Who’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think how oft he found
The warmest welcome at an inn;
—at least, so tradition has it. But Mr. Charles G. Harper thinks it doubtful, and feels that the Henley referred to by historians must have been Henley-in-Arden.
There is one inn mentioned in the book which has not, that we are aware of, been identified. It is the Exchequer Coffee-House, Palace Yard, Westminster, the address given by Mr. Julius Handford to Mr. Inspector on the occasion when he viewed the body of the drowned man (Bk. 1, Chapter III).
CHAPTER XIII
The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices
WOOD’S HOTEL, FURNIVAL’S INN—THE TILTED WAGON—THE TRAVELLERS’ TWOPENNY—THE CROZIER, CLOISTERHAM—THE KING’S ARMS, LANCASTER—THE SHIP, ALLONBY—THE ANGEL, DONCASTER, AND OTHERS
It is a curious fact that Wood’s Hotel, one of London’s old-time inns which must have been familiar to Dickens in his very early days—even before he commenced writing his Pickwick Papers—did not furnish a scene in any of his books until it figured in Edwin Drood, his last.
As early as 1834, when on the staff of the “Morning Chronicle,” Dickens lived at 13 Furnival’s Inn, and in the following year moved to No 15, where he commenced The Pickwick Papers, and where he took to himself a wife and where his first child was born.