Dickens gives no name to this tavern so minutely and wonderfully described, where Quilp and Dick drank with so much freedom. Yet, although it cannot be identified, the word-picture is too good to pass unheeded. However, many years ago there were scores of such which would answer to the description, on the Surrey side of the Thames, and no doubt Dickens hit upon one of them for Quilp’s favourite resort near by his wharf. They have long since disappeared.
No sign is mentioned either of Dick Swiveller’s favourite inn “across the street,” from Sampson Brass’s office in Bevis Marks, where he obtained his “modest quencher.” There is, however, at No. 17, the Red Lion Tavern that claims that honour and acquaints the world of the fact from its sign-board. It is quite an old-fashioned public-house, and has scarcely been altered since it numbered so bright and merry a soul as Dick among its frequenters.
There is, however, one tavern mentioned in the story that leaves us in no doubt about its identification. It will be remembered how annoyed, indeed how desperate, Sampson Brass gets with the Single Gentleman for encouraging the Punch and Judy shows to the house. “I wish I only knew who his friends were,” muttered Sampson, as another appeared in Bevis Marks. “If they’d just get up a pretty little commission de lunatico at the Gray’s Inn Coffee-House and give me the job, I’d be content to have the lodgings empty for awhile, at all events.”
The building which was once known as Gray’s Inn Coffee-House stands to-day, although its front has been stuccoed and turned into chambers. It is the next house on the east from the Holborn gate of Gray’s Inn. It is referred to at length in Chapter LIX of David Copperfield, when David, reaching London, plans to call on Traddles in his chambers in the Inn. He puts up at Gray’s Inn Coffee-House. Having ordered a bit of fish and a steak he stood before the fire musing on the waiter’s obscurity:
“As I followed the chief waiter with my eyes, I could not help thinking that the garden in which he had gradually blown to be the flower he was was an arduous place to rise in. It had such a prescriptive, stiff-necked, long-established, solemn, elderly air. I glanced about the room, which had had its sanded floor sanded, no doubt, in exactly the same manner when the chief waiter was a boy, if he ever was a boy, which appeared to be improbable; and at the shining tables, where I saw myself reflected, in unruffled depths of old mahogany; and at the lamps, without a flaw in their trimmings or cleaning; and at the comfortable green curtains, with their pure brass rods, snugly enclosing the boxes; and at the two large coal fires, brightly burning; and at the rows of decanters, burly as if with the consciousness of pipes of expensive old port wine below; and both England and the law appeared to me to be very difficult indeed to be taken by storm. I went up to my bedroom to change my wet clothes; and the vast extent of that old wainscoted apartment (which was over the archway leading to the inn, I remember) and the sedate immensity of the four-post bedstead, and the indomitable gravity of the chests of drawers, all seemed to unite in sternly frowning on the fortunes of Traddles, or on any such daring youth. I came down again to my dinner; and even the slow comfort of the meal, and the orderly silence of the place, were eloquent on the audacity of Traddles, and his small hopes of a livelihood for twenty years to come.”
We wonder if the staid men who conduct their business in those rooms to-day are conscious that they occupy one of London’s historic old coffee-taverns and a noted Dickens landmark to wit.
The Jolly Sandboys Inn, mentioned at the beginning of Chapter XVIII of The Old Curiosity Shop, is doubtless a purely imaginary one. It was “a small road-side inn of pretty ancient date, with a sign representing three sandboys increasing their jollity with as many jugs of ale and bags of gold, creaking and swinging on its post on the opposite side of the road.” But, as we have no definite information as to the identical spot Codlin and Short had reached at that moment, no attempt can be made to identify it.
The same remarks apply to the Valiant Soldier, the public-house where Nell and her grandfather took shelter from the storm, in Chapter XXIX, and where the old man gambled away Nell’s last coin in a game of cards.