“Take care o’ the archway, gen’l’men,” was Sam’s timely warning as the coach, under the control of his father, started out of the inn yard on its memorable journey down Whitechapel Road to the “Great White Horse,” Ipswich, an hostelry which forms the subject of the following chapter.

CHAPTER X

THE “GREAT WHITE HORSE,” IPSWICH

“In the main street of Ipswich, on the left-hand side of the way, a short distance after you have passed through the open space fronting the Town Hall, stands an inn known far and wide by the appellation of the ‘Great White Horse,’ rendered the more conspicuous by a stone statue of some rampacious animal with flowing mane and tail, distantly resembling an insane cart horse, which is elevated above the principal door.”

With these identical words Dickens introduces his readers to, and indicates precisely, the position of the famous Great White Horse Inn at Ipswich, and a visitor to the popular city of Suffolk need have no better guide to the spot than the novelist.  He will be a little surprised at the description of the white horse, which in reality is quite an unoffending and respectable animal, in the act of simply lifting its fore leg in a trotting action, that is all; but he will be well repaid if when he arrives there he reads again Chapter XXII of The Pickwick Papers before he starts to make himself acquainted with the intricacies of the interior.

That chapter, telling of the extraordinary adventure Mr. Pickwick experienced with the middle-aged lady in the double-bedded room, is one of the most amusing in the book, and one which has made the “Great White Horse” as familiar a name as any in fiction or reality.

There are few inns in the novelist’s books described so fully.  He must have known it well; indeed, he is supposed to have stayed there when, in his early days, he visited Ipswich to report an election for The Morning Chronicle; and probably a similar mistake happened to him to that which Mr. Pickwick experienced.  So when he says, “The ‘Great Horse’ is famous in the neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or county paper-chronicled turnip, or unwieldy pig—­for its enormous size,” he evidently was recalling an impression of those days.

[illustration:  The White Horse Hotel, Ipswich.  Drawn by L. Walker]

It is an imposing structure viewed from without, with stuccoed walls, and a pillared entrance, over which stands the sign which so attracted the novelist’s attention.  The inside is spacious, with still the air of the old days about it, and contains fifty bedrooms and handsome suites of rooms; but Dickens was a little misleading regarding its size and a little unkind in his reproaches.  At any rate, if the seemingly unkind things he said of it were deserved in those days of which he writes, they are no longer.

“Never were such labyrinths of uncarpeted passages,” he says; “such clusters of mouldy, ill-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 Inn.”