Bertram Waldrom Matz

“ The only case in which Dickens deliberately used the name of one inn for another was that of the Maypole and King's Head at Chigwell in Barnaby Rudge. But in this instance he admitted that he had done so, although it was scarcely necessary, for the inns were very dissimilar and the novelist's description of the latter could not be taken for the former.
The case of the "George" and the "White Hart" is different. They both stood quite near to each other at the time Dickens was writing The Pickwick Papers, and were both so named and both famous. ”

“ Yet the only occasion, so far as we are aware, that the Novelist actually mentions the inn is in Little Dorrit, Book I., Chap. XXII, where Maggy, speaking of Tip, says: " If he goes into the " George " and writes a letter ..."
As The Dickensian for February, 1915, in reviewing Mr. Hopkinson Smith's book stated: "The 'George' Inn is just a fine survival of old days—the old days of which Dickens wrote—and is similar, in many respects, to what the 'White Hart' used to be. As such Dickensians have a great affection for it; there is no need to invent stories about it to justify their reverence." ”

“ Great rambling queer old places they are, with galleries and passages and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories."—Charles Dickens in The Pickwick Papers.
Certain traditional legends naturally grow round our old London landmarks and, when once started, no matter how conjectural, they are hard to overtake or suppress.
The George Inn, is no exception in this respect, and the legend that is prone to cling to it is that it was the original of the "White Hart" inn of Pickwick fame ”