Staple Inn, looking toward Holborn Gateway
Inigo Jones the celebrated English architect has left the mark of his genius on many London structures. He was born in London in 1576 and during the reign of James I., when the main amusement of the Court was the putting on of the masques of Ben Jonson he designed the scenery for them. During this reign, too, he held the post of surveyor-general of royal buildings. Long before his death in 1653 he was known to be the first architect of England.
Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre stood where is now the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons on the south side of the gardens. In this playhouse Congreve's "Love for Love," with Mrs. Bracegirdle as Angelica, was first produced in 1695. "The Beggar's Opera" was also first seen here, when Lavinia Fenton afterwards Duchess of Bolton was the Polly Peacham. This is the theatre which Pepys visited so often that, as he himself said, he made his wife "as mad as the devil."
Facing Lincoln's Inn Fields on the west side is still to be seen a stone built house numbered 58, with Doric columns, quite grimy in appearance, where once lived John Forster the biographer of Dickens. In this house, Forster began the library which had grown to 18,000 volumes when he bequeathed it to the nation. Here, too, he often entertained Dickens and here heard him read in manuscript "The Chimes." Dickens made this the home of Tulkinghorn the lawyer of "Bleak House," and killed him here. There is no sign of the fore-shortened allegory on the first floor ceiling now though from appearance it might well have been there once. "Boz," writing of this first floor room declared that you might once have heard "a sound at night, as of men laughing, together with a clinking of knives and forks and wineglasses." The house was built by Robert Bertie, Earl of Lindsey, a general of King Charles I.
In Great Queen Street at No. 56 not far from Lincoln's Inn Fields, Boswell lived and wrote the greater part of the "Life of Johnson."
Where Gray's Inn Road touches Holborn is the old quaint gabled Staple Inn, one of the original ten Inns of Chancery harking back to the days of James I. An arched gateway gives entrance to the interior court where flourish plane trees that look to be as old as the inn itself. It was here that Mr. Grewgious of Dickens' "Bleak House," had his chambers, and over a doorway of the court is a stone with the lettering:
P
J T
1747
This seemingly cabalistic reference stands for Principal John Thompson who presided over the inn for two terms in 1747. Dickens made fun of it in "Bleak House." Dr. Samuel Johnson moved into Staple Inn March 22, 1757, from Gough Square, Fleet Street, and during his residence here the great lexicographer wrote "Rasselas" in the evenings of a week, to pay the funeral expenses of his mother!
The large red brick insurance building opposite Staple Inn on the north side of Holborn is on the site of Furnival's, one of the original ten Inns of Chancery, where Dickens lived when he was first married and where he began the writing of "Pickwick Papers."
A narrow alley between the Holborn houses east of Fetter Lane and having over its entrance a jarring gilt sign leads to the smallest of the ten original Inns of Chancery—Barnard's Inn. Its ancientness is evidenced by its dwarfed courts and tiny Hall. Since 1874 it has been used by the Mercers' Company for their schools. Herbert Pocket in Dickens' "Great Expectations" had rooms here in which Pip slept on his arrival in London.