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