Samuel Johnson’s house in London was full of people reliant on him in one way or another. When he needed respite, he traveled to Streatham Park, outside London, to be the houseguest of the Thrales. He was such a frequent visitor that he had his own room and was treated as a member of the family, his likes and dislikes known, his various ailments — melancholia, insomnia — understood. These trips to the countryside offered a psychological solace he could achieve only in the care of Streatham’s mistress, the devoted Hester Thrale. She kept the house quiet for him and provided interesting dinner guests for conversation in the evening. He worked if he could, or waited out the depressions that often overwhelmed him. For a distressed author it was the ideal arrangement — not unlike any number of residencies for which writers compete today.

Henry James, too, while an expatriate writer in Europe making only a modest living from his writing, gained access to a range of social circles by being an intrepid houseguest. He once admitted that his best story ideas came from dinner table gossip. An inveterate eavesdropper, he insisted that he was mindful to listen just enough to leave room for invention. Whether his hosts always found his presence equally advantageous is unclear.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge also thrived as a guest. He lived with the Wordsworths for weeks at a time, often working or talking with his hosts into the night. The arrangement was a productive one for all of them, but Wordsworth later described Coleridge to a mutual friend as “an absolute nuisance” who “was rotting out his entrails by intemperance.” When not dosing himself with laudanum, Coleridge drank gin, and often woke screaming in the night, terrifying Wordsworth’s family.

The original 1922 edition of Emily Post’s guide to manners has pages and pages of directives for hosts, including that a good host should periodically spend 24 hours in her guest room to better understand its strengths and weaknesses. About being a guest she writes only: “The perfect guest not only tries to wear becoming clothes but tries to put on an equally becoming mental attitude.”

That’s a lot of work for the modern sensibility, which might go some way to explaining why use of the word “houseguest” rose after World War II, peaked around the millennium and seems to be on the decline in our current era of Airbnb. But look at what can arise from the intimacy of shared space: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her future husband, Percy Shelley, were guests of Lord Byron in a villa on Lake Geneva that cold, wet June of 1816 when she started her famous ghost story. Then she finished “Frankenstein” back in England the following year in a house full of guests (a number of whom stayed for two and a half months!), along with six small children and a husband who did little to help.