Other positive effects accredited to the wearing of crinolines were revealed in 1858 when a girl named Martha Shepherd, attempting to commit suicide, leaped from the top of the balustrade of the bridge over the Serpentine in Hyde Park. She clearly had not thought things through as while falling her crinoline expanded to its full dimensions and ‘she came upon the water like a balloon floating there for several minutes’, as reported in the Ipswich Journal.
