This anecdote comes from a newspaper of 1820 and concerns a character known as "Memory Corner Thompson".
The article is too long to transcribe in full but starts as follows:
Quote:
There is a professional man now resident near London who drew from actual memory, in twenty hours, at two sittings, in the presence of two well-known gentlemen, a correct plan of of the parish of St. James, with parts of the parishes of Mary-le-bone, St. Ann, and St. Martin; which plan contained every square, street, lane, alley, market, church, chapel, and all public buildings, with all stable and other yards, with every public-house in the parish, and the corners of all streets, with many minutiae, as pumps, posts, trees, houses that project and inject, bow-windows, Carlton-house, St. James's-palace, with the interior of the markets, without scale or reference to any plan, book, or paper whatever.
Additional prodigious feats of memory are listed and it then continues:
Quote:
He can take an inventory, from memory only, of a gentleman's house, from the attic to the ground floor, and afterwards write out the inventory of the same. This was done at Lord Nelson's Merton.
I wonder if Emma invited "Memory Corner Thompson" to Merton as an amusement at one of her dinner parties??!!
MB