In late October-early November 1875, Engels and his wife Lizzie Burns tookLizzie’s niece Mary Ellen Burns to a boarding house in Heidelberg. On their return they stayed at the Lord Walden hotel in Dover.
The hotel was opened in September 1853, essentially as a rather grand railway hotel. Guests who stayed there included Napoleon 111 and Charles Dickens. Engels was another visitor although he had mixed views about the quality of the rooms and breakfasts and it seems the boot cleaning.
More on the Lord Warden hotel
https://doverhistorian.com/2013/10/02/lord-warden-hotel-house/
London, 8 November 1875
ENGELS T O PHILIPP PAULI
(122 Regent’s Park Road)
Dear Pauli,
We got back here safely last Saturday afternoon, having stopped
overnight in Bingen, Cologne and Dover. In accordance with your
advice we took the steamer from Bingen to Cologne and didn’t
regret it for one instant. The crossing from Ostend was quite good
for the time of year, though my wife suffered a little from seasickness
for a while. In Dover, where we stayed at the Lord Warden, we
recalled how once, in this same hotel, an old Englishman with six
daughters had said: ‘THANK GOD, TS THE COMFORTS OF AN ENGLISH
HOTEL’—consisting of a good bed and a bad breakfast and unpolished
boots, for which they charged us the trifling sum of 16/-, say, sixteen
shillings.
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