The London Tavern where this meeting was held was opened in 1768. It was built on the Tontine principle, the name of the architect one Richard B. Jupp. The great dining-room was known as the "Pillar-room" and was "decorated with medallions and garlands, Corinthian columns and pilasters." It had a ball-room running the whole length of the structure, which was also used for banquets, and was hung with paintings and contained a large organ at one end. In those days the hotel was famous for its turtle soup, the turtles being kept alive in large tanks, and as many as two tons were seen swimming in the vat at one time. The cellars were filled with barrels of porter, pipes of port, butts of sherry, and endless other bottles and bins. The building was erected to provide a spacious and convenient place for public meetings, such as had drawn Ralph Nickleby and his friends on the occasion referred to above. In _Household Words_ in 1852 was a long article on the tavern to which we are indebted for some of the facts here recorded. Meetings of Mexican Bondholders were held on the second floor; of a Railway Assurance "upstairs, and first to the left"; of an asylum election at the end of the passage; and of the party on the "first floor to the right," who had to consider "the union of the Gibbleton line of the Great-Trunk-Due-Eastern Junction"; all these functions brought persons in great excitement and agitation to its hospitable walls. For these meetings the rooms were arranged with benches, and sumptuously Turkey-carpeted: the end being provided with a long table for the directors, with an imposing array of paper and pens. In a word, it was a city tavern for city men, and it still exists to-day to cater for the requirements of the same class of business men, although perhaps not so ostentatiously. Banquets are still held there; city companies hold their meetings there, and Masonic institutions their lodges. Dickens knew the tavern very well, having given dinners there himself or taken the chair for some fund, as he did in June 1844, in aid of the "Sanatorium or Sick-house," an institution for students, governesses and young artists who were above using hospitals and could not afford the expenses of home-nursing in their lodgings. On another occasion (in 1851) Dickens presided there at the annual dinner held in aid of the General Theatrical Fund. The thought of this dinner may have come back to him when he was writing one of his short pieces entitled "Lying Awake," (1852) in which, among the strange things which came to his mind on those occasions, he mentions that he found himself once thinking how he had "suffered unspeakable agitation of mind from taking the chair at a public dinner at the London Tavern in my night clothes, which not all the courtesy of my kind friend and host, Mr. Bathe, could persuade me were quite adapted to the occasion."