THE DICKENS ROOM, “LEATHER BOTTLE,” COBHAM.
The “inn on Marlborough Downs,” referred to in the Bagman’s Story in Chapter XIV., is still the subject of much heated controversy among Dickens commentators. Sandwiched as it is (in the story told by a stranger to the Pickwickians at “Eatanswill”) between Ipswich and Bury St. Edmunds, it appears to be a vague recollection dragged in, neck and crop, by Dickens, of some inn he had casually noticed in 1835, when travelling between London and Bristol. “But,” it has been asked, “what inn was he thinking of, if indeed, of any specific inn at all?”
The Bagman with the Lonely Eye, who told the story of Tom Smart and the widow-landlady of this wayside hostelry, spoke of Tom Smart driving his gig “in the direction of Bristol” across the bleak expanse, and of his mare drawing up of her own accord “before a roadside inn on the right-hand side of the way, about half a quarter of a mile from the end of the downs.”
We are met here, at the very outset, by some puzzling discrepancies and by a wide choice, “Marlborough Downs” being a stretch of wild, inhospitable chalk-down country extending the whole of the fourteen miles between Marlborough and Devizes, and being still “Marlborough Downs” at the threshold of Devizes itself. Moreover, the same characteristic features are common to both the routes to Bath and Bristol that branch at Beckhampton and go, left by way of Devizes, and right through Calne and Chippenham.
The “half a quarter of a mile from the end of the Downs” by the Devizes route brings you, in the direction Tom Smart (of the firm of Bilson and Slum) was going, to a point a half, or three quarters, of a mile from Devizes town, where, neither on the right hand nor the left, was there ever an inn. The same distance from the end of this weird district on the Calne and Chippenham route conducts to the “Black Horse” inn at Cherhill, full in view of the great white horse cut on the hillside in 1780, and standing, correctly enough, on the right-hand side of the way. Could this inn possibly have been the house referred to by Dickens? I have never seen it suggested.
THE “WAGGON AND HORSES,” BECKHAMPTON.
Indeed, earnest people who would dearly, once for all, wish to settle this knotty point, are like to be embarrassed by the numerous inns, not one of them greatly resembling the house described by Dickens, that have claims to be considered the original, and stand, all of them, upon the proper side of the road. Some commentators press the claim of the “Marquis of Ailesbury’s Arms” at Manton, or Clatford, a mile out of Marlborough, and local opinion at the time of The Pickwick Papers being written identified the house with the lonely inn of Shepherd’s Shore, midway between Beckhampton and Devizes, in the very midst of the wild downs—the downs of Marlborough—that are there at their wildest and loneliest. Whatever the correctitude or otherwise of what should be an expert view, certainly the inn of Shepherd’s Shore is a thing of the past, as in the story, where it is described as having been pulled down. There were, indeed, at different periods two inns so called, and now both are gone. “Old Shepherd’s Shore” stood, as also did the new, beside the Wansdyke, but at a considerable distance in a north-westerly direction, on the old road to Devizes, now a mere track. Of “New Shepherd’s Shore” only a fragment remains, and although that fragment is inhabited, it is not any longer an inn.