The Importance of the Women in the Prison

There was a coarser fibre in those wives in maidens' old English birth and breeding than in their fair descendants. The age had not so much refinement that any sense of impropriety restrained the wares of Petticoat and Varthingale from stepping forth into the public ways. A boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, would startle us at the present day. They were her country-women, and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not mor refined, entered largely into their composition.

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