Furnival's Inn
(1868)
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In Wyman’s Architects Engineers & Building Trades Directory of 1868, my great-great grandfather, the architect and surveyor James Mackenzie Roberts, is listed at Furnival’s Inn, possibly while he was working on the Royal Courts of Justice.
ROBERTS, James Mackenzie, Heath cottage, Dedham, Colchester, Essex; and 15 Furnival’s inn, London. – Pupil of H. A. Hunt, esq. – His works comprise Restoration of Dedham and Peldon churches, Essex, and various other works
I was curious as to the history of Furnival’s Inn, who else was there and where it was, as it no longer appears on modern-day maps of London.
Furnival’s Inn showing on Edward Weller’s map of 1868 and the main entrance to the Inn in Holborn. The photograph above of its interior courtyard was taken in the 1890s.
Furnival’s Inn stood on the north side of Holborn, between Brooke Street and Leather Lane, and was originally one of the Inns of Chancery, but converted into private apartments and offices by the builder Henry Peto in the 1820s (and demolished in 1897 to be replaced by the current Prudential Assurance building).
The Inn consisted of sixteen blocks, including a hotel, Woods, and a law stationer’s shop, set around a central courtyard accessed from Holborn through an arched gateway. Each block extended to four floors and a basement.
The Dickens Connection
Three decades before my great-great grandfather was here, Charles Dickens had leased rooms on the third floor, at the very same address, 15 Furnival’s Inn, moving here (from number 13) for a year in February 1836.
Dickens mentions Furnival’s Inn in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) as having ‘a good many stairs’. It is also mentioned in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844):
There is little enough to see in Furnival’s Inn. It is a shady, quiet place, echoing to the footsteps of the stragglers who have business there, and rather monotonous and gloomy on summer evenings.
According to his biographer, John Forster, the great novelist paid a return visit to the building in 1869 (I wonder if this was while James was still there?). With his companion, Dickens
mounted a staircase he had not ascended for more than thirty years, to show the chamber in Furnival’s Inn where the first page of Pickwick was written. (John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens, 1872–74)
The building as it was in 1895 is described in Percy Fitzgerald’s The History of Pickwick:
No. 15 is on the right, nearer the archway, and is of more pretentious character. ... There is no change since Boz’s [Dickens] time, even to the smooth, brass-bound rail on the stone stair. (p. 179)
A room (possibly a sitting room) at Furnivals Inn (1907), the floorplan of number 15 and an illustration of the outside of number 15.
Although by the 1860s many of its rooms were occupied by solicitors, Furnival’s Inn was also a popular address with architects and other professionals. Apart from my great-great grandfather, two other such men are listed at number 15 in Wyman’s 1868 directory:
EARLE, James Foster, 15 Furnival’s Inn, London, EC
PECK, Frederick (formerly Peck & Stevens), 15 Furnival’s Inn, London, EC
Joel Foster Earle
Of the two men listed at 15 Furnival’s Inn in Wyman’s directory, in addition to my great-great grandfather, the one he most likely worked with is Joel Foster Earle (1821–86).
Erroneously given as James Foster Earle in Wyman’s, he was also from out of town, at New Barnet, although he was originally from Hull. He trained as a Baptist minister but by 1860 was working as an architect, first at number 3 Furnival’s Inn (according to Blower’s 1860 directory) and then until 1870 at number 15 (Boyle’s Court Guide and the Post Office Directory).
In 1850 he married the daughter of a solicitor with chambers at number 15, so maybe it was through his father-in-law that he learned of rooms becoming vacant on an upper floor?
My great-great grandfather may have shared an office with Earle as early as 1864, whilst both men lodged elsewhere in London. In December that year James supplied the quantities for a house in St John’s Wood designed by Earle:
For residence in the Avenue-road, St John’s Wood, for Mr J.N. Palmer. Mr J.F. Earle, architect. Quantities supplied by Mr. J.M. Roberts.
The lowest bid (of £2,655) was accepted.
[The client must have been Joseph Nottingham Palmer (1816–74), a fruit merchant. However this particular building project may never have been realised, perhaps because Palmer was suffering from a long and painful illness (as his death notice of 1874 tells us). Until at least 1865 he was at 5 St John’s Terrace, Barrow Hill Road, very much in the vicinity of Avenue Road (see map below, now St Edmund’s Terrace). But by the late 1860s he had moved, with his family and nurse, a little further west to Hamilton Terrace, Maida Vale. I cannot see that anyone called Palmer ever lived on Avenue Road itself. ]
I have found no other instance of my great-great grandfather’s name mentioned with that of Foster Earle, least of all at Furnival’s Inn, where I assume they were contemporaries for a while at least.
According the newspapers, Earle’s other work during the 1860s included ‘fitting up’ the London, Birmingham and South Staffordshire Bank in Cheapside in 1863 (The Builder), repairs to New Road Chapel, Oxford (Nonconformist, 6 December 1865) and a new ‘cement manufactory’ in Hull for the Earle family (Hull Daily News, 16 March 1867). Perhaps James was involved in these too, it is hard to know and there is no mention of quantities in the reports.
It is worth noting that in 1876 Earle’s daughter Emma married an Islington architect’s clerk, Robert John Kell.
Frederick Peck
And what of the other architect listed at 15 Furnival’s Inn in Wyman’s?
In fact the directories (e.g. the biannual Boyle’s Court Guide, Websters register and the ABC Court Directory) show that Frederick Peck (1828–75) was at number 15 between about 1864 and 1871.
Peck was already noted as the designer of the Royal Agricultural Halls in Islington (1862), but during the period in question produced plans for educational establishments, prisons and other public buildings in East Anglia, mostly in the Gothic revival style (see here and here). In 1867 he submitted ‘a Gothic design of considerable merit’ for the London Orphan Asylum at Watford and the following year beat ‘his rival Mr Lee’ in a competition to design a school near Sleaford, Lincolnshire. The Grantham Journal (26 September and 3 October) provides a detailed description of this building.
I don’t know if my great-great grandfather worked with him on any of these projects. Most likely not, but if they were both at 15 Furnival’s Inn around the same time they must surely have known of each other. Peck listed himself as an architect and surveyor, as did my great-great grandfather, although Peck was better known than James (and indeed Foster Earle).
We know Peck occupied the same upstairs rooms as Dickens thanks to the American novelist Louisa May Alcott. In Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, Volume 2 (1872), Alcott describes (writing in the third person) a tour of Dickens’ London she made in June 1866:
Being on a Dickens pilgrimage, they went to Furnival’s Inn, where he wrote ‘Pickwick’ in a three-storey [third-floor] room, and read it to the old porter. The same old porter told them all about it, and quite revelled in the remembrance.
The mainstay at 15 Furnival’s Inn in the 1850s–60s was the porter William Humphrey, so I assume it must be he whom Alcott talked to and who, ‘as the almighty sixpence touched his palm’, led the writer up to Dickens’ old rooms:
Up they went, over the worn stairs; and, finding the door locked, solemnly touched the brass knob, read the name ‘Ed Peck’ on the plate, and wiped their feet on a very dirty mat.
We can assume ‘Ed Peck’ is Frederick Peck (perhaps the plate read ‘Fred Peck’, and Alcott simply mis-remembered when she came to write her account).
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