Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The area had a number of galleries and there were frequent exhibitions. The Gallery of
the British Institution was established by George III to promote native artists and Jane vis-
ited on the same day in 1811 that she went to the Liverpool Museum.
In May 1813 she was amusing herself identifying her characters in portraits in exhib-
itions she visited. Having searched the Society of Painters in Watercolours exhibition in
Spring Gardens for an image of Elizabeth Bennett - Mrs Darcy - she told Cassandra, 'I
have no chance of her in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Paintings which is now
shewing in Pall Mall, & which we are also to visit.' She expected, when she did find her,
that she would be dressed in yellow.
On 8 March 1814 she went to see a group of Indian jugglers at 87 Pall Mall but did not
report what she thought of them.
Pall Mall had a number of upmarket shops. In
Sense and Sensibility
it was outside a sta-
tioner's shop here that Colonel Brandon heard two ladies gossiping in their carriage about
Willoughby's engagement to Miss Grey.
The fashionable drapers, Harding, Howell and Co., were located in the seventeenth-cen-
tury red brick Schomberg House, which still stands out in this street of stone and stucco.
The haberdashery department of Harding, Howell & Co. in
Schomberg House.
St James's Palace, shown here in 1812, has hardly changed to the
present day.
According to Ackermann's
Repository
, 'It is fitted up with great taste, and divided by
glazed partitions into four departments.' These were: furs and fans; 'haberdashery of every
description, silks, muslins, lace, gloves etc.'; jewellery and ornamental items including per-
fumery; and finally millinery and dresses, 'so that there is no article of female attire or dec-
oration, but what may be here procured in the first style of elegance and fashion.'
