Mr. Charles G. Harper has several references to, and interesting anecdotes about, Mrs. Ann Nelson and her inns in his “Road” books.  In one such reference he tells us Mrs. Ann Nelson was “one of those stern, dignified, magisterial women of business, who were quite a remarkable feature of the coaching age, who saw their husbands off to an early grave and alone carried on the peculiarly exacting double business of inn-keeping and coach-proprietorship, and did so with success.”  She was the “Napoleon and Caesar” combined of the coaching business.  Energetic, she spared neither herself nor her servants.  The last to bed she was also the first to rise, “looking after the stable people and seeing that the horses had their feeds and were properly cared for.”  Insistent as she was on rigid punctuality in all things, and hard as she was on those who served her, she, nevertheless, treated them very well, and gave the coachmen and guards a special room, where they dined as well at reduced prices as any of the coffee-room customers.  This room was looked upon as their private property, and there they regaled themselves with the best the house could provide.  It was more sacred and exclusive than the commercial-rooms of the old Bagmen days, and was strictly unapproachable by any but those for whom it was set apart.

[illustration:  The Bull Inn, Whitechapel.  From the water-colour drawing by P. Palfrey]

The “Bull” began to decline when the railway was opened in 1839, and in 1868 it was demolished.

There is no doubt that Dickens knew it well, and probably used it in his journalistic days when having to take journeys to the eastern counties to report election speeches.  In The Uncommercial Traveller he speaks of having strolled up to the empty yard of the “Bull,” “who departed this life I don’t know when, and whose coaches had all gone I don’t know where.”

When, therefore, he wanted a starting-point for Mr. Pickwick’s adventure to Ipswich, the “Bull,” which was nothing less than an institution at the time, readily occurred to him.

There is an anecdote about Dickens and the coachmen’s private apartment, told by Mr. Charles G. Harper.  “On one occasion Dickens had a seat at a table, and ‘the Chairman,’ after sundry flattering remarks, as a tribute to the novelist’s power of describing a coach Journey, said, ’Mr. Dickens, we knows you knows wot’s wot, but can you, sir, ‘andle a vip?’ There was no mock modesty in Dickens.  He acknowledged he could describe a journey down the road, but he regretted that in the management of a ‘vip’ he was not expert.”

Here Sam arrived one morning with his master’s travelling bag and portmanteau, to be closely followed by Mr. Pickwick himself, who, as Sam told his father, was “cabbin’ it . .. havin’ two mile o’ danger at eightpence.”  In the inn yard he was greeted by a red-haired man who immediately became friendly and enquired if Mr. Pickwick was going to Ipswich.  On learning that he was, and that he, too, had taken an outside seat, they became fast friends.  Little did Mr. Pickwick suppose that his newly made friend and he would meet again later under less congenial circumstances.