The “Saracen’s Head” cherishes these more or less authentic recollections, and you are shown, not only the room, but the “very bedstead”—a hoary four-poster—upon which Dickens slept; and if you are very good and reverent, and sufficiently abase yourself before the spirit of the place, you will be allowed to drink out of the very mug he is said to have drunk from and sit in the identical chair he is supposed to have sat in; and accordingly, when Dickensians visit Bath they sit in the chair and drink from the mug to the immortal memory, and do not commonly stop to consider this marvellous thing: that the humble, unknown reporter of 1835 should be identified by the innkeeper of that era with the novelist who only became famous two years later.
Going by the Glasgow Mail to Yorkshire in January, 1838, in company with “Phiz,” Dickens acquired the local colour for Nicholas Nickleby. We hear, in that story, how the coach carrying Nicholas, Squeers, and the schoolboys down to Dotheboys Hall, dined at “Eaton Slocomb,” by which Eaton Socon, fifty-five miles from London, on the Great North Road, is indicated. There, in that picturesque village among the flats of Huntingdonshire, still stands the charming little “White Horse” inn, which in those days, with the long-vanished “Cock,” divided the coaching business on that stage.
THE “WHITE HORSE,” EATON SOCON.
Grantham does not figure largely in the story, in whose pages the actual coach journey is lightly dismissed. There we find merely a mention of the “George” as “one of the best inns in England”; but in his private correspondence he refers to that house, enthusiastically, as “the very best inn I have ever put up at”: and Dickens, as we well know, was a finished connoisseur of inns.
The “George” at Grantham is typically Georgian: four-square, red-bricked and prim. It replaced a fine mediæval building, burnt down in 1780; but what it lacks in beauty it does, according to the testimony of innumerable travellers, make up for in comfort. At the sign of the “George,” says one, “you had a cleaner cloth, brighter plate, higher-polished glass, and a brisker fire, with more prompt attention and civility, than at most other places.”
From Grantham to Greta Bridge was, in coaching days, one day’s journey. There the traveller of to-day finds a quiet hamlet on the banks of the romantic Greta, but in that era it was a busy spot on the main coaching route, with two large and prosperous inns: the “George” and the “New Inn.” The “New Inn,” where Dickens stayed, is now a farmhouse, “Thorpe Grange” by name; while the “George,” standing by the bold and picturesque bridge, has itself retired from public life, and is now known as “the Square.” Under that name the great, unlovely building is divided up into tenements for three or four different families.
THE “GEORGE,” GRETA BRIDGE.
From Greta Bridge Dickens proceeded to Barnard Castle, where he and Phiz stayed, as a centre whence to explore Bowes, that bleak and stony-faced little town where he found “Dotheboys Hall,” and made it and Shaw, the schoolmaster, the centre of his romance. The “Unicorn” inn at Bowes is pointed out as the place where the novelist met Shaw, afterwards drawing the character of “Squeers” from his peculiarities. The rights and the wrongs of the Yorkshire schools, and the indictment of them that Dickens drew, form still a vexed question. Local opinion is by no means altogether amiably disposed towards the memory of Dickens in this matter; and although those schools were gravely mismanaged, we must not lose sight of the fact that this expedition undertaken by Dickens was largely a pilgrimage of passion, in which he looked to find scandals, and did so find them. To what extent, for the sake of his “novel with a purpose,” he dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s of the wrongs he found must ever be a subject for controversy.