Chapter XXXII

. of _Nicholas Nickleby_, cannot be identified: there are,

and long have been, so many handsome hotels in that region. It was in the coffee-room of this establishment that Nicholas encountered Sir Mulberry Hawk; and the description of the affair brings back the memory of a state of things long past. The “Coffee-room” with its boxes partitioned off, no longer exists; there are no such things as those boxes anywhere now, except perhaps in some old-fashioned “eating-houses.” But in that period of which Dickens wrote, the “coffee-room” of an hotel was an institution not so very long before copied from the then dead or fast-expiring “Coffee Houses” of the eighteenth century: once--in the days before clubs--the meeting-places of wits and business men. The Coffee House had been the club of its own particular age, and as there are nowadays clubs for every class and all professions, so in that period there were special Coffee Houses for individual groups of people, where they read the papers and learned the gossip of their circle.

Inns and hotels copied the institution of a public refreshment-room that would nowadays be styled the restaurant, and transferred the name of “Coffee-room,” without specifically supplying the coffee; which, to be sure, was a beverage fast growing out of fashion, in favour of wines, beer, and brandy and water. No one drank whisky then.

Fashions in nomenclature linger long, and even now in old-established inns and hotels, the Coffee-room still exists, but has paradoxically come to mean a public combined dining- and sitting-room for private guests, in contradistinction from the Commercial-room, to which commercial travellers resort, at a recognised lower tariff.

There are inns also in _Oliver Twist_; not inns essential to the story, nor in themselves prepossessing, but, in the case of the “Coach and Horses” at Isleworth, remarkably well observed when we consider that the reference is only in passing. Indeed, the topographical accuracy of Dickens, where he is wishful to be accurate, is astonishing. The literary pilgrim sets out to follow the routes he indicates, possibly doubtful if he will find the places mentioned. There, however, they are (if modern alterations have not removed them), for Dickens apparently visited the scenes and from one eagle glance described them with all the accuracy of a guide-book.

Thus, Bill Sikes and Oliver, trudging from London to Chertsey, where the burglary was to be committed, and occasionally getting a lift on the way, are set down from a cart at the end of Brentford. At length they came to a public-house called the “Coach and Horses”; a little way beyond which another road appeared to turn off. And here the cart stopped.

[Illustration: THE “COACH AND HORSES,” ISLEWORTH.]

One finds the “Coach and Horses,” sure enough, at the point where Brentford ends and Isleworth begins, by the entrance to Sion Park, and near the spot where the road branches off to the left. The “Coach and Horses” is not a picturesque inn. It is a huge, four-square lump of a place, and wears, indeed, rather a dour and forbidding aspect. It is unquestionably the house of which Dickens speaks, and was built certainly not later than the dawn of the nineteenth century. In these latter days the road here has been rendered somewhat more urban by the advent of the electric tramway; but I have in my sketch of the scene taken the artistic licence of omitting that twentieth-century development, and, to add an air of verisimilitude, have represented Sikes and Oliver in the act of approaching. The left-hand road beyond leads to a right-hand road, as in the story, and this in due course to Hampton.

The most interesting Dickensian inn, outside the pages of _Pickwick_, is the “Maypole,” in _Barnaby Rudge_.

There never existed upon this earth an inn so picturesque as that drawn, entirely from his imagination, by Cattermole, to represent the “Maypole.” You may seek even among the old mansions of England, and find nothing more baronial. The actual “Maypole”--when found--is a sad disappointment to those who have cherished the Cattermole ideal, and there is wrath and indignation among pilgrims from over-seas when they come to it. This, although natural enough, is an injustice to this real original, which is one of the most picturesque old inns now to be found, and is not properly to be made little of because it cannot fit an impossible artistic fantasy.

I have hinted above that the “Maypole” requires some effort to find, and that is true enough, even in these days when the England of Dickens has been so plentifully elucidated and mapped out and sorted over. The prime cause of this incertitude and boggling is that there really is a “Maypole” inn, but at that very different place, Chigwell Row, two miles distant from Chigwell and the “King’s Head.” Many years ago, the late James Payn wrote an amusing account--as to whose entire truth we cannot vouch--of his taking a party of enthusiastic American ladies in search of this scene of _Barnaby Rudge_. They drove about the forest seeking (such was their ignorance) the “Maypole,” and not the “King’s Head”; and found it, in a low and ugly beerhouse from which drunken beanfeasters waved inviting pots of beer. Eventually they left the forest convinced that the inn Dickens described was a sheer myth.

If the “King’s Head” of fact--“such a delicious old inn opposite the churchyard,” as Dickens wrote of it to Forster--is not so wonderful an old house as the “Maypole” of fiction and of Cattermole’s picturesque fancy, we must, at any rate, excuse the artist, who was under the necessity of working up to the fervid description of it with which the story begins: “An old building, with more gable-ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag chimneys, out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes, imparted to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables, gloomy, ruinous, and empty. The place was said to have been built in the days of King Henry the Eighth; and there, was a legend, not only that Queen Elizabeth had slept there one night while upon a hunting excursion, to wit, in a certain oak-panelled room with a deep bay-window, but that next morning, while standing upon a mounting-block before the door, with one foot in the stirrup, the virgin monarch had then and there boxed and cuffed an unlucky page for some neglect of duty.”

[Illustration: THE “KING’S HEAD,” CHIGWELL, THE “MAYPOLE” OF _BARNABY RUDGE_.]

Passing the references to sunken and uneven floors and old diamond-paned lattices, with another to an “ancient porch, quaintly and grotesquely carved,” which does not exist, we come to a description of dark red bricks, grown yellow with age, decayed timbers, and ivy wrapping the time-worn walls,--all figments of the imagination.

The real “Maypole,” identified with the “King’s Head” at Chigwell, in Epping Forest, is not the leastest littlest bit like that. The laziest man on the hottest day could easily count its gables, which number three large ones[17] and a small would-be-a-gable-if-it-could, that looks as though it were blighted in its youth and had never grown to maturity. The front of the house is not of red brick, and never was: the present white plaster face being a survival of its early years; while the front of the ground-floor is weather-boarded.

But it is a delightful old house, in a situation equally delightful, standing opposite the thickly wooded old churchyard of Chigwell, just as described in the story; the sign--a portrait head of Charles the First--projecting from an iron bracket, and the upper storeys of the inn themselves set forward, on old carved oak beams and brackets. There is no sign of decay or neglect about the “King’s Head.”

In _Martin Chuzzlewit_ the literary annotator and professor of topographical exegesis finds an interesting problem of the first dimensions in the question, “Where was the ‘Blue Dragon’ of that story situated?” It is a matter which, it is to be feared, will never be threshed out to the satisfaction of all seekers after truth. “You all are right and all are wrong,” as the chameleon is supposed to have said when he heard disputants quarrelling as to whether he was green or pink; and then turned blue, to confound them. But the chameleon, in this instance, is no more: and we who have opinions may continue, without fear, to hold them.

Well, then: in the third chapter of _Martin Chuzzlewit_ we are

## particularly introduced to an inn, the subject of an earlier allusion in

those pages, the “Blue Dragon,” near Salisbury. In what direction it lay from that cathedral city we are not told--whether north, south, east, or west; and we only infer from incidents of the story, in which the inn is brought into relation with the London mail and coaching in general, that the “Blue Dragon” was at Amesbury, eight miles to the north of Salisbury, by which route the famous “Quicksilver” Exeter mail to and from London went, in the old coaching days, avoiding Salisbury altogether. The course of the narrative, the situation of an old mansion on the Wilsford road near Amesbury--generally pointed out as Pecksniff’s home--and the position of Amesbury, all seem at the first blush to point to that fine old inn, the “George” at Amesbury, being the original of the “Blue Dragon”; and this old inn certainly was not only a coaching-house, but was what another claimant to the honour of being the real true original of the “Blue Dragon”--the “Green Dragon” at Alderbury--could never have been: a hostelry with accommodation sufficient for postchaise travellers such as old Martin Chuzzlewit and Mary.

[Illustration: THE “GREEN DRAGON,” ALDERBURY.]

The “George” at Amesbury is a house of considerable size and architectural character, and its beauties might fitly have employed the pencils of Pecksniff’s pupils, had that great and good man condescended to notice anything less stupendous than cathedrals, castles, and Houses of Parliament. As it was, however, the architectural studies of his young friends were made to contemplate nothing meaner than “elevations of Salisbury Cathedral from every possible point of sight,” and lesser things were passed contemptuously by. (Chap. I.)

The “George,” after the fine old church--that church in which Tom Pinch played the organ--is the chief ornament of Amesbury, and that it was the inn meant by Dickens when he wrote _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is in the village an article of faith which no visitor dare controvert or dispute in any way on the spot. Like the small boys who do not say “Yah!” and are not courageous enough to make grimaces until safely out of arm’s reach, we only dare dispassionately discuss the _pros_ and _cons_ when out of the place. It were not possible on the spot to object, “Yes, but,” and then proceed to argue the point with the landlord, who confidently shows you old Martin Chuzzlewit’s bedroom and a room with a descent of one step inside, instead of the “two steps on the inside so exquisitely unexpected that strangers, despite the most elaborate cautioning, usually dived in, head first, as into a plunging-bath.”

[Illustration: THE “GEORGE,” AMESBURY.]

But the truth is, like many another literary landmark, the “Blue Dragon” in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ is a composite picture, combining the features of both the “George” at Amesbury, eight miles to the north of Salisbury, and those of the “Green Dragon” at Alderbury, three miles to the south. Nay, there were not so long ago at Alderbury those who remembered the picture-sign of the “Green Dragon” there, which doubtless Dickens saw in his wanderings around the neighbourhood. “A faded and an ancient dragon he was; and many a wintry storm of rain, snow, sleet, and hail had changed his colour from a gaudy blue to a faint lack-lustre shade of grey. But there he hung; rearing in a state of monstrous imbecility on his hind-legs; waxing with every month that passed so much more dim and shapeless that as you gazed at him on one side of the sign-board it seemed as if he must be gradually melting through it and coming out upon the other.” (Chap. III.)

The sign has long since been replaced by the commonplace lettering of the present day, but it was then, in Dickens’s own words, “a certain Dragon who swung and creaked complainingly before the village ale-house door,” a phrase which at once shows us that if by the “Blue Dragon” of the story the “George” at Amesbury was intended to be described, that was a derogatory description of the fine old hostelry.

This brings us to the chief point upon which the validity of this claim of the “Green Dragon” at Alderbury must rest. Dickens distinctly alludes to the “Blue Dragon” as a “village ale-house,” and such it is and has ever been; while to the “George” at Amesbury that description cannot even now justly apply, and certainly it could never in coaching times, when in the heyday of its prosperity, have been so fobbed off with such a phrase. Moreover, we will do well to bear in mind that old Chuzzlewit and his companion did not put up at the inn--this “village ale-house”--from choice. The gentleman was “taken ill upon the road,” and had to seek the first house that offered.

Those curious in the byways of Dickens topography will find Alderbury three miles from Salisbury, on the left-hand side of the Southampton road. Half a mile from it, on the other side of the way, stands “St. Mary’s Grange,” a red-brick building in a mixed Georgian and Gothic style, built by Pugin, and locally reputed to be the original of Mr. Pecksniff’s residence: a circumstance which may well give us pause and opportunity for considering whether Dickens had that distinguished architect in his mind when creating the character of his holy humbug.

[Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE “GREEN DRAGON,” ALDERBURY.]

The “Green Dragon,” which we have thus shown to have, at the least of it, as good a title as the “George” at Amesbury to be considered the original of the house kept by the genial Mrs. Lupin, friend of Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley, and Martin Chuzzlewit in particular, and of her fellow-creatures in general, does not directly face the highway, but is set back from it at an angle, behind a little patch of grass. It is pre-eminently rustic, and is even more ancient than the casual wayfarer, judging merely from its exterior, would suppose; for a fine fifteenth-century carved stone fireplace in what is now the bar parlour bears witness to an existence almost mediæval. It is a beautiful, though dilapidated, work of Gothic art of the Early Tudor period, ornamented with boldly carved crockets, heraldic roses, and shields of arms, and is worthy of inspection for itself alone, quite irrespective of its literary interest.

A London inn intimately associated with _Martin Chuzzlewit_ finally disappeared in the early part of 1904, when the last vestiges of the “Black Bull,” Holborn, were demolished. The “Black Bull,” in common with the numerous other old inns of Holborn, in these last few years all swept away, stood just outside the City of London, and was originally, like its neighbours, established for the accommodation of those travellers who, in the Middle Ages, arrived too late in the evening to enter the City. At sundown the gates of the walled City of London were closed, and, unless the traveller was a very privileged person indeed, he found no entrance until the next morning, and was obliged to put up at one of the many hostelries that sprang up outside and found their account in the multitude of such laggards by the way. The old “Black Bull,” after many alterations, was rebuilt in a very commonplace style in 1825, and in later years it became a merely sordid public-house, with an unlovely pile of peculiarly grim “model” dwellings in the courtyard. In spite of those later changes, the great plaster effigy of the Black Bull himself, with a golden girdle about his middle, remained on his bracket over the first floor window until the house was pulled down, May 18th, 1904.

[Illustration: SIGN OF THE “BLACK BULL,” HOLBORN.]

An amusing story belongs to that sign, for it was, in 1826, the subject of a struggle between the landlord, one Gardiner, on the one side and the City authorities on the other. The Commissioner of Sewers served a notice upon Gardiner, requiring him to take his bull down, but the landlord was obstinate, and refused to do anything of the kind, whereupon the Commissioner assembled a storming-party of over fifty men, with ladders and tackle for removing the objectionably large and weighty effigy. No sooner, however, had the enemy begun their preparations, when, to their astonishment, and to that of the assembled crowds, the bull soared majestically and steadily to what Mrs. Gamp would doubtless have called the “parapidge.” Arrived there he displayed a flag with the bold legend, “I don’t intrude now.”

Some arrangement was evidently arrived at, for the bull occupied its original place, above the first-floor window over the archway, for the whole of the seventy-eight years between 1826 and 1904.

The house is referred to in _Martin Chuzzlewit_ as the “Bull,” and is the place to which Sairey Gamp repaired from Kingsgate Street to relieve Betsy Prig in the nursing of the mysterious patient. She found it “a little dull, but not so bad as might be,” and was “glad to see a parapidge, in case of fire, and lots of roofs and chimley-pots to walk upon.”

There are no greatly outstanding inns to be found in _Bleak House_, the “Dedlock Arms,” really the “Sondes Arms” at Rockingham, being merely mentioned. On the other hand, in _David Copperfield_ we find the “Plough” at Blundeston mentioned, and that hotel at Yarmouth whence the London coach started: only unfortunately it is not possible to identify it, either with the “Crown and Anchor,” the “Angel,” or the “Star.”

In Parliament Street, Westminster, until 1899, stood the “Red Lion” public-house, identified with the place where David Copperfield (