The topic for The Session this month, as set by Phil at Beer Diary, is pubs in fiction – which happens to be one of our favourite subjects.
Thinking about pubs in fiction in broad terms, the things tend to grab our attention:
- good, accurate depictions of pubs – these people know the score
- awful depictions that tell us the creators don’t have a clue
- historical sources that tell us something about the history or culture of the pub
One example from category 1 is the crime writer Ruth Rendell. We’ve both read many of her books, including those she wrote under the name Barbara Vine, but Jess is a particular fan.
Having binged a bunch of Inspector Wexford mysteries over the space a few months, she observed that Rendell not only wrote convincingly about pubs, but was also a sharp observer of trends in pub culture. This is from our newsletter for March 2020:
In particular, [Rendell] writes about a kind of pub that doesn’t get much attention in pub writing: the middle class pub in a middle class town in middle England… In A New Lease of Death, published in 1967, gives us this neat portrait of the pubs in the fictional Sussex town where her books are often set: “The Olive & Dove is the best hostelry in Kingsmarkham that can properly be called an hotel… The Olive, as locals invariably call it, is situated in the High Street at the Stowerton end of Kingsmarkham, facing the exquisite Georgian residence of Mr Missal, the Stowerton car dealer. It is partly Georgian itself, but it is a hybrid structure with lingering relics of Tudor and a wing that claims to be pre-Tudor. In every respect it conforms to what nice middle-class people mean when they talk about a ‘nice hotel’.” … By the 1990s… the Olive & Dove has become a gastropub, and by the late 2000s, had air-conditioning fitted to cope with the first signs of global warming.
In fact, Rendell might also fit into category 3, as a source of historical information, now we think about it.
As for category 2, well, we don’t take note of bad examples because, we suppose, they’re not much use to us. But they do tend to make us think less of the books and films in which we encounter them.
Racking our brains, the dreadful, cheesy depiction of a pub in the Cotswolds in The Holiday comes to mind, for example.
We also find ourselves thinking of Midsomer Murders, in which the pubs are ostensibly convincing, and often filmed on location in real pubs. But they all feel 30 or 40 years out of date, and totally unrealistic, despite the surface detail. For one thing, they often have wealthy, influential publicans who are deeply involved in the lives of everyone in town. See also: Eastenders.
For category 3, we’ll point to a couple of fictional pubs we referenced in our book 20th Century Pub. First, there’s the description of an ornate late Victorian pub in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure:
[The inn] had been entirely renovated and refitted in modern style since Jude’s residence here… Tinker Taylor drank off his glass and departed, saying it was too stylish a place now for him to feel at home in unless he was drunker than he had money to be just then… The bar had been gutted and newly arranged throughout, mahogany fixtures having taken the place of the old painted ones, while at the back of the standing-space there were stuffed sofa-benches. The room was divided into compartments in the approved manner, between which were screens of ground glass in mahogany framing, to prevent topers in one compartment being put to the blush by the recognitions of those in the next. On the inside of the counter two barmaids leant over the white-handled beer-engines, and the row of little silvered taps inside, dripping into a pewter trough… At the back of the barmaids rose bevel-edged mirrors, with glass shelves running along their front, on which stood precious liquids that Jude did not know the name of…
Jess also has a theory (work in progress) that just as Charles Dickens invented our modern concept of Christmas, he also played a part in inventing the idea of the ideal English pub.
The illustration above is by James Mahoney for Our Mutual Friend and depicts The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters – one of the all-time great fictional pubs. Is it a record of reality, of history, in a meaningful way? It’s always hard to say with Dickens.
If you want more examples of specific pubs in books and on film you can check out a post from our archive, and an entire category:
And we often include a fictional pub or two in our monthly newsletter, depending on what we’ve spotted between us in our reading and watching.
Main illustration adapted by us via victorianweb.org
