THE COACH AND HORSES, ISLEWORTH
Drawn by C. G. Harper
On the other hand, the Coach and Horses, at Isleworth, where Bill Sikes and Oliver alighted from the cart they had “begged a lift” in, is no flight of Dickens’s imagination and can be discovered to-day exactly where he located it.
The tramp of the two from Spitalfields to Chertsey on the burglary expedition can easily be followed from Dickens’s clearly indicated itinerary. The point on the journey where they obtained their lift in a cart bound for Hounslow was near Knightsbridge. Having bargained with the driver to put them down at Isleworth, they at length alighted a little way beyond “a public-house called the Coach and Horses, which stood at the corner of a road just beyond Isleworth leading to Hampton.” They did not enter this public-house, but continued their journey. Mr. John Sayce Parr, in an article in The Dickensian, Vol. I, page 261, speaks of the topographical accuracy of Dickens in this instance: “The literary pilgrim,” he says, “sets out to follow the route he indicates, doubtful if he will find the places mentioned. There is, however, not the slightest excuse for making mistakes, for Dickens apparently visited the scenes and described them with the accuracy of a guide-book. Thus, one finds the Coach and Horses, sure enough, at the point where Brentford ends and Isleworth begins, by the entrance to Sion Park, and near the spot where the road rambles off to the left.”
THE “EIGHT BELLS” Hatfield
Drawn by F. G. Kitton
The Coach and Horses, the same writer says, is not a picturesque inn. It is a huge four-square lump of a place, and wears, indeed, rather a dour and forbidding aspect. It is unquestionably the house of which Dickens speaks, and was built certainly not later than the dawn of the nineteenth century.
It still exists to-day, although the surroundings have altered somewhat by the advent of the electric tramways and other “improvements.”
The George Inn, mentioned in Chapter XXXIII, where Oliver took the letter for Mr. Losberne to be sent by “an express on horseback to Chertsey,” cannot be identified, as the market-town in whose market-place it stood is not mentioned or hinted at. Mr. Percy FitzGerald claims that the description applies to Chertsey, but, as the letter had to be taken to Chertsey, something seems wrong in his deduction.
In the chapter describing the flight of Bill Sikes, we read that, on leaving London behind, he shaped his course for Hatfield. “It was nine o’clock at night when the man, quite tired out, and the dog, limping and lame from the unaccustomed exercise, turned down the hill by the church of the quiet village, and, plodding along the little street, crept into a small public-house whose scanty light had guided them to the spot. There was a fire in the tap-room, and some of the country labourers were drinking before it. They made room for the stranger, but he sat down in the farthest corner, and ate and drank alone, or rather with his dog, to whom he cast a morsel of food from time to time.” Here he met the pedlar with his infallible composition for removing blood-stains. This particular public-house is no doubt the Eight Bells, a picturesque old house which still remains on the spot where Dickens accurately located it. It is a quaint little building with a red-tiled roof and dormer windows, and local tradition assigns it as that at which Bill Sikes sought refuge for a short time before continuing his journey to St. Albans, enabling Hatfield to claim it as a veritable Dickens landmark, together with that other, the churchyard, where Mrs. Lirriper’s husband was buried.