Psychological torture enters the story, as Lionel’s sister Perdita begins to experience the world of a politician’s wife.
For the return to Westminster, we go back behind the walls of the old House of Commons.
Even as they were being demolished for an expansion of the hall, an engraver named John Thomas “Antiquity” Smith cataloged the newly-discovered wall paintings and decorative fragments from the medieval chapel that had been there originally—a regal, sumptuous, polychromatic one; see it reconstructed in panoramic 3D by the generous scholars at the University of York, whose work I used here previously. In 1807, Smith published Antiquities of Westminster, an historical survey with an account of the discovery and many beautiful plates (there’s even one lithograph, the first ever in an English book); read it at Internet Archive.
