Arriving at Yarmouth, David found Ham awaiting him at the public-house which was the stopping place of the Blunderstone carrier. Although Dickens does not mention its name, the Buck Inn undoubtedly was the identical house where Barkis came to a halt on such occasions, and it still exists in the Market Square. At the end of his visit, David, arm-in-arm with Little Em’ly, made for the same inn once again to meet Barkis for the homeward journey in his cart.
The inn, however, at Yarmouth which has more importance attaching to it than any other is that where David met the friendly waiter whilst waiting for the coach to take him to London, and where he procured the sheet of paper and ink-stand to write his promised note to Clara Peggotty assuring her that “Barkis is willing.”
There is little doubt that the inn referred to here was the Duke’s Head. It was the principal coaching inn of the town, and we know that Dickens knew it well. On his arrival there in Barkis’s cart, David observed that “the coach was in the yard shining very much all over, but without any horses to it as yet; and it looked in that state as if nothing was more unlikely than its ever going to London.” To the coffee-room, which was a long one with some maps in it, David was conducted by William the waiter, who assisted him to get through his meal, and told him the horrible tale of the man who died from drinking a glass of ale that was too old for him. But that incident of David and the friendly waiter is too well known to need recapitulation here.
Before leaving Yarmouth, there is one more inn that claims attention. When David and Steerforth later on in the story visited the Peggottys, the hotel they stayed at has been identified as the Star Hotel, an old mansion, with moulded ribbed ceilings and the sides of the rooms panelled with oak. It has been added to since those days, but the old part still remains. It was in this house that Miss Mowcher was first introduced into the story.
It is also believed that the Feathers at Gorleston is the “decent ale-house” on the road to Lowestoft where David Copperfield, as stated in Chapter XXXI, stopped to dine, when out for a walk whilst on a visit to Yarmouth.
But let us return to David on the coach waiting to start for Salem House, Blackheath, via London. Having suffered a good deal of chaff from the maids and others over the huge dinner he was supposed to have eaten, the coach started on its journey, during which the jokes about his appetite continued. He reached his destination at last, having approached London “by degrees, and got, in due time, to the inn in the Whitechapel district,” he says, “for which we were bound. I forget whether it was the Blue Bull or the Blue Boar; but I know it was the Blue Something, and that its likeness was painted up on the back of the coach.” Here, more solitary than Robinson Crusoe, he went into the booking-office, and, “by invitation of the clerk on duty, passed behind the counter, and sat down on the scale at which they weighed the luggage.” Thus he waited until called for by Mr. Mell, when the clerk “slanted me off the scale, and pushed me over to him, as if I were weighed, bought, delivered, and paid for.”
This inn was the Blue Boar, an old coaching inn long demolished, where the daily coach from Yarmouth made its halting place. There is still a relic of it in the shape of a sculptured effigy of a boar, with gilded tusks and hoofs, built into the wall of a tobacco factory marking the site of the inn.
In Chapter XI of the book, describing David’s start in life on his own account, there are one or two inns and taverns mentioned where he partook of meals and other refreshment. He tells us he had “a plate of bread and cheese and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house opposite our place of business, called the Lion, or the Lion and something else that I have forgotten.” This has not definitely been identified, but may have been the White Swan at Hungerford Stairs, referred to later. On another occasion he went into a public-house one hot evening and said to the landlord, “What is your best—your very best—ale a glass?” “Twopence-halfpenny is the price of the Genuine Stunning ale,” was the reply. “Then,” says I, producing the money, “just draw me a glass of the Genuine Stunning, if you please, with a good head to it.” Having served him, the landlord invited his wife to join him in surveying the little customer and “the landlord’s wife, opening the little half-door of the bar, and bending down, gave me my money back, and gave me a kiss that was half-admiring and half-compassionate, but all womanly and good, I am sure.”
This incident actually occurred to Dickens himself when a lad in the blacking factory, for he has admitted it to be so, in his own words, recorded in Forster’s “Life,” Book 1, Chapter XI. He there states that on the occasion in question he “went into a public-house in Parliament Street, which is still there, though altered, at the corner of the short street leading into Cannon Row.” The public-house where it took place was the Red Lion at 48 Parliament Street, and is situated at the corner of Derby Street. There is a Red Lion public-house there to-day—not the same one Dickens visited—that was demolished in 1899—but on the same spot. It is more pretentious than the old one, but keeps its red lion rampant as a sign, and has a bust of the novelist, standing within a niche in the front of the building as a hall-mark of its Dickensian association.
The “little public-house close to the river, with an open space before it, where some coal-heavers were dancing,” referred to in the same chapter, was the Fox under the Hill[1] in the Adelphi.