The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries: To-Day and in Days of OldHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Portsmouth Road and Its Tributaries: To-Day and in Days of Old
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs; Portsmouth Road (England)
Guildford has many old inns, as befits an old town which lay directly upon
an old coach-road. Of these the chiefest lie in the High Street, and they
are the "Angel," the "Crown," the "White Hart," and the "Red Lion." The
"Red Lion" has a modernized frontage, but within it is the same hostelry
at which Mr. Samuel Pepys stayed, time and again; the others are more
suggestive of the flower of the coaching age and of Pickwickian revels;
but in these latter days the wide race of "commercial gentlemen" and the
somewhat stolid and beefy grazier class are their more usual guests.
Behind their prosperous-looking fronts are the vast stable-yards,
approached from the High Street by yawning archways that "once upon a
time" admitted the coaches, and whence issued the carriages and
post-chaises of a by-gone day; now echoing with the rumble of the omnibus
that plies between the town and the railway-station, laden chiefly with
the sample-boxes of enterprising bagmen. But in that "once upon a time,"
whose chronology finally determined and came to an end in the '40's, there
was a superabundance of coach traffic here.
Hogarth has left a picture of a typical country inn-yard of his time which
shows, better than any amount of unaided description, what manner of
places they were whence started the lumbering stages of last century. No
one has yet identified the picture, reproduced here, with any particular
inn, although some have sought to place it in Essex, because of the
election crowd seen in the background carrying an effigy and a banner
inscribed with the weird, and at first sight incomprehensible, legend "No
Old Baby." A candidate named Child stood for one of the Essex boroughs
about this date, and, according to Hogarth commentators, this group was
intended as an incidental satire upon him. On the other hand, the
likelihood of this being really an inn-yard upon the Portsmouth Road is
seen by the sailor who occupies a somewhat insecure position upon the roof
of the coach beside a French valet, and whose bundle is inscribed
"Centurion." The "Centurion," one of Anson's squadron, put in repeatedly
at Portsmouth, and the sailor is apparently on a journey home, fresh from
the sea and from Anson's command.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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