CHAPTER X

PICKWICKIAN INNS

What visions of Early Victorian good-fellowship and conviviality, of the roast-beef and rum-punch kind, are called up by the title! The Pickwickian Inn was, in the ’30’s of the nineteenth century, the last word in hospitable comfort, and its kitchen achieved the topmost pinnacle of culinary refinement demanded by an age that was robust rather than refined, whose appetites were gross rather than discriminating, and whose requirements seem to ourselves, of a more sybarite and exacting generation, few and modest. The Pickwickian age was an age of prodigious performances in eating and drinking, and our ancestors of that time, so only they had great joints, heaped-up dishes, and many bottles and decanters set before them, cared comparatively little about delicate flavours. The chief aim was to get enough, and the “enough” of our great-grandfathers would nowadays be a surfeit to ourselves. If it were not then quite the essential mark of a jolly good fellow to be carried up to bed at the end of an evening with the punch and the old port, a man who shirked his drink was looked upon with astonishment, almost suspicion, and the only use in those deep-drinking days and nights for table-waters was to help a man along the road to recovery, after “a night of it.”

Then to be otherwise than of a Pickwickian rotundity was to be not merely a poor creature, but generally connoted some mental crook or eccentricity; while fatness and hearty good-nature were thought of almost as interchangeable terms.

’Twas ever thus. Even Shakespeare loved the well-larded, and makes Julius Cæsar, who himself was sufficiently lean, say:

Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o’ nights: Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look: He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.

In the time of Dickens they were still suspect; and when at last Wilkie Collins made his villainous Count Fosco a fat villain, the new departure seemed to that generation a wanton, extravagant flying in the face of nature.

There are even yet to be found substantial old inns something after the Pickwickian ideal, but they are few and far between, and they are none of them Pickwickian to the core. Rarely do you see nowadays the monumental sideboards, with the almost equally monumental sirloins of beef and the like, and even the huge cheese, last of the old order of things to survive upon these tables, is nowadays generally represented by a modest wedge.

It is true that even the Pickwickians did not always happen upon well-ordered inns, for the “Great White Horse” at Ipswich was severely criticised by Dickens; but such exceptions do but serve to prove the Dickensian rule, that there was no such place, and there never had been any such place, as the hostelry of the coaching age for creature-comforts and good service. Dickens had already, when he began writing _The Pickwick Papers_ at the age of twenty-five, an almost encyclopædic knowledge of inns, especially of country inns. It was, like his own Mr. Weller’s knowledge of London, “extensive and peculiar.” His fount of information about country inns, at any rate, was acquired at an early and receptive age, in his many and hurried journeys as a reporter, when, on behalf of _The Morning Chronicle_, he flew--flew, that is to say, as flying was then metaphorically understood, at an average rate of something under ten miles an hour--by coach, east, west, north, and south, in the capacity of Parliamentary reporter, despatched to “take” the flow of eloquence from Members, or would-be Members of Parliament, addressing the conventionally “free and enlightened” voters of the provinces.

No fewer than fifty-five inns, taverns, etc., London and provincial, are named in _Pickwick_, many of them at considerable length; but, so great and sweeping have been the changes of the last seventy years, only twelve now remain. The London houses, with the exception of Osborne’s Hotel, John Street, Adelphi--now the “Adelphi” Hotel--and the “George and Vulture,” in George Yard, Lombard Street--in these days almost better known as Thomas’s Restaurant--have been either utterly disestablished or remodelled beyond all knowledge.

_Pickwick_ is the very Odyssey of inns and travel. You reach the second chapter and are whirled away at once from London by the “Commodore” coach, starting from the “Golden Cross,” Charing Cross, for Rochester, and only cease your travels and adventures at inns in Chapter LI., near the end of the story. Meanwhile you have coasted over a very considerable portion of England with the Pickwickians: from Rochester and Ipswich on the east, to Bath and Bristol on the west, and as far as Birmingham and Coventry in the Midlands.

He who would write learnedly and responsibly on the subject of Pickwickian Inns must bring to his task a certain amount of foreknowledge, and must add to that equipment by industry and research--and even then he shall find himself, after all, convicted of errors and inadequacies; for indeed, although the Pickwickians began their travels no longer ago than 1827, the changes in topography for one thing, and in manners and customs for another, are so great that it needs a scientific historian to be illuminating on the subject.

To begin at the usual place, the beginning, the history of the “Golden Cross,” the famous inn whence the Pickwickians started, offers a fine series of snares, pitfalls, traps, and rocks of offence to him who does not walk warily, for the “Golden Cross” of to-day, although a coaching inn remodelled, is by no means the original of that name, and indeed stands on quite a different (although neighbouring) site.

Changes in the geography of London have been so continuous, so intricate, and so puzzling that few people at once realise how the inn can have stood until 1830 at the rear of King Charles the First’s statue, on the spot now occupied by the south-eastern one of the four lions guarding the Nelson Column.

At that time Charing Cross was still the narrow junction of streets seen in Shepherd’s illustration, where the “Golden Cross” inn is prominent on the left hand, and Northumberland House, the London palace of the Dukes of Northumberland (pulled down in 1874), more prominent on the right. The block of buildings, including the “Golden Cross,” was removed, in 1830, to form part of the open space of Trafalgar Square, and the site of the ducal mansion is now Northumberland Avenue.

There had long been a “Golden Cross” inn here: how long we do not know, but a house of that name was in existence in 1643, for in that year we find the Puritans demanding the removal of the, to them, offensive sign of the cross. It was then a half-way house at the little village of Charing, midway between the then entirely separate and distinct cities of London and Westminster. In front of it, on the site of King Charles’s statue, stood the ancient cross of Charing, erected, long centuries before, to the memory of Queen Eleanor.

The earliest picture we have of the “Golden Cross” inn is a view by Canaletti, engraved in 1753, showing a sign projecting boldly over the footpath. As the architectural style of the house shown in that view is later than that prevailing in the reign of Charles the First, the inn must obviously have been rebuilt at least once in the interval. This building is again illustrated in a painting executed certainly later than 1770, according to the evidence of the sign, which, instead of the old gallows sign in Canaletti’s picture, is replaced by a board fixed against the front of the building, in obedience to the Acts of Parliament, 1762-70, forbidding overhanging signs in London. That such measures were necessary had been made abundantly evident so early as 1718, when a heavy sign had fallen in Bride Lane, Fleet Street, tearing down the front of the house and killing four persons.

In this view, later than 1770, and probably executed about 1800, we have the “Golden Cross” inn of _Pickwick_. Its successor, the Gothic-fronted building generally associated by Dickens commentators with that story, was built in 1828 and demolished two years later. Dickens wrote _Pickwick_ in 1836: when both the house he indicated and its successor were swept away, and the very site cleared and made a part of the open road; but, as he specifically states that the Pickwickians began their travels on May 13th, 1827, it must needs have been the predecessor of the Gothic building from which they set forth on the “Commodore” coach for Rochester.

The inn at that time had a hospitable-looking front and a really handsome range of coffee-room windows looking out upon the street. Beside them you see the celebrated archway of Jingle’s excited and disjointed cautions: “Terrible place--dangerous work--other day--five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--crash--knock--children look round--mother’s head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking!”

The great stable-yard and the back premises probably remained untouched, for when David Copperfield came up by coach from Canterbury, the “Golden Cross” was, we learn, “a mouldy sort of establishment,” and his bedroom “smelt like a hackney-coach, and was shut up like a family vault”--characteristics not generally associated with new buildings.

But, indeed, although references to the “Golden Cross” are plentiful in literature, they are few of them flattering: “A nasty inn, remarkable for filth and apparent misery,” wrote Edward Shergold, early in the nineteenth century, and he was but one of a cloud of witnesses to the same effect. It is thus a little difficult to understand a writer in _The Epicure’s Almanack_ for 1815, who says, in the commendatory way, that the fame of the “Golden Cross” had spread “from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ganges; from Nova Scotia to California.”

At that period this was the chief booking-office for coaches in the West End of London, and it was to that quarter what the “Bull and Mouth” was to the City. To that commanding position it had been raised by William Horne, who came here from the “White Horse” in Fetter Lane, in 1805. He died in 1828, and was succeeded by his son, the great coach-proprietor, Benjamin Worthy Horne, who further improved the property, and was powerful enough to command respect at the councils of the early railways. Under his rule, beneath the very shadow of the Charing Cross Improvement Act, by whose provisions Trafalgar Square was ordained and eventually created, the house was rebuilt, with a frontage in the Gothic manner. Shepherd’s view of Charing Cross, published December 18th, 1830, shows this immediate successor of the Pickwickian inn very clearly, with, next door, the establishment of Bish, for whose lotteries Charles Lamb was employed to write puffs.

When the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who had the Charing Cross improvement in charge, cleared the ground, the inn migrated to the new building, some distance eastwards, the present “Golden Cross,” 452, West Strand, which, like the whole of the West Strand, in the Nash, stucco-classic manner, was designed in 1832, by Mr. (afterwards Sir William) Tite.

Maginn lamented these changes, in the verses “An Excellent New Ballad; being entitled a Lamentation on the Golden Cross, Charing Cross”:

No more the coaches shall I see Come trundling from the yard, Nor hear the horn blown cheerily By brandy-bibbing guard. King Charles, I think, must sorrow sore, Even were he made of stone, When left by all his friends of yore (Like Tom Moore’s rose) alone.

* * * * *

O! London won’t be London long, For ’twill be all pulled down; And I shall sing a funeral song O’er that time-honoured town.

According to a return made to Parliament of the expenses in connection with these street improvements, “10 Houses and the Golden Cross Inn, Stable Yards, &c.,” were purchased for £108,884 4_s._; the inn itself apparently, if we are to believe a statement in _The Gentleman’s Magazine_, 1831, with three houses in St. Martin’s Lane and two houses and workshops in Frontier Court, costing £30,000 of that sum.

The present building was planned with a courtyard, and had archways to the Strand and to Duncannon Street. The last remains, and is in use as a railway receiving-office, but the Strand archway, the principal entrance, was built up and abolished in 1851.

The first house to which Mr. Pickwick and his followers--the amorous Tupman, Winkle the sportsman, and the poetic Snodgrass--came at the close of their first day’s travel is still in being. I name the “Bull” at Rochester, which long ago adopted Jingle’s recommendation, and blazoned it on the rather dingy forefront, of grey brick: “Good house--nice beds.” It is still very much as it was when Dickens conferred immortality upon it; only there are now portraits of him and pictures of Pickwickian characters on the walls of the staircase. Still you may find in the hall the “illustrious larder,” rather like a Chippendale book-case, behind whose glass doors the “noble joints and tarts” are still placed--only I think they have not now the nobility or the aldermanic proportions demanded by an earlier generation--and the cold fowls are indubitably there. The “very grove” of dangling uncooked joints is, if one’s memory of such things serves, not as described, in the hall, but depending, as they commonly are made to do in old inns, from hooks in the ceiling of the archway entrance. The custom excites the curiosity of many. To the majority of observers it has seemed to be by way of advertisement of the good cheer within; but the real reason is sufficiently simple: it is to keep the joints fresh and sweet in the current of air generally to be reckoned upon in that situation.

The ball-room, with the “elevated den” for musicians at one end, is a real room, and you wonder exceedingly at the smallness, not only of the den, but of the room itself, where the fine flower of Dockyard society gathered and fraternised with the even finer flower of that belonging to the Garrison: the two, joining forces, condescending to, or sneering upon, the vulgar herd of tradesmen and their wives.

In this somewhat exiguous apartment Tupman and Jingle danced, and the bellicose Dr. Slammer, of the 97th Regiment, glared; and the society of Chatham and Rochester had, you cannot help thinking, a very close and tightly packed evening.

They take their Pickwickian associations very seriously at the “Bull,” which, by the way, is an “inn” no longer, but an “hotel.” In 1836, the Princess Victoria and her mother, travelling to London, were detained by stress of weather that rendered it dangerous to cross the bridge, and they reluctantly stayed at Rochester the night. Who were low-class Pickwickians, that they should stand before such distinction? So the old house for a while took on a new name, and became the “Victoria and Bull,” and then, Royal associations gradually waning and literary landmarks growing more popular, the “Bull and Victoria,” finally, in these last years, revered again to its simple old name.

That Royal visit is well-nigh forgotten now, and you are no longer invited to look with awe upon the rooms occupied by those august, indubitably flesh-and-blood travellers; but you _are_ shown the bedrooms of the entirely fictitious Pickwickians.

“So this is where Mr. Pickwick is supposed to have slept?” remarked a visitor, when viewing bedroom No. 17 by favour of a former landlord. That stranger meant no offence, but the landlord was greatly ruffled. “_Supposed_ to have slept? He _did_ sleep here, sir!”

“O ye verities!” as Carlyle might have exclaimed.

Many Dickens commentators have long cherished what Horace Walpole might have styled a “historic doubt” as to what house was that one in Rochester referred to by Jingle as Wright’s. “Wright’s, next house, dear--very dear--half a crown in the bill if you look at the waiter--charge you more if you dine at a friend’s than they would if you dined in the coffee-room--rum fellows--very.” But “Wright’s” really was the next “house”--house, that is to say, in the colloquial sense, by which “public-house” is understood, and not by any means next door.

There is every excuse for writers on Dickens-land going wrong here, for the real name of the old house to which Wright came, somewhere about 1820, and on which he imposed his own was the “Crown.”

The old “Crown” fronted on to the High Street, and was one of those old galleried inns already mentioned so plentifully in these pages. It claimed to have been built in 1390, and its yard was not only the spot where, unknown to all save his intimates, Henry the Eighth had his first peep at his intended consort Anne of Cleves, whom that disappointed connoisseur in feminine beauty immediately styled a “Flanders mare”; but was in all probability the original of the inn-yard in _Henry the Fourth_, whence Shakespeare’s flea-bitten carriers with their razes of ginger and other goods for London, sleepless probably on account of those uncovenanted co-partners of their beds, set forth, by starlight, yawning, with much talk of highway dangers. At the “Crown” too, once stayed no less a personage than Queen Elizabeth; while some two centuries later Hogarth and his fellow-roysterers stayed a night in the house, on their “Frolic” down Thames.

When Wright came to the “Crown,” he, like any other monarch newly come to his own, made sweeping alterations. Antiquity, gabled frontages, elaborately carved barge-boards, and all such architectural vanities were nothing to him, nor indeed were they much to any one else in that grossly unappreciative era, and he left that portion of the house to carriers and the like, used all their lives to be leeched by diminutive lepidoptera. Wright did business with customers of more tender hide, who had preferences for more civilised lodgment, and housed the great, the rich, and the luxurious, travelling post to and fro along the Dover Road. For their accommodation he built a remarkably substantial and amazingly ugly structure--a something classical that might, by the look of it, be either town hall, heathen temple, or early dissenting chapel--in the rear, and facing the river. This was the building essentially “Wright’s.” It still stands, and people with sharp eyes, who look very hard in the right place, will yet discover a ghostly “Wright’s” on what Mrs. Gamp would call the “parapidge.”

Such a place would naturally impress a poor strolling actor like Jingle, whose humorous sally, “charge you more if you dine at a friend’s than they would if you dined in the coffee-room,” is a perversion of the well-known charge for “corkage” made by hotel-keepers when a guest brings his own wine.

Wright himself has, of course, long since gone to that place where innkeepers who make extravagant demands upon travellers are held to account.

The course of _Pickwick_ now takes us to “Muggleton,” as to whose identity much uncertainty has long been felt. It is a choice between Maidstone and Town Malling, and as the distances given in the book between Rochester and Dingley Dell and “Muggleton” cannot be made to agree with either Town Malling or Maidstone, it is a poor choice at the best. At the former the “Swan” is pointed to as the real “Blue Lion,” and at Maidstone the “White Lion.”