Abstract
The hotel offers itself as the ideal literary setting, enabling authors to bring disparate characters together and often acting as a microcosm of society. All of this is thanks to the mobility by which the hotel is necessarily characterised and defined. Charting the gradual shift in the early nineteenth century from coaching inns to hotels in Britain, Short highlights the significance of the growing rail network in the nineteenth century to the advent of the hotel, and its place in literature. Mobility is also inherent in the hotel at an architectural level. The spaces within the hotel are arranged according to the movements of its guests and the staff who serve them, rendering it a space that is both produced and continually constituted by mobility.
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Notes
- 1.
The Official Hotel Directory of the British Isles, 60, July (1900), p. 3.
- 2.
An 1847 article in Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, however, reveals that the number of ‘purpose-built’ hotels to which Sandoval-Strausz refers here remained limited until at least the mid-nineteenth century, with the author noting that ‘a hotel in any part of Great Britain is a mansion fitted up very much like a private house. People live in it apart from each other, as they would do in a lodging establishment; and for this seclusion, and the special way in which they are served, they usually pay at an extravagant rate. The consequence of this extravagance is, that people go to hotels as little as they possibly can, instead of resorting to them freely’. See: “English and Foreign Hotels”, Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal, 192, September (1847): 153–155 (p. 153).
- 3.
For a more in-depth discussion of the division of public rooms within the hotel, see Chap. 4 of this book.
- 4.
The advertisement referred to here by Berger is cited in: Meryle Evans, “Knickerbocker Hotels and Restaurants, 1800–1850”, New York Historical Quarterly, 36 (1952): 382–383.
- 5.
For further and more detailed discussion of this legislation and its repercussions on the hotel industry, see Chap. 6.
- 6.
Advertisement for the Midland Grand Hotel, The Pall Mall Gazette, 2550, 18 April (1873), p. 15. The materials used to build Midland Grand Hotel at St Pancras were, as far as possible, sourced ‘from places accessible by the Midland Railway. The facing bricks are from Nottingham, the stone is Ancaster, red Mansfield, and Park Spring, the slates are from the Swithland and Groby quarries, Leicestershire’. See: ‘The Midland Railway Hotel’, The London Journal and Weekly Record of Literature, Science, and Art (57: 1476), 24 May (1873), pp. 324–325 (p. 325).
- 7.
Bicycle Touring Club: Revised Prospectus Regarding Hotels, 1 May (1879). See the archive of the Cyclists’ Touring Club held at the University of Warwick (MSS.328/C) for further information.
- 8.
Other work on the hotel includes: Siegfried Kracauer’s, “The Hotel Lobby”, in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 173–185; D.J. van Lennep’s, “The Hotel Room”, in Phenomenological Psychology: The Dutch School, ed. Joseph J. Kockelmans (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 209–215; and Douglas Tallack’s, “‘Waiting, Waiting’: The Hotel Lobby”, Irish Journal of American Studies, 7 (1998): 1–20.
- 9.
I am grateful to my anonymous reviewer for their suggestions on this point.
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Short, E. (2019). Introduction: Modern Mobilities in the Hotel. In: Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22129-4_1
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