In Great Expectations is found a notice of the “Cross Keys,” Wood Street, Cheapside, a coaching inn abolished in the ’70’s; but it is merely an incidental reference, on the occasion of Pip’s coming to London by coach from Rochester. The inns of that story are, indeed, not well seen, and although that little boarded inn at Cooling, the “Horseshoe and Castle,” is identified as the “Three Jolly Bargemen” of the tale, you can find in those pages no illuminating descriptive phrase on which to put your finger and say, conscientiously, “Found!”
Only at the close of the story, where, in Chapter LIV., Pip is endeavouring to smuggle the convict, Magwitch, out of the country, down the Thames, do we find an inn easily identified. That is the melancholy waterside house below Gravesend, standing solitary on a raised bank of stones, where Pip lands: “It was a dirty place enough, and I daresay not unknown to smuggling adventurers; but there was a good fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and bacon to eat, and various liquors to drink. Also there were two double-bedded rooms—‘such as they were,’ the landlord said.” Outside there was mud: mud and slimy stones, and rotten, slimy stakes sticking out of the water, and a grey outlook across the broad river.
This describes the actual “Ship and Lobster” tavern, on the shore at Denton, below Gravesend, to which you come past the tramway terminus, down a slummy street chiefly remarkable for grit and broken bottles, then across the railway and the canal and on to the riverside where, in midst of the prevalent grittiness that is now the most outstanding natural feature, stands the inn, in company with the office of an alarming person who styles himself “Explosive Lighterman,” at Denton Wharf.
There are even fewer inns to be found in Our Mutual Friend, where, although the “Red Lion” at Henley is said to be the original of the up-river inn to whose lawn Lizzie drags the half-drowned Wrayburn, we are not really sure that Henley actually is indicated. That mention of a lawn does not suffice: many riverside inns have lawns. In short, the edge of Dickens’s appreciation of inns was growing blunted, and he took less delight, as he grew older, in describing their peculiarities. His whole method of story-telling was changed. Instead of the sprightly fancy and odd turns of observation that once fell spontaneously from him, he at last came to laboriously construct and polish the action and conversation of a novel, leaving in comparative neglect those side-lights upon localities that help to give most of his writings a permanent value.
Apart from the novels, we have many inns associated with Dickens by tradition and in his tours and racily descriptive letters; and there, at any rate, we find him, when not overweighted with the more than ever elaborated and melodramatic character of his plots, just as full of quaint, fanciful, and cheerful description as ever.
THE “SHIP AND LOBSTER.”
His tours began early. So far back as the autumn of 1838 Dickens and Phiz took holiday in the midlands, coming at last to Shrewsbury, where they stayed at the “Lion,” or rather in what was at that time an annexe of the “Lion,” and has long since become a private house. Writing to his elder daughter, Dickens vividly described this place: “We have the strangest little rooms (sitting-room and two bedrooms together) the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand. The windows bulge out over the street, as if they were little stern windows in a ship. And a door opens out of the sitting-room on to a little open gallery with plants in it, where one leans over a queer old rail.”
Mr. Kitton[18] states: “This quaint establishment, alas! has been modernised (if not entirely rebuilt) since those days, and presents nothing of the picturesqueness that attracted the author of Pickwick.” But that is by no means the case. It stands exactly as it did, except that since the business of the “Lion” has decreased, it no longer forms a part of that great hostelry.[19] The blocked-up communicating doors between the two buildings may still be seen on the staircase of the “Lion,” and the little house does still bulge over the pavement and closely resemble the stern of an old man-o’-war.
The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices, a light-hearted account of a tour taken by Dickens and Wilkie Collins in 1857, begins with the travellers being set down by the express at Carlisle, and ends, after many wanderings in Cumberland and Lancashire, at Doncaster. It is largely an account of inns, including the “Queen’s Head,” Hesket Newmarket, in Cumberland, now a private house; and the “King’s Arms,” Market Street, Lancaster, pulled down in 1880. The “King’s Arms” was, from the exterior, commonplace personified, but within doors you were surrounded by ancient oaken staircases, mahogany panelling, and, according to Dickens, mystic old servitors in black; and doubtless were so encompassed with mysteries and forebodings that when you retired to rest—not being able in such a house to merely “go to bed”—in one of the catafalque-like four-posters, you immediately leapt between the sheets and drew the clothes over your head, in fear of ghosts; dreaming uncomfortably that you were dead and lying in state, and waking with a terrific start in the morning, at the coming of the hot water and the tap at the door, with the dreadful impression that the Day of Judgment was come and you summoned to account before the Most High. These being the most remarkable features of the “King’s Arms” at Lancaster, it is perhaps not altogether strange that the house was at length demolished and replaced by an uninteresting modern hotel, with no associations—and no ghosts.