It was exactly 153 years ago today that the most famous guest arrived at The Lion.
Novelist Charles Dickens came to the hotel on August 12, 1858, with his friend and illustrator, Hablot K Browne, otherwise know as Phiz.
They were given rooms in what was then an annexe and Dickens wrote to one of his daughters: “We have the strangest little rooms, the ceilings of which I can touch with my hand. The windows bulge out over the street as if they were little stern windows of a ship.
“And a door opens out of the sitting room on to a little open gallery with plants in it where one leans over a queer old rail.”
Visitors can still see and stay in the two rooms that Dickens used as a bedroom (pictured below by Richard Bishop) and a study which have hardly changed since the novelist’s day.
Hotel guests can look at the stern windows, the gallery and the bulging windows and the rail and the plaque to commemorate his stay
It wasn’t the only time that Dickens stayed at The Lion. He had visited there 20 years previously when he records in his 1838 Journal that on Wednesday, October 31 he and his wife Catherine had attended the Shrewsbury Theatre to see A Roland for an Oliver before leaving the next day to travel on to Llangollen.
The author is known to have visited Shrewsbury on a number of other occasions, including May 10, 1852, when he appeared at the Music Hall in the comedy Not so bad as we seem or Many sides to a character, which was written by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. The performance concluded with an original farce in one act by Charles Dickens and Mark Lemon entitled Mr Nightingale’s Diary.
With it being the anniversary of Dickens’ stay it gave me a great opening to impress the visitors at today’s Shrewsbury Flower Show – and to sell many books.
Anyone coming to the show tomorrow will see me surrounded by books on the Salop Leisure stand.
No comments:
Post a Comment