Last September when I met up with my online book group friend sherry in Marion, Massachusetts she presented me with a copy of Elizabeth Bowen‘s ‘The Shelbourne Hotel : an enchanting account […] of the hotel that for more than a century has been at the heart of Irish life’. Tucked inside the book was this postcard (no date, but probably early 20th century) :

Postcard View

The Shelbourne Today

I read the book in May for a taste of the history of this grand hotel in advance of a booked Afternoon Tea with Julie, another book group friend, on Tuesday 7 June. This date had been in my diary for nearly a year! Julie was staying in Dublin to attend a meeting of Law Librarians later in the week. (I already know that next June I could be meeting her for tea at one of those glitzy hotels in …… Manchester)

The Wonderland Sandwiches Arrive

Bowen’s history only takes us up to the end of the 1940s. The US edition (mine) was first published in 1951. You can read a potted history of the hotel here. But Elizabeth Bowen’s full account of how the hotel came about, the backgrounds to all the characters – owners and employees, quirky designs and family rows makes the story very entertaining – as you would expect from such a fine writer.

The Shelbourne Lobby

For fun here I noted a few eccentricities/interesting features from the book to look out for but following refurbishments most of these have now disappeared. As far as I could see there is no longer a stuffed moose in the lobby;

“(The moose, which for some reason was to have a depressing effect on Thackeray, is still on view)” [p.57]

the original lift has now gone;

“And the Shelbourne now had in its core a new sound and motion: it had installed a lift. strung on cables, round and round which the flights of the staircase turn, the lift hummed up and down inside fretwork gates – as it continues to do today.” [1906-1913 p.168]

and (horror of horrors) although the room is basically as per Bowen’s description it is called The Lord Mayor’s Lounge.

“In the drawing room ], for instance – never let us fall short and call this the lounge! – elaborately heavy frieze and patterned ceiling soar above pale-tinted walls, light coffee tables, and those armchairs and sofas whose easy-going resilience and floral cretonnes Mrs Margaret Jury might not, perhaps, have approved. Victorianism is a structural part of the Shelbourne’s ground floor, whose atmosphere it mellows and dignifies.” [p. 227]