George Moore lived in “two detestable rooms” at this address from 1883 (the year of A Modern Lover) until 1887 (the year of A Mere Accident). Despite its name, location and decrepitude (the property was termed “ancient” in auction publicity in 1909), the building was not one of the Inns of Court.
Moore entered the little cul-de-sac called Danes Inn by a gateway near the intersection of the Strand and Wych Street — “a narrow, licentious street” in his contemporary account (“Spring in London,” Pall Mall Gazette, 31 March 1894).
The gateway opened into a dark and dreary alley, surrounded on either side by tenements and closed at the far end by a wall bordering New Inn.
On the right side of the gate as he entered he passed the King’s Head Public House, to whose namesake in Soho the character William Latch welcomed his bride Esther Waters (1894).
Danes Inn and Wych Street, in an area once famous for a heavy concentration of booksellers, disappeared around 1901 in the building of today’s Aldwych. The post office never recorded George Moore’s residence here, nor the residence in 1886 of the poet Francis Thompson.
