During these days Wood’s Hotel occupied the north side of the quiet quadrangle of Furnival’s Inn, and Dickens must have known it well. It was a staid and respectable house with an air about it of domestic comfort, suitable for country visitors, and where, we are informed, family prayers, night and morning, were included in the accommodation.
Its stately building of four stories had dignity added to it by the four tall white stone pillars in the centre portion of the front reaching to the third floor. Although stolid-looking, it was not aggressively so, nor was it altogether unpicturesque, with its grass plot immediately before the entrance, encircling a statue of the founder of the inn, surrounded by white posts connected by chains.
Its imposing appearance from without reflected the comforts which the inside of a reputable family hotel is expected to provide. At such an hotel one would naturally look for courteous attention from waiters and chambermaids, and good meals cleanly served, and at Wood’s no disappointment in these respects was experienced. Indeed, Dickens conveys that idea in referring to it in Edwin Drood.
Entering through the archway of Furnival’s Inn, the hotel caught the eye immediately, and acted as a relief to the straight, angular, and flat appearance of the buildings which formed the once famous quadrangle so intimately associated with Dickens.
It is believed by some, and was definitely stated to be a fact by a writer in the American magazine, the “Cosmopolitan,” for May, 1893, and again by a writer in the “Middlesex and Hertfordshire Notes and Queries,” July, 1895, that Dickens in his bachelor days had apartments on the second floor of the hotel in the right-hand corner, and that in the latter years of its existence the walls of this same room were decorated with pictures of scenes and characters from his works.
We have, however, been unable to find any authority for this statement. But it is quite possible that he frequented the hotel, and we may even assume that he and his friends, Hablôt K. Browne and Robert Young, who occupied rooms in Furnival’s when they were executing engravings for Pickwick, would perhaps chat over details in a snug room in the hotel, when they would be joined by their other friend and engraver, Finden.
Bearing all these ideas in mind, it is certainly a little strange that Dickens waited for his last book before he introduced the hotel into his writings.
In that book we are told that Mr. Grewgious crossed over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn from Staple Inn opposite for his dinner “three hundred days in the year at least,” and after dinner crossed back again. On one occasion, a very important interview between him and Edwin Drood took place in his chambers, and Edwin was pressed to stay for a meal. “We can have dinner in from just across Holborn,” Grewgious assured him, and Bazzard, his clerk, was not only invited to join them, but asked if he would mind “stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in materials for laying the cloth.... For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made dish that can be recommended and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of mutton) and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare—in short, we’ll have whatever there is on hand.”
Bazzard, after bringing out the round table, accordingly withdrew to execute the orders. His return with the waiters gives Dickens an opportunity for one of his humorous descriptive passages which we make no excuse for quoting in full:
“Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters—an immovable waiter, and a flying waiter; and the three brought in with them as much fog as gave a new roar to the fire. The flying waiter, who had brought everything on his shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while the immovable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him. The flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and the immovable waiter looked through them. The flying waiter then flew across Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another flight for the joint and the poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was discovered from time to time that the immovable waiter had forgotten them all. But, let the flying waiter cleave the air as he might, he was always reproached on his return by the immovable waiter for bringing fog with him and being out of breath. At the conclusion of the repast, by which time the flying waiter was severely blown, the immovable waiter gathered up the table-cloth under his arm with a grand air, and, having sternly (not to say with indignation) looked on at the flying waiter while he set clean glasses round, directed a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious, conveying: ‘Let it be clearly understood between us that the reward is mine, and that nil is the claim of this slave,’ and pushed the flying waiter before him out of the room.”