Christmas Stories and Minor Writings

THE MITRE INN—THE SALISBURY ARMS—THE PEAL OF BELLS—THE NUTMEG-GRATER—THE DODO—THE PAVILIONSTONE HOTEL—HEN AND CHICKENS—THE SWAN

In the First Branch of “The Holly Tree,” in Christmas Stories, there are many inns far and wide referred to, and reminiscences associated with each recalled. These reminiscences may be personal to Dickens or merely of an imaginary nature. The Holly Tree Inn itself is real enough, and has been identified as the George, Greta Bridge, referred to in our chapter on Nicholas Nickleby. There is no doubt, either, that the inn in the cathedral town where Dickens went to school was the Mitre Inn at Chatham. “It was the inn where friends used to put up,” he says, “and where we used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and to be tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign—the Mitre—and a bar that seemed the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord’s daughter to distraction—but let that pass. It was in that inn that I was cried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight. And though she had been, that Holly Tree night, for many a long year where all tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.”

THE MITRE INN, CHATHAM
From an engraving

The Mitre Inn and Clarence Hotel still exists at Chatham, very much as it was in Dickens’s childhood days when his family lived in Ordnance Terrace. It was kept in those days by a Mr. Tribe, who was a friend of John Dickens, and the two families met there and enjoyed many friendly evenings when Dickens and his sister, as he has told us, mounted on a dining-table for a stage, would sing some old sea-songs together. He had a clear treble voice then, but, recalling these incidents many years afterward, said, “he must have been a horrible little nuisance to many unoffending grown-up people who were called upon to admire him.”

The Mitre Inn was described in 1838 as being the Manor House, and the first posting-house of the town. It is also on record that, at the close of the eighteenth century, Lord Nelson used to reside there when on duty at Chatham, and that the room he occupied was known as “Nelson’s Cabin” till recent times. William the Fourth, when Duke of Clarence, used to stay there, hence the added word of Clarence to the sign.

The Salisbury Arms at Hatfield where Mr. and Mrs. Lirriper went upon their wedding-day, “and passed as happy a fortnight as ever happy was,” adjoined the little post-office there, and now exists as a private house. Mr. Lirriper’s youngest brother also had a sneaking regard for the Salisbury Arms, where he enjoyed himself for the space of a fortnight and left without paying his bill, an omission Mrs. Lirriper rectified in the innocent belief that it was fraternal affection which induced her unprincipled brother-in-law to favour Hatfield with his presence.

It is believed that Dickens and Phiz stayed the night of October the 27th, 1838, at the Salisbury Arms, when they made their excursion to the West Country.

The scene of the first four chapters of “A Message from the Sea,” is laid in “Steepways, North Devon, England,” the name Dickens gives to Clovelly, and the story opens with a faithful and unmistakable description of one of the most beautiful and quaintest villages in England. To it comes Captain Jorgan to unravel a sea mystery, but no reference is made to his staying at the inn there. The task he has set himself, however, eventually takes him to another adjacent village, which Dickens calls Lanrean. There he puts up at the King Arthur’s Arms, to identify which we must first identify Lanrean. That Dickens had a certain village near Clovelly in mind, there is little doubt, for he and Wilkie Collins, who collaborated in writing the story, went there for the purpose. Their description of Clovelly being so accurate and meticulous, it is only natural that Lanrean has a prototype, and, if found, the original of King Arthur’s Arms would be forthcoming.

The original of the Peal of Bells, the village ale-house, in “Tom Tiddler’s Ground,” on the other hand, has been discovered, for Mr. Traveller seeking Mr. Mopes the Hermit, naturally had to go where Mr. Mopes the Hermit located himself. This we know to have been near Stevenage, and F. G. Kitton identified the ale-house as the White Hart there, where Dickens called on his way to see Lucas, the original of Mr. Mopes, to enquire of the landlord, old Sam Cooper, the shortest route to his “ruined hermitage” some five miles distant.

No particular coffee-houses were, we suspect, intended for the Slamjam Coffee-House or the Admiral Nelson Civic and General Dining Rooms, mentioned in “Somebody’s Luggage”; nor can we hope to identify the George and the Gridiron, where the waiters supported nature by what they found in the plates, “which was, as it happened, and but too often thoughtlessly, immersed in mustard,” or what was found in the glasses, “which rarely went beyond driblets and lemons.”

No name either is given to the inn in “Mugby Junction” where the traveller arrived at past three o’clock on a tempestuous morning and found himself stranded. Having got his two large black portmanteaux on a truck, the porter trundled them on “through a silent street” and came to a stop. When the owner had shivered on the pavement half an hour, “what time the porter’s knocks at the inn door knocked up the whole town first, and the inn last, he groped his way into the close air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.”

It is known that Mugby stood for Rugby, but that is all. The particular shut-up inn, if it ever had any original, has not, so far as we are aware, been discovered.

In A Christmas Carol we are told that Scrooge “took his melancholy dinner in his usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the rest of the evening with his banker’s book, went home to bed.”

There were many taverns in the city of London at which Scrooge might have dined, and it may be that Baker’s Chop-House in Change Alley, as has been suggested, was the one he chose. It is no longer a chop-house, having a year or so back been taken over by a city business company, and the building added to their premises. But it had been for a century or more a noted city chop-house, where, up to the last, meals were served on pewter plates, and other old-time customs were retained. It was one of those city houses, of which some still exist happily, where the waiters grow old in the service of their customers. Baker’s had at least one such waiter, known familiarly as James, who pursued his calling there for thirty-five years, and became famous by having his portrait painted in oils and hung in the lower room, where it remained until the end of the career of the house as a tavern. Perhaps old Scrooge was one of his special customers.

The Nutmeg-Grater, the inn kept by Benjamin Britain in “The Battle of Life,” has no real prototype, but such an inn as described would entice any country rambler into its cosy interior. It was “snugly sheltered behind a great elm tree, with a rare seat for idlers encircling its capacious bole, addressed a cheerful front towards the traveller, as a house of entertainment ought, and tempted him with many mute but significant assurances of a comfortable welcome. The ruddy sign-board perched up in the tree, with its golden letters winking in the sun, ogled the passer-by, from among the leaves, like a jolly face, and promised good cheer. The horse trough, full of clear, fresh water, and the ground below it sprinkled with droppings of fragrant hay, made every horse that passed prick up his ears. The crimson curtains of the lower rooms, and the pure white hangings in the little bedrooms above, beckoned Come in! with every breath of air. Upon the bright green shutters, there were golden legends about beer and ale, and neat wines, and good beds, and an affecting picture of a brown jug frothing over at the top. Upon the window-sills were flowering plants in bright red pots, which made a lively show against the white front of the house; and in the darkness of the doorway there were streaks of light, which glanced off from the surface of bottles and tankards”——

An ideal picture of an inn any traveller would love to encounter and sample.

Reprinted Pieces would form a happy hunting-ground for tracking down inns and public-houses mentioned in its pages if one were so minded. Few of them would prove to be of any importance if discovered, but the task would have its excitement and interest.

Take for instance the chapter devoted to the Detective Police. No doubt the taverns used by the criminals which the police had to visit were real houses, as the detectives whom Dickens interviewed were real persons. In this chapter alone there is the Warwick Arms, through which, and the New Inn near R., Tally-Ho Thompson the horse stealer was tracked and captured; the “little public-house” near Smithfield, used by journeymen butchers, and those concerned in “the extensive robberies of lawns and silks”; and the Setting Moon in the Commercial Road, where Simpson was arrested in a room upstairs.

Then there is the extinct inn, the Dodo, in one of the chiefest towns of Staffordshire—the pivot of the chapter on “A Plated Article.” Which is the town, and which is the inn referred to, we know not. But Dickens’s description of it is very minute:

“If the Dodo were only a gregarious bird,” he says, “if he had only some confused idea of making a comfortable nest, I could hope to get through the hours between this and bedtime, without being consumed by devouring melancholy. But the Dodo’s habits are all wrong. It provides me with a trackless desert of sitting-room, with a chair for every day in the year, a table for every month, and a waste of sideboard where a lonely China vase pines in a corner for its mate long departed, and will never make a match with the candlestick in the opposite corner if it live till Doomsday. The Dodo has nothing in the larder. Even now I behold the Boots returning with my sole in a piece of paper; and, with that portion of my dinner, the Boots, perceiving me at the blank bow-window, slaps his leg as he comes across the road, pretending it is something else. The Dodo excludes the outer air. When I mount up to my bedroom, a smell of closeness and flue gets lazily up my nose like sleepy snuff. The loose little bits of carpet writhe under my tread, and take wormy shapes. I don’t know the ridiculous man in the looking-glass, beyond having met him once or twice in a dish-cover—and I can never shave him to-morrow morning! The Dodo is narrow-minded as to towels; expects me to wash on a freemason’s apron without the trimming: when I ask for soap, gives me a stony-hearted something white, with no more lather in it than the Elgin marbles. The Dodo has seen better days, and possesses interminable stables at the back—silent, grass-grown, broken-windowed, horseless. This mournful bird can fry a sole, however, which is much. Can cook a steak, too, which is more. I wonder where it gets its sherry? If I were to send my pint of wine to some famous chemist to be analysed, what would it turn out to be made of? It tastes of pepper, sugar, bitter-almonds, vinegar, warm knives, any flat drinks, and a little brandy. Would it unman a Spanish exile by reminding him of his native land at all? I think not. If there really be any townspeople out of the churchyards, and if a caravan of them ever do dine, with a bottle of wine per man, in this desert of the Dodo, it must make good for the doctor next day!”

If the Dodo is undiscoverable, the same need not be said of the Pavilionstone Hotel, because we know that Dickens gave that name to the town of Folkestone, in the chapter entitled “Out of Town.” The lion of Pavilionstone, he tells us, is its great hotel, and one sees at once how he manufactured the name, for its hotel was, and is to-day, called the Pavilion.

“A dozen years ago, going over to Paris by South-Eastern Tidal Steamer,” the narrative goes on, “you used to be dropped upon the platform of the main line Pavilionstone Station (not a junction then) at eleven o’clock on a dark winter’s night, in a roaring wind; and in the howling wilderness outside the station was a short omnibus which brought you up by the forehead the instant you got in at the door; and nobody cared about you, and you were alone in the world. You bumped over infinite chalk, until you were turned out at a strange building which had just left off being a barn without having quite begun to be a house, where nobody expected your coming, or knew what to do with you when you were come, and where you were usually blown about, until you happened to be blown against the cold beef, and finally into bed. At five in the morning you were blown out of bed, and after a dreary breakfast, with crumpled company, in the midst of confusion, were hustled on board a steamboat, and lay wretched on deck until you saw France lingering and surging at you with great vehemence over the bowsprit.”

THE LORD WARDEN HOTEL, DOVER
See page 253

THE PAVILION HOTEL, FOLKESTONE
From old Engravings

This was written in 1855, and even by then Dickens had to admit that things had changed considerably for the better.

“If you are going out to Great Pavilionstone Hotel, the sprightliest porters under the sun, whose cheerful looks are a pleasant welcome, shoulder your luggage, drive it off in vans, bowl it away in trucks, and enjoy themselves in playing athletic games with it. If you are for public life at our great Pavilionstone Hotel, you walk into that establishment as if it were your club; and find ready for you your news-room, dining-room, smoking-room, billiard-room, music-room, public breakfast, public dinner twice a day (one plain, one gorgeous), hot baths and cold baths. If you want to be bored, there are plenty of bores always ready for you, and from Saturday to Monday in particular you can be bored (if you like it) through and through. Should you want to be private at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, say but the word, look at the list of charges, choose your floor, name your figure—there you are, established in your castle, by the day, week, month, or year, innocent of all comers or goers, unless you have my fancy for walking early in the morning down the groves of boots and shoes, which so regularly flourish at all the chamber doors before breakfast that it seems to me as if nobody ever got up or took them in....

“A thoroughly good inn, in the days of coaching and posting, was a noble place. But no such inn would have been equal to the reception of four or five hundred people, all of them wet through, and half of them dead sick, every day in the year. This is where we shine, in our Pavilionstone Hotel....”

The hotel has, alas, made way for something still more imposing. Its extensive red-brick building, containing hundreds of rooms, with its spacious gardens in front, would both astonish and disappoint the novelist if he saw it to-day, for there is no doubt that he was very fond of its predecessor, very frequently used it, and found hearty welcome there.

The hotel is again referred to in the sketch entitled “A Flight” in the same volume, where, however, he calls it the Royal George Hotel.

In the volume of Miscellaneous Papers there is one describing a visit to Birmingham and Wolverhampton, under the heading of “Fire and Snow.” At the latter town Dickens stayed at the Swan, which he says “is a bird of a good substantial brood, worthy to be a country cousin of the hospitable Hen and Chickens, whose company we have deserted for only a few hours, and with whom we shall roost again at Birmingham to-night.”

The Hen and Chickens here referred to was an hotel Dickens knew very well indeed. Apart from his books, Birmingham is very closely connected with Dickens himself and the various schemes he embarked upon for the welfare of others. He visited it on several occasions, either for the purpose of public reading from his works, to give theatrical performances for charity, or to appear at some national function associated with the city. These visits were spread over the whole of his life, the last occasion being on the 7th of January, 1870, when he presented the prizes to the students of the Birmingham and Midland Institute.

During his stay in the city, Dickens usually put up at the Old Royal Hotel in Temple Row, or at the Hen and Chickens in New Street, and it may be assumed that he knew both hotels well. Only the former, however, is made the scene of an incident in his novels, and that is, when it is introduced into The Pickwick Papers.[4] He visited Birmingham some dozen times from 1840 to 1870, and on most of the early occasions it is believed that he stayed at the Old Royal Hotel. But during his later visits he made the Hen and Chickens Hotel his headquarters. He was there in Christmas week, 1853, for the series of readings from his books, and before he left the city he and his friends were entertained at breakfast at the hotel, and a presentation was made to Mrs. Dickens.

He was a guest there again in 1861, and on the occasion wrote his autograph in the album of the proprietress, dated “Last day of the year 1861.”For some reason he does not describe the hotel in the same manner as he does the Swan at Wolverhampton. The latter, he tells us, “has bountiful coal-country notions of firing, snug homely rooms; cheerful windows looking down upon the clusters of snowy umbrellas in the market-place.... Neat, bright-eyed waitresses do the honours of the Swan. The Swan is confident about its soup, is troubled with no distrust concerning codfish, speaks the word of promise in relation to an enormous chine of roast beef.... The Swan is rich in slippers—in those good old flip-flap inn-slippers which nobody can keep on, which knock double knocks on each stair as their wearer comes downstairs, and fly away over the banisters before they have brought him to level ground.”

There are many other hotels and taverns mentioned in this collection of Miscellaneous Papers, but usually only by name, the mere list of which would serve no purpose.

Those already touched upon or dealt with at length in the course of the present volume practically exhaust the subject, from which it will be seen how overwhelmingly attracted Dickens was to every kind of house of refreshment and in every thing relating thereto. The works of no other author of genius provide so much material for such a purpose, and no other writer has treated the subject with so much healthy realism, so much refreshing good nature and humour, or with such expressions of genuine joy.