ROCHESTER IN PICKWICKIAN DAYS, SHOWING THE OLD BRIDGE AND “WRIGHT’S.”
When Wright came to the “Crown,” he, like any other monarch newly come to his own, made sweeping alterations. Antiquity, gabled frontages, elaborately carved barge-boards, and all such architectural vanities were nothing to him, nor indeed were they much to any one else in that grossly unappreciative era, and he left that portion of the house to carriers and the like, used all their lives to be leeched by diminutive lepidoptera. Wright did business with customers of more tender hide, who had preferences for more civilised lodgment, and housed the great, the rich, and the luxurious, travelling post to and fro along the Dover Road. For their accommodation he built a remarkably substantial and amazingly ugly structure—a something classical that might, by the look of it, be either town hall, heathen temple, or early dissenting chapel—in the rear, and facing the river. This was the building essentially “Wright’s.” It still stands, and people with sharp eyes, who look very hard in the right place, will yet discover a ghostly “Wright’s” on what Mrs. Gamp would call the “parapidge.”
Such a place would naturally impress a poor strolling actor like Jingle, whose humorous sally, “charge you more if you dine at a friend’s than they would if you dined in the coffee-room,” is a perversion of the well-known charge for “corkage” made by hotel-keepers when a guest brings his own wine.
Wright himself has, of course, long since gone to that place where innkeepers who make extravagant demands upon travellers are held to account.
The course of Pickwick now takes us to “Muggleton,” as to whose identity much uncertainty has long been felt. It is a choice between Maidstone and Town Malling, and as the distances given in the book between Rochester and Dingley Dell and “Muggleton” cannot be made to agree with either Town Malling or Maidstone, it is a poor choice at the best. At the former the “Swan” is pointed to as the real “Blue Lion,” and at Maidstone the “White Lion.”
THE “SWAN,” TOWN MALLING: IDENTIFIED WITH THE “BLUE LION,” MUGGLETON.
Chapter X. takes us back to London, and there brings on to the crowded stage of Pickwick, for the first time, Sam Weller, engaged as “Boots” of the “White Hart” in the Borough, in going over the foot-gear of the guests.