Transcriber’s Note
Italic text displayed as: _italic_
THE
Book of the Cheese
BEING TRAITS AND STORIES OF
“Y^E OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE”
WINE OFFICE COURT, FLEET STREET
LONDON, E.C.
COMPILED BY THE LATE T. W. REID
THIRD EDITION REVISED BY WILLIAM HUSSEY GRAHAM
FOURTH EDITION EDITED BY R. R. D. ADAMS, M.A.
FIFTH EDITION
REVISED AND ABRIDGED BY FRANK BANFIELD, M.A. (OXON.)
_ILLUSTRATED BY MESSRS.
SEYMOUR LUCAS, R.A., HERBERT RAILTON, JOSEPH PENNELL,
WALTER ALLEN & GEORGE CRUICKSHANK_
“Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?”—SHAKESPEARE
London:
“Y_{E} OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE”
145, FLEET STREET, E.C.
1908
PREFACE
TO
THE FIFTH EDITION
_TO OUR FRIENDS AND CUSTOMERS THROUGHOUT THE WORLD_
In the present edition, while most of the matter which has appeared
in previous editions of our little book has been retained, we have
deleted portions that we considered could be dispensed with, and
added some fresh incidents and reminiscences that we think may add to
its interest. We have enlarged the work by the addition of a chapter
descriptive of the pictures and objects of interest to be seen within
the precincts of this historic House. We desire to record our thanks
to Messrs. W. Marchant & Co., of the Goupil Gallery, 5, Regent
Street, for assistance given in relation to the pictures, and to many
old customers of the House for facts relating to its past history.
Yours obediently,
THE DIRECTORS.
O. C. C., LD.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. EARLY HISTORY OF YE OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE 1
II. JOHNSON AND GOLDSMITH AT THE “CHEESE” 9
III. RELICS AND ART TREASURES OF THE “CHEESE” 15
IV. MR. JOSEPH PENNELL AND LADY COLIN CAMPBELL ON THE “CHEESE” 26
V. ABOUT THE PUDDING 33
VI. THE BAR 37
VII. CLUB LIFE AT THE “CHEESE” 42
VIII. DR. JOHNSON’S HOMES AND HAUNTS 55
IX. THE “CHEESE” AND ITS FARE—A GREAT FALL IN PUDDING 57
X. MR. GEORGE AUGUSTUS SALA AND OTHERS ON THE “CHEESE” 61
XI. THE PRESS AND THE “CHEESE” 65
XII. WHAT THE WORLD SAYS OF THE “CHEESE” 72
XIII. THE “CHESHIRE CHEESE” IN LITERATURE 85
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
_PLATES_
“TODDY AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE,” _by
W. Dendy Sadler_ _Frontispiece_
“THE COSY CORNER” IN OLD CHESHIRE
CHEESE _to face p._ 13
THE JOHNSONIAN CORNER ” 18
DR. JOHNSON’S CHAIR ” 22
AN INCIDENT AT THE OLD CHESHIRE
CHEESE ” 23
“THE WAY IN” ” 27
THE BAR ” 37
“THE WAY OUT” ” 38
DR. JOHNSON’S HOUSE IN GOUGH SQUARE ” 55
_IN TEXT_
PAGE
ENTRANCE TO THE OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE IN
WINE OFFICE COURT 5
STAIRCASE IN “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE” 8
CHESHIRE COURT AT SIDE OF OLD CHESHIRE
CHEESE 25
FRONTISPIECE OF BILL OF FARE 78
PRINTED BY
EDEN FISHER & CO., LTD., 95-97, FENCHURCH ST.,
LONDON, E.C.
[Illustration: “TODDY AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE.” _By W. Dendy Sadler._
_By permission of Mr. L. H. Lefèvre, owner of the Copyright._]
[Illustration: A _Storied_ TAVERN.]
CHAPTER I
EARLY HISTORY OF YE OLDE CHESHIRE CHEESE
Time consecrates;
And what is grey with age becomes religion.—SCHILLER.
Old London is fast disappearing off the face of the earth. One by
one its ancient taverns have gone, or if the names familiar to our
ancestors have been retained, the hand of the builder has been laid
remorselessly on the structures our forefathers knew, and they
have been transformed beyond recognition. One of them, however,
survives, untouched by the hand of time, spared by the vitality of
the traditions, literary and other, which it enshrines, and that
is the Cheshire Cheese. Though its story reaches back long before
the eighteenth century, it is with the memory of Dr. Johnson and his
more brilliant contemporaries that it is very largely associated
in the minds of men. It is in a special sense London’s living
memorial of the great Lexicographer. Amid the changes which have
altered Fleet Street almost beyond recognition by the Doctor and his
contemporaries, it stands safe still, its old activities in full
swing in the narrow backwater of Wine Office Court, a venerable
reminder of the past. That men should be possessed with an unwearying
curiosity about the old tavern which was so much the haunt of the
mighty literary potentate who was the patron and friend of Goldsmith,
is but natural. They feel for it what the devotee feels for a
shrine. Dr. Johnson was not himself indifferent to a sentiment of
the sort, and just as we take an intense interest in the “Cheshire
Cheese” which he frequented, so he, in his day, was sympathetically
curious as to the places which Dryden half a century or so before the
Doctor’s time had made sacred to literary memory by his presence.
“When I was a young fellow,” he says, “I wanted to write the life
of Dryden, and in order to get materials I applied to the only two
persons then alive who had seen him; these were old Swinney and old
Cibber. Swinney’s information was no more than this, ‘That at Will’s
Coffee-house, Dryden had a particular chair for himself, which was
set by the fire in winter and then called his winter chair, and that
it was carried out for him to the balcony in summer, and then called
his summer chair.’ I went and sat in it.”
Thanks, therefore, to the fact that we have one specimen of the
Johnsonian tavern remaining practically the same as it was in the
Johnsonian days, we can still depict for ourselves, with but the
slightest effort of the imagination, what must have been the scene
at the Cheshire Cheese in the Doctor’s time. Johnson is there in his
favourite seat, mouthing and talking as who should say: “I am Sir
Oracle, and when I ope my mouth let no dog bark.” One or other of his
friends is never wanting to keep him company—Burke, or Goldsmith, or
it may be Langton or Beauclerk. But the inn is with us, though the
men of the eighteenth century are gone.
Even then the tavern as a club was beginning to fall into comparative
decay. Fashion was voting for the club proper, proprietary or
otherwise, and the habit of ceasing to live in the City carried away
the old frequenters of the Fleet Street taverns into the suburbs or
the more distant environs of London. Washington Irving gives us in
his “Sketch Book” a charming account of one of the city of London
hostelries, as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The opening of the description would serve for the Cheshire Cheese
of to-day. “This has been a temple of Mirth and Wine from time
immemorial. It has always been in the family, so that its history
is tolerably well preserved by the present landlord. It was much
frequented by the gallants and cavalieros of the reign of Elizabeth,
and was looked into now and then by the wits of Charles the Second.
The members of the club which now holds its weekly sessions there
abound in old catches, glees, and choice stories that are traditional
in the place. The life of the club, and indeed the prime wit of the
neighbourhood, is mine host himself. At the opening of every club
night he is called in to sing his ‘Confession of Faith,’ which is the
famous old drinking troll from Gammer Gurton’s ‘Needle.’” Washington
Irving gives the words of the four verses of the song with chorus,
the first of which, as a specimen of an old-time City tavern song,
may suffice to be produced here:
I cannot eate but little meat,
My stomack is not good;
But sure I think that I can drink
With him that wears a hood.
Though I go bare, take ye no care,
I nothing am acold.
I stuff my skin so full within
With jolly good ale and old.
_Chorus_: Back and side go bare, go bare,
Both foote and hand go cold;
But belly! God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.
But from the time of Dr. Johnson down to the present day unbroken
links of tradition connect the Cheshire Cheese of the twentieth
century with the Cheshire Cheese of the eighteenth, and through
that with all the taverns in story, which begin with the Tabard and
pass on, through the Mermaid and the rest, to the old house in Wine
Office Court. This venerable survivor of a vanished race has a double
interest: to the lover of antiquity in general it appeals as the type
of the place our forefathers loved; to the lover of the Johnsonian
cycle, as enabling him to picture to himself what that race of giants
did, where they ate and drank, and where they talked. That they had
reason for their choice of an inn, and could give a reason for that
choice too, is plain from a well-known passage in Boswell, which runs
as follows:—
[Illustration: ENTRANCE TO THE “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE” IN WINE OFFICE
COURT.
_From an Original Drawing by Herbert Railton._]
“There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so
well as at a capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of
good things, ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so
much desire that everybody should be easy, in the nature of things it
cannot be; there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The
master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests, the guests
are anxious to be agreeable to him; and no man but a very impudent
dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man’s house as
if it were his own. Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom
from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome, and the more noise you
make, the more trouble you give” (we should remember that this was
said in the rougher world of the last century), “the more good things
you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you
with the alacrity which waiters do who are incited by the prospect
of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, Sir, there
is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much
happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”
Although the origin of the Old Cheshire Cheese (formerly spelt “Ye
Olde Cheshire Chese”) is not altogether involved in obscurity, there
is a decided want of complete, or even semi-complete, details as to
its very early history; but it is much more affluent in literary
anecdote.
It was in the Old Cheshire Cheese that the dispute arose about who
would most quickly make the best couplet. One said:—
I, Sylvester,
Kiss’d your sister.
The other’s retort was:
I, Ben Jonson,
Kiss’d your wife.
“But that’s not rhyme,” said Sylvester. “No,” said Jonson; “but it’s
true.”
A later poet, Lord Tennyson, was himself a frequenter of the “Cheese”
in his young days, while it was there that Isaac Bickerstaff made the
epigram:
When late I attempted your pity to move,
What made you so deaf to my prayers?
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But—why did you kick me down stairs?
In fact, the “Cheese” was famous for epigrammatists. Who would not
like to have seen the face of the old glutton and scandalmonger when,
in the “Cheese,” the following lines were solemnly presented to him?—
You say your teeth are dropping out—
A serious cause of sorrow,
Not likely to be cured, I doubt,
To-day, or yet to-morrow.
But good may come of this distress,
While under it you labour,
If, losing teeth you guzzle less,
And don’t backbite your neighbour.
That Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and other distinguished men
were in the habit of frequenting the Old Cheshire Cheese, there can
be no manner of doubt, and they knew what they were about in choosing
their place of rendezvous, for I find in a _brochure_ entitled “Round
London” (1725), that the house is described as “Ye Olde Cheshire
Cheese Tavern, near ye Flete Prison, an eating-house for goodly fare.”
Wine Office Court, where the Cheshire Cheese is situated, took its
name from the fact that wine licences were granted in a building
close by. The present “wine office” of the Old Cheshire Cheese is
exactly at the junction of the Court and Fleet Street.
“In this court,” says Mr. Noble, “once flourished a fig tree, planted
a century ago by the vicar of St. Bride’s, who resided at No. 12. It
was a slip from another exile of a tree formerly flourishing in a
sooty kind of grandeur at the sign of the Fig Tree in Fleet Street.”
[Illustration: STAIRCASE IN “OLD CHESHIRE CHEESE.”
_From an Original Drawing by Herbert Railton._]