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.
'There is almost no aspect of life in Restoration London that is not meticulously described in these 300 odd pages' Jan Morris, Independent
'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' - Roy Porter, Observer
'A pot pourri of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the predictable and the astonishing' - Literary Review
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.