Abstract
This chapter considers the communal areas that are less public than the lobby, but more so than the bedrooms. Short reveals that while these areas often function as spaces of community, this is complicated by a number of factors. Spaces such as the drawing room and smoking room are often explicitly gendered, demanding the performance of traditional femininities and masculinities. Short examines the ways in which such spaces are consequently figured as exclusionary for those who do not conform to such rigid gender identities. The gaze of the other marks them further as spaces in which class identity is constantly scrutinised. This chapter demonstrates the preoccupation of literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with the impact of space upon the subject.
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Notes
- 1.
The earliest traceable reference to Woods’ Hotel appears in a list of insolvent debtors published in the London Gazette on 2 February 1830, which gives the hotel as one of the many residences of a William Adair Carter. For details on the demolition of Woods’ Hotel and Furnival’s Inn, see: Laurie Dennett, A Sense of Security: 150 Years of Prudential (Cambridge: Granta, 1998), pp. 148–150.
- 2.
On the use of armour as decoration, see also: Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), p. 136.
- 3.
See also: Diane Kirkby, Barmaids: A History of Women’s Work in Pubs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 46.
- 4.
- 5.
See Chap. 5 of this book for further discussion of the relationship between class and the hotel bedroom.
- 6.
While Joan Lawrence’s age may never be specifically referred to, it might be deduced that she is in her early twenties from Colonel Duperrier’s subsequent rumination, as he gazes ‘at the back of Joan’s neck […] with uncovetous appreciation’, that if his ‘wife were to die, he would marry some girl of twenty-three who would be very much in love with him and with whom he would be very happy’ (Bowen 2003 [1927], p. 55).
- 7.
The Hotel Cecil was demolished, save for some of its façade, in 1930. The Shell Mex Building now stands in its place on the Strand.
- 8.
Further evidence to support the claim that the Royal Grand is based on the Hotel Cecil comes in the form of the gateway of the hotel, in which Kipps experiences ‘a moment of elation […]. He felt all the Strand must notice him as he emerged through the great gate of the Hotel’ (Wells 2005 [1905], p. 221). Unlike the Savoy, whose entrance is set back from the Strand down a passageway, the Hotel Cecil did indeed have a grand gate opening out directly onto the Strand.
- 9.
The Hotel Cecil falls under tariff A (the most expensive tariff) of The Official Hotel Directory price guide (1898) and is defined as a family hotel. See Chap. 5 for further details of this tariff.
- 10.
See Chap. 5 of this book for a more sustained discussion of the history and significance of lifts in hotels.
- 11.
For further discussion of middle-class dining etiquette of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see: Rachel Rich, Bourgeois Consumption: Food, Space, and Identity in London and Paris, 1850–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).
- 12.
The aforementioned article in the Pall Mall Gazette features the following detailed description of the lavish décor in the Hotel Cecil dining room: ‘The room measures about sixty feet by eighty, and will accommodate some seventy tables. The floor is of oak parquetry; a dozen highly decorated columns support the old-gold ceiling, and the fittings are of walnut. Two fireplaces, set in white Sicilian marble, with red supporting columns, give the room an air of cosiness, in spite of its grandeur, and this effect is accentuated by the circumstances that these fireplaces are of the old English sort’ (Anon 1896, p. 8).
- 13.
Sylvia Hardy has established the extent of William James’s influence on Wells’s writing, noting that Wells was not just familiar with James’s arguments, but that he had read and was inspired by James’s Principles of Psychology. See: Sylvia Hardy, “A Story of the Days to Come: H.G. Wells and the Language of Science Fiction”, Language & Literature 12 (3) (2003): 199–212; and Hardy, “H.G. Wells and William James: A Pragmatic Approach”, in H.G. Wells: Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Steven McLean, 130–146 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008).
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Short, E. (2019). ‘The Intolerable Impudence of the Public Gaze’: The Public Rooms of 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_4
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