History

With London’s rapidly growing population during the nineteenth century, many large estates were broken up to make way for businesses and more efficient housing. However, mansions and larger villas with gardens were present in affluent parts of the city. Many working-class people were employed in middle and upper-class homes (as cooks, housekeepers, footmen, etc.), but such spaces often demanded respectable appearances as these were seen to represent deeper human qualities. For more on nineteenth-century standards of physical appearance, see Ryan Sweet’s free 2022 book Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.