If you want to know what London looked like in Jane Austen’s day, there is no better place to start than The Microcosm of London, a series of coloured prints published by the enterprising Rudolph Ackermann (who designed Nelson’s funeral carriage, with emblematic figurehead). Thomas Rowlandson provided the human figures that peopled the architectural drawings by Augustus Pugin, (father of the architect).
One print is of the Great Synagogue at Duke’s Place in Houndsditch, on the edge of the City of London, an airy space that could be taken for a Georgian church. Light comes in from round-headed windows below the ceiling and along the galleries each side, which are supported by tall Ionic columns. In the galleries can be made out shapely forms of women in the bonnets and Grecian dresses of the period. They look over the parapet of a grille or mehitzah that separates them from the men worshippers.
