Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories, by Barbara Black

Abstract

Reviewed by: Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories by Barbara Black Eloise Moss (bio) Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories, by Barbara Black; pp. x + 245. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2019, $64.95, $34.95 paper, $29.95 ebook, £54.95. The grand hotels of Victorian London provide the spatial crucible for Barbara Black's fascinating investigation of the role of hotels in shaping ideas of citizenship, national identities, morality (including discourses of crime, anonymity, and sexual fantasy), as well as global cross-cultural encounters since the mid-1800s. Hotel London: How Victorian Commercial Hospitality Shaped a Nation and Its Stories is crammed full of literary and cinematic references to hotels and to the memoirs of both staff and famous guests—though predominantly focusing on the latter, particularly literary greats such as Oscar Wilde, Henry James, and Ouida. The hotel magnates of the era, César Ritz and Richard D'Oyly Carte, are also afforded plenty of scrutiny here for effectively bringing the metropolis's hospitality industry up to the same standard as its Parisian and American counterparts, ensuring that London's hotels could become future "palaces" for luxury stays by exiled kings, diplomats, and celebrities (65). As such, one of the important contributions of this book (hinted at in its title) is to lay the groundwork for exploring the crucial role of hotels in determining the future course of international politics, gesturing toward the powerful motor of commercial hospitality spaces in the history of global diplomacy. [End Page 308] Hotel London is, however, a deep interrogation of hotel stays as a form of cultural psyche rather than a social history, although the second chapter, "Hotel Individualism," does offer architectural and social biographies of five case-study hotels: Brown's, Claridge's, the Langham, the Midland Grand, and the Savoy. Black argues that her focus on the similarity between hotels and the literary project, including the motifs of hotels as spaces of personal reinvention and arbiters of exclusion and inclusion in these texts (and in real life), shifts away from existing historiographical approaches to these buildings often written in an American history context. While scholarship on hotels in modern British history has been largely undertaken from a social historical perspective (particularly in work by John Walton and Kevin James, whose extensive scholarship on late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century British hotels does not feature in this book), literary scholar Charlotte Bates's oft-cited article about the interwar hotel, "Hotel Histories: Modern Tourists, Modern Nomads and the Culture of Hotel Consciousness" (2003), reached very similar conclusions to Black's work, with a comparable blend of disciplinary approaches—though some might simply call this cultural history. Emma Short's excellent recent book Mobility and the Hotel in Modern Literature: Passing Through (2019) is another example of this, though, being published in the same year as Hotel London, one could not expect Black to have drawn upon it. Where Black's work ranges more widely is in the dazzling set of connections it draws between hotels' cosmopolitanism—material, in the form of international goods and services, as well as human in these institutions' diverse populations—and the enduring power of London itself as a nexus of the global consumer economy, explicitly situating hotels as part of the dynamic trends outlined in Judith Walkowitz's study of pre-World War II Soho, Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (2012). Black charts how Victorian women's access to hotels as spaces of leisure and sociability, having been coaxed into hosting tea parties and dinners at hotels rather than at home by savvy hoteliers, is an important contribution to the history of the democratizing effects of these commercial spaces. Power and inequality recur as key themes (though are much less developed in relation to race and ethnicity), and are assisted by Black's deft integration of a wide range of theoretical essays on the transitional, experimental nature of hotels by authors such as Wayne Koestenbaum, while the presiding spirit of the text is Walter Benjamin. This elegant conceptual framing of hotels as homes away from home, yet inherently transitional spaces, accompanied by...