At the time Dickens was writing _Dombey and Son_ in 1846, the Royal Hotel at Leamington, where Mr. Dombey stayed with Major Bagstock, and where Edith Granger, who became his second wife, visited him with her mother on one occasion, did not exist, having been demolished about 1841-2 to make way for railway improvements. But he knew the hotel in its palmy and aristocratic days, for in 1838 he and his artist friend, Phiz, made a bachelor excursion in the autumn of that year into the Midlands by coach, their first halt being Leamington, and the hotel they put up at there was Copp's Royal Hotel, which stood at the corner of Clemens Street and High Street. In writing to his wife of his arrival there, he said: "We found a roaring fire, an elegant dinner, a snug room, and capital beds all ready for us at Leamington, after a very agreeable (but very cold) ride." From here they visited Kenilworth, Warwick, and Stratford, and the outcome of the jaunts is reflected in the story. [Illustration: THE BEDFORD HOTEL, BRIGHTON _From an old Engraving_] [Illustration: THE ROYAL HOTEL, LEAMINGTON _From a contemporary lithograph_] Some writers, in referring to the incidents in _Dombey and Son_ associated with the Royal Hotel, have either assumed that it is still there, or, having discovered that there is no hotel with that name in the town, have given the Regent the credit of being the original of Mr. Dombey's Royal Hotel. Neither is correct. The Royal Hotel of _Dombey and Son_ was the Royal Hotel of Dickens's visit to Leamington in 1838, and his descriptions of it in the book must have been made from memory, for in 1846, when he was writing of it in the novel, the hotel had already been demolished. Leamington always boasted one peculiarity which it claimed did not belong to any other watering-place: the "truly select nature and high rank of respectability of the greater part of its frequenters." For the reception of such notables several really first-class hotels were provided. The Regent was the most fashionable for a period, owing to the fact that it was the resort of Royalty; but Copp's Royal Hotel was a keen rival, and when in 1828 it was "re-erected on a scale of magnificence almost unprecedented, displaying a grand front, cased in Roman cement to imitate stone ... in the style of Grecian architecture," it even outshone the Regent. The building was rusticated to the height of the first story and a balcony on a level with the second floor ran the whole extent of the hotel. Its appearance is fully described in an old and very rare guide-book, and so minutely described that it is worth quoting: