The inn at Hatfield

The inn at Hatfield serves as the last public house where Bill Sikes, fleeing the murder of Nancy, attempts to pass unnoticed among ordinary country folk before his guilt and terror drive him back into the night. It is a small, quiet village public-house whose scanty light guided the exhausted murderer and his limping dog to its door at nine o'clock on the night after the killing. Here, Sikes encounters the mundane world he has irrevocably left behind, and a seemingly trivial incident—a peddler's offer to clean a stain from his hat—shatters his fragile composure and forces him onward toward his doom.

Setting and Atmosphere

The inn at Hatfield is a modest village public-house, its light barely sufficient to guide travelers through the dark. Inside, a fire burns in the tap-room, where several country-laborers are drinking before it. The atmosphere is one of ordinary rural conviviality: the conversation turns to neighboring land and farmers, and then to the age of an old man who had been buried the previous Sunday, with the younger men considering him very old and the older men declaring him quite young. There is nothing to attract attention or excite alarm in this setting; it is precisely the kind of unremarkable, quiet establishment where a fugitive might hope to blend in.

Sikes's Arrival and Behavior

Sikes enters the inn with his dog, both exhausted from the unaccustomed exercise of his flight. He sits down in the furthest corner, eating and drinking alone, casting a morsel of food to his dog from time to time. He pays his reckoning and sits silent and unnoticed in his corner, almost dropping asleep. His demeanor is that of a sullen, solitary traveler, and the countrymen make room for him without suspicion. The dog, too, is present, a white shaggy animal with a scratched and torn face, a creature as ill-favored as its master.

The Peddler's Arrival and the Crisis

The fragile peace is shattered by the noisy entrance of an antic fellow, half pedlar and half mountebank, who travels about the country on foot vending hones, strops, razors, washballs, and various wares. His entrance is the signal for homely jokes with the countrymen. After making his supper, he opens his box of treasures and begins to hawk his goods, uniting business with amusement. He produces a composition cake, boasting of its power to remove all sorts of stains—wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains, paint-stains, pitch-stains, mud-stains, and finally, blood-stains. As he points to a dark stain upon the hat of a gentleman in company, offering to take it clean out, Sikes, recognizing the threat, starts up with a hideous imprecation, overturns the table, tears the hat from the peddler, and bursts out of the house.

Consequences and Significance

Sikes's flight from the inn at Hatfield marks a critical turning point in his desperate journey. The peddler's casual mention of blood-stains, combined with the sight of the dark mark on his own hat, triggers an overwhelming paranoia that makes it impossible for him to remain among people. He turns back up the town, getting out of the glare of the lamps of a stage-coach, and overhears the guard and a gentleman discussing the murder—a woman, in Spitalfields. This confirmation that his crime is already public knowledge drives him deeper into isolation and terror. He leaves Hatfield and takes the road toward St. Albans, plunging into the solitude and darkness where the full weight of his guilt descends upon him. The inn at Hatfield thus represents the last point of contact between the murderer and the ordinary social world; after his abrupt departure, he is consumed by the hallucinatory horror of his own conscience, culminating in his eventual death at Jacob's Island.