Presently to this waggish person enter Mr. Pickwick, Old Wardle, and Perker, the lawyer. “‘Pretty busy, eh?’” asks the lawyer.
“Oh, werry well, sir; we shan’t be bankrupts, and we shan’t make our fort’ns. We eats our biled mutton without capers, and don’t care about horse-radish wen we can get beef;” which just about figures the middling and declining fortunes of the old Borough inns at that period.
THE “BELLE SAUVAGE.”
From a drawing by T. Hosmer Shepherd.
The “Bull and Mouth” inn, casually mentioned in Chapter X., was the great coaching inn that stood in St. Martin’s-le-Grand, on the site of the Post Office building adjoining the church of St. Botolph. In 1830 it was rebuilt and re-named the “Queen’s Hotel,” and so remained until 1887. The enormous plaster sign of the “Bull and Mouth,” that was placed over the entrance to the stables in the by-street of that name, and kept its place there when the stables became a railway goods yard, is now in the Guildhall Museum.
THE “LEATHER BOTTLE,” COBHAM.
The “Belle Sauvage,” on Ludgate Hill, another fine old galleried inn whence the coaches for the eastern counties largely set forth, is the subject of allusion in Chapters X. and XLIII. The house was pulled down many years ago, but the yard, now very commonplace, remains. It was known as “Savage’s Inn” so long ago as the reign of Henry the Sixth, and alternatively as the “Bell in the Hoop.” So early as 1568, when the property was bequeathed to the Cutler’s Company “for ever,” the “Belle Sauvage” myth was current; and thus we see that when Addison, in The Spectator, suggested the “beautiful savage” idea, he was but unconsciously reviving an ancient legend or witticism. One other variant, that ingeniously refers the sign of the inn to one Isabella Savage, a former landlady, seems to have created her for the purpose.
The “Marquis o’ Granby” at Dorking, kept by the “widder” who became the second Mrs. Weller, has been identified by some with the late “King’s Head” in that town; while the “Town Arms,” the “Peacock,” and the “White Hart” at “Eatanswill” (i.e. Ipswich) have never been clearly traced.
No difficulty of identification surrounds the “Old Leather Bottle” at Cobham, to whose rustic roof the love-lorn Tupman fled to hide his sorrows, in Chapter XI. It is to-day, however, a vastly altered place from the merely “clean and commodious village ale-house” in which Mr. Pickwick found his moping, but still hungry, friend, and its “Dickens Room” is a veritable museum. Additions have been made to the house, and it is now more or less of a rustic hotel, with the sign of the leather bottle swinging in the breeze, and beneath it our Mr. Pickwick himself, in the immortal attitude depicted in the frontispiece to The Pickwick Papers, declaiming, with one arm outstretched, the other tucked away under his coat-tails.