King’s Arms in the Market Street, the exterior of which was dismal, quite uninviting, and lacked any sort of picturesqueness such as one associates with old inns; but the interior soon compensated for the unattractiveness of the exterior by its atmosphere, fittings and customs. Being then over two centuries old, it had allurement calculated to make the lover of things old happy and contented. “The house was a genuine old house,” the story tells us, “of a very quaint description, teeming with old carvings, and beams, and panels, and having an excellent staircase, with a gallery or upper staircase cut off from it by a curious fence-work of old oak, or of old Honduras mahogany wood. It was, and is, and will be, for many a long year to come, a remarkably picturesque house; and a certain grave mystery lurking in the depth of the old mahogany panels, as if they were so many deep pools of dark water—such, indeed, as they had been much among when they were trees—gave it a very mysterious character after nightfall.”A terrible ghost story was attached to the house concerning a bride who was poisoned there, and the room in which the process of slow death took place was pointed out to visitors. The perpetrator of the crime, the story relates, was duly hanged, and in memory of the weird incident bride-cake was served each day after dinner.

The complete story of this melodramatic legend is narrated to Goodchild by a spectre in the haunted chamber where he and his companion had been writing.

Dickens wove into the story much fancy and not a little eerieness, and it is said that the publicity given to it in Household Words, in which it first appeared, created so much interest that the hotel was sought out by eager visitors who love a haunted chamber. As this was situated in an ancient inn with its antique bedstead all complete, to say nothing of the curious custom of providing bride-cake at dinner in memory of the unfortunate bride, the King’s Arms, Lancaster, discovered its fame becoming world-wide instead of remaining local.

At the time of the visit of Dickens and Wilkie Collins to this rare old inn, the proprietor was one Joseph Sly, and Dickens occupied what he termed the state bedroom, “with two enormous red four-posters in it, each as big as Charley’s room at Gads Hill.” He described the inn as “a very remarkable old house ... with genuine rooms and an uncommonly quaint staircase.” A certain portion of the “lazy notes” for the book were, we are told, written at the King’s Arms Hotel.

THE KING’S ARMS, LANCASTER
Drawn by L. Walker

On their arrival, Dickens and Collins sat down to a good hearty meal. The landlord himself presided over the serving of it, which, Dickens writes in a letter, comprised “two little salmon trout; a sirloin steak; a brace of partridges; seven dishes of sweets; five dishes of dessert, led off by a bowl of peaches; and in the centre an enormous bride-cake. ‘We always have it here, sir,’ said the landlord, ‘custom of the house.’ Collins turned pale, and estimated the dinner at half a guinea each.”

Mr. Sly became quite good friends with the two distinguished novelists, and cherished with great pride the signed portrait of Dickens which the author of Pickwick presented him with. He left the old place in 1879 and it was soon afterwards pulled down and replaced by an ordinary commercial hotel. Although the bride-cake custom was abandoned, and the haunted chamber with its fantastic story swept away, it is interesting to know that the famous oak bedstead, in which Dickens himself slept, was acquired by the Duke of Norfolk.

Mr. Sly, who died in 1895, never tired of recalling the visit of the two famous authors. He took the greatest pride in his wonderful old inn, and found real delight in conducting visitors over the building and telling amusing stories about Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Indeed, he was so proud of the association that he obtained Dickens’s permission to reprint those passages of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices relating to the hostelry, in pamphlet form, with an introductory note saying, “The reader is perhaps aware that Mr. Charles Dickens and his friend Wilkie Collins, in the year 1857, visited Lancaster, and during their sojourn stayed at Mr. Sly’s King’s Arms Hotel.”

There is a further association with the inn and Dickens to be found in “Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions.” We find it recorded there that Doctor Marigold and his Library Cart, as he called his caravan, “were down at Lancaster, and I had done two nights’ more than the fair average business (though I cannot in honour recommend them as a quick audience) in the open square there, near the end of the street where Mr. Sly’s King’s Arms and Royal Hotel stands.”

“Doctor Marigold” was published in 1865, seven years after Dickens’s visit. But he not only remembered the King’s Arms, but also Mr. Sly, the proprietor, who thus became immortalised in a Dickens story. Mr. Sly evidently was a popular man in the town, and his energy and good nature were much appreciated. That this was so, the following paragraph bears witness:It is recorded as an historical fact that, on the marriage of H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, the demonstration made in Lancaster exceeded any held out of the Metropolis. The credit of this success is mainly due to Mr. Sly, who proposed the programme, which included the roasting of two oxen whole, and a grotesque torchlight procession. The manner in which the whole arrangements were carried out was so satisfactory to the inhabitants of the town and neighbourhood that, at a meeting held a short time after the event, it was unanimously resolved to present Mr. and Mrs. Sly with a piece of plate, of a design suitable to commemorate the event. The sum required was subscribed in a few days, the piece of plate procured, and the presentation was made in the Assembly Rooms on the 9th of November by the High Sheriff, W. A. F. Saunders, Esq., of Wennington Hall, in the presence of a numerous company.

In its palmy days the King’s Arms was a prominent landmark for travellers en route to Morecambe Bay, Windermere, the Lakes, and Scotland. It was erected in 1625, and in the coaching era was the head hotel in the town for general posting purposes, and was the most suitable place for tourists to break their journey going North, or in returning. Consequently, it was one of the most important in the North of England.

The inn the two idle apprentices entered at Hesket Newmarket “to drink whiskey and eat oat-cake” is not named, but it has been identified with a house which is no longer an inn. At the time of the story it was called the Queen’s Head, and was quite a prominent hostelry in the town, the innkeeper of which is described as having “a ruddy cheek, a bright eye, a well-knit frame, an immense hand, a cheery, outspeaking voice, and a straight, bright, broad look. He had a drawing-room, too, upstairs, which was worth a visit to the Cumberland Fells.”

“The ceiling of this drawing-room,” we are further told, “was so crossed and re-crossed by beams of unequal lengths, radiating from a centre, in a corner, that it looked like a broken starfish. The room was comfortably and solidly furnished with good mahogany and horsehair. It had a snug fireside, a couple of well-curtained windows, looking out upon the wild country behind the house. What it most developed was an unexpected taste for little ornaments and knick-knacks, of which it contained a most surprising number,” which Dickens goes on to describe in his own whimsical manner.Hesket has not altered very much, we understand, since those days, and the inn itself remains, not as an inn, but as a private house, and the room where the oat-cake and whiskey were served still has its crossed and re-crossed beams of unequal length.

From this inn, and under the guidance of the landlord, the two idle apprentices mounted Carrock—with what disastrous effects to Mr. Idle on the way down, readers of the story well know.

On again reaching the inn, under uncomfortable circumstances, they remained only a few hours, and continued the tour to Wigton in a covered carriage. Here, Mr. Idle was “melodramatically carried to the inn’s first floor and laid upon three chairs.” The King’s Arms is said to be the Wigton inn referred to, but no details are given of it in the book.

Their next halting place was Allonby, where they put up at the Ship. Thomas Idle, we are informed, “made a crab-like progress up a clean little bulk-headed staircase, into a clean little bulk-headed room, where he slowly deposited himself on a sofa, with a stick on either hand of him, looking exceedingly grim,” and both partook of dinner. The little inn is described as delightful, “excellently kept by the most comfortable of landladies and the most attentive of landlords.” It still exists, and, “as a family and commercial hotel and posting-house commanding extensive views of the Solway Firth and the Scottish Hills,” is apparently little altered since Dickens and Collins visited it. Its Dickensian associations are cherished by the owner to-day, who shows with pride the room occupied by the two literary giants.

After their visit to Lancaster, already referred to, the two idle apprentices went on to Doncaster, and arrived there in the St. Leger Race week. They put up at the Angel Hotel, where they had secured rooms, which Dickens described as “very good, clean and quiet apartments on the second floor, looking down into the main street.” His own room was “airy and clean, little dressing-room attached, eight water-jugs ... capital sponge bath, perfect arrangement, exquisite neatness.”

Doncaster during the race week is described as a collection of mad people under the charge of a body of designing keepers, horse-mad, betting-mad, vice-mad. But the two novelists managed to find it enticing enough to remain there a week.The Angel Hotel was often called the Royal because Queen Victoria stayed there in 1851. It was built in 1810, has always been a celebrated hotel, and was a busy coaching-inn in those days. It remains much as it was when Thomas Idle lay in the room for a week with his bad ankle and his friend Francis Goodchild went roaming around the city with his usual observant eyes.