It is the scene of many incidents in the story. Indeed, it was the meeting place of all the men of the village, to whom Mr. Wopsle read the news round the fire, and where all the gossip of the district was retailed.
The Horseshoe and Castle is a typical village inn, in all appearances like a doll’s house, built of wood in a quite plain fashion, lying a little back from the road. It was in this inn that Mr. Jaggers unexpectedly appeared one day enquiring for Pip, which ultimately resulted in the change in Pip’s fortune and his journey to London.
Pip’s journey from “our town,” as he calls it, to the Metropolis, was, we read, “a journey of about five hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse stage-coach by which I was passenger got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.”
This incident of the early life of Pip, related in 1860, was a reminiscence of Dickens’s early childhood, which he recalls in The Uncommercial Traveller, when he tells us that, as a small boy, he “left Dullborough in the days when there were no railroads in the land,” and he left it in a stage-coach. “Through all the years that have since passed,” he goes on, “have I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed—like game—and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.... The coach that carried me away was melodiously called Timpson’s Blue-Eyed Maid, and belonged to Timpson at the coach office up street.” In speaking of Dullborough and “our town,” it is known that Dickens was referring to Rochester.
The Cross Keys was a notable coaching inn of those days, and the Rochester coaches started and ended their journey there. It was demolished over fifty years ago. Although Dickens does not give us one of his pleasant pen-pictures of it, he refers to it occasionally in other of his stories, such as Little Dorrit and Nicholas Nickleby.
Another one-time famous London inn, referred to in Great Expectations, but no longer existing, is Hummum’s, in Covent Garden.
When Pip received that note one evening on reaching the gateway of the Temple, warning him not to go home, he hired a chariot and drove to Hummum’s, Covent Garden. He spent a very miserable night there. In those times, he tells us, “a bed was always to be got there at any hour of the night, and the chamberlain, letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the candle next in order on his shelf, and showed me straight into the bedroom next in order. It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the back, with a despotic monster of a four-post bed in it, straddling over the whole place, putting one of its arbitrary legs into the fire-place, and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.”
He goes on to wail of his doleful night. The room smelt of cold soot and hot dust, the tester was covered in blue-bottle flies, which he thought must be lying up for next summer. “When I had lain awake a little while, those extraordinary voices, with which silence teems, began to make themselves audible. The closet whispered, the fire-place sighed, the little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers.”
He then thought of the unknown gentleman who once came to Hummum’s in the night and had gone to bed and destroyed himself and had been found in the morning weltering in his blood. Altogether a dismal, doleful and miserable experience of Hummum’s. But no doubt Pip’s liver or nerves were the cause of it, not the hotel.
Another reference to it is made in Sketches by Boz in the chapter describing the streets in the morning. Speaking of the pandemonium which reigns in Covent Garden at an early hour after daybreak, the talking, shouting, horses neighing, donkeys braying, Dickens says “these and a hundred other sounds form a compound discordant enough to a Londoner’s ears, and remarkably disagreeable to those of country gentlemen who are sleeping at Hummum’s for the first time.”