Passing the references to sunken and uneven floors and old diamond-paned lattices, with another to an “ancient porch, quaintly and grotesquely carved,” which does not exist, we come to a description of dark red bricks, grown yellow with age, decayed timbers, and ivy wrapping the time-worn walls,—all figments of the imagination.
The real “Maypole,” identified with the “King’s Head” at Chigwell, in Epping Forest, is not the leastest littlest bit like that. The laziest man on the hottest day could easily count its gables, which number three large ones[17] and a small would-be-a-gable-if-it-could, that looks as though it were blighted in its youth and had never grown to maturity. The front of the house is not of red brick, and never was: the present white plaster face being a survival of its early years; while the front of the ground-floor is weather-boarded.
But it is a delightful old house, in a situation equally delightful, standing opposite the thickly wooded old churchyard of Chigwell, just as described in the story; the sign—a portrait head of Charles the First—projecting from an iron bracket, and the upper storeys of the inn themselves set forward, on old carved oak beams and brackets. There is no sign of decay or neglect about the “King’s Head.”
In Martin Chuzzlewit the literary annotator and professor of topographical exegesis finds an interesting problem of the first dimensions in the question, “Where was the ‘Blue Dragon’ of that story situated?” It is a matter which, it is to be feared, will never be threshed out to the satisfaction of all seekers after truth. “You all are right and all are wrong,” as the chameleon is supposed to have said when he heard disputants quarrelling as to whether he was green or pink; and then turned blue, to confound them. But the chameleon, in this instance, is no more: and we who have opinions may continue, without fear, to hold them.
Well, then: in the third chapter of Martin Chuzzlewit we are particularly introduced to an inn, the subject of an earlier allusion in those pages, the “Blue Dragon,” near Salisbury. In what direction it lay from that cathedral city we are not told—whether north, south, east, or west; and we only infer from incidents of the story, in which the inn is brought into relation with the London mail and coaching in general, that the “Blue Dragon” was at Amesbury, eight miles to the north of Salisbury, by which route the famous “Quicksilver” Exeter mail to and from London went, in the old coaching days, avoiding Salisbury altogether. The course of the narrative, the situation of an old mansion on the Wilsford road near Amesbury—generally pointed out as Pecksniff’s home—and the position of Amesbury, all seem at the first blush to point to that fine old inn, the “George” at Amesbury, being the original of the “Blue Dragon”; and this old inn certainly was not only a coaching-house, but was what another claimant to the honour of being the real true original of the “Blue Dragon”—the “Green Dragon” at Alderbury—could never have been: a hostelry with accommodation sufficient for postchaise travellers such as old Martin Chuzzlewit and Mary.
THE “GREEN DRAGON,” ALDERBURY.
The “George” at Amesbury is a house of considerable size and architectural character, and its beauties might fitly have employed the pencils of Pecksniff’s pupils, had that great and good man condescended to notice anything less stupendous than cathedrals, castles, and Houses of Parliament. As it was, however, the architectural studies of his young friends were made to contemplate nothing meaner than “elevations of Salisbury Cathedral from every possible point of sight,” and lesser things were passed contemptuously by. (Chap. I.)
The “George,” after the fine old church—that church in which Tom Pinch played the organ—is the chief ornament of Amesbury, and that it was the inn meant by Dickens when he wrote Martin Chuzzlewit is in the village an article of faith which no visitor dare controvert or dispute in any way on the spot. Like the small boys who do not say “Yah!” and are not courageous enough to make grimaces until safely out of arm’s reach, we only dare dispassionately discuss the pros and cons when out of the place. It were not possible on the spot to object, “Yes, but,” and then proceed to argue the point with the landlord, who confidently shows you old Martin Chuzzlewit’s bedroom and a room with a descent of one step inside, instead of the “two steps on the inside so exquisitely unexpected that strangers, despite the most elaborate cautioning, usually dived in, head first, as into a plunging-bath.”