The White Hart was the personal badge of Richard II, who probably derived it from the arms of his mother, Joan "The Fair Maid of Kent", heiress of Edmund of Woodstock. It may also have been a pun on his name, as in "Rich-hart". In the Wilton Diptych, which is the earliest authentic contemporary portrait of an English king, Richard II wears a gold and enamelled white hart jewel, and even the angels surrounding the Virgin Mary all wear white hart badges. In English Folklore, the white hart is associated with Herne the Hunter.

Sam Weller is a fictional character in The Pickwick Papers (1836), the first novel by Charles Dickens, and the character that made Dickens famous. A humorous Cockney bootblack, Sam Weller first appeared in the fourth serialised episode. Previously the monthly parts of the book had been doing badly, selling only about 1,000 copies a month — but the humour of the character transformed the book into a publishing phenomenon, raising the sales by late autumn of 1837 to 40,000 a month.