History

As the architecture of the city shows today, nineteenth-century London had no shortage of Georgian townhouses in affluent areas such as Kensington, Chelsea, and Westminster. 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.