“OSBORNE’S HOTEL, ADELPHI.”
What was once the kitchen of the “Saracen’s Head” is now the bar-parlour of the “Pomfret Arms”; but otherwise the house is the same as when Dickens knew it. The somewhat severe frontage loses in a black-and-white drawing its principal charm, for it is built of the golden-brown local ferruginous sandstone of the district.
The journey to London is carried abruptly from Towcester to its ending at the “George and Vulture”; and with “Osborne’s Hotel in the Adelphi” the last inn to be identified in the closing scenes of Pickwick is reached. That staid family hotel, still existing in John Street, and now known as the “Adelphi,” is associated with the flight of Emily Wardle and Snodgrass. The sign of the last public-house in the story, “an excellent house near Shooter’s Hill,” to which Mr. Tony Weller, no longer “of the Bell Savage,” retired, is not disclosed.
CHAPTER XI
DICKENSIAN INNS
The knowledge Dickens possessed of inns, old and new, was, as already said, remarkable. His education in this sort began early. From his early years in London, at the blacking factory, when he sampled the “genuine stunning” at the “Red Lion,” Parliament Street, through his experiences as a reporter of election speeches in the provinces, when long coach journeys presented a constant succession of inns and posting-houses, circumstances made him familiar with every variety of house of public entertainment; and afterwards, as novelist, he enlarged upon inns from choice, realising as he did that in those days romance had its chief home at them.
Dickensian inns, as treated of in this chapter, are those houses, other than the inns of Pickwick, associated with Dickens personally, or through his novels. It is hardly necessary to add at this day, that either association is assiduously cultivated, and that we have almost come to that dizzy edge of things where, in addition to the inns Dickens is certainly known to have mentioned or visited, those he would have treated of or stayed at, had he known better, will come under review, together with a further paper on the inns he did not immortalise, and why not.
When Dickens first visited Bath, in May, 1835, as a reporter, he stayed, according to tradition, at the humble “Saracen’s Head,” in Broad Street, and there also, according to tradition, he was assigned a humble room in an outhouse down the yard. A dozen times, if we may believe a former landlady’s story, he went with lighted candle across the windy yard to his bedroom; a dozen times, the wind puffed it out, and he never uttered a mild d——! It is a remarkable instance of restraint, likely to remain in the recollection of any landlady.