Here on a certain very eventful day appeared Mr. Pickwick, who was to have met his friends there, but as they had not arrived when he and Mr. Peter Magnus reached it by coach, he accepted the latter’s invitation to dine with him.

Dickens’s disparaging descriptions of the inn’s accommodation lead one to believe that his experiences of the “over-grown tavern,” as he calls it, were not of the pleasantest.  He refers to the waiter as a corpulent man with “a fortnight’s napkin” under his arm, and “coeval stockings,” and tells how this worthy ushered Mr. Pickwick and Mr. Magnus into “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.”  Here they made their repast from a “bit of fish and a steak,” and “having ordered a bottle of the most horrible port wine, at the highest possible price, for the good of the house, drank brandy and water for their own.”  After finishing their scanty meal they were conducted to their respective bedrooms, each with a japanned candlestick, through “a multitude of torturous windings.”  Mr. Pickwick’s “was a tolerably large double-bedded room, with a fire; upon the whole, a more comfortable looking apartment than Mr. Pickwick’s short experience of the accommodation of the ’Great White Horse’ had led him to expect.”

Whether all this was ever true does not seem to have mattered much to the various proprietors, for they were not only proud of the association of the inn with Pickwick, but made no attempt to hide what the novelist said of its shortcomings.  On the contrary, one of them printed in a little booklet the whole of the particular chapter wherein these disrespectful remarks appear.  Indeed, that is the chief means of advertisement to lure the traveller in, and when he gets there he finds Pickwick pictures everywhere on the walls to dispel any doubt he might have of the associations.

It is not necessary to re-tell the story of Mr. Pickwick’s misadventure here.  It will be recalled that having forgotten his watch he, in a weak moment, walked quietly downstairs, with the japanned candlestick in his hand, to secure it again.  “The more stairs Mr. Pickwick went down, the more stairs there seemed to be to descend, and again and again, when Mr. Pickwick got into some narrow passage, and began to congratulate himself on having gained the ground floor, did another flight of stairs appear before his astonished eyes. . . .Passage after passage did he explore; room after room did he peep into”; until at length he discovered the room he wanted and also his watch.

The same difficulty confronted him on his journey backward; indeed, it was even more perplexing.  “Rows of doors, garnished with boots of every shape, make, and size, branched off in every possible direction.”  He tried a dozen doors before he found what he thought was his room and proceeded to divest himself of his clothes preparatory to entering on his night’s rest.  But, alas! he had got into the wrong bedroom and the story of the dilemma he shortly found himself in with the lady in the yellow curl-papers, and how he extricated himself in so modest and gentlemanly a manner, is a story which “every schoolboy knows.”