The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway

by Charles G. Harper

XXXII

The most famous thing in Ipswich is a thing neither ancient nor beautiful, yet it is an object to which most visitors to the town turn their first attention: it is the "Great White Horse." The "Great White Horse" is an hotel, of a size, in the merry days of the road, justly thought enormous. It has been left for the present age to build many hotels in town and country capable of containing half-a-dozen or more hostelries of the size of the "Great White Horse," but in its own especial era that house fully justified the adjective in its sign. Especially did its bulk strike the imagination of the reporter of the London Morning Chronicle who was dispatched to Ipswich in 1830 for the purpose of reporting a Parliamentary election in the town. He was a very young, a very impressionable and a very bright reporter, and although we may be quite sure that the business on which he was come to Ipswich was an arduous piece of work, calculated to fully occupy his time and thoughts, he carried away with him so accurate an impression of the big inn where he stayed, that when, some time afterwards, he wrote about it the description was as exact as though it had been penned within sight of the house. That reporter was Charles Dickens, and it is his description in the Pickwick Papers which has made the place famous.

THE "GREAT WHITE HORSE."

It was not a flattering description. Few more severe things have ever been said of inns than those Dickens wrote of the "Great White Horse." Indeed, if such things were nowadays printed of any inn or hotel, the writer might confidently expect to be made the defendant in an action for libel. Yet (such is the irony of time and circumstances) the house that Dickens so roundly abused is now eager in all its advertisements to quote the association; and the adventures of Mr Pickwick in the double-bedded room with the elderly lady in yellow curl-papers have brought many more visitors than the unfavourable notice of the "uncarpeted passages" and the "mouldy, ill-lighted rooms" has turned away. If, as has been thought, Dickens thus wrote of the house in order to be revenged for some slights and discomforts he may have experienced here, certainly fortune has played the cynic in converting his remarks into the best of all imaginable recommendations.

The exterior of the house is much the same as it was when Dickens first saw it, "in the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the way, a short distance after you have passed through the open space fronting the Town Hall."

It is the same plain, square building, constructed of a pallid kind of brick suggesting underdone pastry, and is still, although the coaches have disappeared and railways have supplanted them, "known far and wide by the appellation of the 'Great White Horse.'" Still, over the pillared entrance trots the effigy of the Great White Horse himself, perhaps the aboriginal ancestor of that famous breed of equines, the "Suffolk Punches," a very muscular race, more famous for their bulk and strength than for elegance, like those sturdy Flanders mares to which Henry the Eighth inelegantly likened his bride, Anne of Cleves.

Dickens, using the usual licence of the novelist, describes this effigy as "a stone statue of some rampacious animal, with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an insane cart-horse, elevated above the principal door." Quite apart from the fact that the word "rampacious" is unknown to the English language, and is probably meant for "rampageous," the horse is really represented in the act of beginning a gentle trot, and looks as mild as the mildest milk that ever dewed the whiskers of a new-born kitten. His off fore-leg, broken at some period, has been restored of a size that does not match with the other three. Never, in the whole of his existence, has the Great White Horse gone on the rampage, and, like all the truly great, his manners have always been distinguished by their unobtrusiveness.

"The 'Great White Horse,'" writes Dickens, "is famous in the neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or county paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig—for its enormous size. Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, ill-lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof, as are collected together between the four walls of the 'Great White Horse' at Ipswich." Further, he describes it as "an overgrown tavern," at whose door, when Mr Pickwick descended from the coach, stood a waiter whose description quite takes one's desire for dinner away. He was "a corpulent man with a fortnight's napkin under his arm and coeval stockings on his legs."

Although that must have been in the best and most prosperous days of the highway, this waiter does not appear to have had anything more pressing to do than "staring down the road," while the account of the internal arrangements of the house does not indicate flourishing business. The private room into which the guests were shown was a "large, badly-furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a small fire was making a wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast sinking under the dispiriting influence of the place." After this we are not surprised to read that it was only "after the lapse of an hour" that "a bit of fish and a steak," representing a dinner, appeared. When this was disposed of, Mr Pickwick and Mr Peter Magnus huddled up to the fire, and, "having ordered a bottle of the worst possible port wine, at the highest possible price, for the good of the house, drank brandy-and-water for their own."