The inn’s interior is typical of those to be found in country villages, with its sanded floor of the parlour, and wooden settles with arms at each corner. One of these corners is said to have been the favourite seat of Dickens, for it is known that he sometimes called at the inn as he drew near the end of one of his long walks, either alone or with friends, for refreshments. It was an inn, as he said elsewhere, that no thirsty man was known to pass on a hot summer’s day.
CHAPTER XV
Christmas Stories and Minor Writings
THE MITRE INN—THE SALISBURY ARMS—THE PEAL OF BELLS—THE NUTMEG-GRATER—THE DODO—THE PAVILIONSTONE HOTEL—HEN AND CHICKENS—THE SWAN
In the First Branch of “The Holly Tree,” in Christmas Stories, there are many inns far and wide referred to, and reminiscences associated with each recalled. These reminiscences may be personal to Dickens or merely of an imaginary nature. The Holly Tree Inn itself is real enough, and has been identified as the George, Greta Bridge, referred to in our chapter on Nicholas Nickleby. There is no doubt, either, that the inn in the cathedral town where Dickens went to school was the Mitre Inn at Chatham. “It was the inn where friends used to put up,” he says, “and where we used to go to see parents, and to have salmon and fowls, and to be tipped. It had an ecclesiastical sign—the Mitre—and a bar that seemed the next best thing to a bishopric, it was so snug. I loved the landlord’s daughter to distraction—but let that pass. It was in that inn that I was cried over by my rosy little sister, because I had acquired a black eye in a fight. And though she had been, that Holly Tree night, for many a long year where all tears are dried, the Mitre softened me yet.”
THE MITRE INN, CHATHAM
From an engraving
The Mitre Inn and Clarence Hotel still exists at Chatham, very much as it was in Dickens’s childhood days when his family lived in Ordnance Terrace. It was kept in those days by a Mr. Tribe, who was a friend of John Dickens, and the two families met there and enjoyed many friendly evenings when Dickens and his sister, as he has told us, mounted on a dining-table for a stage, would sing some old sea-songs together. He had a clear treble voice then, but, recalling these incidents many years afterward, said, “he must have been a horrible little nuisance to many unoffending grown-up people who were called upon to admire him.”