Dickens used the Albion in the ’fifties. In a letter to W. H. Wills (1851) there are instructions to order a plain cold supper at Simpson’s, the Albion, by Drury Lane Theatre, for the next play night. “I would merely have cold joints, lobsters, salad, and plenty of clean ice,” he says. “Perhaps there might be one hot dish, as broiled bones. But I would have only one, and I would have it cheap.” The play referred to was “Not so Bad as we Seem,” which Dickens and his friends were rehearsing for the Guild of Literature and Art. The supper was to be paid for at so much per head, “not including wines, spirits or beers, which each gentleman will order for himself.”
Mr. Percy FitzGerald tells of another evening when Dickens took his friends to the Albion. It was the occasion of Hollingshead’s revival of “The Miller and his Men,” and Dickens was determined to be there. He gave a little dinner party at “the good old Albion,” and all were in great spirits, seated in one of the “boxes” or eating pews as they might be called, and then crossed over the Drury Lane Theatre afterwards.
In the chapter devoted to “Mr. Minns and his Cousin,” in giving instructions as to the best way for Mr. Augustus Minns to get to Mr. Budden’s in Poplar Walk, the latter says, “Now mind the direction; the coach goes from the Flower Pot in Bishopsgate Street, every half-hour. When the coach stops at the Swan, you’ll see, immediately opposite you, a White House.”
The Flower Pot was a coaching inn of some distinction in those days, for not only did the coaches ply between it and the north-east of London, but the inn was also the starting point of the Norwich coach and others to the eastern counties. The Swan was at Stamford Hill, and, beyond that it was the scheduled stopping-place for coaches, to and from London, we can find no record of its history.
The innumerable references to inns and taverns in The Uncommercial Traveller are for the most part purely imaginary. Even when it is clear that Dickens is describing something he actually saw and experienced, he has taken the precaution, in this book, to disguise the inn’s name and whereabouts. There are several such in the chapter entitled “Refreshments for Travellers,” a chapter made up of a series of complaints and adverse criticisms verging on the brink of libel. For instance:
“Take the old-established Bull’s Head with its old-established knife-boxes on its old-established sideboards, its old-established flue under its old-established four-post bedsteads in its old-established airless rooms, its old-established frouziness upstairs and downstairs, its old-established cookery, and its old-established principles of plunder. Count up your injuries, in its side-dishes of ailing sweetbreads in white poultices, of apothecaries’ powders in rice for curry, of pale stewed bits of calf ineffectually relying for an adventitious interest on forcemeat balls. You have had experience of the old-established Bull’s Head stringy fowls, with lower extremities like wooden legs sticking up out of the dish; of its cannibalistic boiled mutton, gushing horribly among its capers, when carved; of its little dishes of pastry—roofs of spermaceti ointment erected over half an apple or four gooseberries. Well for you if you have yet forgotten the old-established Bull’s Head fruity port; whose reputation was gained solely by the old-established price the Bull’s Head put upon it, and by the old-established air with which the Bull’s Head set the glasses and d’oyleys on, and held that Liquid Gout to the three-and-sixpenny wax candle, as if its old-established colour hadn’t come from the dyers.”
Had that inn been properly named at the time, the proprietor’s ire would have been raised, with serious consequences.
Then there is the chapter on “An Old Stage-Coaching House,” whose title seemed to augur well for our purpose. Yet, although it is interesting as picturing the decay of coaching and how it resulted on a coaching town, there is nothing by which we can fix the name of the town, and so identify the Dolphin’s Head there. It had been a great stage-coaching town in the great stage-coaching times, and the ruthless railways had killed and buried it. That is all we are told about its whereabouts.
“The sign of the house was the Dolphin’s Head. Why only head I don’t know; for the Dolphin’s effigy at full length, and upside down—as a dolphin is always bound to be when artistically treated, though I suppose he is sometimes right side upward in his natural condition—graced the sign-board. The sign-board chafed its rusty hooks outside the bow-window of my room, and was a shabby work. No visitor could have denied that the dolphin was dying by inches, but he showed no bright colours. He had once served another master; there was a newer streak of paint below him, displaying with inconsistent freshness the legend, By J. Mellows.
“Pursuing my researches in the Dolphin’s Head, I found it sorely shrunken. When J. Mellows came into possession, he had walled off half the bar, which was now a tobacco shop with its own entrance in the yard—the once glorious yard where the post-boys, whip in hand and always buttoning their waistcoats at the last moment, used to come running forth to mount and away. A ‘Scientific Shoeing-Smith and Veterinary Surgeon’ had further encroached upon the yard; and a grimly satirical Jobber, who announced himself as having to let ‘A neat one-horse fly, and a one-horse cart,’ had established his business, himself, and his family, in a part of the extensive stables. Another part was lopped clean off from the Dolphin’s Head, and now comprised a chapel, a wheelwright’s, and a Young Men’s Mutual Improvement and Discussion Society (in a loft); the whole forming a back lane. No audacious hand had plucked down the vane from the central cupola of the stables, but it had grown rusty and stuck at Nil: while the score or two of pigeons that remained true to their ancestral traditions and the place had collected in a row on the roof-ridge of the only outhouse retained by the Dolphin, where all the inside pigeons tried to push the outside pigeon off. This I accepted as emblematical of the struggle for post and place in railway times.”