The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters Inn

The watercolour portrays The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, a public house at Limehouse by the Thames. It is described in Dickens's 'Our Mutual Friend' Chapter 6 '...a tavern of a dropsical appearance, had long settled down into a state of hale infirmity...but it had out-lasted, and clearly would yet outlast, many a better-trimmed building, many a sprucer public-house. Externally it was a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over the water; but seemed to have got into the condition of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on the brink that he will never go in at all...The back of the establishment, though the cheif entrance was there, so contracted, that it merely represented in its connection with the front, the handle of a flat-iron set upright on its broadest end. This handle stood at the bottom of a wilderness of court and alley; which wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the Six Jolly Fellowship-Porters as to leave the hostelry not an inch of ground beyond its door.'

Very little is known about James Lawson Stewart who exhibited watercolours in various London galleries between 1883-1889. He died in c. 1918 and towards the end of life was employed to copy prints of London; the accuracy of some of the locations should therefore be questioned.

The Museum was gifted a large selection of watercolours featuring locations which appeared in Dickens's works in 1934 and a set of cigarette cards was issued by R and J Hill Ltd in 1926 and 1934 entitled Historic Places from Dickens Classics which featured watercolours by Stewart.