Part II
DICKENS AND THE GEORGE INN
"There are in London several old inns, once the headquarters of celebrated coaches in the days when coaches performed their journeys in a graver and more solemn manner than they do to-day; but which have degenerated into little more than the abiding and booking places of country wagons. In the Borough especially there still remain some half-dozen old inns which have preserved their external features unchanged. Great rambling queer old places they are, with galleries and passages and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories."—Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers.
Certain traditional legends naturally grow round our old London landmarks and, when once started, no matter how conjectural, they are hard to overtake or suppress.
The George Inn, is no exception in this respect, and the legend that is prone to cling to it is that it was the original of the "White Hart" inn of Pickwick fame; the contention being that Dickens, when writing so faithfully of the "White Hart" in Chapter X. of The Pickwick Papers, where Sam Weller was first discovered, described "The George" and called it after its near neighbour, the " White Hart." This contention, we submit, has no justification whatever.
It is surprising that so good a Dickensian as the late J. Ashby Sterry should have been one of those who favoured the idea. Whether he was the first to do so we are not aware. But in his very interesting and informative article entitled "Dickens in Southwark," in The English Illustrated Magazine from which we have quoted in our previous chapter, he states it as his opinion that the "George" was the original of the "White Hart," and reverted to the same idea in The Bystander (1901). The following
25
