"La Belle Sauvage" has, like many other historic inns, gone into the
limbo of past, if not of forgotten, things, leaving nothing but its
name denoting a cul-de-sac, to remind the present generation of its
one-time fame.

This was the inn where Tony Weller, resplendent in many layers of
cloth cape and huge brimmed hat, stopped "wen he drove up" on the
box seat of one of the stage coaches of the period. For Tony was,
as everybody knows, a coachman typical of the period of the book,
and the "Belle Savage" (the spelling of "savage" here follows the
fashion of the period referred to) was where he started and ended
his journeys in London. But the anecdote related by his son of
how he was hoodwinked into taking out a licence to marry Mrs.
Clarke contains the chief of the only two actual references to
the fact that his head-quarters were the "Belle Savage," as he
called it. It is certainly recorded that he started from the
"Bull" in Whitechapel when he drove the Pickwickians to Ipswich,
but it is the "Belle Savage" that is associated with his name.

"'What's your name, sir?' says the lawyer.

"'Tony Weller,' says my father. 'Parish?' says the lawyer. 'Belle
Savage,' says my father; for he stopped there wen he drove up, and
he know'd nothing about parishes, he didn't."

Now it seems to us a curious fact that Dickens never made any
further use of this famous inn, either in Pickwick or in his other
books; indeed, we can only recall one other reference to it, and