View of Box Hill, Misty Day.
Dorking.
CHAPTER XXIX
DORKING
Mr. Stiggins at the Marquis of Granby—A Ruin.—The battle of Dorking.—Real fighting.—The Table and Cellar.—Water-souchy, a delicious dish.—Wild cherries.—Dorking snails.—Sandy kine.—Women without roses.—Shrove Tuesday football.—Dorking's glory.—Jupp at Cotmandene.—An earthquake.—Giant and Dwarf.
Dorking has twice had history made for it, and travellers come to visit the scenes. It was in the bar of the Marquis of Granby at Dorking that Sam Weller met his mother-in-law, and watched the reverend Mr. Stiggins make toast and sip the pineapple rum and water, and advised Mr. Weller senior as to the best method of treating Shepherds with cold water. Pilgrims cross the Atlantic to visit the Marquis of Granby. No Dorking inn bears the name, nor ever has; but Americans will tell you that the Marquis is only a name Dickens invented to cover the identity of the White Horse, which fronts the cobbles of Dorking High Street with its gables and white and green paint much as it must have done in the time of Dickens. Dickens himself, in All the Year Round—he did not sign the article, but in that paper none but he might have written of that inn—conceived "the Markis" to be the King's Head, in the old days a great coaching house on the Brighton Road. It stood at the corner of High Street and South Street, and in South Street to-day you may still gaze at its unhappy walls and windows. The old lattices are boarded up, smashed with stones; the rooms are empty. When the post office came to stand at the corner, the King's Head became a tenement house; afterwards a ruin.