The “handsome hotel,” “between Park Lane and Bond Street,” referred to in Chapter XXXII. of _Nicholas Nickleby_, cannot be identified: there are, and long have been, so many handsome hotels in that region. It was in the coffee-room of this establishment that Nicholas encountered Sir Mulberry Hawk; and the description of the affair brings back the memory of a state of things long past. The “Coffee-room” with its boxes partitioned off, no longer exists; there are no such things as those boxes anywhere now, except perhaps in some old-fashioned “eating-houses.” But in that period of which Dickens wrote, the “coffee-room” of an hotel was an institution not so very long before copied from the then dead or fast-expiring “Coffee Houses” of the eighteenth century: once--in the days before clubs--the meeting-places of wits and business men. The Coffee House had been the club of its own particular age, and as there are nowadays clubs for every class and all professions, so in that period there were special Coffee Houses for individual groups of people, where they read the papers and learned the gossip of their circle. Inns and hotels copied the institution of a public refreshment-room that would nowadays be styled the restaurant, and transferred the name of “Coffee-room,” without specifically supplying the coffee; which, to be sure, was a beverage fast growing out of fashion, in favour of wines, beer, and brandy and water. No one drank whisky then. Fashions in nomenclature linger long, and even now in old-established inns and hotels, the Coffee-room still exists, but has paradoxically come to mean a public combined dining- and sitting-room for private guests, in contradistinction from the Commercial-room, to which commercial travellers resort, at a recognised lower tariff. There are inns also in _Oliver Twist_; not inns essential to the story, nor in themselves prepossessing, but, in the case of the “Coach and Horses” at Isleworth, remarkably well observed when we consider that the reference is only in passing. Indeed, the topographical accuracy of Dickens, where he is wishful to be accurate, is astonishing. The literary pilgrim sets out to follow the routes he indicates, possibly doubtful if he will find the places mentioned. There, however, they are (if modern alterations have not removed them), for Dickens apparently visited the scenes and from one eagle glance described them with all the accuracy of a guide-book. Thus, Bill Sikes and Oliver, trudging from London to Chertsey, where the burglary was to be committed, and occasionally getting a lift on the way, are set down from a cart at the end of Brentford. At length they came to a public-house called the “Coach and Horses”; a little way beyond which another road appeared to turn off. And here the cart stopped. [Illustration: THE “COACH AND HORSES,” ISLEWORTH.]