by Rachael Taylor My PhD research focuses on representations of female beauty and cosmetics use in British literature and culture from 1848 to 1901. From performing keyword searches of the JISC Historical Texts database for novels which frequently mentioned cosmetics use to gather my primary sources, I was led to an encounter with G. W. … More Walking the Streets and Treading the Boards: Cosmetics, The Prostitute and the Actress in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and G. W. M. Reynolds’s Ellen Percy; Or, the Memoirs of an Actress (1857)