THE PAVILION HOTEL, FOLKESTONE
From old Engravings
This was written in 1855, and even by then Dickens had to admit that things had changed considerably for the better.
“If you are going out to Great Pavilionstone Hotel, the sprightliest porters under the sun, whose cheerful looks are a pleasant welcome, shoulder your luggage, drive it off in vans, bowl it away in trucks, and enjoy themselves in playing athletic games with it. If you are for public life at our great Pavilionstone Hotel, you walk into that establishment as if it were your club; and find ready for you your news-room, dining-room, smoking-room, billiard-room, music-room, public breakfast, public dinner twice a day (one plain, one gorgeous), hot baths and cold baths. If you want to be bored, there are plenty of bores always ready for you, and from Saturday to Monday in particular you can be bored (if you like it) through and through. Should you want to be private at our Great Pavilionstone Hotel, say but the word, look at the list of charges, choose your floor, name your figure—there you are, established in your castle, by the day, week, month, or year, innocent of all comers or goers, unless you have my fancy for walking early in the morning down the groves of boots and shoes, which so regularly flourish at all the chamber doors before breakfast that it seems to me as if nobody ever got up or took them in....
“A thoroughly good inn, in the days of coaching and posting, was a noble place. But no such inn would have been equal to the reception of four or five hundred people, all of them wet through, and half of them dead sick, every day in the year. This is where we shine, in our Pavilionstone Hotel....”
The hotel has, alas, made way for something still more imposing. Its extensive red-brick building, containing hundreds of rooms, with its spacious gardens in front, would both astonish and disappoint the novelist if he saw it to-day, for there is no doubt that he was very fond of its predecessor, very frequently used it, and found hearty welcome there.
The hotel is again referred to in the sketch entitled “A Flight” in the same volume, where, however, he calls it the Royal George Hotel.
In the volume of Miscellaneous Papers there is one describing a visit to Birmingham and Wolverhampton, under the heading of “Fire and Snow.” At the latter town Dickens stayed at the Swan, which he says “is a bird of a good substantial brood, worthy to be a country cousin of the hospitable Hen and Chickens, whose company we have deserted for only a few hours, and with whom we shall roost again at Birmingham to-night.”
The Hen and Chickens here referred to was an hotel Dickens knew very well indeed. Apart from his books, Birmingham is very closely connected with Dickens himself and the various schemes he embarked upon for the welfare of others. He visited it on several occasions, either for the purpose of public reading from his works, to give theatrical performances for charity, or to appear at some national function associated with the city. These visits were spread over the whole of his life, the last occasion being on the 7th of January, 1870, when he presented the prizes to the students of the Birmingham and Midland Institute.
During his stay in the city, Dickens usually put up at the Old Royal Hotel in Temple Row, or at the Hen and Chickens in New Street, and it may be assumed that he knew both hotels well. Only the former, however, is made the scene of an incident in his novels, and that is, when it is introduced into The Pickwick Papers.[4] He visited Birmingham some dozen times from 1840 to 1870, and on most of the early occasions it is believed that he stayed at the Old Royal Hotel. But during his later visits he made the Hen and Chickens Hotel his headquarters. He was there in Christmas week, 1853, for the series of readings from his books, and before he left the city he and his friends were entertained at breakfast at the hotel, and a presentation was made to Mrs. Dickens.