Previous
Mood
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
“The Landlady” is set in the city of Bath, England in the mid-20th century. Dahl communicates several important elements of the setting in the opening lines of the story:
Billy Weaver had traveled down from London on the slow afternoon train, with a change at Reading on the way, and by the time he got to Bath, it was about nine o’clock in the evening, and the moon was coming up out of a clear starry sky over the houses opposite the station entrance. But the air was deadly cold and the wind was like a flat blade of ice on his cheeks.
Here readers learn that Billy, the protagonist, is visiting Bath from London and that he is getting in after dark on a cold winter’s night. These details—combined with the description of the wind as “a flat blade of ice on [Billy’s] cheeks”—suggest an unsettled energy. At the time Dahl wrote this story, cities were viewed as sites of immorality and violence, so the fact that Billy is arriving at this new place after dark is likely meant to put readers on edge.
As the story goes on, Billy ends up deciding to stay at an isolated yet cozy-looking bed and breakfast rather than at the popular Bell and Dragon pub that the train porter recommended to him. In having the landlady of the empty bed and breakfast turn out to be a psychotic murderer, Dahl suggests that the anonymity of city life is dangerous and people are safer when living (or traveling) in community.
Related Themes:
