In this view, later than 1770, and probably executed about 1800, we have the “Golden Cross” inn of _Pickwick_. Its successor, the Gothic-fronted building generally associated by Dickens commentators with that story, was built in 1828 and demolished two years later. Dickens wrote _Pickwick_ in 1836: when both the house he indicated and its successor were swept away, and the very site cleared and made a part of the open road; but, as he specifically states that the Pickwickians began their travels on May 13th, 1827, it must needs have been the predecessor of the Gothic building from which they set forth on the “Commodore” coach for Rochester. The inn at that time had a hospitable-looking front and a really handsome range of coffee-room windows looking out upon the street. Beside them you see the celebrated archway of Jingle’s excited and disjointed cautions: “Terrible place--dangerous work--other day--five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--crash--knock--children look round--mother’s head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking!” The great stable-yard and the back premises probably remained untouched, for when David Copperfield came up by coach from Canterbury, the “Golden Cross” was, we learn, “a mouldy sort of establishment,” and his bedroom “smelt like a hackney-coach, and was shut up like a family vault”--characteristics not generally associated with new buildings. But, indeed, although references to the “Golden Cross” are plentiful in literature, they are few of them flattering: “A nasty inn, remarkable for filth and apparent misery,” wrote Edward Shergold, early in the nineteenth century, and he was but one of a cloud of witnesses to the same effect. It is thus a little difficult to understand a writer in _The Epicure’s Almanack_ for 1815, who says, in the commendatory way, that the fame of the “Golden Cross” had spread “from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ganges; from Nova Scotia to California.” [Illustration: CHARING CROSS, ABOUT 1829, SHOWING THE “GOLDEN CROSS” INN. _From the engraving after T. Hosmer Shepherd._]