ABSTRACT
Professional hospitality, especially in hotels, required proprietors and managers to strike careful balances between courtesy to patrons and over-familiarity or over-effusiveness, between keeping one's managerial guard up and seeming unconcerned. Ancient inns had crannies, cellars, secret staircases, the new hotels had whole areas out of bounds to guests—kitchens, laundries, offices—and house detectives to patrol the boundaries. The language of hospitality in British and Irish literature of the long nineteenth century distinguishes between hotel and inn, a distinction marked by time and place. In literary Gothic, the process slides one stage further, toward the Unheimliche, when ungastlich events trump gastlich expectations of safety from external and internal dangers, natural or supernatural. Some of the dangers in dark hostelries, especially inns, are created by the hosts themselves. Staying at a hostelry meant perhaps a temporary domesticity, perhaps a temporary exposure to that Victorian bugbear, the wrong sort of people, and usually a separation from kith and kin.
