Genre:

Editorial Reply, Drollery

Subjects:

Gender, Mathematics, Education, Class, Public Health, Disease

    The editor replies to letters from correspondents complaining about the 'enormous length of our fashionable women's trains'. 'If we were to calculate the extent of the fashionable promenades by the space which one of our élégantes occupies in walking there, it would be absolutely necessary to call in the aid of a little practical geometry, and we are afraid, in consequence of this, some of our beaux would be compelled to return to their studies, and attend a course of lectures in that science. What an alteration would not this make in the beau-monde? The simpering fops would become geometricians, their minds bent on calculation'. Suggests that trains are 'hurtful to public salubrity', since they raise 'clouds of dust of an evening in St. James's and the Green Park', causing lung disease.