How you characterize the inns and taverns of dickens
How you characterize the inns and taverns of dickens
THE CHARLES DICKENS HISTORIC PUB WALK
Discover The Pubs That Dickens Knew
THE INNS AND TAVERNS OF DICKENS LONDON
Join Richard Jones for an evening stroll around some of London’s most historic pubs as you follow in the footsteps of Charles Dickens through the old streets and hidden courtyards that have changed very little since his day. Indeed, were Dickens to return today, he would most certainly recognise these ancient inns and historic taverns and would feel right at home in them!
A MAGICAL JOURNEY BACK IN TIME
This hugely enjoyable walking tour explores a veritable maze of hidden thoroughfares into which the advances of modern London have yet to penetrate. The pubs that hide away in these timeless backwaters are, likewise, stranded in the past.
Loud music, fruit machines and the ubiquitous TV sports channels are about as welcome in these old places as Bill Sikes in a Victorian orphanage!
The only sound you will hear when you cross their thresholds is the murmur of conversation as people exchange stories and gossip, much as people have been doing within their time-worn walls for 400 or 500 years.
That’s how old and special some of these places are. Time capsules, every one of them!
A GREAT PUB TO START IN
Let’s be honest, isn’t it much better to actually start a pub walk at a pub rather than at an underground station? You can enjoy a meal before you set off, and get yourself well and truly in the mood for the night of fun and fascination that lies ahead.
A NIGHT OUT IN LONDON’S PAST
Having met your guide and fellow walkers you will then head off into the night to twist and turn your merry way through some of London’s most timeless alleyways, courtyards and hidden passageways.
Frequent pauses will be made to allow you to take in your surroundings as Richard regales you with fascinating history and fun facts about the fantastic places you encounter.
LONDON’S MOST HIDDEN PUB
Before long you will find yourself stepping through an old set of iron gates, into a tranquil courtyard that Dickens featured in his most autobiographical of novels David Copperfield.
Oh the tales its walls could tells if only they could speak.
Tales from the age of Shakespeare, of a brow-beaten bishop competing with a haughty aristocrat for the land on which the pub now stands.
Tales from the days in the 19th century when Charles Dickens might have dropped by for a quick tankard of ale before setting off to explore one of Victorian London’s most notorious criminal enclaves that once stood close by.
SIKES and FAGIN NANCY AND OLIVER
Indeed, we shall then follow in his footsteps through the very streets where the slum once stood in which Dickens set Fagin’s lair in Oliver Twist. The slum, and the criminal gangs have long since departed, yet there is a pub here that was, reputedly, the inspiration for the Three Cripples where Sikes, Nancy and Fagin were wont to down a tankard or two.
BY NOW WE’LL ALL BE COMPANIONS
By the time our merry little band of Dickensian tipplers leave this wonderful old hostelry we’ll be on first name terms and people who were strangers just an hour or so before will now be seasoned drinking companions! That’s the nice thing about pub walks, they’re as much a social event as they are a guided tour.
AND THE HISTORY KEEPS ON COMING
We continue our journey by twisting and turning through a maze of streets and passages that bring us to Fleet Street, once the heart of the newspaper industry.
You will see plenty of local landmarks and hear many tales about the history of the streets through which you walk.
By which time you will be ready for another pub, and what a treasure this one is. A 17th century hostelry, no less, which was built by Sir Christopher Wren for the workmen who were building a nearby church.
Dickens would, most certainly, have known it, for it is very close the place where he founded his own Daily newspaper.
A TRUE TIME CAPSULE TO FINISH IN
Having strolled through the warren of tiny alleyways and courtyards that snake away from Fleet Street, we cross the timeworn step of a truly historic hostelry that was rebuilt in 1667.
With its saw-dust strewn floors, its creaking staircases and wood paneled walls this famous London pub is well and truly marinated in the cask of bygone London.
In the past it has welcomed the likes of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Dr Johnson and, of course, Charles Dickens himself. Tonight it will welcome our merry band of time travellers.
There is no better, or more apt, place to go to to wind down a tour of the inns and taverns of Dickensian London than inside this wonderful survivor from bygone London, so we’ll raise one last glass and bid each other a fond farewell. Cheers!
So join Richard Jones for a magical and memorable journey back in time on which each step taken, and each pub visited, will bring you closer and closer to encountering the old and historic streets of the London of Charles Dickens.
QUICK TOUR INFO
The walk is currently
only available for private tours
MEETING POINT?
Outside the
Cittie of Yorke Pub
22 High Holborn
Closest Underground Station
Chancery Lane
2 minutes away
HOW MUCH?
DURATION?
2 hours 30 minutes
END POINT?
Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese
Fleet Street
WANT TO TALK?
If you are unsure of anything, or you just want the re-assurance of talking to a real live human, then please feel free to call us during our designated office hours, which are Monday to Friday 10.30am to 4.30pm.
Outside of these designate hours please leave us a message and we will call you back as soon as we return.
OUR PHONE NUMBER IS
WHAT IF IT RAINS?
«There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing.»
Alfred Wainwright
A Coast to Coast Walk
The walk always takes place regardless of what the weather is doing. So, if it’s raining, please don’t panic, just dress accordingly.
The walk always takes place irrespective of the weather conditions.
Come rain, shine, snow or fog, Richard is always at the meeting point awaiting your arrival.
Please remember that this an outdoor tour, so please be sure to check the weather forecast and ensure that you arrive suitably dressed for anything the elements might throw at you!
PLAN YOUR JOURNEY
When planning your journey to the start of the Dickens pub tour, please allow 3 minutes for every station you will be through and then add 10 minutes to allow for any travel delays.
It is suggested that you check on the TFL website an hour or so before you set out on your journey as it will alert you to potential delays and allow you to plan accordingly.
A WORD FROM RICHARD
I’ve always enjoyed visiting the pubs that we take in on this walk and, to be honest, I just never grow tired of them!
I have been visiting the Cittie of Yorke, where our tour begins, since 1980 and it is one of the most atmospheric pubs you can imagine,
I would suggest that you get to the pub early so that you can enjoy a drink to get yourself in the mood for the night that lies ahead.
The pub also does food and it is the London pub that I always recommend for my groups who want to end their evening with a meal. The service is good and very fast and, I can honestly say that every group I have taken there have been delighted with the service and the food.
Be sure to go and have a look at the main bar. It is more like a baronial hall than it is like a pub interior. There are little booths, which if you can get one, (they do get snapped up early on) are fantastic to sit and chat in.
The other pubs we visit are all equally fascinating and, again, I just never grow tired of them.
I hold many fond memories of the wonderful people I’ve met on the tour and to whom I’ve introduced these pubs to in the 31 years since I first led this tour around the inns and taverns of Dickens London.
I hope I get the chance to show you just how timeless these places are and that, once you discover them, you’ll want to return time and again.
PRIVATE TOURS
The Dickens Pub Tour can be booked as a private tour for your office social, tour group, or even as an outing with a difference for a group of friends or relatives.
The World of Charles Dickens, Complete With Pizza Hut
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Dickens World, in other words, sounded less like a viable business than it did a mockumentary, or a George Saunders short story, or the thought experiment of a radical Marxist seeking to expose the terminal bankruptcy at the heart of consumerism. And yet it was real. Its existence raised a number of questions. Who was the park’s target audience? (“Dickens-loving flume-ride enthusiasts” seems like a small, sad demographic.) Was it a homage to, or a desecration of, the legacy of Charles Dickens? Was it the reinvention of, or the cheapening of, our culture’s relationship to literature? And even if it were possible to create a lavish simulacrum of 1850s London — with its typhus and cholera and clouds of toxic corpse gas, its sewage pouring into the Thames, its average life span of 27 years — why would anyone want to visit? (“If a late-20th-century person were suddenly to find himself in a tavern or house of the period,” Peter Ackroyd, a Dickens biographer, has written, “he would be literally sick — sick with the smells, sick with the food, sick with the atmosphere around him.”)
And so I went to Dickens World. This was April 2007: the best of times. The global economy was booming. The county of Kent, where the park is, turned out to be the kind of verdant paradise I’d only read about in Romantic poetry: wooded hills, chalk cliffs, and that classically deep, soft, green English grass punctuated by huge spreads of yellow flowers, like some bureaucratic deity had gone over all the valleys with a giant highlighter. Even the city of Chatham — Dickens’s childhood home, which had fallen on hard times — seemed to be coming up in the world. The city’s formerly derelict dockyard, where Dickens’s father worked, and where Dickens World was opening, were suddenly covered with cranes, the sign of a thousand real estate projects blooming. It was a time of investment, development, fortune, progress, joy — and Dickens World seemed to be at the heart of it.
The only problem was that Dickens World didn’t open as planned.
Shortly before I arrived in Chatham, the park’s Web site announced (with all the sunny bluster of a Dickens politician) that it was “proud” to report that, instead of holding a ribbon-cutting ceremony as scheduled, its opening would be delayed for a month and a half. Instead of a functional attraction, I found a vaguely Dickensian construction site. The park is housed inside a big blue warehouse, and when I got there, teams of workers were filling all of its pseudo-19th-century nooks with litter and noise and tattoos and mohawks and sexual novelty T-shirts (“Excellent Growth Potential”) and aggressive handwritten signs. (One of them, taped to a cinderblock wall, read, “Nick my tools, and I’ll put a chisel in your throat.”) I got a tour from the park’s manager, who was wearing a hard hat and a reflective vest. He told me I couldn’t go on the Great Expectations boat ride because it was being repaired. (A worker later told me that it had broken down during a gala celebration the day before, forcing the local V.I.P.’s, he said, to put on big rubber boots and wade out through the water trough.) I couldn’t go into the haunted house, he said, because technicians were using special welding torches that might burn out my eyes. There was a red tractor working outside a miniature version of Newgate Prison. Extension cords squiggled all over the imitation cobblestones. Everything smelled powerfully like sawdust.
It was fascinating to watch. The laborers had been hired to do basically the opposite of a typical construction job. They were building squalor — making new things look old, clean things look filthy, dry things look wet, solid things look rotten. A worker named Phil explained to me some of the park’s technical aspects. The ivy was silk. The trees were polyurethane cores surrounded by sculptured plaster. The cobblestones were made from a latex mold of actual cobblestones. The moss was a mixture of sawdust, glue and green paint — you stirred it in a bucket and flung it on the walls. The bricks were casting plaster that had been dyed pencil-eraser pink; they arrived in big rolled sheets that were bolted to the wooden buildings, in thin layers toward the top (where no one would touch it) and thick layers below — because, Phil said, kids tend to kick things. Later, professional scene painters came along to make the pink bricks look grimy, adding highlights to signify texture and smoke. The result looked so good that, when I got back to London, some of the actual Victorian-era brick and moss and ivy struck me as unrealistic.
Being at Dickens World, at the moment of its creation, felt exactly like being in an episode of “The Office.” The manager told me that, when the park advertised for 50 jobs a few months earlier, nearly 1,000 people had applied. (The job market in Chatham has been desperate since the navy pulled out of the dockyard in the early ’80s.) He also told me that he and his staff narrowed the pool with “American Idol”-style auditions. “We made the applicants demonstrate customer service,” he said. “What they’d do if somebody lost a child, or injured themselves. Or if there was a complaint, unfortunately. But then I said to them, ‘The twist is, you have to do it in a Victorian manner.’ ”
I left Dickens World after a couple of days. As a literary experience, it had been pretty thin gruel. But like Oliver Twist, I wanted more.
What is the best way to commune with an author, other than reading his books? Stand in his childhood bedroom? Retrace the route he used to walk to work? Write his name, in his house, with his own quill pen, on a postcard of him?
Such behaviors have become staples of literary tourism, a tradition that has been around for at least a couple of centuries. A literary tour is the secular echo of a religious pilgrimage. The hope is the same as with saints’ relics: that some residue of genius will survive in the physical objects an author has touched, that the secret to his mind will turn out to be hidden in the places his body passed through — the proportions of a doorway, the smell of old stone. Literature, for all its power, is an abstract transaction: a reader gives time and attention, an author gives patterns of words that call up vivid people and landscapes that — mystifyingly — are not physically there (at least beyond the level of neurons firing). It seems like a natural human response to try to plug that gap — to look for solid, real-world corollaries for those interior landscapes, whether it’s walking the route of “Ulysses” on Bloomsday, stuffing a bagpipe with haggis on Burns Day or wizard-spotting on Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross station. It’s the brain’s attempt to anchor an abstraction, to make the spirit world and the boring world finally align. It is, in my experience, one of the cheapest forms of magic available.
Dickens himself was a literary tourist. He once spent an entire day at Sir Walter Scott’s house, contemplating the dead writer’s hat. He also partook, strangely enough, in Dickens tourism. (Dickens was, in many ways, the world’s biggest Dickens fan.) He commissioned paintings of his characters, named his daughter after Dora in “David Copperfield” and went out of his way to visit a pub named after “Our Mutual Friend.” It’s said that a few days before he died, Dickens was seen standing in a park in Rochester, just a few miles from the future site of Dickens World, gazing wistfully at a stout brick building across the street. It was the actual house on which he modeled Miss Havisham’s house in “Great Expectations.” Dickens lived, and then he died, in his own Dickens World.
Last month, a few weeks before Dickens’s 200th birthday, I went back to Dickens World. It was the worst of times. In 2007, the plan was to create 200 jobs and attract 500,000 visitors a year and help reignite the region’s economy. But the attraction opened just before the global economy tanked. The management company that had generated those early projections was fired for failing to deliver anything even close to them. The park reduced performers’ work shifts, dropped managerial positions and even turned off the Dickensian gas lamps. Today Dickens World survives largely as a landlord, collecting rent from the Odeon movie theater next door and the restaurants (Pizza Hut, Subway, Chimichanga) that surround it. Its marketing plan now focuses on attracting schoolchildren and retirees.
I arrived at Dickens World at noon on a gray and windy day. The most striking feature of the building’s exterior is a big clock on which the numbers run counterclockwise. (I wasn’t sure if this was supposed to signify some kind of mystical journey back in time or was just an installation error.) As I approached, the clock started to chime the hour, which triggered a little show: its face opened to reveal Charles Dickens sitting in a wooden rowboat along with two kids and a dog. (I have no idea.) The figures started talking, but I could hardly understand anything they were saying because of the pop music blasting from Nando’s, the Portuguese chain restaurant next door, and also because the trailer for the new Muppets movie was playing on a giant screen outside the Odeon. Compared to this ambient multimedia barrage, Dickens and his crew seemed oddly lifeless. I gave up listening and went inside.
A Visit to Dickens World
View Slide Show ›
I recognized, immediately, many of the buildings I had seen in progress five years earlier: landmarks from Dickens’s life and work, all scaled down and crowded together. There were rows of leaning houses with crooked chimneys, Warren’s Blacking factory (where Dickens worked as a boy) and the Marshalsea prison (where his father was imprisoned for debt). It was all, still, technically impressive. But Dickens World, it quickly became clear, was an attraction very much down on its luck. This was the low season for park visitors — the numbers are highest around Christmas and over the summer — and only a smattering of families wandered around. Dickens World had been closed, during recent weeks, for its annual maintenance session, and yet things still weren’t quite running smoothly. Posts were abandoned; displays were broken; animatronics failed to animate. In the schoolroom, the schoolmaster was conspicuously absent, and some of the desks’ interactive touch screens were out of order. (I managed, on a functional one, to play a quiz game and earn 75 Dickens Points, although there was no indication of how the scoring worked or what the points were good for.) The gift shop was called — in blatant disregard of both Victorian spelling and the title of Dickens’s novel — the Olde Curiosity Shoppe. One of the performers in the plaza was riding a unicycle, a mode of transport that wasn’t invented until after Dickens’s death.
The visitor experience consisted mainly of listening to recorded speeches, many of which were either dull or unintelligible. This made it the opposite of a Dickens novel, in which your experience is expertly guided, your attention constantly engaged. Dickens’s genius was to unite all kinds of contradictory impulses: education and entertainment, misery and fun, violence and laughter, simplicity and sophistication. At Dickens World, these contradictions just felt contradictory. The result was sad and funny, in a way that Dickens would have loved. He was obsessed with grand plans that ended in failure, with the comic tragedy of provincial ambition. In this way, Dickens World was a perfect tribute to Charles Dickens.
For a park that markets itself to children, Dickens World was surprisingly grisly. I saw at least two severed heads, and when the performers lip-synched their way through a dramatization of “Oliver Twist” in the courtyard, it ended as the novel ends: with Bill Sikes murdering Nancy by beating her head in with a club, then being chased by a mob until he accidentally hangs himself. The violence was suggested rather than shown, but still — I flinched slightly for the kids who had been pulled in from the audience to play orphans. The gruesomeness was admirable, in a way: you wouldn’t want Dickens World to exclude the darker side of things — that would be a misrepresentation. But it made me wonder, again, if the idea of this place really made sense.
I had brought a friend to the park — another Dickens enthusiast — and, with sinking hearts, we decided to try the Great Expectations boat ride. There were signs, at various points in the line, announcing that it would be a 45-minute wait from here, a 30-minute wait from there — but it was a zero-minute wait, and we walked to the end unobstructed. Instead of an attendant, we found a black chair occupied by only a walkie-talkie and a Stephen King novel. After a minute or two, someone came and put us on a boat. Halfway up a dark tunnel, the chemical smell-pots engulfed us in a powerful cloud of sour mildew. It was genuinely unpleasant, and in the midst of that cloud of stench I felt something suddenly slip inside of me: two centuries of literary touristic tradition, the pressure of Dickens reverence, the absurdity of this commodified experience — all of it broke, like a fever, and what poured out of me was hysterical laughter. I laughed, in a high-pitched cackle that sounded like someone else’s voice, for most of the ride. At some point the boat swiveled and shot backward down a ramp, splashing us and soaking our winter coats, and an automated camera took our picture. It caught us looking like a perfectly Dickensian pair: me in a mania of wild-eyed laughter, my friend resigned and unhappy — comedy and tragedy side by side, “in as regular alternation,” as Dickens put it in “Oliver Twist,” “as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.” Afterward, in the gift shop, I bought a copy of the picture, as well as a 59-page version of “Great Expectations” published by a company called Snapshot Classics. “In the time it takes to read the original,” promised the book’s cover, which was designed to look soiled and creased, “you can read this Snapshot Classic up to 20 times and know the story and characters off by heart.”
All the Dickens World employees I talked to — the performers, the bartenders, the marketing director — were unfailingly kind and seemed to be working hard. Many of them had worked at the park since it opened (they called themselves “originals”), sticking with it even when it could no longer guarantee them regular hours. They said they felt like a family and seemed to genuinely mean it. I wanted them to succeed. But the whole project seemed doomed. None of this was their fault. It was modernity’s fault, capitalism’s fault, Charles Dickens’s fault. I found myself fantasizing that Dickens World would be adopted by a wealthier park — maybe the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, in Orlando, Fla. — and that it would manage to somehow vanquish its villains, overcome the odds, live happily ever after.
When the plan for Dickens World was announced in 2005, many people were predictably horrified. The New York Times wrote an editorial full of earnest hand-wringing (“There is a lot to fear here”) over the way that Literature, this sacred receptacle of Truth, was being tainted by consumerism. But if Dickens World seems to violate certain unspoken treaties about the commercial exploitation of literature, it’s worth remembering that Charles Dickens did so as well. His art was gleefully tangled with capitalism. The first printings of his novels, in their monthly installments, often had more pages of ads than they did of fiction. His stories inspired endless adaptations, extensions and tributes, including hundreds of spinoff products: Dickens-themed hats, pens, cigars, songbooks, joke books, figurines, sheet music, ladles. Theater companies in London staged rival versions of his novels before he’d even finished writing them.
All of which is to say that paying tribute to Dickens gets very tricky very quickly. Homage and exploitation shade into each other. Dickens World is just the latest in a long line of attempts to profit by making Dickens’s fictional worlds concrete. The park doesn’t fail because it’s too commercial — it fails because it’s too reverent, and reverent about the wrong things. It treats Dickens as an institution, when what we want is what is gone, or what survives only in the texts: the energy, the aura, the spirit.
Which brings us back to religion. Dickens World sits in the center of Dickens territory, right on the River Medway — the young Dickens, confined to his attic bedroom with terrible pains in his side, might have been able to see the attraction from his window. My friend and I, looking for traces of whatever energy Dickens left behind in the actual world, made our own self-guided pilgrimage through Kent.
We drove a tiny rented Hyundai between curving hedgerows into Cooling, a country village that feels more like the absence of a village, a negative space defined by birdsong and horizon and wind. We parked next to St. James, an 800-year-old church, to which Dickens often walked, and which seemed to exist today in a pocket of such deep, eternal silence that I felt immediately alienated from my iPhone. Its graveyard contains one particularly tragic cluster of stones: 13 tiny markers, each of which represents a child killed, before Dickens’s time, in a malaria epidemic. Ten of those children belonged to a single family. Dickens gave this tragedy (slightly downsized for plausibility) to Pip, who begins “Great Expectations” trying to imagine, based only on the shapes of their graves, what his parents and his five siblings were like.
Standing there, looking at these real stones that were also Pip’s fictional stones, I felt a powerful confluence: the lovely loneliness of the landscape, the sadness of that family’s tragedy, the old elegance of the graves (Pip thinks of them as “lozenges”), my affection for “Great Expectations” and this immediate physical connection to its author, whom I tried to imagine standing on this same spot, his body touched by these same patterns of cold wind, having some version of these same feelings. There was no parking garage, no admission fee, no gift shop, no hidden camera taking my picture. I felt pinned between worlds.
We drove deeper into the country, to Dickens’s old house, Gad’s Hill Place. This was the emblem of Dickens’s success: as a child, he walked by it many times with his father and fantasized about someday buying it. As an adult, he came back and did. It’s now a private school, and on this day it was empty and locked. We stood outside its front gate for a while, looking. My friend said, finally, that it looked exactly right: the kind of house a child would find impressive but that’s not actually great — drab, slightly pompous. I just kept trying to imagine the actual human Charles Dickens walking across this lawn. I was having trouble not picturing him in black and white.
We drove to Rochester, an ancient Roman town whose castle and cathedral had been staring at each other for many centuries before Dickens was born. Dickens wanted to be buried there but was overruled, after his death, and taken to Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, where he remains pressed up against Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling. (And so the great enemy of institutions began to be institutionalized.) In Dickens’s final, unfinished novel, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” a character remarks that being in Rochester Cathedral was like “looking down the throat of Old Time.”
For all its history, Rochester has been for years now a kind of proto-Dickens World. Many of the stores on its High Street have kitschy Dickensian signs: A Taste of Two Cities Indian restaurant, Pip’s grocery, Little Dorrit’s Piercing Studio. Down an alley you can find Dickens’s actual writing hut: a two-story chalet decorated with Swiss frippery in which Dickens wrote for the last five years of his life. It was moved, years ago, from the yard at Gad’s Hill Place and is now (according to the informational banner in front of it, which also calls it “the most iconic building in British literature”) about to collapse. It’s being held up, inside, by steel props, and the Dickens Fellowship is hoping to raise £100,000 to fix it.
Our last stop was one of Dickens’s last stops: Miss Havisham’s house. My friend, who was skeptical about literary tourism when we started our trip — authors, he insisted, are just ordinary people — was suddenly in ecstasy. “Of course this is Miss Havisham’s house!” he shouted. “Look at that window up top — a perfect window for peeking!” The house is open to visitors during the summer, but today it was closed. My friend was determined to see into its walled back garden, so we walked down an alley, ascended a metal staircase on the side of a church, climbed on top of the stairs’ highest railing — and from there we could see down into it: Miss Havisham’s garden, the Eden of the 19th-century novel, source of all desire, conflict, motion, disturbance and growth. It was manicured now rather than overgrown, but it still seemed like the right place. Looking into it felt like looking into the nerve center not only of “Great Expectations,” or of Dickens’s imagination, or of 19th-century literature — but of the entire history of the novel. And we had it all to ourselves.
We left Rochester in an ecstasy of Dickens communion, my friend exclaiming about how, in just a few hours, in one morning, he had come to understand Dickens on a totally new level. This, then, seemed to be the real Dickens World, at least for us, on that day.
Charles Dickens London
What was it like to live in the London of Charles Dickens?
Charles Dickens applied his unique power of observation to the city in which he spent most of his life. He routinely walked the city streets, 10 or 20 miles at a time, and his descriptions of nineteenth century London allow readers to experience the sights, sounds, and smells of the old city.
Imagine yourself in the London of the early 19th century. The homes of the upper and middle class exist in close proximity to areas of unbelievable poverty and filth. Rich and poor alike are thrown together in the crowded city streets. Street sweepers attempt to keep the streets clean of manure, the result of thousands of horse-drawn vehicles. The city’s thousands of chimney pots are belching coal smoke, resulting in soot which seems to settle everywhere. In many parts of the city raw sewage flows in gutters that empty into the Thames. Street vendors hawking their wares add to the cacophony of street noises. Pick-pockets, prostitutes, drunks, beggars, and vagabonds of every description add to the colorful multitude.
Personal cleanliness is not a big priority, nor is clean laundry. In close, crowded rooms the smell of unwashed bodies is stifling.
At night the major streets are lit with feeble gas lamps. Side and secondary streets may not be lit at all and link boys are hired to guide the traveler to his destination. Inside, a candle or oil lamp struggles against the darkness and blacken the ceilings.
In Little Dorrit Dickens describes a London rain storm:
In the Streets
This film (credit BFI) made 33 years after Dickens’ death still gives a good idea of what the London streets of Dickens’ times would look like.
In Oliver Twist, Dickens describes the scene as Oliver and Bill Sikes travel through the Smithfield live-cattle market on their way to burglarize the Maylie home: «It was market-morning. The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above. All the pens in the centre of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the gutter side were long
Henry Mayhew estimated that in the 1850s there were 12,000 costermongers (street sellers) making their living in the London streets. These sellers sold fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, pies, muffins, and a variety of other goods. Generally the costers would go out early in the morning and buy their goods from the London markets such as Billingsgate fish market, Covent Garden, or Borough Market, bartering for the cheapest price with what they called their «stock money». These goods were then pushed through the streets in rented barrows. Mayhew detailed the lives of these street sellers in his London Labour and the London Poor (1851). Read Mayhew’s description of Covent Garden Market.
The River Thames
Just as the river runs through London, so it runs through the novels of Dickens. The river becomes a major player in many of the novels. In Great Expectations, Pip practices his boating ability in preparation for smuggling Magwitch out of the country via the Thames leading to the climactic struggle on the water. Dickens’ last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend, is centered on Thames watermen who make their living searching the river for the bodies of the drowned.
Cholera
The Law
The Poor
The Victorian answer to dealing with the poor and indigent was the New Poor Law, enacted in 1834. Previously it had been the burden of the parishes to take care of the poor.
Charles Dickens, because of the childhood trauma caused by his father’s imprisonment for debt and his consignment to Warren’s Blacking Factory to help support his family, was a true champion to the poor. He repeatedly pointed out the atrocities of the system through his novels, notably in Oliver Twist, and through Betty Higden in Our Mutual Friend.
Journalist Henry Mayhew chronicled the plight of the London poor in articles originally written for the Morning Chronicle and later collected in London Labour and the London Poor (1851).
End of an Era
With the turn of the century and Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 the Victorian period came to a close. Many of the ills of the 19th century were remedied through education, technology and social reform. and by the social consciousness raised by the immensely popular novels of Charles Dickens.
Eating and Drinking with Charles Dickens
In reply to a letter from an irate advocate of abstinence in 1847 Dickens answered:
Demoralisation and Total Abstinence
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Inns and taverns
In the Witcher universe, inns and taverns play a significant role. In fact, the very first story about the witcher begins with Geralt entering Vizima and heading straight for The Fox, one of the two taverns in town. Many telling conversations between Geralt and the people he meets take place at the local inn, both in the novels and in the game.
In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt [ ]
Velen and Novigrad [ ]
Skellige [ ]
Toussaint [ ]
In The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings [ ]
In The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings, there are two inns proper, and one area that functions as an inn:
All these places, now offer storage since Patch 1.3.
In The Witcher computer game [ ]
Inns and taverns are found throughout the game, except in Chapter V, the Epilogue and «The Price of Neutrality». They are excellent places to store, or retrieve, items which are of no immediate use and therefore cluttering up precious inventory slots and to buy or sell other items, like alcohol for potion making, or food. They can also be used as places to meditate which is also necessary in potion making.
They are also social places where one can find entertainment, fistfighting and gambling.
Inns and taverns in the game [ ]
Storage and Meditation [ ]
Mechanics [ ]
Buying and Selling [ ]
Typically these transactions are handled by the waitresses. Just initiate conversation with the waitress and then either ask her using a conversation option what she sells, or just click on the buy/sell icon during dialogue mode. This will open a panel showing you what she has to sell. Also, items she is willing to buy will be highlighted in your own inventory panel on the same screen.
Typical wares include food, drink, as well as some grease. Just double-click on an item to either buy or sell. Happy transacting!
RDI: Guide to Inns and Taverns
“Don’t get me wrong, heroes are made in the dungeon. But, it’s not until we share a mug of ale with them that we get to learn about who they really are.” – Cliff Bohm, SlugFest Games
The Red Dragon Inn Guide to Inns and Taverns is a Pathfinder-compatible sourcebook describing how to add inns and taverns, like the Red Dragon Inn, to your adventure!
What’s the big deal with inns and taverns anyway? Think of your favorite fantasy adventure. Did those heroes meet up at a tavern at some point? (Yep.) Did a “simple” night at the inn start a great adventure story? (Thought so.) Adventuring goes hand in hand with meeting, planning, scheming, and fighting in taverns!
Now let’s look at your game. Does your campaign have its “Prancing Pony” or “Inn of the Last Home”? Are your taverns a big deal? If they are, then this guide will give you new tools to make them even better. If they aren’t, and you want them to be, you’ve come to the right place… with this guide, you have all the tools you need!
While this guide has everything you need to add The Red Dragon Inn to your game, it’s about much more than that. It’s about the inn or tavern that you want to make! Whether you are a player with a retiring hero looking to start their own tavern, or a GM looking for the perfect setting for that great moment, you will find useful information on everything from construction to what to stock in the pantry. How much should you pay for a wooden chair, pewter plate, or barrel of ale?
The guide also introduces new rules for common folk – both player characters and NPCs – so you can tell more detailed stories about the folks who work at inns and taverns as well as those who visit. For storytellers there are additional chapters with maps, encounters, and details to help incorporate inns and taverns into your game.
We have made an effort to create a complete treatment on the topic. Most importantly, we hope we’ve made a tool that helps you tell better stories!
What’s Inside
The Guide to Inns and Taverns has information for both players and gamemasters. Players have access to new classes, feats, spells, and magic items, as well as the mechanics to build their own taverns. GMs will be provided with new kinds of encounters, NPC classes, suggestions for building the sorts of encounters that might take place in an inn or tavern, as well as fully fleshed-out taverns and NPCs.
Chapters 1 through 10 are for Players and GMs!
Chapter 1 – Operating Inns and Taverns: This chapter goes over the ins and outs of putting inns and taverns into your game. It covers topics such as who to hire, what sort of entertainment to bring in, and what kinds of amenities you might offer to your guests.
Chapter 2 – Barroom Brawling: What party of adventurers doesn’t get into a scuffle at a tavern eventually? This chapter greatly expands the kinds and uses of improvised weapons, as well as addressing obstacles and potential hazards common to these settings.
Chapter 3 – Building Inns and Taverns: This chapter provides you with the step-by-step process for building inns and taverns. You’ll find detailed information on everything, from choosing locations to thatching your roof, plus how much it will all cost and how long it will take to build or repair almost anything!
Chapter 4 – Equipment: A tavern wouldn’t be a tavern without some tables, chairs, plates and mugs. This chapter goes over all of the items you would expect to find in an inn or tavern, how hard they are to break, and how much it costs to replace them. You’ll also find new magic items and variant rules that improve the items made by master crafters.
Chapter 5 – Drinks and Drinking: This chapter introduces new mechanics that better reflect the effects that a night of debauchery (and the morning after) can have on your characters, with new intoxicated conditions and rules for handling ingested poisons.
Chapter 6 – Gambling: This chapter covers how to use gambling in interesting ways and introduces Gambling Encounters, a new system for resolving games of skill and chance in your game.
Chapter 7 – Feats and Traits: This chapter introduces new feats and traits for player characters and NPCs.
Chapter 8 – Classes: Artisan: This chapter introduces the Artisan, a new player character class that focuses on crafting, trading and dealing with common folk. Artisans are similar to the commoner NPC class… only better!
Chapter 9 – Baking, Brewing and Cooking: This chapter introduces new rules that cover the crafting of food and drink, as well as enchanted food and drink.
Chapter 10 – Spells: This chapter introduces new spells that take advantage of the new intoxicated conditions and crafting mechanics.
Chapters 11 through 13 are for GMs only!
Chapter 11 – Non Player Characters: This chapter provides GMs with the tools for making a cast of believable NPCs for the player characters to interact with. It is filled with new NPC classes as well as generation mechanics that fill your campaign with characters who are not just looking for a fight.
Chapter 12 – Gambling Encounters: This chapter provides GMs with sample Gambling Encounters to drop into your campaigns or use as inspiration.
Chapter 13 – Sample Taverns: This chapter provides GMs with full-color maps and descriptions for three different taverns that can be added straight to your game.