Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2017 May 18

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

May 18

Private hotels

In the context of late Victorian or early Edwardian London, what was a private hotel, how did it differ from non-private hotels, and was there a term for non-private hotels? The concept appears repeatedly in A Study in Scarlet (early on, Watson stays in one, and at the end, Stangerson is killed in another), and references in The London of Sherlock Holmes make it appear as if there were significant differences between the two types of hotels. Google found almost nothing useful, and thefreedictionary.com I find it difficult to trust, at least. Nyttend (talk) 04:31, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

No reference here, but I rather suspect it may be just a fuller title, and the differentiating is from "inn". --Dweller (talk) Become old fashioned! 09:52, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Maybe the difference is between an inn and a pension (lodging) or a boarding house? Just some ideas. --Jayron32 12:42, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

Could it be a translation of the French term "Hôtel particulier"? --Xuxl (talk) 12:52, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

"a residential hotel or boarding house in which the proprietor has the right to refuse to accept a person as a guest, esp a person arriving by chance" http://www.thefreedictionary.com/private+hotel - the opposite was a "common inn", where the innkeeper had a legal duty to accept a guest, unless already full. I am not sure if that legal distinction still applies - I suspect it would fall foul of the equality laws, as it would allow the owner to refuse a client for racist or homophobic reasons. There is also an alternative meaning in Australia, where it means there is no alcohol licence, but that would not be the meaning in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Wymspen (talk) 13:32, 18 May 2017 (UTC)

This is speculation, but I suspect that in the Sherlock Holmes context a private hotel is one where many or all of the guests are actually permanent or long-term residents. This used to be a reasonably common way for moderately well-off retired people to live: think of the characters in Separate Tables (film), or the Major and Miss Tibbs & Miss Gatsby in Fawlty Towers. I had a great-uncle who lived in this way in a hotel in Edinburgh for many years around the 1960s (though his was more of a "normal" hotel). AndrewWTaylor (talk) 08:17, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Maybe it was just meant to sound a bit exclusive, "private" in the sense of not open to the hoi-polloi (as the dictionary definition suggests). They are still around, I found the Bluedaws Private Hotel in London. Alansplodge (talk) 01:07, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Most hotels allow the general public to use the dining room and the bar. Maybe private hotels are off - limits for this. 92.19.171.173 (talk) 11:59, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

Probably right. It fits in with the modern Australian definition of a hotel without a bar. Alansplodge (talk) 21:17, 21 May 2017 (UTC)