“presented a woeful aspect, being dirty and very ragged.” The police judged “Nichols” to be “the worst woman in the square.”4 It was described how she and a group of other women had made a business of begging beneath the terrace that separated the National Gallery from Trafalgar Square. These women waited for “respectable people” to appear, at which point they would “take off their shawls and shake themselves as if they were cold, in order to invite sympathy.”
