ABSTRACT
Like other sociable places – taverns, operas and pleasure gardens, to name just a few5 – inns attracted the artistic and the writerly imagination. If research on the emergence of the public sphere in the eighteenth century has frequently focused on urban sociability (co eehouses, theatres), little has been written
60 Drink in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
about the country inn, although it was instrumental to the forging of a public sphere, which was by no means only urban, as for example William Hogarth’s print Th e Stage Coach or Country Inn Yard (1747) shows. In literary texts, especially realist novels, with their programmatic focus on everyday details, inns are popular settings because they allow for expected and unexpected encounters across the barriers of social class and gender, facilitating intellectual debates as well as quarrels and love stories. Henry Fielding was intrigued by inns, co eehouses, alehouses and other public meeting and drinking spaces, as his play Th e Coff ee-House Politician (1730) as well as numerous episodes in his novels Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) show.6 e famously ill-humoured Scotsman Smollett’s novels and travelogues also lead the reader through an array of inns: carnivalesque haunts brimming with strange fellows in Roderick Random (1748), a veritable ‘temple sacred to hospitality’ in Launcelot Greaves (1762) and an assortment of places in Humphry Clinker (1771)7 present him as a connoisseur of inns and other public institutions, which he judged meticulously by his own high standards. A er a brief survey of the status of the country inn in eighteenth-century England, this contribution will turn to visual material: a print by Hogarth, depicting an inn, as well as the ubiquitous inn sign. I will then consider novels and travel writing by Scott, Fielding and Smollett.
