each end wall. Cruikshank suggests that the unfluted shafts were marbled or of scagliola. Between the capitals, the bays were decorated with a frieze of festoons and paterae, and below these were oblong panels with relief subjects. In Cruikshank's time, the windows were furnished with elegant scrolled pelmet-heads of gilt wood supporting swagged draperies, and Rococo looking-glasses filled some of the wall panels. He shows the orchestra playing in a balcony with a gilt trellised railing, but in a position it can hardly have occupied, and two-tiered crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling. In the Old and New London view, these have been replaced by huge lustres of cut glass, hanging from a flat ceiling with a shallow segmental cove, the general form of which was probably original. Not shown in the earlier illustration, but reported by sources at the time, are the sofas which lined the walls for the guests to sit on between dances, the ladies-patronesses having a sofa to themselves at the upper end. Besides the great ballroom, the building also included card rooms and supper rooms." In fiction Almack's, in its heyday, appears or is mentioned in some of the "silver fork novels" of the time. These notably included Almack's by Marianne Spencer Hudson (1827) and Almack's Revisited by Charles White (1828). Almack's and its patronesses also appear frequently in the Regency romances of Georgette Heyer and many other authors of the genre. Heyer stresses the crucial importance to one's social standing of gaining admission to the club: "the right of entry (to Almack's) conferred on the recipient a greater distinction than a Court presentation, and was far more difficult to obtain". Despite the fact that the actual entertainment was notoriously dull and the refreshments inferior, exclusion from Almack's was the ultimate social failure. In a significant speech made at a banquet for the London Metropolitan Sanitary Association on 10 May 1851, a speech which prefigured the publication of Bleak House in serial form in March 1852, Charles Dickens referred to Almack's: 'That no man could estimate the amount of mischief grown in dirt - that no man could say the evil stops here or stops there, either to its moral or physical effects, or could deny that it begins in the cradle or was not at rest in the grave - was as certain as it was, that the air from Gin-Lane would not be