Dickensian Inns & Taverns

by B. W. Matz

SOL’S ARMS—THE DEDLOCK ARMS—THE LONDON COFFEE—HOUSE—PEGASUS’ ARMS—ETC.

There are very few inns of any importance mentioned in Bleak House, and only one that plays any prominent part in the story. The one at Barnet, where Esther Summerson hired the carriage to drive to Mr. Jarndyce’s house, was no doubt meant to be the Red Lion, and is dealt with in the first chapter of the present volume; while the White Horse Cellar, where she alighted on her entry into London from Reading, claims attention in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick.”

Of the two other taverns, Sol’s Arms, where the inquest on Nemo was held, and the Dedlock Arms at Chesney Wold, the former is the chief.

The original of Sol’s Arms was the old Ship Tavern which once stood at the corner of Chichester Rents off Chancery Lane. It is first referred to in Chapter XI as the place of the coroner’s inquest. “The coroner is to sit in the first-floor room at the Sol’s Arms, where the Harmonic Meetings take place twice a week, and where the chair is filled by a gentleman of professional celebrity, faced by Little Swills the comic vocalist.... The Sol’s Arms does a brisk stroke of business all the morning.”

According to Allbut, Dickens took the name from a tavern in the Hampstead Road where the harmonic meetings of the Sol’s Society were held, and it certainly seems that he adapted its characteristics to the Ship.

At the appointed hour the coroner arrived, and was conducted by the beadle and the landlord to the Harmonic Meeting Room, “where he puts his hat on the piano, and takes a Windsor chair at the head of the long table, formed of several short tables put together, and ornamented with glutinous rings in endless involutions, made by the pots and glasses. As many of the jury as can crowd together at the tables sit there. The rest get among the spittoons and pipes, or lean against the piano.”

All in readiness, the famous inquest on Nemo, with poor Joe as a witness, took place, after which the Sol’s Arms gradually “melts into the shadowy night, and then flares out of it strong in gas.”

That was a special event for the Sol’s Arms, which generally speaking was just a tavern frequented by lawyers’ clerks and the inhabitants of Chichester Rents and its neighbourhood. It, no doubt, was Krook’s habitual place of call, it certainly was patronized by Mrs. Piper and Mrs. Perkins, and Mr. Guppy must often have looked in; but its chief claim to fame was its being the meeting place of the Harmonic Company, of whom Little Swills was so distinguished a member.

Although Chichester Rents, which exists to-day, is not the same Chichester Rents as when the Old Ship Tavern was there, and Krook lived there, with Miss Flite as a lodger, one is easily reminded of these things, and of the inquest, of Poor Joe, and of the great Little Swills, when one wanders through this district of Dickens Land.

It is common knowledge that Chesney Wold, the country seat of the Dedlocks of the story, was Rockingham Castle, the home of the Hon. Richard Watson and Mrs. Watson, to whom Dickens dedicated David Copperfield. There is, therefore, no difficulty in tracing the Dedlock Arms. The village of Chesney Wold was the village of Rockingham. In Rockingham is an old inn bearing the date of 1763, known as Sonde’s Arms, which stands for the Dedlock Arms of the story.