ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches a brief history of inns and hotels in the long nineteenth century and traces representations both of the nostalgically evoked inn and of the more modern hotel through the lens of several writers: Charles Dickens, Albert Smith, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mary E. Braddon, and Arnold Bennett, and their renderings of these establishments in fiction and essays spanning the years between 1840 and 1902. In 1884, Dickens Jr., son to the famous Victorian author, published the fourth edition of his popular Dictionary of London, which has an entry for "hotel": One of the greatest changes in London during the last score or so of years is in the matter of hotels. The Victoria Hotel at Wildernsea in Lady Audley's Secret or the Waterlily Hotel at Malvern in Dickens and Lemon's farce Mr Nightingale's Diary serve as backdrops for plots evolving around love and deception.
