Restoration London, Liza Picard
Restoration London, Liza Picard
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Restoration London
Everyday Life in the 1660s

Author: Liza Picard

Narrator: Sean Barrett

Abridged: 6 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/21/2011

Synopsis

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.

Read by Sean Barrett

(p) 2004 Orion Publishing Group

About Liza Picard

Liza Picard was born in 1927. She is the bestselling author an acclaimed series of books on the history of London: ELIZABETH'S LONDON, RESTORATION LONDON, DR JOHNSON'S LONDON and VICTORIAN LONDON. Her most recent book, CHAUCER'S PEOPLE, explores the Middle Ages through the lives of the pilgrims in THE CANTERBURY TALES. She read law at the London School of Economics and was called to the Bar by Gray's Inn, but did not practise. She worked for many years in the office of the Solicitor of the Inland Revenue before retiring to become a full-time author. She lives in London.

About Sean Barrett

Sean Barrett has narrated many television documentaries for the BBC and Discovery Channel, notably THE PEOPLE'S CENTURY, WALKING WITH BEASTS, and GREAT LIVES. As a member of the BBC Radio Rep, he has appeared in hundreds of radio plays, and played Father Gillespie in the BBC Worldservice / BBC7 serial WESTWAY throughout its eight year-run. As a film and television actor he has appeared in pieces as diverse as TWELFTH NIGHT and FATHER TED, and he is a doyen of audiobook reading, with acclaimed recordings of authors ranging from Chaucer to Beckett and in 2012 recorded Antony Beevor's THE SECOND WORLD WAR.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Lolly's Library on January 10, 2012

Whoa. This is certainly not a book you could read in one go...unless you want your eyes to bleed from overuse. Reading this was the equivalent of a rich, heavy fruitcake which had been crumbled up and stirred into the batter of another rich, heavy fruitcake, with the resulting confection then covere......more

Goodreads review by Brian on July 15, 2017

Like Picard's other books on this topic from different eras, this survey of what it meant to live in the time of the Restoration of the monarch to the English throne covers every conceivable area of daily life. Depending upon one's personal interests, some sections will be more interesting than othe......more

Goodreads review by Rachel on February 26, 2011

Finished this a while ago, and just read Bill Bryson's At Home. They're a nice companion set about life in England in the "olden days". The jacket of Restoration London tries to sell it as a catalog of all the crazy things Britons did and thought in the 17th century, but the book is really a solidly......more

Goodreads review by Karen on January 29, 2016

Having read and thoroughly enjoyed Liza Picard’s Elizabethan London, I knew I was in for a real treat when I discovered her book, Restoration London: Everyday Life in the 1660s. I wasn’t disappointed. Using sources from the era (in particular, extracts from Samuel Pepys diary) as well as almanacs, g......more

Quotes

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 INDEPENDENT

A potpourri of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the predictable and the astonishing Literary Review

This is a joy of a book. Its style is both simple and evocative ... and it radiates throughout that quality so essential in a good historian: infinite curiosity Observer

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 MAIL ON SUNDAY

Anyone who enjoys the minutiae of life in the past will have great fun exploring SPECTATOR

A beautifully produced reference work ... [an] entertaining historical bran tub FINANCIAL TIMES

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 TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

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

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

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