Free Imagined London by Anna Quindlen

Fall of the Roman Empire.
    There was also, according to the exhibit’s companion guide, the requisite hostility toward immigrants. They were simply different immigrants than today’s Brick Lane Bangladeshis or Brixton Jamaicans. Scots, Jews, Irish, French Huguenots. There was, in the opinion of many native Londoners, something wrong with each of them, and they were certain to lower the tone and sully the streets. Many of them set up shop, but not on Bond Street, where the quality shopped, then as now.
    Talk of farthingales and arsenic powder makes us also assume that fashions in dress were completelyunlike our own, and indeed the tight trousers and slashed skirts of Soho would shock and amaze any of the ladies of 1753 London. But in the British Museum exhibit, there are a pair of women’s shoes as pretty as any in a Notting Hill boutique now, blue-green silk encrusted with silver lace, with a small curved heel, and alongside the shoes are some bejeweled hair ornaments, gold and silver with garnets. You could sell either in a sec in Harvey Nick’s to one of those girls in tight trousers.
    White’s and Boodles in Mayfair were the best clubs then, not the more bohemian hangouts of modern London, the Soho and the Groucho, where, one account has it, the artist Damien Hirst was banned for being too casual about exposing himself. (Of course, literature would create its own clubs, some even more compelling. Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft is a member of the Diogenes Club on Pall Mall, a club in which “no member is permitted to take the least notice of any other one.” And Adam Dalgliesh, the poet who is also P. D. James’s Scotland Yard superintendent, occasionally dines at the Cadaver Club on Tavistock Square, whose members are men “with an interest in murder.”)
    For the working man of 1753, one great pleasure was the coffeehouse. There were hundreds of them, all doinga booming business, although to listen to people inveigh against the proliferation of Nero’s decaf take-away latte and the like, you would swear they were purely a modern invention. In the coffeehouses were the newspapers: “All Englishmen are great newsmongers,” one French observer wrote.
    Which brings us to the case of Elizabeth Canning. While the London tabloids of our own time were mining the cases of two women accused of infanticide and another who had killed two young boys when she herself was a child, Elizabeth’s case was the tabloid equivalent of three centuries ago, her bad press now encased in glass exhibition cases. The eighteen-year-old scullery maid disappeared on New Year’s Day, 1753, and when she turned up again a month later she said she’d been kidnapped. Two old women were arrested for the crime, and both found guilty: One was branded on the thumb and sentenced to the notorious Newgate prison—“black as a Newgate knocker,” they once said of the lock of hair thieves wore behind one ear—and the other, incredibly, sentenced to death because she had allegedly stolen Elizabeth’s stays, worth about ten shillings.
    When an alibi surfaced for one woman and a judge became suspicious of Canning’s claims, the alleged stealer of the stays, a woman named Mary Squires(always described in the press as “the old gypsy”) was pardoned by the king. Broadsides showed plans of the house where Canning was allegedly held, which she was apparently unable to describe accurately although it consisted of little more than two small downstairs rooms and an attic. Her portrait appeared in the papers in profile, in a cap and short cape. Another popular illustration showed Canning, who was herself tried for perjury, in the dock; the publisher exercised a master stroke of economy and, instead of using a new drawing, merely recycled the copperplate of the trial of a highwayman named James Maclaine, erasing Maclaine and having an artist draw the figure of a young woman in