Chapter XXXV. sees Mr. Pickwick and his friends arrived at Bath and duly

installed in “their private sitting-rooms at the ‘White Hart’ Hotel, opposite the great Pump-room, where the waiters, from their costume, might be mistaken for Westminster boys, only they destroy the illusion by behaving themselves much better.”

Until its last day, which came in 1864, the great “White Hart,” owned by the Moses Pickwick from whose name Dickens probably derived that of the immortal Samuel, maintained the ceremonial manners of an earlier age, and habited its waiters in knee-breeches and silk stockings, while the chambermaids wore muslin caps. The Grand Pump-room Hotel now stands on the site of the “White Hart,” and the well-modelled effigy of the White Hart himself, seen in the illustration of the old coaching inn, has been transferred to a mere public-house of the same name in the slummy suburb of Widcombe.

Round the corner from Queen Square, Bath, is the mean street where Dickens pilgrims may gaze upon the “Beaufort Arms,” the mean little public-house identified, on a very slender thread, with the “greengrocer’s shop” to which Sam Weller was invited to the footmen’s “swarry.” The identification hangs chiefly by the circumstance that it is known to have been the particular meeting-place of the Bath footmen, just as the “Running Footman” in Hay Hill, London, is even at this day the chosen house of call for the men-servants around Berkeley Square.

The “Royal Hotel,” whence Mr. Winkle fled by branch coach to Bristol, is not to be found, and the “Bush” at Bristol itself is a thing of the past. It stood in Corn Street, and was swept out of existence in 1864, the Wiltshire Bank now standing on the site of it; but how busy a place it was in Pickwickian days let the old picture of coaches arriving and departing eloquently tell.

The inns of the succeeding chapters--the tavern (unnamed) at Clifton, the “Farringdon Hotel,” the “Fox-under-the-Hill,” overlooking the river from Ivy Bridge Lane in the Strand, the “New Hotel,” Serjeant’s Inn Coffee House, and Horn’s Coffee House--are merely given passing mention, and it is only in Chapter XLVI. that we come to closer touch with actualities, in the arrest of Mrs. Bardell in the tea-gardens of the “Spaniards” inn, Hampstead Heath. The earwiggy arbours of that Cockney resort are still greatly frequented on Saturdays, Sundays, and public holidays.

A very modest and comparatively little-known Pickwickian house is the “Bell,” Berkeley Heath, on the dull, flat high-road between Bristol and Gloucester, unaltered since the day when Mr. Pickwick set forth by post-chaise with Mr. Bob Sawyer and his fellow-roysterer, Ben Allen, from the “Bush” at Bristol for Birmingham. Here they had lunch, as the present sign-board of the inn, gravely and with a quaint inaccuracy, informs us: insisting that it was “Charles Dickens and party” who so honoured the “Bell.” They had come only nineteen miles, and without any exertion on their own part, yet when they changed horses here, at half-past eleven a.m., Bob Sawyer found it necessary to dine, to enable them “to bear up against the fatigue.”

“‘Quite impossible!’ said Mr. Pickwick, himself no mean trencherman.

“‘So it is,’ rejoined Bob; ‘lunch is the very thing. Hallo, you sir! Lunch for three, directly, and keep the horses back for a quarter of an hour. Tell them to put everything they have cold on the table, and some bottled ale, and let us taste your very best Madeira.’”

Those were truly marvellous times. All the way from Bristol those three had been drinking milk-punch, and had emptied a case-bottle of it, and we may be quite sure (although it is not stated) that they made havoc of a prodigious breakfast before they started; Yet they did “very great justice” to that lunch, and when they set off again the case-bottle was filled with “the best substitute for milk-punch that could be procured on so short a notice.”

“At the ‘Hop-Pole’ at Tewkesbury they stopped to dine; upon which occasion there was more bottled ale, with some more Madeira, and some port besides; and here the case-bottle was replenished for the fourth time.” Therefore, it is evident that, twice on the twenty-four miles between Berkeley Heath and Tewkesbury, they had a re-fill.

We do not find Gloucester mentioned, although it must have been passed on the way; but, under those circumstances, we are by no means surprised.

The “Hop Pole” at Tewkesbury is still a “going concern,” and, with the adjoining gabled and timbered houses, is a notable landmark in the High Street. Nowadays it proudly displays a tablet recording its Pickwickian associations.

A drunken sleep (for it could have been nothing else) composed those two “insides,” Mr. Pickwick and Ben Allen, on the way to Birmingham, while, thanks in part to the fresh air, Sam Weller and Bob Sawyer “sang duets in the dickey.” By the time they were nearing Birmingham it was quite dark. The postboy drove them to the “Old Royal Hotel,” where an order for that surely very necessary thing, soda-water, having been given, the waiter “imperceptibly melted away”: a proceeding that, paradoxically enough, seems to have been initiated by the house itself, years before; for it was about 1825, two years before the Pickwickians are represented as starting on their travels, that the “Old Royal” was transferred from Temple Row to New Street, and there became the “New Royal.”

The inn at Coventry, at which the post-horses were changed on the journey from Birmingham, is unnamed, unhonoured, and unsung; but very famous, in the Pickwickian way, is the “Saracen’s Head” at Towcester, or “Toaster,” as the townsfolk call it, even though its identity is a little obscured by the sign having been exchanged for that of the “Pomfret Arms.” The change, which was actually made in April, 1831, was a complimentary allusion to the Earls of Pomfret, who before the title became extinct, in 1867, resided at the neighbouring park of Easton Neston.

In all essentials the inn remains the same as the old coaching hostelry to which Mr. Pickwick and his friends drove up in their post-chaise, after the long wet journey from Coventry. As “at the end of each stage it rained harder than it had done at the beginning,” Mr. Pickwick wisely decided to halt here.

“There’s beds here,” reported Sam; “everything’s clean and comfortable. Wery good little dinner, sir, they can get ready in half an hour--pair of fowls, sir, and a weal cutlet; French beans, ’taturs, tarts, and tidiness. You’d better stop vere you are, sir, if I might recommend.”

At the moment of this earnest colloquy in the rain the landlord of the “Saracen’s Head” appeared, “to confirm Mr. Weller’s statement relative to the accommodations of the establishment, and to back his entreaties with a variety of dismal conjectures regarding the state of the roads, the doubt of fresh horses being to be had at the next stage, the dead certainty of its raining all night, the equally mortal certainty of its clearing up in the morning, and other topics of inducement familiar to innkeepers.”

When Mr. Pickwick decided to stay, “the landlord smiled his delight” and issued orders to the waiter. “Lights in the Sun, John; make up the fire; the gentlemen are wet!” he cried anxiously, although, doubtless, if the gentlemen had gone forward they might have been drowned, for all he cared.

And so the scene changed from the rain-washed road to a cosy room, with a waiter laying the cloth for dinner, a cheerful fire burning, and the tables lit with wax candles. “Everything looked (as everything always does in all decent English inns) as if the travellers had been expected, and their comforts prepared for days beforehand.”

Upon this charming picture of ease at one’s inn descended the atrabilious rival editors of _The Eatanswill Gazette_ and _The Eatanswill Independent_, the organs respectively of “blue” and “buff” shades of political opinion. Pott of the _Gazette_, and Slurk of the _Independent_ each found his rival sheet lying on the tables of the inn; but what either of those editors or those newspapers were doing here in Northamptonshire (Eatanswill being a far-distant East Anglian town, by general consensus of opinion identified with Ipswich) is one of those occasional lapses from consistency that in _Pickwick_ give the modern commentator and annotator food for speculation.

When the inn was closed for the night Slurk retired to the kitchen to drink his rum and water by the fire, and to enjoy the bitter-sweet luxury of sneering at the rival print; but, as it happened, Mr. Pickwick’s party, accompanied by Pott, also adjourned to the kitchen to smoke a cigar or so before bed. How ancient, by the way, seems that custom! Does any guest, anywhere, in these times of smoking-rooms, withdraw to the kitchen to smoke his cigar, pipe, or cigarette?

How the rival editors--the “unmitigated viper” and the “ungrammatical twaddler”--met and presently came from oblique taunts to direct abuse of one another, and thence to a fight, let the pages of _The Pickwick Papers_ tell. For my part, I refuse to believe that there were ever such journalists.

What was once the kitchen of the “Saracen’s Head” is now the bar-parlour of the “Pomfret Arms”; but otherwise the house is the same as when Dickens knew it. The somewhat severe frontage loses in a black-and-white drawing its principal charm, for it is built of the golden-brown local ferruginous sandstone of the district.

The journey to London is carried abruptly from Towcester to its ending at the “George and Vulture”; and with “Osborne’s Hotel in the Adelphi” the last inn to be identified in the closing scenes of _Pickwick_ is reached. That staid family hotel, still existing in John Street, and now known as the “Adelphi,” is associated with the flight of Emily Wardle and Snodgrass. The sign of the last public-house in the story, “an excellent house near Shooter’s Hill,” to which Mr. Tony Weller, no longer “of the Bell Savage,” retired, is not disclosed.