This describes the actual “Ship and Lobster” tavern, on the shore at Denton, below Gravesend, to which you come past the tramway terminus, down a slummy street chiefly remarkable for grit and broken bottles, then across the railway and the canal and on to the riverside where, in midst of the prevalent grittiness that is now the most outstanding natural feature, stands the inn, in company with the office of an alarming person who styles himself “Explosive Lighterman,” at Denton Wharf. There are even fewer inns to be found in _Our Mutual Friend_, where, although the “Red Lion” at Henley is said to be the original of the up-river inn to whose lawn Lizzie drags the half-drowned Wrayburn, we are not really sure that Henley actually is indicated. That mention of a lawn does not suffice: many riverside inns have lawns. In short, the edge of Dickens’s appreciation of inns was growing blunted, and he took less delight, as he grew older, in describing their peculiarities. His whole method of story-telling was changed. Instead of the sprightly fancy and odd turns of observation that once fell spontaneously from him, he at last came to laboriously construct and polish the action and conversation of a novel, leaving in comparative neglect those side-lights upon localities that help to give most of his writings a permanent value. Apart from the novels, we have many inns associated with Dickens by tradition and in his tours and racily descriptive letters; and there, at any rate, we find him, when not overweighted with the more than ever elaborated and melodramatic character of his plots, just as full of quaint, fanciful, and cheerful description as ever. [Illustration: THE “SHIP AND LOBSTER.”] His tours began early. So far back as the autumn of 1838 Dickens and Phiz took holiday in the midlands, coming at last to Shrewsbury, where they stayed at the “Lion,” or rather in what was at that time an annexe of the “Lion,” and has long since become a private house. Writing to his elder daughter, Dickens vividly described this place: “We have the strangest little rooms (sitting-room and two bedrooms together) the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand. The windows bulge out over the street, as if they were little stern windows in a ship. And a door opens out of the sitting-room on to a little open gallery with plants in it, where one leans over a queer old rail.” Mr. Kitton[18] states: “This quaint establishment, alas! has been modernised (if not entirely rebuilt) since those days, and presents nothing of the picturesqueness that attracted the author of _Pickwick_.” But that is by no means the case. It stands exactly as it did, except that since the business of the “Lion” has decreased, it no longer forms a part of that great hostelry.[19] The blocked-up communicating doors between the two buildings may still be seen on the staircase of the “Lion,” and the little house does still bulge over the pavement and closely resemble the stern of an old man-o’-war.