… functioned as settings for novels, facilitating encounters between individuals belonging to different strata of society. With the advent of the railway network in the nineteenth century, they began to decline. Places > Residences & … the inn's potential as a literary setting and used it as a backdrop to chance encounters and as a symbolic microcosm of society. 8 Inns also figured regularly in travelogues. The range of inns a traveller might encounter in the course of a … 1909). 7 . Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989). 8 . On the role of the inn in some select novels, see …