THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE
Dickens students, however, are of opinion that the Cheshire Cheese is the tavern where Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton dined after the trial at the Old Bailey, described in Chapter IV of Book 2. The evidence offered for this is as follows:
Darnay tells Carton that he is faint for want of food.
“Then why the devil don’t you dine? I dined myself while those numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to—this, or some other.” “Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well in,” replied Carton.
“Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate Hill to Fleet Street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here they were shown a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton sat opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port before him, and his full half-insolent manner upon him.”
The Cheshire Cheese no doubt was the tavern Dickens was thinking of when he wrote the foregoing passages. It certainly was the resort of the literary and legal professions in those days, as it has been since. It is too well known to warrant any detailed account of it here. Besides, its two-and-a-half-century history is too packed with anecdote and story to allow of adequate description in our limited space. An excellent book is issued by the proprietors fully dealing with its past, and copiously illustrated.
There seems to be a growing desire on the part of Dickens students to prove that Cooling, the hamlet in Kent near to Gads Hill is not the spot where are laid certain scenes of Great Expectations, in spite of the fact that Dickens told Forster it was. We do not propose to argue the matter here. The chief point at issue seems to be that there is no blacksmith’s forge at Cooling, whereas there is at Chalk and at Hoo, two other villages in the district that claim the honour. Yet at Chalk there are no “graveyard lozenges,” but at Hoo we believe there happens to be both lozenges in the churchyard and a forge in the village.
On the other hand, we are told there was a blacksmith’s forge at Cooling in Dickens’s time. If, therefore, we accept Cooling as Joe Gargery’s village, the Horseshoe and Castle Inn there would stand for the Three Jolly Bargemen where Joe Gargery and Pip used to while away certain hours of the evening, as described in Chapter X of the book.
It is first referred to on the occasion when Pip had promised “at his peril” to bring Joe home from it. “There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen,” Pip tells us, “with some alarmingly long chalk scores in it on the wall at the side of the door” which seemed never to be paid off. They had been there ever since he could remember, and had grown more than he had. There was a common-room at the end of the passage with a bright large kitchen fire, where Joe smoked his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle. It was here that Pip again encountered his convict who stirred his drink with the file Pip had borrowed for him earlier in the story, and where he was presented with a shilling wrapped in “two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle markets in the country.”