Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
She was here again in March 1814, working on the proofs, and wrote on the 21st, 'Per-
haps before the end of April,
Mansfield Park
by the author of S. & S. - P. & P. may be in
the World.' It was actually published in May.
The royal coat of arms over the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre.
The ground floor is a shop now, although the upper part of the façade is more or less as
Jane would have known it. The interior was virtually stripped out when it became a nurses'
home in the 1950s.
Henry moved back to Knightsbridge in mid-summer 1814. Perhaps, after all, he found
Covent Garden noisy and disruptive and the apartment too small.
Next door, at No. 9, was Bedford House, the mercers' shop of Layton and Shears. On 24
May 1813 Jane bought fabric there for her mother to have a gown made up - seven yards at
six shillings and sixpence the yard. And in September she was shopping there again, look-
ing at very pretty English and Irish poplins, a cloth made of silk and fine worsted.
At the end of Henrietta Street turn left and left again into Maiden Lane which retains a
few eighteenth-century houses. On the right is Exchange Court, the site of the artist Turn-
er's birthplace. Further along on the same side is the Adelphi Theatre's stage door. The
present building is on the site of the Sans Pareil (1806), which became the Adelphi in 1819.
It was popular for burlesques, melodramas, farces and pantomimes. Further along, Rules
restaurant, which dates to 1798, still serves traditional English food, although in an atmo-
sphere more redolent of the Edwardians than the Georgians.
Covent Garden is still full of stalls and crowded with shoppers, but
these days they are buying gifts and crafts, not fruit and vegetables.
