An interesting and well-researched reference on everyday life in London in the mid 18th century, particularly for the poor and middle classes, this book covers everything from housing to medicine to jobs and labor relations to entertainment. It’s minutely organized and indexed, making it very easy to refer back to a particular section; individual sections, however, are quite short, no surprise when the text comes in at under 300 pages for a broad variety of material. I found a number of surprises about the 18th century: at the same time, water was being piped into Londoners’ homes through pipes made of elm buried under the streets (wooden pipes? And we think of water utilities as being a much later development), and convicted criminals might be put in the pillory or whipped through the streets (which sounds downright medieval). This is not a narrative – Samuel Johnson, of Dictionary of the English Language fame, provides a time frame but is only occasionally mentioned – but it should be both useful and accessible to those interested in learning more about the period.

This is a somewhat bland novel that is supposed to be an autobiography of Jean-Luc Picard, but reads more like a Vulcan student's summary of the life of Captain Picard in which his human school mate wrote the first third dealing with Picard's childhood. Nothing particularly new or exciting to read here.

I recommend the Star Gazer novels by Michael Jan Friedman and Buried Age by Christopher L. Bennett for anyone wanting to know more about Jean-Luc Picard.

This rating (4 1/2 stars) is for Picard's Restoration London: From Poverty to Pets, From Medicine to Magic, From Slang to Sex, From Wallpaper to Women's Rights, which I can't seem to find in the database.  All of her London books are well worth a read (and tend to have interesting illustrations), and cover the social history of the city from Elizabethan through Victorian times (so roughly 1560-1870).

I'd love for her to do a "Chaucer's London," but am not sanguine (Picard is 87, I believe).

bookshelves: winter-20102011, nonfiction, history, britain-england, published-2000, medical-eew, sciences

 Home audio. You will need a strong stomach to take some of the medical stuff *shudders*


Narrator Fiona Shaw

blurb - Liza Picard certainly isn't tired of London. The lives that once thronged its streets are the stuff of her books, and Dr Johnson's London updates her 1997 volume, Restoration London, by one hundred years or so. Samuel Pepys gives way to Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, though, entertainingly, she shows no affection for the pair. She pursues them solely for their era, stretching 30 years from 1740 to 1770, pivoted on the publication of Johnson's Dictionary in 1755. Starting with a "virtual" sedan-chair tour of the city, she proceeds to elucidate every aspect of urban life, with particular attention paid to the poor, and the "middling sort", a fledgling middle class. This goes some way to redressing a balance which historically has tended to favour the rich and famous, who left behind the majority of buildings and ephemera.
Picard's conversational style, as bursting with rhetorical questions as a primary teacher, belies the breadth of her reading and research. Her informality breathes life into dry descriptions, and her sharp eye lends itself to shrewd selection from source passages. The familiarity of this Blackadder-esque London is borne out by its physical dimensions, with parks, hospitals and even bridges already starting to become recognisable to a contemporary eye, as well as its phenomena, such as lottery tickets and road rage. Although Picard sways between tenses with a giddy ease, adding a sprinkling of her own curious observations, her assimilation of information renders her prose sprightly, whether she be observing a meal in "real time", or delighting in the medical remedies, often involving quite the worst ingredients (though it's useful to know that powdered roast mouse is a reliable cure for incontinence).

Hogath's depiction of cruelty clearly shows a parish workhouse badge worn on the right arm of the light coloured youth. It was the law of the times that these badges be worn."

Rake's Progress by Hogarth"