Restoration London : Everyday Life in the 1660s - Softcover

Picard, Liza

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1842127306 ISBN 13: 9781842127308

Publisher: Phoenix, 2003

Synopsis

'From poverty to pets, from medicine to magic, from slang to sex, from wallpaper to women's rights' A glorious portrait of life in London from 1660-1670 by the bestselling author of ELIZABETH'S LONDON.

Making use of every possible contemporary source - diaries, memoirs, advice books, government papers, almanacs, even the Register of Patents - Liza Picard presents an enthralling picture of how life in London was really lived in the 1600s: the houses and streets, gardens and parks, cooking, clothes and jewellery, cosmetics, hairdressing, housework, laundry and shopping, medicine and dentistry, sex, education, hobbies, etiquette, law and crime, religion and popular beliefs.

About this title

About the Author:

Liza Picard was born in 1927. She read law at the London School of Economics and qualified as a barrister, but did not practise. She worked for many years in the office of the Solicitor of the Inland Revenue and lived in Gray's Inn and Hackney, before retiring to live in Oxford. Restoration London, the result of many years' interest and research into London life, was her first book.

Review:

How our seventeenth-century ancestors ate, slept, travelled, worshipped, loved, clothed themselves, tried to keep healthy ... A marvellous source-book for historical novelists and film-makers out for authenticity, and a near-perfect bedside book for anyone else * Sunday Telegraph * Picard has a delicious sense of humour, an insatiable curiosity and an acute eye for detail. And she tells you all the things you really want to know about everyday life in London between 1660 and 1670 ... A truly wonderful book * Sydney Morning Herald * A densely textured accumulation of physical detail for the period, a history of the prosaic written with clarity and modesty ... An engagingly eccentric book which adds texture to existing accounts of the time -- Helen Simpson * TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT * A beautifully produced reference work ... [an] entertaining historical bran tub -- Rose Tremain * FINANCIAL TIMES * Anyone who enjoys the minutiae of life in the past will have great fun exploring -- Juliet Townsend * SPECTATOR * An encyclopedic overview of the London of Pepys and Wren ... Answers all those questions about the Great Fire of London you wanted to ask but never knew where to look for the answer -- Andrew Roberts * MAIL ON SUNDAY * This is a job of a book. Its style is both simple and evocative ... and it radiates throughout that quality so essential in a good historian: infinite curiosity -- Roy Porter * OBSERVER * A potpourri of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the predictable and the astonishing * Literary Review * Imagine Samuel Pepys re-incarnated as a 20th-century woman lawyer, and looking back at 17th-century London not as a diarist but as a social analyst. Imagine P. D. James deciding to set a thriller in the time of Charles II and assembling her background materials ... There is almost no aspect of life in Restoration London that is not meticulously described in these 300-odd pages -- Jan Morris * INDEPENDENT *

About this edition

• Publisher: Phoenix
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1842127306
• ISBN 13: 9781842127308
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 376