INNS IN LITERATURE
Inns occupy a very large and prominent place in the literature of all
ages. A great deal of Shakespeare is concerned with inns, most prominent
among them the “Boar’s Head,” in Eastcheap, scene of many of Falstaff’s
revels; while at the “Garter,” at Windsor, Falstaff had “his chamber, his
house, his castle, his standing bed and truckle-bed,” and his chamber was
“painted about with the Story of the Prodigal, fresh and new.”
It is difficult to see what the old dramatists could have done without
inns. In Farquhar’s _Beaux’ Stratagem_ we find some of the best dialogue
to be that at the inn at Lichfield, between Boniface, the landlord, and
Aimwell.
“I have heard your town of Lichfield much famed for ale,” says Aimwell: “I
think I’ll taste that.”
“Sir,” replies the landlord, “I have now in my cellar ten tun of the best
ale in Staffordshire; ’tis smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber,
and strong as brandy, and will be just fourteen years old the fifth day of
next March, old style.”
“You’re very exact in the age of your ales.”
“As punctual, sir, as in the age of my children. I’ll show you such ale.
Here, tapster, broach number 1706, as the saying is. Sir, you shall taste
my _anno domini_. I have lived in Lichfield, man and boy, above fifty
years, and, I believe, have not consumed eight-and-fifty ounces of meat.”
“At a meal, you mean, if one may guess your sum by your bulk.”
“Not in my life, sir; I have fed freely upon ale. I have ate my ale, drank
my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.”
Izaak Walton, going a-fishing in the river Lea, was not ashamed to call at
the “Swan,” Tottenham High Cross, and drink ale, and call it “nectar.”
The history of the inns at which Pepys stayed would form an interesting
subject of inquiry. Few men of his time were better informed than he on
the subject of inns: large, small, dear, cheap, comfortable and
uncomfortable: they are all set forth in detail in his _Diary_. He more
than once patronised the “Red Lion” at Guildford, a far more important
house then than now. At that time it possessed very fine and extensive
orchards and gardens, and, according to Aubrey, could make up fifty beds,
and owned stables for two hundred horses. Imagination can easily picture
Mr. Pepys, during his stay in 1661, cutting asparagus for supper: “the
best that ever I ate in my life.”
Those gardens were long since abolished, and Market Street stands on the
site of them.
On June 10th, 1668, we find him sleeping at the “George,” Salisbury, in a
silk bed. He notes that he had “very good diet, but very dear,” and had
probably, overnight, when sleeping in that silk bed, been visited with
gruesome thoughts of the bill to follow the luxury. The bill was, as he
expressed it, “exorbitant.”
Insatiable curiosity in that old Pepys. Something, too, of childlike
wonder, infantile artlessness, and a fear of strange things, and the dark.
His inquisitiveness took him to the lonely giant ramparts of Old Sarum,
“prodigious, so as to fright me”; and thereabouts he and his party of
three ladies riding pillion found, and stayed at, a rustic inn, where a
pedlar was turned out of bed in order that our Samuel might turn in. The
party found the beds “lousy.” Strangely enough, this was a discovery
“which made us merry.” Every man to his taste in merriment.
And so, enjoying the full savour of life, he goes his way, as appreciative
of good music as of a good dinner, and a connoisseur alike of sermons and
of a pretty face. Did he ever outlive his lusts, and know all things to be
vanities, before his natural force had abated? or did the end surprise him
in midst of his worldly activities?
A transition from Pepys to Sir Roger de Coverley is easy and natural. The
old servant in Sir Roger’s family, retiring from service and taking an
inn, is one of Addison’s most pleasing pictures. To do honour to his
master, the old retainer had Sir Roger’s portrait painted and hung it out
as his sign, under the title of the “Knight’s Head.”
As soon as Sir Roger was acquainted with it, finding that his servant’s
indiscretion proceeded wholly from affection and good-will, he only told
him that he made him too high a compliment; and when the fellow seemed to
think that could hardly be, added, with a more decisive look, that it was
too great an honour for any man under a duke; but told him, at the same
time, that it might be altered with a very few touches, and that he
himself would be at the charge of it. Accordingly, they got a painter, by
the Knight’s directions, to add a pair of whiskers to the face, and, by a
little aggravation of the features, to change it into the “Saracen’s
Head.”
According to Pope, in his _Moral Essays_, it was at an inn that the witty
and sparkling debauchee, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, “the
most accomplished man of the age, in riding, dancing, and fencing,” died
in his fifty-ninth year, in 1687:
In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung,
The floors of plaster and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw,
The George and Garter dangling from that bed
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies--alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim.
A most complete picture of retribution in a moral essay, set forth in the
most denunciatory lines.
In the whole range of poetry there is nothing that so well lends itself to
a cold, calculated vituperation as the heroic couplet. You can pile detail
upon detail, like an inventory-clerk, so long as rhymes last; and thus an
impeachment of this sort has a very formidable air.
[Illustration: HOUSE WHERE THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM DIED, KIRKBY MOORSIDE.]
But it has been denied that the profligate Duke ended in such misery.
However that may be, he maintained his peculiar reputation to the last;
for, according to Dr. Lowth, Bishop of London, he “died between two common
girls,” at the house of one of his tenants in the Yorkshire village of
Kirkby Moorside. That house is still wearily pointed out to the insistent
stranger by the uninterested Kirkby Moorsiders, who, as Yorkshiremen with
magnificent thirsts, are uninterested, chiefly by reason of its being no
longer an inn; and, truth to tell, its old-time picturesque features, if
it ever had any, are wholly overlaid by furiously ugly modern shop-fronts.
Now, if it were only the “Swan,” some little way up the street, still, in
the midst of picturesque squalor, dispensing drink of varied sorts to all
and sundry, for good current coin of the realm, one might conceive some
local historic and literary enthusiasm. The “Swan,” however, has no
associations, and is merely, with its projecting porch, supported upon
finely carved but woefully dilapidated seventeenth-century Renaissance
pillars, a subject for an artist. The odd, and ugly, encroachment of an
adjoining hairdresser’s shop is redeemed, from that same artistic point of
view, by that now unusual object, a barber’s pole, projecting across.
The robust pages of Fielding and Smollett are rich in incidents of travel,
and in scenes at wayside inns, where postboys, persecuted lovers,
footpads, and highwaymen mingle romantically. The “Three Jolly Pigeons,”
the village ale-house of Goldsmith’s _She Stoops to Conquer_, must not be
forgotten, while the “Black Bear” in Sir Walter Scott’s _Kenilworth_, is
prominent. Marryat, Theodore Hook, Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever,
Bulwer Lytton, all largely introduced inns into their novels. Dickens, of
course, is so prolific in his references to inns and taverns that he
requires special chapters. Thackeray’s inns are as the poles asunder from
those of Dickens, and are superior places, the resorts of superior
people, and of people who, if not superior, endeavour to appear so. In
short, in their individual treatment of inns, Dickens and Thackeray are
thoroughly characteristic and dissimilar. Thackeray’s waiters and the
waiters drawn by Dickens are very different. Thackeray could never have
imagined the waiter at the “Old Royal,” at Birmingham, who, having
succeeded in obtaining an order for soda-water from Bob Sawyer, “melted
imperceptibly away”; nor the preternaturally mean and cunning waiters at
Yarmouth and at the “Golden Cross,” in _David Copperfield_--own brothers
to the Artful Dodger. I don’t think there could ever have existed such
creatures.
[Illustration: THE “BLACK SWAN,” KIRKBY MOORSIDE.]
Thackeray’s waiters are not figments of the imagination; they are drawn
from the life, as, for example, John, the old waiter in _Vanity Fair_,
who, when Dobbin returns to England, after ten years in India, welcomes
him as if he had been absent only weeks, and supposes he’ll have a roast
fowl for dinner.
But in the amazing quantity of drink they consume, the characters of
Dickens and Thackeray are on common ground. Mr. Pickwick could apparently
begin drinking brandy shortly after breakfast, and continue all day,
without being much the worse for it; and in _Pendennis_ we read how Jack
Finucane and Mr. Trotter, dining at Dick’s Restaurant with Mr. Bungay,
drank with impunity what would easily suffice to overthrow most modern
men.
Washington Irving thought as highly of inns as did Dr. Johnson. “To a
homeless man, who has no spot on this wide world which he can truly call
his own,” he says, in a memorable passage, “there is a momentary feeling
of something like independence and territorial consequence when, after a
weary day’s travel, he kicks off his boots, thrusts his feet into
slippers, and stretches himself before an inn fire. Let the world without
go as it may; let kingdoms rise or fall, so long as he has the wherewithal
to pay his bill, he is, for the time being, the very monarch of all he
surveys. The armchair is his throne, the poker his sceptre, and the little
parlour, some twelve feet square, his undisputed empire. It is a morsel of
certainty, snatched from the midst of the uncertainties of life; it is a
sunny moment gleaming out kindly on a cloudy day; and he who has advanced
some way on the pilgrimage of existence knows the importance of husbanding
even morsels and moments of enjoyment. ‘Shall I not take mine ease in mine
inn?’ thought I, as I gave the fire a stir, lolled back in my elbow-chair,
and cast a complacent look about the little parlour of the ‘Red Horse,’ at
Stratford-on-Avon.”
He was very speedily answered, No! for at that instant the chimes preluded
the stroke of midnight, and at the same time “a gentle tap came at the
door, and a pretty chambermaid, putting in her smiling face, inquired,
with a hesitating air,” whether that momentary monarch of all he surveyed
had rung. Of course she knew perfectly well he had not rung, and the
humbled autocrat of those twelve square feet was quite correct when he
“understood it as a modest hint that it was time to retire.” The Emperor
of the Inn Parlour accordingly abdicated immediately, lest a worse
thing--_i.e._, the possible turning off the gas at the meter--should
befall; and, his dream of absolute dominion at an end, went off to bed,
like a good boy, rather than the Crowned Head he had fancied himself.
[Illustration: WASHINGTON IRVING’S “THRONE” AND “SCEPTRE.”]
The “Red Horse”--the name is taken from the Vale of Red Horse in which the
town of Stratford-on-Avon stands--is still in being, and the “Washington
Irving Room” is even yet a shrine, of sorts. A shrine, however, none too
easy for the casual worshipper of heroes, or the amateur of literary
landmarks, to come to, for it is generally used as a private sitting-room;
and not the most sympathetic and easy-going of guests who has hired it for
that purpose is content to receive all day a stream of strangers bubbling
over with real, or affected, interest. It is a small room, measuring some
ten feet by fifteen, looking out upon Bridge Street. Nowadays the walls of
it are hung with portraits of Irving himself, of Longfellow, and others,
together with old views of the town; and a framed letter written by
Irving, and a silhouette of “Sally Garner,” daughter of the landlord of
that time, bring the place closely into touch with the _Sketch Book_. The
“Sexton’s Clock” stands beside the door, with a suitably inscribed brass
plate; but no longer may you wield that poker which was Irving’s
“sceptre,” nor sit in the chair that was, in his fancy, a throne; for the
poker is kept in the office of the hotel, and the chair, also with an
inscribed brass plate, is locked within a cupboard, through whose glass
doors you may see where it is jealously retired from touch. In short,
every thing that will harbour an inscription has one, not excepting the
poker itself, which has been engraved with the legend, “Geoffrey Crayon’s
Sceptre.”
The chambermaid who so obliquely suggested that it was time to go to bed,
and no doubt preceded him to Number 15, with candle and warming-pan, was,
we are told, “pretty Hannah Cuppage,” and we wish he had told us more
about her, instead of writing so much very thin description of
antiquities.
Poets--Southey apart, with his tragical _Mary, the Maid of the Inn_--have
not sung so frequently as might have been expected of the fair maids at
inns. Of this type of minstrelsy, Gay’s ballad on Molly Mog, daughter of
the landlord at the “Rose,” Wokingham, is best known:
Says my Uncle, I pray you discover
What hath been the cause of your woes;
Why you pine and you whine like a lover?
--I have seen Molly Mog, of the “Rose.”
O Nephew! your grief is but folly,
In town you may find better prog;
Half a crown there will get you a Molly,
A Molly much better than Mog.
But he will not hear anything of the kind:
I know that by wits ’tis recited
That women are best at a clog:
But I am not so easily frighted
From loving of sweet Molly Mog.
And so forth, for twelve more verses; when, having exhausted all possible
rhymes to “Mog,” he concludes, not before we are heartily tired of him and
Molly too.
The ballad was composed in the company of Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, the
four friends whiling away the dull hours of a rainy day at the inn by
capping verses in praise of Molly, “with pluvial patter for refrain.”
The verses were supposed to be the lament of the love-lorn young Squire of
Arborfield, the last of the Standens, who died through an unrequited
affection for her.
The beautiful Molly lived to the age of sixty-seven, and died a spinster,
in 1766. It should be added that the present “Rose” inn at Wokingham,
although itself of great age, and not unpicturesque, and an inn centuries
before coy Molly herself was thought of, has only in modern times adopted
the sign. The old “Rose” is the plain red-brick house opposite, now
occupied partly as an ironmonger’s shop.
Another Mary, maid--barmaid--of the inn, is sung in the modern song, “The
Belle of the ‘Rose and Crown’”; but no one would accuse that of being
poetry. How does it go?--
I’m saving ’em all for Mary, she shall have ev’ry one,
I’m saving ’em all for Mary, she shall have lots of fun.
They know me well at the County Bank,
Cash is better than fame or rank.
So, happy-go-lucky, I’ll marry my ducky,
The Belle of the “Rose and Crown.”
Let us hope, in all charity, that purse-proud bounder and the barmaid
married, and lived happily ever after.
Inns figure in various ways in literature. Daniel De Foe wrote a part of
_Robinson Crusoe_ at the “Rose and Crown” at Halifax, and at the “Royal
Hotel,” at Bideford, Charles Kingsley wrote _Westward Ho!_ During a
wakeful night at the “Burford Bridge Hotel,” near Dorking, Robert Louis
Stevenson imagined a highway romance in the tapping of an outside shutter
by some chance wayfarer at dead o’ night, and there Keats composed
_Endymion_.
The “Royal” is in many respects a notable house. The earliest portion,
dating from 1688, is the old mansion of one of Bideford’s merchant
princes, who flourished so bravely in the remote times when distance had
not been annihilated by mechanical invention and when each port had its
own rich and self-contained trade. The house compares well with the “Star”
Hotel at Yarmouth, whose history closely matches it. Here, at Bideford, a
finely carved oak staircase leads to rooms magnificently panelled and
furnished with moulded plaster ceilings designed in wreaths of fruits and
flowers, ascribed to Italian workmanship. The Drawing-room, in which
_Westward Ho!_ or a portion of it, was written, has an exceptionally fine
ceiling, of this type.
The great “Lion” inn on Wyle Cop, Shrewsbury, forms the scene of one of De
Quincey’s mystical rhapsodies. It is the house to which he came in 1802,
when, as a youth, he was setting forth in his unpractical way for London.
He had walked in from Oswestry, reaching Shrewsbury two hours after
nightfall. Innkeepers in those times knew little of pedestrians who footed
it for pleasure, and classed all who walked when they might have rode as
tramps. Therefore, it will be allowed that De Quincey timed his arrival
well, at an hour when dusty feet are not so easily seen. However, had his
shoes been noticed, he was ready with a defence, for he came to the “Lion”
as a passenger already booked to London by the Mail. An Oswestry friend
had performed that service for him, and here he was come to await the
arrival of that conveyance.
“This character,” he says, “at once installed me as rightfully a guest of
the inn, however profligate a life I might have previously led as a
pedestrian. Accordingly I was received with special courtesy, and, it so
happened, with something even like pomp. Four wax-lights carried before me
by obedient mutes, these were but ordinary honours, meant (as old
experience had instructed me) for the first engineering step towards
effecting a lodgment upon the stranger’s purse. In fact, the wax-lights
are used by innkeepers, both abroad and at home, to ‘try the range of
their guns.’ If the stranger submits quietly, as a good anti-pedestrian
ought surely to do, and fires no counter-gun by way of protest, then he is
recognised at once as passively within range, and amenable to orders. I
have always looked upon this fine of 5_s._ or 7_s._ (for wax that you do
not absolutely need) as a sort of inaugural _honorarium_ entrance-money,
what in jails used to be known as _smart_ money, proclaiming me to be a
man _comme il faut_, and no toll in this world of tolls do I pay so
cheerfully. This, meantime, as I have said, was too customary a form to
confer much distinction. The wax-lights, to use the magnificent Grecian
phrase επομπ ευε moved pompously before me, as the holy-holy fire (the
inextinguishable fire and its golden hearth) moved before Cæsar _semper_
Augustus, when he made his official or ceremonial _avatars_. Yet still
this moved along the ancient channels of glorification: it rolled along
ancient grooves--I might say, indeed, like one of the twelve Cæsars when
dying, _Ut puto, Deus fio_ (It’s my private opinion that at this very
moment I am turning into a god), but still the metamorphosis was not
complete. _That_ was accomplished when I stepped into the sumptuous room
allotted to me. It was a ball-room of noble proportions--lighted, if I
chose to issue orders, by three gorgeous chandeliers, not basely wrapped
up in paper, but sparkling through all their thickets of crystal branches,
and flashing back the soft rays of my tall waxen lights. There were,
moreover, two orchestras, which money would have filled within thirty
minutes. And, upon the whole, one thing only was wanting--viz., a throne,
for the completion of my _apotheosis_.
“It might be seven p.m. when first I entered upon my kingdom. About three
hours later I rose from my chair, and with considerable interest looked
out into the night. For nearly two hours I had heard fierce winds arising;
and the whole atmosphere had by this time become one vast laboratory of
hostile movements in all directions. Such a chaos, such a distracting
wilderness of dim sights, and of those awful ‘sounds that live in
darkness’ (Wordsworth’s _Excursion_), never had I consciously
witnessed.... Long before midnight the household (with the exception of a
solitary waiter) had retired to rest. Two hours, at least, were left to
me, after twelve o’clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflections, and
the local circumstances around me deepened and intensified these
reflections, impressed upon them solemnity and terror, sometimes even
horror....
“The unusual dimensions of the rooms, especially their towering height,
brought up continually and obstinately, through natural links of
associated feelings or images, the mighty vision of London waiting me,
afar off. An altitude of nineteen or twenty feet showed itself unavoidably
upon an exaggerated scale in some of the smaller side-rooms--meant
probably for cards or for refreshments. This single feature of the
rooms--their unusual altitude, and the echoing hollowness which had become
the exponent of that altitude--this one terrific feature (for terrific it
was in its effect), together with the crowding and evanescent images of
the flying feet that so often had spread gladness through these halls, on
the wings of youth and hope, at seasons when every room rang with
music--all this, rising in tumultuous vision, whilst the dead hours of the
night were stealing along, all around me--household and town--sleeping,
and whilst against the windows more and more the storm was raving, and to
all appearance endlessly growing, threw me into the deadliest condition of
nervous emotion under contradictory forces, high over which predominated
horror recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in London into which I was now
so wilfully precipitating myself.”
The circumstance that led to his being shown into the ball-room of the
“Lion,” was that of the house being under repair. That room is still in
existence, and a noble and impressive room it is, occupying the upper
floor of a two-storeyed building, added to the back of the older house
perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago. Lofty, as he describes it, and
lighted by tall windows, the feature of the two music-galleries and the
chandeliers are still there, together with the supper-room at one end
divided off from the greater saloon, and therefore disproportionately
lofty. The ball-room is additionally lighted from the ceiling by a domed
skylight. The moulded plaster decorations on walls and ceiling, in the
Adams style--that style which so beautifully recast classic
conventions--are exquisite, and even yet keep their delicate colouring, as
do the emblematic figures of Music and Dancing painted on the door-panels.
At rare intervals the room is used for its original purpose, and has a
fine oak dancing-floor, but it more commonly serves, throughout the year,
that of a commercial traveller’s stock-room.
The way to this derelict haunt of eighteenth-century gaiety lies down the
yard of the inn, and up a fine broad stone stairway, now much chipped,
dirty, and neglected. On the ground floor is the billiard-room of the
present day, formerly the coach dining-room. In crepuscular apartments
adjoining, in these times given over to forgotten lumber, the curious may
find the deserted kitchens of a bygone age, with the lifts and hatches to
upper floors that once conveyed their abundant meals to a vanished
generation of John Bulls.
This portion of the house is seen to advantage at the end of the
cobble-stoned yard, passing the old coach-office remaining there,
unchanged, and proceeding to the other end, where the yard passes out into
a steep and narrow lane called Stony Bank. Looking back, the great
red-brick bulk of the ball-room, with the stone effigy of a lion on the
parapet, is seen; the surrounding buildings giving a very powerful
impression of the extensive business done here in days of old.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “OLD ANGEL,” BASINGSTOKE.]
The “Old Angel,” Basingstoke, associated with Jane Austen’s early days,
has for close upon thirty years ceased from being an inn, and is now quite
unrecognisable as a modern “temperance hotel.” In the rear, approached
nowadays through the yard of a livery-stable, the old Assembly Rooms where
she danced with the _élite_ of the county families of her day, may with
some difficulty be found by climbing a crazy staircase and pushing through
the accumulated cobwebs of years. There, on a spacious upper floor, is the
ball-room of a hundred years ago, now deserted, or but seldom used as a
corn-store.
The great “Royal George” hotel at Knutsford is associated with that finest
of Mrs. Gaskell’s works, _Cranford_, and the “White Hart” at Whitchurch,
on the Exeter Road, has reminiscences of Newman.
The “White Hart” is an inn typical of the coaching age along that western
highway, and repays examination. Dark and tortuous corridors, a
coffee-room decorated in barbaric colours, a capacious stable-yard, all
tell of the old days of the Exeter Mail. The inn stands in the centre of
the little town of narrow streets, where the Oxford and Southampton Road
crosses the road to Exeter, and was thus in receipt of a very great deal
of coaching business, travellers from Southampton or from Oxford changing
here and waiting for the West of England coaches. Here it was, perhaps in
the coffee-room, that the young clergyman who afterwards became a pervert
to Rome and figured prominently as Cardinal Newman, wrote the first verses
of the _Lyra Apostolica_, beginning:
Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?
It was on December 2nd, 1832, while waiting for the mail to Falmouth, that
he found his inspiration here. He wrote, at the same time, to his mother
that he was waiting “from one till eleven” for the down Exeter mail. Ten
hours! Can we imagine any one in these days waiting even half that time
for a train? I think not even the most bizarre imagination could conceive
such a preposterous notion. But such were the experiences of our
grandfathers, travelling from branch roads to intercept the mails. With
such facts before us, we may well understand how it was the inns then
did such good business.
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HART,” WHITCHURCH.]
Since 1857, when Dinah Mulock, at the age of thirty-one, wrote that
remarkably popular novel, _John Halifax, Gentleman_, the “Bell” inn at
Tewkesbury has been marked down for a literary landmark. For the “Morton
Bury” of that story is the Tewkesbury of fact, and a tombstone (long since
disappeared) in the Abbey churchyard gave her the name of the hero. It was
in 1852, on a chance drive into the town with a friend, to view the Abbey,
that Miss Mulock first thought of it as the background of a story, and
lunching at the “Bell” inn, close by the Abbey gates, decided her to make
that house the pivot of the tale. According to the landlord of that time,
it had once, before becoming an inn, been the house of a tanner; and thus
we find something of the framework of the story suggested. The resemblance
of the actual house to the home of Abel Fletcher, the Quaker tanner of the
story, is scarce to be followed, for it is only in the mention of the
bowling-green in the garden and the yew hedge, and the channels of the
Severn and the Avon at the end of it that the place is to be identified at
all. You find no mention of the fine old timbered front and its three
gables, nor of the initials “I K 1696” that probably indicate the owner
who restored the house at that date (for the building is certainly at
least a hundred and fifty years older), and altogether there is in the
pages of _John Halifax, Gentleman_, none of that meticulous topographical
care that many later novelists have been at pains to bestow upon their
works. But that matters little to the literary pilgrims in general, or to
the American section of them in particular, who flock to Tewkesbury for
sake of that very rare hero, John Halifax, whose like, one fears, never
walked this imperfect earth of ours. He is, in short, a lady novelist’s
hero, and all such, whether they be the military heroes of Ouida, with the
physique of Greek gods, and queer morals, or the never-say-“damn” young
men of the opposite extreme, have few points of contact with human beings.
John Halifax, however, has a brother in fiction, and may be found in Mr.
Thomas Hardy’s _Mayor of Casterbridge_, where he masquerades as a Scot,
under the alias of “Donald Farfrae.” He and Angel Clare, of _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_, are rivals for the distinction of being the least natural
men among all Mr. Hardy’s characters. Donald is not quite the perfect
gentle knight of Miss Mulock’s tale, but the same blood runs in the veins
of either.
When the author of _John Halifax, Gentleman_, who had many years before
become Mrs. Craik, died, in 1887, a monument was fittingly erected to her
memory in Tewkesbury Abbey Church, hard by the home of her hero.
[Illustration: THE “BELL,” TEWKESBURY.]
The “Bell” inn is a beautiful old building, of strongly contrasted very
white plaster and very black timbers. A blue and gold bell hangs out as a
sign in front. At the left-hand side an addition has quite recently
been made (not included in the illustration) to provide a billiard-room
and additional bedrooms.
[Illustration: THE “WHEATSHEAF,” TEWKESBURY.]
For the rest, Tewkesbury is a town full of ancient buildings, built in
those dark times of the warring Roses, when men were foolish enough to
fight--and to die and to lose all--for their principles. Savage, barbaric
times, happily gone for ever, to give place to the era of argument and
the amateur lawyer! In our own age you do not go forth and kill or be
killed, but simply “passively resist” and await the advent of the bailiffs
coming to distrain for the amount of your unpaid rates and taxes,
confident that, in any change of government, your party will in its turn
be able to enact the petty tyrant.
In those times, when men fought well, they built with equal sturdiness,
and the memory of their deeds beside the Avon meadows, in the bloody
Battle of Tewkesbury of 1471, survives, side by side with the fine
black-and-white timbered houses they designed and framed, and will survive
centuries yet.
Tewkesbury is a town of inns. The “Hop Pole,” among the largest of them,
is a Dickensian inn, and so treated of in another chapter; but besides it
you have the great red-brick Georgian “Swan,” typically a coaching
hostelry, that is not quite sure of the titles “inn,” “hotel,” or
“tavern,” and so, to be certain, calls itself, in the boldest of
lettering, “Swan Hotel, Inn, and Tavern,” and thus has it all ways.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE “WHITE HORSE,” MAIDEN NEWTON.]
[Illustration: THE “WHITE HORSE,” MAIDEN NEWTON.]
Probably the oldest inn of Tewkesbury is the “Berkeley Arms.” There it
stands in the High Street, as sturdily as ever, and is in every timber,
every casement, and in all the circumstances of uneven flooring and
tortuous stairways, so indubitably ancient that men who fought on Yorkist
or Lancastrian side in those contested meads by Severn and Avon in 1471
may well have slept beneath its roof the night before the battle, and
considered the place, even then, “old-fashioned.” Its age is so evident
that for the sign to proclaim it, as it does, in the modern pseudo-antique
Wardour Street style, “Ye olde Berkeley Arms,” is an impertinent
inadequacy, comparable to calling the Pyramids “large” or the Alps
“hills.” It is much the same tale with the “Wheatsheaf”; a little less
hoary, perhaps, and certainly more susceptible to pictorial treatment. It
latterly has become “Ye,” instead of “The,” Wheatsheaf, and has assumed a
redundant “e” or so; but the equally old neighbouring “Black Bear” fairly
revels in the antique, and on a quite new sign-board proclaims itself to
be “Ye Olde Blacke Beare.” What a prodigal and immoral consumption of that
already poor, overworked letter “e,” already, as every compositor working
at case knows, the greatest in demand of all the twenty-six letters of the
alphabet!
Among the various inns mentioned in Thomas Hardy’s novels, the “White
Horse” at Maiden Newton was exceptionally picturesque. “Was,” and is not,
for already, in the little while between the writing of _Tess of the
D’Urbervilles_ and now, that fine old stone hostelry of the seventeenth
century has been pulled down, to make way for a smart new red-brick house,
all show and glitter. The old house was the original of the inn at
“Chalk-Newton,” where Tess breakfasted, on the way to Flintcomb Ash.
The “Carnarvon Arms,” Bloomsbury, in Besant and Rice’s _Golden Butterfly_,
to which the dog “Cæsar” leads Phillis so early in the morning, is the
“Guildford Arms,” at the corner of Guildford and Brunswick Streets: “The
door ... hung half open by means of a leathern strap.... A smell of stale
beer and stale tobacco hanging about the room smote her senses, and made
her sick and faint.... She was in a tavern--that is, she thought, a ‘place
where workmen spend their earnings and leave their families to starve.’”
Similarly, the “Birch Tree Tavern,” of the same authors’ _Seamy Side_, is
the “Bay Tree,” St. Swithin’s Lane. It is described in those pages as the
resort, in the quieter hours of the afternoon, when all the hungry diners
were gone, of Mr. Bunter Baker and a coterie of needy company-promoters,
always seeking to float impossible companies and impracticable inventions,
and so unfortunate as to be, themselves, convinced of the commercial value
of their preposterous projects.