ABSTRACT
In gothic fictions from the Victorian period to the mid-twentieth century, it is as travelers and sojourners that most British, Irish, and Americans experience continental Europe. Consequently, hotels and inns are central to those travels and those tales. One dark locale to be found in the subgenre of the uncanny hotel is the murder inn. There is a strand of stories in which the protagonists enter as a guest a space controlled by strangers—whether an inn, a hotel, a lodging house, or merely a room for the night—and find out that the proffered hospitality is homicidal. Writers on Dickens such as Harry Stone, Rosemary Bodenheimer, and Michael Slater have seen the figure of the ghost doomed forever to tell the tale of how he had murdered his wife as a stand-in for the novelist himself, troubled by his infidelity and the coming end of his marriage to Catherine Dickens.
