Chapter I: Early History of Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese

Time consecrates;
And what is grey with age becomes religion.—SCHILLER.

Old London is fast disappearing off the face of the earth. One by one its ancient taverns have gone, or if the names familiar to our ancestors have been retained, the hand of the builder has been laid remorselessly on the structures our forefathers knew, and they have been transformed beyond recognition. One of them, however, survives, untouched by the hand of time, spared by the vitality of the traditions, literary and other, which it enshrines, and that is the Cheshire Cheese. Though its story reaches back long before the eighteenth century, it is with the memory of Dr. Johnson and his more brilliant contemporaries that it is very largely associated in the minds of men. It is in a special sense London’s living memorial of the great Lexicographer. Amid the changes which have altered Fleet Street almost beyond recognition by the Doctor and his contemporaries, it stands safe still, its old activities in full swing in the narrow backwater of Wine Office Court, a venerable reminder of the past. That men should be possessed with an unwearying curiosity about the old tavern which was so much the haunt of the mighty literary potentate who was the patron and friend of Goldsmith, is but natural. They feel for it what the devotee feels for a shrine. Dr. Johnson was not himself indifferent to a sentiment of the sort, and just as we take an intense interest in the “Cheshire Cheese” which he frequented, so he, in his day, was sympathetically curious as to the places which Dryden half a century or so before the Doctor’s time had made sacred to literary memory by his presence.

“When I was a young fellow,” he says, “I wanted to write the life of Dryden, and in order to get materials I applied to the only two persons then alive who had seen him; these were old Swinney and old Cibber. Swinney’s information was no more than this, ‘That at Will’s Coffee-house, Dryden had a particular chair for himself, which was set by the fire in winter and then called his winter chair, and that it was carried out for him to the balcony in summer, and then called his summer chair.’ I went and sat in it.”

Thanks, therefore, to the fact that we have one specimen of the Johnsonian tavern remaining practically the same as it was in the Johnsonian days, we can still depict for ourselves, with but the slightest effort of the imagination, what must have been the scene at the Cheshire Cheese in the Doctor’s time. Johnson is there in his favourite seat, mouthing and talking as who should say: “I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my mouth let no dog bark.” One or other of his friends is never wanting to keep him company—Burke, or Goldsmith, or it may be Langton or Beauclerk. But the inn is with us, though the men of the eighteenth century are gone.

Even then the tavern as a club was beginning to fall into comparative decay. Fashion was voting for the club proper, proprietary or otherwise, and the habit of ceasing to live in the City carried away the old frequenters of the Fleet Street taverns into the suburbs or the more distant environs of London. Washington Irving gives us in his “Sketch Book” a charming account of one of the city of London hostelries, as it was at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The opening of the description would serve for the Cheshire Cheese of to-day. “This has been a temple of Mirth and Wine from time immemorial. It has always been in the family, so that its history is tolerably well preserved by the present landlord. It was much frequented by the gallants and cavalieros of the reign of Elizabeth, and was looked into now and then by the wits of Charles the Second. The members of the club which now holds its weekly sessions there abound in old catches, glees, and choice stories that are traditional in the place. The life of the club, and indeed the prime wit of the neighbourhood, is mine host himself. At the opening of every club night he is called in to sing his ‘Confession of Faith,’ which is the famous old drinking troll from Gammer Gurton’s ‘Needle.’” Washington Irving gives the words of the four verses of the song with chorus, the first of which, as a specimen of an old-time City tavern song, may suffice to be produced here:

I cannot eate but little meat,
My stomack is not good;
But sure I think that I can drink
With him that wears a hood.
Though I go bare, take ye no care,
I nothing am acold.
I stuff my skin so full within
With jolly good ale and old.

_Chorus_: Back and side go bare, go bare,
Both foote and hand go cold;
But belly! God send thee good ale enough,
Whether it be new or old.

But from the time of Dr. Johnson down to the present day unbroken links of tradition connect the Cheshire Cheese of the twentieth century with the Cheshire Cheese of the eighteenth, and through that with all the taverns in story, which begin with the Tabard and pass on, through the Mermaid and the rest, to the old house in Wine Office Court. This venerable survivor of a vanished race has a double interest: to the lover of antiquity in general it appeals as the type of the place our forefathers loved; to the lover of the Johnsonian cycle, as enabling him to picture to himself what that race of giants did, where they ate and drank, and where they talked. That they had reason for their choice of an inn, and could give a reason for that choice too, is plain from a well-known passage in Boswell, which runs as follows:—

_From an Original Drawing by Herbert Railton._]

“There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of good things, ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, ever so much desire that everybody should be easy, in the nature of things it cannot be; there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests, the guests are anxious to be agreeable to him; and no man but a very impudent dog indeed can as freely command what is in another man’s house as if it were his own. Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome, and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give” (we should remember that this was said in the rougher world of the last century), “the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. No, Sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”

Although the origin of the Old Cheshire Cheese (formerly spelt “Ye Olde Cheshire Chese”) is not altogether involved in obscurity, there is a decided want of complete, or even semi-complete, details as to its very early history; but it is much more affluent in literary anecdote.

It was in the Old Cheshire Cheese that the dispute arose about who would most quickly make the best couplet. One said:—

I, Sylvester,
Kiss’d your sister.

The other’s retort was:

I, Ben Jonson,
Kiss’d your wife.

“But that’s not rhyme,” said Sylvester. “No,” said Jonson; “but it’s true.”

A later poet, Lord Tennyson, was himself a frequenter of the “Cheese” in his young days, while it was there that Isaac Bickerstaff made the epigram:

When late I attempted your pity to move,
What made you so deaf to my prayers?
Perhaps it was right to dissemble your love,
But—why did you kick me down stairs?

In fact, the “Cheese” was famous for epigrammatists. Who would not like to have seen the face of the old glutton and scandalmonger when, in the “Cheese,” the following lines were solemnly presented to him?—

You say your teeth are dropping out—
A serious cause of sorrow,
Not likely to be cured, I doubt,
To-day, or yet to-morrow.
But good may come of this distress,
While under it you labour,
If, losing teeth you guzzle less,
And don’t backbite your neighbour.

That Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, and other distinguished men were in the habit of frequenting the Old Cheshire Cheese, there can be no manner of doubt, and they knew what they were about in choosing their place of rendezvous, for I find in a _brochure_ entitled “Round London” (1725), that the house is described as “Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese Tavern, near ye Flete Prison, an eating-house for goodly fare.”

Wine Office Court, where the Cheshire Cheese is situated, took its name from the fact that wine licences were granted in a building close by. The present “wine office” of the Old Cheshire Cheese is exactly at the junction of the Court and Fleet Street.

“In this court,” says Mr. Noble, “once flourished a fig tree, planted a century ago by the vicar of St. Bride’s, who resided at No. 12. It was a slip from another exile of a tree formerly flourishing in a sooty kind of grandeur at the sign of the Fig Tree in Fleet Street.”

_From an Original Drawing by Herbert Railton._]