Death and Mr. Pickwick

by Stephen Jarvis

  ‘The Pickwick Papers is a work that reeks of the alehouse and filthy inns. It is a work that must be swept from our bookshops and our libraries. It is a work in which the author goes out of his way to make attractive the drinking of alcohol. It is a work against which I intend to fight!

  ‘When the young man of today reads about Mr Pickwick’s brandy-and-ale-soaked adventures he wants to buy himself a pewter mug and sit before a roaring open fire at some wayside tavern and drink himself into insensibility. He thinks it very smart to be an itinerant rumhound like Mr Pickwick and his companions Snodgrass, Tupman and Winkle, and that intoxicated beast Sam Weller. The Pickwick Club guzzles on, as though drink has no effect but the convivial. It is as though Mr Pickwick and his crew have filters in their throats to do away with all that is bad in drink. We know the terrible unfiltered truth!

  ‘Liquor will soon be driven out of this country. Let us start to drive it from our literature. Alcoholised literature must go – and Pickwick must go first!’

  The crowd stood as one to applaud, and cries of ‘Hear hear!’ came from every corner of the hall. I pulled up my collar, and returned to England.

  *

  It was 1921, and as my motor car approached Ipswich I saw smoke from the railways, from the gasworks, and from a multitude of tall chimneys on this busy side of the town. It made me think that the smoke of modern falsehood had to be blown away before the true Pickwickian town could be revealed.

  Eventually, buildings became older, and streets narrower. I parked my car, and soon I found myself walking towards the ivied facade of the Great White Horse tavern.

  It struck me that, except in a Pickwickian sense, it could not be considered Great. There were mildewed pillars on either side of the doorway. As for the statue of the horse itself, above the entrance, it seemed too small, and as it lifted its dirty alabaster leg, the creature’s gesture had a quality of the stubbed cigarette rather than a noble depiction by Stubbs.

  George II stayed here, so did Louis XVIII of France, and so too did Nelson and Lady Hamilton. All these people, no matter how distinguished, have no importance whatsoever compared to the imaginary man who was once a guest. Who would visit Ipswich without seeing the inn where Mr Pickwick spent the night? And this was the case wherever Mr Pickwick visited.

  Mr Pickwick stayed at the Great White Horse because Dickens stayed at the Great White Horse. The circumstances of the latter’s visit are worth recounting.

  *

  ‘Do you think I do not know the room I am in?’ said Dickens to the proprietor of the Great White Horse, William Brooks, who had been summoned to the reception desk to resolve the dispute. ‘I am in room ten. In your pigeonholes, my key is the second left, top row. Your desk clerk disputes this plain fact, and refuses to give me my key.’

  William Brooks had a dry, white face, the white displayed especially in flakes distributed across his forehead and nose. He looked over his spectacles. ‘My clerk is correct. Room ten has been taken by a gentleman of the law.’

  ‘Impossible. My portmanteau was in that room. I was led to understand it was your best room.’

  Brooks reached up to a pigeonhole. ‘This is your key. Your luggage has been moved.’

  ‘By what right?’

  ‘By my right. You are lucky to have a room at all, with so many people here for the election.’

  ‘I suppose this gentleman of the law offered you a higher price.’

  ‘Do you want the room I am offering, or not? It’s that, or the key to the street.’

  Dickens took the key held up by Brooks – as he walked away, he heard Brooks whisper ‘Damn reporters!’ followed by a low-pitched laugh from the clerk. He soon entered a cold and pokey room situated over stabling, with a cracked chamber pot under the bed and a stuffed weasel on a wall. The strap around his portmanteau had been fastened on a different notch.

  It was late that night when Dickens returned to the Great White Horse. He pushed through election agents at the entrance, and voters seeking favours and pledges, and waited at the unmanned desk to order a sandwich. After ten minutes no one had come, and when the clerk eventually appeared he said that it was impossible to make sandwiches that night as the cook had just left, and even if the cook had been present, all the meat and cheese had, in all likelihood, been used up. So Dickens resigned himself to bed and an empty stomach. He stamped up the stairs. He faced two doors on a poorly lit triangular landing. He should have paid closer attention to which door was his, but he was in such a mood, a mood which also took away the thought of unlocking with a key, and he simply turned the handle of the first door.

  The door opened, and a woman shrieked. In the darkness, he could just make out her form, sitting up in bed, clutching the covers to her breast. She screamed at the intruder to get out; Dickens apologised, adding that one door looked very much like another, and left.

  The next morning, a middle-aged woman knocked on Mr Brooks’s office. She told of a man who had come to peep on her, and perhaps intended worse. Surely, she said, it was a proprietor’s first responsibility to protect the virtue of ladies who stayed in his rooms. Otherwise, Mr Brooks was not worthy to call himself a decent proprietor. She had kept her door closed, and it was not unusual to expect protection from the monstrous intentions of young men on the premises. That her door was unlocked was true; but she always kept her door unlocked for fear of fire. She demanded action.

  When Dickens returned to the Great White Horse that evening and requested his key, the desk clerk said that he had instructions to summon Mr Brooks, and could not issue the key until he had done so. In exasperation, Dickens stood at the desk, and when Brooks appeared, he subjected Dickens to questioning, within earshot of every election agent and voter passing through.

  ‘So you admit you entered this lady’s room last night?’

  ‘I have told you – it was a mistake.’

  ‘Was it?’

  ‘My key, sir.’

  ‘I don’t like your tone.’

  ‘Nothing happened!’

  ‘If I hear one more word about you, you’ll be out, in a pig’s whisper.’

  ‘The key!’

  ‘And you wondered why I would let the room to a gentleman of the law. Because he’s respectable, that’s why!’

  ‘Will you or will you not give me the key?’

  Brooks passed it over, to the accompaniment of a grudging look. He said to his clerk, in the loudest possible voice: ‘Any more trouble with him, and you fetch me straight away. If I’m not available – send for the authorities.’

  Over eighteen months later, the readers of The Pickwick Papers learnt of how Mr Pickwick, lost in the corridors of the Great White Horse, inadvertently entered the room of a lady with yellow curl-papers in her hair. Dickens described the Great White Horse thus: ‘Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages, such clusters of mouldy, badly lighted rooms, such huge numbers of small dens for eating or sleeping in, beneath any one roof as are collected together between the four walls of the Great White Horse at Ipswich’, which sold ‘the worst possible port wine at the highest possible price for the good of the house’. There were mentions of ‘a large, badly furnished apartment, with a dirty grate, in which a small fire was making a wretched attempt to be cheerful, but was fast sinking beneath the dispiriting influence of the place’, and a dinner at which ‘after the lapse of an hour, a bit of fish and a steak were served up to travellers’.

  The number was brought to the attention of Mr Brooks, whose fury was unbounded. Flakes of skin sloughed off his hand as he thumped the desk. The offending passages must be excised, damages must be paid, and a public apology must be printed in the next number of Pickwick. Mr Brooks summoned a lawyer – the very gentleman of the law who had taken Dickens’s room – who set about drafting a letter to Chapman and Hall.

  Yet Mr Brooks also noticed a peculiar phenomenon, which began on the very day of publication of the offending number of Pickwick: every room in the entire tavern became occupied. Unde
r special circumstances, such as at the election Dickens had reported on, this was likely, but not otherwise. Furthermore, correspondence arrived every day, asking for accommodation – and a fair proportion of the letters merely requested a room at the earliest time one was available, as the precise date did not matter. The eating dens too were full to capacity at every meal, and there was an especially high demand for the port wine.

  ‘I believe,’ said Mr Brooks to the desk clerk, ‘we could increase our rates by ten per cent. Perhaps twenty per cent!’ He chuckled away – and that was a rare sight indeed! ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘we could sell the worst bottle of black strap at the price of the finest port from Lisbon!’ He further expressed his belief that repairs and renovations, long postponed, would soon be within the Great White Horse’s means. ‘Though perhaps – perhaps – it would be in our interest to delay them further. We should think about what our customers come here to see!’

  One thing was clear: normal commercial considerations, of damage to reputation, were suspended in relation to Pickwick. It did not matter how defamatory the description – to be associated with The Pickwick Papers, in any way whatsoever, was the most powerful advertising promotion in the world.

  The letter the lawyer drafted was never sent.

  *

  In the Ipswich of 1921, I entered the Great White Horse’s glass-covered courtyard. There was a trickling fountain, and various hams and cured joints suspended from beams. I found myself passing into a bar, where two gentleman farmers – so they seemed to me – leant, drinking and making comment on two other gentleman farmers playing a good-natured game of billiards. The Boots sat in a little room nearby, a young man obviously employed for a passing resemblance to Sam Weller. A bell within his room started ringing, and he stood, noted which bell, pulled down his jacket and affected a jauntiness in his manner, probably because he could see me watching. He gave me a smile as he left, which would have been a little too familiar in any normal hotel. But then, Boots are becoming fewer and fewer these days, so who can say what is normal? Before the Great War, the services of a Boots were charged as a separate item in a hotel’s bill. Not so now. The labours of a Boots today are usually subsumed under the cold and anonymous ‘Attendance’.

  At the reception, of course I attempted to stay in Mr Pickwick’s room, but it was booked for months ahead. I asked when that room would be available. ‘I’m afraid, sir,’ replied the man at the desk, ‘I couldn’t fit you in before…’ I watched him turn page after page of bookings in the Great White Horse’s diary – so many, he might just as well have gone on for ever.

  A little later, though, I approached a matronly-breasted maid who pushed a trolley of sheets, and asked her whether I might take a brief look in Mr Pickwick’s room.

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I shouldn’t.’

  ‘I am sure I am not the first person you have shown.’

  She took my coins and said: ‘Just a minute, mind.’

  We proceeded along a corridor that was narrow and intricate, under a sloping ceiling, where Mr Pickwick would have brushed his sides against the walls. The Great White Horse may be a crooked and rambling tavern, but it is not quite the maze I had expected: judging from Pickwick, its corridors should unwind in every direction, universally bewildering, a place where men could be swallowed up and never seen again. It is not that; though it is certainly true that there are nooks and recesses and passages and concertina-loads of stairs at different stages of expansion and contraction. These features are doubled by the presence of mirrors. After a night of alcoholic indulgence, what a very devilish tune these stairs would play upon a man of poor eyesight, limited memory, and no sense of direction. A man, in short, like Samuel Pickwick – who would turn a corner, see a stairwell in the depths of a mirror, and think himself lost in the Ipswich labyrinth.

  At the top, we came to a room called The Pickwick. The maid inserted the key.

  There was a four-poster with bright yellow hangings. ‘Here you are, sir – the bed that Mr Pickwick slept in.’

  I recreated the scene in my imagination. How many others from all over the world had done the same? I noticed a nightcap with a tassel, hanging from a hook. I grabbed the cap, and put it on.

  ‘You look like a baby in a bonnet,’ said the maid.

  ‘I’ll give you two pounds for this nightcap.’

  ‘That’ll be about the fifteenth I’ve had to replace this year,’ she said, as she took the money.

  *

  That afternoon, I went to the Church of St Clement. A tortoiseshell cat played among the gravestones. An old man, passing by, smiled and said: ‘Looking for Sam Weller?’

  ‘Just a cat here,’ I said, smiling back. ‘A cat awaiting its gravy and pie crust.’

  ‘Don’t forget the seasoning,’ he smiled, leaning on his stick. ‘Great pity the church isn’t in a good way. The bells are silent, you see, because the tower isn’t safe.’ I could see that the stone was crumbling around the door and windows.

  *

  It was with great sadness that, in 1925, I read in the newspaper that the blacking manufacturer, Day and Martin, would soon be wound up, having been absorbed by another company.

  So on a wet summer afternoon I found myself in King Street, near the Guildhall. There was a tiny rectangular piece of paper beside a door, in a column of similarly sized, similarly constructed nameplates, which said: ‘Day and Martin Limited’. With a heavy step, and polished shoes, upstairs I went.

  I came to an office whose only furniture was a table and a pair of chairs. There were two men in the room, one per chair, inspecting a few bundles of documents. One was a young man with large lips, large glasses, shining cuff links and the air of a newly qualified accountant. The other was an older man, whose name is the only description I care to give.

  ‘I am Mr Percy Scull,’ he said.

  I pretended I was looking for work.

  ‘You will be disappointed,’ he replied. ‘This single room is all that is left of Day and Martin. When we close up tonight, Day and Martin will be over.’

  My face showed disbelief and despondency. I said that Day and Martin had always been used in my family. ‘My father used to say that even if you were poor, you would still look smart if you had some Day and Martin on your boots.’ Laying on the disbelief, I shook my head and mentioned that this was the blacking that Sam Weller used. ‘What has done this?’

  An expression of great melancholy came over Mr Scull. ‘I have been the secretary to the company for twenty years,’ he said. ‘I would normally be cautious in my remarks, but what does it matter now? The company believed that it was above the normal demands of commerce. It believed itself so well known it did not have to tell the world about itself. Nothing was spent on advertising. The world, little by little, came to ignore Day and Martin.’

  Thus, the story that began on a hot summer afternoon in 1770 ended on a wet summer afternoon in 1925.

  *

  In the spring of 1930, I stayed at the Bull in Rochester. When I arrived and saw the rows of windows and the old, smoked brick, a peculiar sensation of the nineteenth century stole upon me; although I must also say it was an adulterated sensation, for it was mingled with traces of the present, notably the motor cars in the yard, instead of stagecoaches.

  Inside there was a glass office, facing a bull’s head on the opposite wall, and a woman cashier. It was my great fortune to be able to stay overnight in Mr Pickwick’s room, number seventeen. An ageing chambermaid, who creaked up and down the stairs in a neat black and white outfit, showed me to that room. The staircase twisted upwards exactly as in Seymour’s picture, though the wooden banisters had been replaced. I smiled when I saw that the walls of the staircase were adorned with that most Pickwickian item: a warming pan. We entered room seventeen, and the bed boasted a canopy and curtains, and a black and white silk eiderdown.

  Once settled in, I wandered around the hotel – the empty ballroom exerted a special fascination. As with the Great White Horse, this
location was not as I had expected. My impression from Pickwick was that the ballroom was so long it could accommodate all the assembled gentry and officer class of Chatham and Rochester, either on the dance floor or on its crimson benches. In fact the ballroom was quite small. While the chandelier, I noted, was now lit by electric light, not candles. I stepped into the elevated den for the musicians, walked up and down the flight of back stairs, paused at the fireplace, and then entered the small passage where the angry doctor went.

  *

  Early next morning, I put on my dressing gown and went downstairs. There was no one around – not a maid, not a clerk at the desk. There were, however, sounds of sweeping, cleaning, and unassigned creaks.

  I turned the handle of the coffee room and entered, thinking as I did of the bar opposite where the tickets for the ball in Pickwick would have been on sale. Inside was an old-fashioned mahogany table and chairs, as well as engravings on the wall, a side table with silver plate, a mantelpiece capped with a sun-and-moon-and-stars clock, and sconces decorated with tinkling glass baubles. I walked to the window, pulled down a slat of the blinds, and looked into the high street, on to the bright morning. The old city was before me, mostly deserted, just waking up.

  All this may seem mundane. What happened next was not.

  When I looked out, I felt as if – no, that is just cowardice. It was not ‘as if’.

  It was akin to the sensation of being watched. That prickling of the neck that someone is behind you. Except this sensation related to someone upstairs. Also, if I try to describe it, I would say it was more like a firm conviction than just a feeling.

  What happened was this: at the very moment I pulled down the slat and looked out on the city – my neck is prickling now as I recall it – and this will sound ridiculous and I will be mocked – but I was suddenly aware, even if everyone else thinks it is madness – I say at that moment I knew that Winkle and Tupman and Snodgrass and Pickwick were upstairs, really upstairs, in their beds. I could have chosen two routes to Winkle’s room, nineteen, by the route at the back staircase, leading straight there, or via the internal route, as it was inside Mr Tupman’s room, thirteen. Either way, I would have seen the shape of Mr Winkle under the bedclothes. I could have called out his name, ‘Winkle … Winkle…’ and a faint voice would have said ‘Hallo!’ from within the bedclothes. And if I had then said, ‘Someone wishes to see you in the coffee room,’ then I could have left, gone to the coffee room again, and he would have jumped out of bed, hastily put on a few articles of clothing and come downstairs. I would have heard the handle turn, and I know that as soon as the door opened, there he would be – Mr Winkle in a travelling shawl and dressing gown.