Retitled 'An Old Stage-Coaching House' in collected editions of the series.

Dickens touches on the national decline in coaching activity in the face of railway competition in 'Dullborough Town' but had first publicly predicted it in 1837, in his final editorial contribution to Bentley's Miscellany (see Vol. 1 of the Dent edition of Dickens's Journalism, p. 553).

Likewise, in the 3rd number of Master Humphrey's Clock, Tony Weller had blasted the railway as 'unconstitootional and an inwaser o' priwileges ... a outrage and a insult ... to sich coachmen and guards as is sometimes forced to go by it' (18 April 1840).

Dickens's narrator avoids specifically naming or otherwise identifying the town on which the essay focuses; the 'Dolphin's Head' is likewise an invented name. The first editor of Dickens's journalism, B.W. Matz, concluded that 'there is nothing by which we can... identify the Dolphin's Head' (Dickensian Inns and Taverns, London: Cecil Palmer, 1922, p. 251). However, W.J. Carlton and Alan S. Watts have since argued in detail that the town is based on Newbury, in Berkshire, and that the coaching-house is based on the 'George and Pelican', overriding objections from Pansy Pakenham that Beaconsfield or Aylesbury are better qualified candidates (see Carlton, 'Dickens's 'Old Stage-Coaching House', The Dickensian, 48 (1958), pp. 13-20; Watts, 'Charles Dickens—A Visitor to Newbury', Newbury Weekly News, 21 August 1980, p. 4; Pakenham, 'Letter to the Editor', The Dickensian, 48 (1958), pp. 121-122).

The 'George and Pelican' stood at the busy crossing of the Great Western Road between London and Bath and the road from Oxford to Winchester, in the parish of Speenhamland, and later became a popular choice for literary reflections on the departed glories of the coaching era, featuring in this capacity in Lord William Pitt Lennox's novel Percy Hamilton (1851) and in John Hollingshead's fine essay 'The Last Stage-Coach'—strikingly similar to Dickens's treatment—collected in Odd Journeys In and Out of London (1860). Dickens had stayed at the 'George and Pelican' in its heyday, putting up there on 7 November 1835 en route to report for the Morning Chronicle on a speech given by Lord John Russell in Bristol. He wrote to his fiancée Catherine Hogarth of 'a chaotic state of confusion just now' at the inn, being 'surrounded by maps, road-books, ostlers, and post-boys', before finishing with the postscript 'I hear the Coach at this moment' (Pilgrim, Vol. I, p. 90). Between this and the composition of the present paper, there is no instance in which he is known to have been in Newbury (thus Carlton's assertion that Dickens is writing about a return visit to Newbury 'made in the summer or Autumn of 1845' cannot be confirmed) but his frequent trips to the West country to see his parents, or tours of public readings and amateur theatricals are likely to have taken him there on several occasions.

Literary allusions:

• 'Dolphin... showed no bright colours': Byron, Childe Harold (1818), Canto 4, Stanza 29 ('Parting day/ Dies like the dolphin, whom each parting pang imbues/ With a new colour as it gasps away');
• 'Valley of the Shadow': The Book of Common Prayer (1662), Psalm 23:4;
• 'a world too wide': Shakespeare, As You Like It (1599), Act 2, Sc. 7.

Author: John Drew; © J. M. Dent/Orion Publishing Group, Dickens' Journalism Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859-1870, 2000.

DJO gratefully acknowledges permission to reproduce this material.

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