Chapter LIV

., Pip is endeavouring to smuggle the convict, Magwitch, out of the country, down the Thames, do we find an inn easily identified. That is the melancholy waterside house below Gravesend, standing solitary on a raised bank of stones, where Pip lands: “It was a dirty place enough, and I daresay not unknown to smuggling adventurers; but there was a good fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and bacon to eat, and various liquors to drink. Also there were two double-bedded rooms--‘such as they were,’ the landlord said.” Outside there was mud: mud and slimy stones, and rotten, slimy stakes sticking out of the water, and a grey outlook across the broad river.

This describes the actual “Ship and Lobster” tavern, on the shore at Denton, below Gravesend, to which you come past the tramway terminus, down a slummy street chiefly remarkable for grit and broken bottles, then across the railway and the canal and on to the riverside where, in midst of the prevalent grittiness that is now the most outstanding natural feature, stands the inn, in company with the office of an alarming person who styles himself “Explosive Lighterman,” at Denton Wharf.

There are even fewer inns to be found in _Our Mutual Friend_, where, although the “Red Lion” at Henley is said to be the original of the up-river inn to whose lawn Lizzie drags the half-drowned Wrayburn, we are not really sure that Henley actually is indicated. That mention of a lawn does not suffice: many riverside inns have lawns. In short, the edge of Dickens’s appreciation of inns was growing blunted, and he took less delight, as he grew older, in describing their peculiarities. His whole method of story-telling was changed. Instead of the sprightly fancy and odd turns of observation that once fell spontaneously from him, he at last came to laboriously construct and polish the action and conversation of a novel, leaving in comparative neglect those side-lights upon localities that help to give most of his writings a permanent value.

Apart from the novels, we have many inns associated with Dickens by tradition and in his tours and racily descriptive letters; and there, at any rate, we find him, when not overweighted with the more than ever elaborated and melodramatic character of his plots, just as full of quaint, fanciful, and cheerful description as ever.

[Illustration: THE “SHIP AND LOBSTER.”]

His tours began early. So far back as the autumn of 1838 Dickens and Phiz took holiday in the midlands, coming at last to Shrewsbury, where they stayed at the “Lion,” or rather in what was at that time an annexe of the “Lion,” and has long since become a private house. Writing to his elder daughter, Dickens vividly described this place: “We have the strangest little rooms (sitting-room and two bedrooms together) the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand. The windows bulge out over the street, as if they were little stern windows in a ship. And a door opens out of the sitting-room on to a little open gallery with plants in it, where one leans over a queer old rail.”

Mr. Kitton[18] states: “This quaint establishment, alas! has been modernised (if not entirely rebuilt) since those days, and presents nothing of the picturesqueness that attracted the author of _Pickwick_.” But that is by no means the case. It stands exactly as it did, except that since the business of the “Lion” has decreased, it no longer forms a part of that great hostelry.[19] The blocked-up communicating doors between the two buildings may still be seen on the staircase of the “Lion,” and the little house does still bulge over the pavement and closely resemble the stern of an old man-o’-war.

_The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices_, a light-hearted account of a tour taken by Dickens and Wilkie Collins in 1857, begins with the travellers being set down by the express at Carlisle, and ends, after many wanderings in Cumberland and Lancashire, at Doncaster. It is largely an account of inns, including the “Queen’s Head,” Hesket Newmarket, in Cumberland, now a private house; and the “King’s Arms,” Market Street, Lancaster, pulled down in 1880. The “King’s Arms” was, from the exterior, commonplace personified, but within doors you were surrounded by ancient oaken staircases, mahogany panelling, and, according to Dickens, mystic old servitors in black; and doubtless were so encompassed with mysteries and forebodings that when you retired to rest--not being able in such a house to merely “go to bed”--in one of the catafalque-like four-posters, you immediately leapt between the sheets and drew the clothes over your head, in fear of ghosts; dreaming uncomfortably that you were dead and lying in state, and waking with a terrific start in the morning, at the coming of the hot water and the tap at the door, with the dreadful impression that the Day of Judgment was come and you summoned to account before the Most High. These being the most remarkable features of the “King’s Arms” at Lancaster, it is perhaps not altogether strange that the house was at length demolished and replaced by an uninteresting modern hotel, with no associations--and no ghosts.

[Illustration: THE “LION,” SHREWSBURY, SHOWING THE ANNEXE ADJOINING, WHERE DICKENS STAYED.]

A weird story was told of the old inn, by which it seems that a young bride was poisoned there, in a room pointed out as the “Bride’s Chamber,” the criminal being duly hanged at Lancaster gaol. In memory of this traditional romance, it was the custom to serve the incoming guests with a piece of bride-cake. They might also, if they liked, sleep in the very identical ancient black oak four-poster, in the room where the tragedy took place; but, although there was sufficient eagerness to see it in daylight, no very great competition was ever observed among guests for the honour of occupying--we will not say sleeping in--that tragical couch. Dickens himself, however, lay in it, and seems to have slept sufficiently well; greatly, we may suppose, to his disappointment.

Among those inns that no Dickensian neglects is “Jack Straw’s Castle,” on Hampstead Heath, a house as commonplace and as little like any castle of romance as it is possible to conceive. How else could it be? It was built as a private residence in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and, with various additions and alterations, each one vulgarising the house a step further, it now is little better than a London “public.” The Dickensian association is here a personal one, and somewhat thin at that. It does not form a scene in any one of his stories, but was a house he sometimes affected in his suburban walks. In 1837 we find him writing to that “harbitrary gent,” Forster, inviting him to a winter’s walk across the Heath, and adding, “I knows a good ’ous there where we can have a red-hot chop for dinner and a glass of good wine.” “This,” says Forster, “led to our first experience of ‘Jack Straw’s Castle,’ memorable for many happy meetings in coming years.”

How do myths germinate and sprout? Are they invented, or do they spring spontaneously into being? Two myths cling to “Jack Straw’s Castle”: the one that it stands upon the site of a fort thrown up by that peasant leader in the reign of Richard the Second; the other that Dickens not only visited the house, but often stayed there, a chair called “Dickens’s Easy Chair” being shown in what is represented as having been his bedroom. The Great Dickens Legend is now well on its way, and the inns “where he stayed” will at no distant day match the apocryphal “Queen Elizabeth’s Bedrooms” that amaze the historical student with their number.

[Illustration: “JACK STRAW’S CASTLE.”]

The “Jack Straw” legend is old, although by no means so old as the house. It is probable that the house was built on the site of some ancient earthwork, but that might have been either much older or much later than Jack Straw; and in any case history has nothing to say about the spot.

The first reference to the inn by its present name appears to be in the report of a horse-race on the Heath in 1748. In the same year an allusion to it in Richardson’s _Clarissa Harlowe_ speaks merely of “The Castle.”

The illustration printed here shows the bow-window of a good many years ago, a somewhat picturesque feature now abolished in favour of an ugly modern front.

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