“‘Yes, you may be sure that the stairs are fireproof,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘and that any outbreak of the devouring element would be perceived and suppressed by the watchmen.’”
Having seen Rosa comfortably settled, he left her, assuring the night porter as he went that, “if someone staying in the hotel should wish to send across the road to me in the night, a crown will be ready for the messenger.”
To the hotel next morning Mr. Grewgious went faithfully to time with Mr. Crisparkle, who had followed Rosa up from Rochester as fast as he could. Soon also Tartar arrived. After a long consultation between them about Mr. Landless and the use Tartar’s chambers could be put to for certain spying purposes, Tartar took Rosa and Mr. Grewgious for a row up the river. Apartments ultimately being found for Rosa elsewhere, she left Wood’s Hotel, and no further reference is made to it in the book.
In 1898 Furnival’s Inn was demolished with its hotel. Upon its site now stand an insurance company’s huge premises.
In Chapter XV, detailing Neville Landless’s long tramp from Cloisterham, we are told that he stopped at the next road-side tavern to refresh. Dickens describes it in the following words:
“Visitors in want of breakfast—unless they were horses or cattle, for which class of guests there was preparation enough in the way of water-trough and hay—were so unusual at the sign of the Tilted Wagon that it took a long time to get the wagon into the track of tea and toast and bacon; Neville, in the interval, sitting in a sanded parlour, wondering in how long a time after he had gone the sneezy fire of damp fagots would begin to make somebody else warm. Indeed, the Tilted Wagon was a cool establishment on the top of a hill, where the ground before the door was puddles with damp hoofs and trodden straw; where a scolding landlady slapped a moist baby (with one red sock on and one wanting) in the bar; where the cheese was cast aground upon a shelf in company with a mouldy table-cloth and a green-handled knife in a sort of cast-iron canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumbs over its shipwreck in another canoe; where the family linen, half-washed and half dried, led a public life of lying about; where everything to drink was drunk out of mugs, and everything else was suggestive of a rhyme to mugs: the Tilted Wagon, all these things considered, hardly kept its painted promise of providing good entertainment for man and beast.”
Mr. Edwin Harris, in his guide to Dickensian Rochester, has identified the Coach and Horses on the top of Strood Hill as the original of the Tilted Wagon.
The Travellers’ Twopenny, where the boy deputy was a “man-servant,” as he explained to Jasper, was originally the White Duck, and afterwards Kit’s lodging-house, and stood in the Maidstone Road at Rochester. It degenerated into a crazy wooden sort of cheap public-house, and was not demolished before it was necessary. On its site now stands a business warehouse.
The Crozier, the “Orthodox Hotel,” where Datchery lodged in the same city, was the Crown, and is dealt with in “The Inns and Taverns of Pickwick.”
In the late autumn of 1857, Dickens and Wilkie Collins started “on a ten or twelve days’ expedition to out-of-the-way places, to do (in inns and coast corners) a little tour in search of an article and in avoidance of railroads.” Their selection was the Lake District, but the outcome of their expedition was not one article merely but a series of five under the title of The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, written in collaboration. The two idle apprentices were Francis Goodchild and Thomas Idle, the first name being the pseudonym of Dickens.