ABSTRACT
Many contemporaries shared William J. Fanning's belief that the inn inhabited rural spaces and remote temporal realms, and hailed, like him, the inexorable rise of the modern hotel. Caroline Kirkland and Eliza Farnham articulated deep disjunctures between their idea of the hotel and the places they stayed as they headed into the rural West, some rude forms of accommodation conforming neither to the aesthetic nor to the functional features and service cultures of the antebellum Eastern seaboard "hotels" that they knew. The commercial and family hotels of America, the spas of Britain, and innumerable boardinghouses, lodging houses, and other institutions constituted a complex matrix of commercial accommodation beyond the palace hotels of New York City, London, and Paris. The "hotel" also encompassed a variety of building types, from the modest small-town hotel or estate hostelry bearing the name of the landed family, to the great hotels that spanned a city block.
