Laura Bell, ex-Belfast shop girl, whose apogee as what Sir William Hardman called "The Queen of London Whoredom" occurred in the mid-nineteenth century, was an immensely successful prostitute. When she visited the Opera in 1852 the whole house rose to watch her departure. In 1856 she married Captain Augustus Thistlethwaytes, a nephew of the then Bishop of Norwich. They lived for a time in Grosvenor Square in what may be considered a somewhat eccentric fashion. The Captain, for instance, summoned servants by firing a pistol through the bedroom ceiling. Laura had brought to the marriage a dowry of £250,000, earned from a Nepalese prince. Later she "got religion" and "she was, by all accounts, as successful a preacher as she had been a whore- no mean achievement." Cora Pearl, another nineteenth-century prostitute managed to accumulate a few hundred thousand pounds.