Day a famous guest checked in

On this day 173 years ago the most famous visitor to The Lion Hotel checked in to stay in Shrewsbury for probably the first time.

Charles Dickens wrote in his 1838 Journal that on Wednesday, October 31 that year he and his wife Catherine had travelled through Birmingham and Wolverhampton on his way to The Lion.

In the evening, the couple attended the Shrewsbury Theatre to see A Roland for an Oliver before leaving the next day to go on to Llangollen.

Dickens is known to have visited Shrewsbury on a number of occasions, and it is probable that he stayed at The Lion on at least two more occasions.

When he visited there he had two rooms, a bedroom upstairs and a lounge below complete with desk, both of which can still be seen today, complete with plaque.

He definitely stayed there on August 12, 1858, with his friend and illustrator, Hablot K Browne, otherwise know as Phiz because 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.”

Charles John Huffam Dickens, who was born on February 7, 1812, in Portsmouth, moved to London when he was three.

His first job was at Warrens Blacking Warehouse where he was pasting labels on shoe polish.

But when he was 15 he joined the law office of Ellis and Blackmore, attorneys, of Holborn Court, Gray’s Inn, as a junior clerk, before becoming a freelance journalist concentrating on court and later political reporting.

His first stories were serialised in magazines, and rather than wait until he had finished the whole story, Dickens often wrote the episodes week by week and his first novel, the Pickwick Papers, was completed this way in March 1836.

He learnt to leave the end of each part on a cliff-hanger so the public would look forward to the next instalment.

A month later on April 2, 1836, Dickens married Catherine Tomson Hogarth (1816-1879), pictured below, the daughter of George Hogarth, editor of the Evening Chronicle, and they went on to have ten children.

By the time Charles arrived in Shrewsbury he and Catherine had already had two children.

The author had also already written Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist in 1837 and was well on the way to finishing Nicholas Nickleby which he worked on from 1838-39.

There’s more about Dickens’ visit to Shrewsbury in Four Centuries at The Lion Hotel. To buy a copy for the special Christmas price of £6 including postage email John@jbutterworth.plus.com.