Titled 'Refreshments for Travellers' in The Uncommercial Traveller, Vol. 1 (1860, 1863).
The French idea of a 'restaurant' to refresh and restore travellers of both sexes during a journey, was still foreign to British cities in 1860, but the end of March saw the second reading of Gladstone's 'Refreshment Houses and Wine Licensing Bill', which proposed: to let small retailers take out licences (at the discretion of the issuing magistrate) for the sale of wine to be consumed off the premises, to let eating-house keepers take out licences for the sale of wine to be consumed on the premises, and to place all eating houses under the control of the police; the Bill became law on 1 July 1860 (Refreshment Houses and Wine Licenses Act, 23 Vict. cap. 27). Dickens's paper is in one sense highly topical, anticipating a leader in The Times of 28 March, which repeats the main complaint in Dickens's essay: '[o]ne of the most grievous discomforts to which all visitors to London are exposed is the difficulty of finding in it either a dinner or a luncheon, more especially if ladies are of the party... The want is in the deficiency of small Refreshment houses where people of moderate or even humble means may procure dinner and other necessary refreshments at a [small] cost' (p. 9 cols. d-e).
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