Chapter XX., to which the worried Mr. Pickwick “bent his steps” after the

interview with Dodson and Fogg, in Freeman’s Court, Cornhill. We know it was in some court on the right-hand, or north, side of Cheapside; but, on the other hand, we do not know how far Mr. Pickwick had proceeded along that thoroughfare when Sam recommended, as a suitable place for “a glass of brandy and water warm,” the “last house but vun on the same side the vay--take the box as stands in the first fireplace, ’cos there an’t no leg in the middle o’ the table, wich all the others has, and it’s wery inconwenient.” Probably Grocers’ Hall Court is meant. It has still its coffee-and chop-houses.

There it is that Tony Weller is introduced, and suggests that, as he is “working down” the coach to Ipswich in a couple of days’ time, from the “Bull” inn Whitechapel, Mr. Pickwick had better go with him. An incidental allusion is made in the same place to the “Black Boy” at Chelmsford, a fine old coaching inn, destroyed in 1857.

Mr. Pickwick was a good--nay, a phenomenal--pedestrian for so stout a man. From Cheapside--fortified possibly by the brandy and water--he walked to Gray’s Inn, there ascending two pairs of steep (and dirty) stairs, and thence to Clare Market, and the “Magpie and Stump,” described as “situated in a court, happy in the double advantage of being in the vicinity of Clare Market and closely approximating to the back of ‘New Inn.’”

It was “what ordinary people would designate a public-house,” and has been identified by most with the “Old Black Jack” in Portsmouth Street, or its next-door neighbour, the “George the Fourth Tavern,” both demolished in 1896. The last-named house was remarkable for entirely overhanging the pavement, the very tall building being supported on wooden posts springing from the kerb. In the words of Dickens: “In the lower windows, which were decorated with curtains of a saffron hue, dangled two or three printed cards, bearing reference to Devonshire cyder and Dantzic spruce, while a large black board, announcing in white letters to an enlightened public that there were 500,000 barrels of double stout in the cellars of the establishment, left the mind in a state of not unpleasing doubt and uncertainty as to the precise direction in the bowels of the earth in which this mighty cavern might be supposed to extend. When we add that the weather-beaten sign-board bore the half-obliterated semblance of a magpie intently eyeing a crooked streak of brown paint, which the neighbours had been taught from infancy to consider as the ‘stump,’ we have said all that need be said of the exterior of the edifice.”

The “Black Jack,” next door, was in the eighteenth century the scene of one of the famous Jack Sheppard’s exploits. The Bow Street runners entered the house after him, and, as they went in at the door, he jumped out of a first-floor window. In thieving circles the house was afterwards known as “The Jump.” The “Black Jack,” however, romantic though the title sounds, did not owe its name to Sheppard, but to that old style of vessel, the leathern jacks or jugs of the Middle Ages. For their better preservation, the old leathern jacks were often treated with a coating of pitch: hence the name of “pitcher,” at a very early period enlarged to denote jugs in general, whether of leather or of earthenware.

The proverbial pitcher that goes often to the well and is broken at last could not possibly be a leathern one, for the greatest virtue of the leathern vessel was its indestructible nature, well set forth in the old song of “The Leather Bottel”:

And when the bottle at last grows old, And will good liquor no longer hold, Out of its sides you may make a clout To mend your shoes when they’re worn out; Or take and hang it upon a pin-- ’Twill serve to put hinges and odd things in. So I hope his soul in Heaven may dwell Who first found out the Leather Bottel.

Such leather bottles, some of them very ancient, are often to be found, even at this day, in the barns and outhouses of remote hamlets, with a side cut away to receive those “hinges and odd things” of the verse. They are also often used to hold cart-grease.

The “Bull,” Whitechapel, whence Mr. Tony Weller “worked down” to Ipswich, was numbered No. 25, Aldgate High Street. It stood in the rear of the narrow entry shown in the accompanying illustration. Rightly, it will be seen, did Mr. Tony Weller advise the “outsides” on his coach to “take care o’ the archvay, gen’lm’n.” The “Bull” was long occupied by the widowed Mrs. Ann Nelson--one of those stern, dignified, magisterial women of business who were a quite remarkable feature of the coaching age, who saw their husbands off to an early grave, and alone carried on the peculiarly exacting double business of innkeeping and coach-proprietorship, and did so with success. Mrs. Ann Nelson--no one ever dared so greatly as to spell her name “Anne”--was the Napoleon and Cæsar combined of the coaching business on the East Anglian roads, and accomplished the remarkable feat--remarkable for an innkeeper in the East End of London--of also owning that crack mail-coach of the West of England Road, the Devonport “Quicksilver.” As Mrs. Nelson would permit no “e” to her Christian name, so also she would never hear of her house being called “hotel.” It was, to the last, the “Bull Inn”; as you see in the illustration, with Martin’s woollen-drapery shop, formerly that of James Johnson, whip-maker, on the one side and that of Lee, the confectioner, on the other. Richard Lee himself you perceive standing on the pavement, taking a very keen interest in the coach emerging from the yard, as he had every reason to do; for he, like William Lee, his father before him, was a partner, though not a publicly acknowledged one, with Mrs. Nelson, and the money he made out of his jam tarts he invested, with much profit to himself, in that autocratic lady’s coaching speculations.

From the date of the opening of the Eastern Counties Railway, in 1839, the business of the “Bull” began to decline, and the house was at length sold and demolished in 1868.[16]

The journey from the “Bull” ended at the “Great White Horse” at Ipswich, a house that still survives and flourishes on the notice (including even the abuse) that Dickens gave it. The “Great White Horse” is neither ancient nor beautiful; but it _is_ great and it _is_ white, for it is built of a pallid kind of brick strongly suggesting under-done pastry, and it is in these days the object to which most visitors to Ipswich first turn their attention, whether they are to stay in the house or not.

In the merry days of the road, when this huge caravanserai was built, it was justly thought enormous; but it has been left to the present age to build many hotels in town and country capable of containing half-a-dozen or more hostelries the size of the “Great White Horse,” which by comparison with them is as a Shetland pony is to the great hairy-legged creatures that still, even in these “horseless” times, haul waggons and brewers’ drays.

Especially did the bulk of this house strike the imagination of that young reporter of the London _Morning Chronicle_ who in 1830 was despatched to Ipswich for the purpose of reporting a Parliamentary election. That reporter was, of course, Dickens. The inn made so great an impression upon him that, when he wrote about it in the pages of _Pickwick_, a few years later, his description was as exact as though it had been penned on the spot.

It was not a flattering description. Few more severe things have ever been said of an inn than those Dickens said of the “Great White Horse.” Yet, such is the irony of time and circumstance, the house Dickens so roundly attacked is now eager, in all its advertisements, to quote the Dickensian association; and the adventures of Mr. Pickwick in the double-bedded room (now identified with No. 36) of the elderly lady in yellow curl-papers have attracted more visitors than the unfavourable notice has turned away.

“The ‘Great White Horse,’” said Dickens, “is famous in the neighbourhood in the same degree as a prize ox, or county-paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig--for its enormous size. Never were there such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected together between the four walls of the ‘Great White Horse’ at Ipswich.”

The house was evidently then an exception to the rule of the “good old days,” of comfort and good cheer and plenty of it; for, passing the corpulent and insolent waiter, “with a fortnight’s napkin under his arm and coeval stockings on his legs,” Mr. Pickwick entered only to find the dining-room “a large, badly furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a small fire was making a wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast sinking beneath the dispiriting influence of the place. After the lapse of an hour, a bit of fish and a steak were served up to the travellers,” who then, ordering “a bottle of the worst possible port wine, at the highest possible price, for the good of the house, drank brandy and water for their own.”

I may here mention the singular parallel in Besant and Rice’s novel, _The Seamy Side_, where, in Chapter XXVIII., you will find Gilbert Yorke going to the hotel at Lulworth, in Dorset, and there ordering, like another Will Waterproof, “for the good of the house,” “a pint of port” after dinner. He, we are told, could not drink “the ardent port of country inns,” and therefore “he poured the contents of the bottle into a pot of mignonette in the window.... The flowers waggled their heads sadly and then drooped and died,” as of course, being notoriously total abstainers, they could not choose but do. But it was unfair, alike to the port and the plants.

How changed the times since those when Mr. Pickwick stayed at the “Great White Horse!” We read how, after his unpleasant adventure with the lady in the yellow curl-papers, he “stood alone, in an open passage, in the middle of the night, half dressed,” and in perfect darkness, with the uncomfortable knowledge that, if he tried to find his own bedroom by turning the handles of each one in succession “he stood every chance of being shot at, and perhaps killed, by some wakeful traveller.” No one in a similar position would have that fear now: and even American guests, commonly supposed to “go heeled,” _i.e._ to carry an armoury of six-shooters about them, do not invariably sleep with their shooting-irons under their pillows.

The exterior of the “Great White Horse” is much the same as when Dickens saw it, “in the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the way.” Still over the pillared portico trots the effigy of the Great White Horse himself, “a stone statue of some rampacious animal, with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse”; but the old courtyard has in modern times been roofed in with glass, and is now a something partaking in equal parts of winter-garden, smoking-lounge, and bar.

Returning again to London from Ipswich, Mr. Pickwick, giving up his lodgings in Goswell Road with the treacherous Mrs. Bardell, took up his abode in “very good old-fashioned and comfortable quarters, to wit, the ‘George and Vulture’ Tavern and Hotel, George Yard, Lombard Street.”

One may no longer stay at the “George and Vulture,” and indeed, if one might, I do not know that any one would choose, for after business hours, and on Sundays and holidays, the modern George Yard, now entirely hemmed in with the enormous buildings of banks and insurance-companies, is a dismally deserted and forbidding place. The sunlight only by dint of great endeavour comes at a particular hour slanting down to one side of the stony courtyard, and the air is close and stale. But on days of business, and in the hours of business, in the continual stream of passers-by, you do not notice these things. Many of those whom you see in George Yard disappear, a little mysteriously it seems, in an obscure doorway, tucked away in an angle. It might, in most likelihood, be a bank to which they enter; but, as a sheer matter of fact, it is the “George and Vulture”: in these days one of the most famous of City chop-houses.

I have plumbed the depths of depravity in chops, and have found them often naturally hard, tasteless, and greasily fat; or if not naturally depraved, the wicked incapacity of those who cook them has in some magic way exorcised their every virtue. It matters little to you whether your chop be innately uneatable, or whether it has acquired that defect in the cooking: the net result is that you go hungry.

At the “George and Vulture,” as before noted, you may not stay--or “hang out,” as it was suggested by Bob Sawyer that Mr. Pickwick did--but there you do nowadays find chops of the best, cooked to perfection on the grill, and may eat off old-world pewter plates and, to complete the ideality of the performance, drink ale out of pewter tankards; all in the company of a crowded roomful of hungry City men, and in a very Babel of talk. And, ah me! where does the proprietor get that perfect port?

Between Chapters XXVI. and XXXIV. we have a perfect constellation--or rather, a species of cloudy Milky Way--of inns, nebulous, undefined; but in Chapter XXXV. we find Mr. Pickwick, on his way to Bath, waiting for the coach in the travellers’-room of the “White Horse Cellar,” Piccadilly, a very brilliant star of an inn, indeed, in its day; but rather a migratory one, for in the coaching age it was removed from its original site at the corner of Arlington Street, where the Ritz Hotel stands now, to the opposite side of the road, at the corner of Albemarle Street. There it remained until 1884, when the old house was pulled down and the present “Albemarle” built in its stead.

Mr. Pickwick was “twenty minutes too early” for the half-past seven o’clock in the morning coach, and so, leaving Sam Weller single-handedly to contend with the seven or eight porters who had flung themselves upon the luggage, he and his friends went for shelter to “the travellers’-room--the last resource of human dejection”--railways in general and the waiting-rooms of Clapham Junction in especial not having at that time come into existence, to plunge mankind into deeper abysms of melancholia.

“The travellers’-room at the ‘White Horse Cellar’ is, of course, uncomfortable; it would be no travellers’-room if it were not. It is the right-hand parlour, into which an aspiring kitchen fireplace appears to have walked, accompanied by a rebellious poker, tongs, and shovel. It is divided into boxes, for the solitary confinement of travellers, and is furnished with a clock, a looking-glass, and a live waiter: which latter article is kept in a small kennel for washing glasses, in a corner of the apartment.”

So now we know what the primeval ancestor of the Railway Waiting-room, with its advertisements of cheap excursions to places to which you do not want to go, and its battered Bible on the table was like, and it seems pretty clear that, whatever the travellers’-room of a coaching inn might have been, its present representative is a degenerate.