Liza Picard

Like her previous books, this book is the product of the author's passionate interest in the realities of everyday life - and the conditions in which most people lived - so often left out of history books. This period of mid Victorian London covers a huge span: Victoria's wedding and the place of the royals in popular esteem; how the very poor lived, the underworld, prostitution, crime, prisons and transportation; the public utilities - Bazalgette on sewers and road design, Chadwick on pollution and sanitation; private charities - Peabody, Burdett Coutts - and workhouses; new terraced housing and transport, trains, omnibuses and the Underground; furniture and decor; families and the position of women; the prosperous middle classes and their new shops, e.g. Peter Jones, Harrods; entertaining and servants, food and drink; unlimited liability and bankruptcy; the rich, the marriage market, taxes and anti-semitism; the Empire, recruitment and press-gangs. The period begins with the closing of the Fleet and Marshalsea prisons and ends with the first (steam-operated) Underground trains and the first Gilbert & Sullivan.

The Life of a City, 1840-1870

Victorian London

An illustrated portrait of daily life in late-sixteenth-century London covers everything from city sanitation to social mores, from the disapproval of spitting by everyone but the queen, to prostitution within the halls of St. Paul's Cathedral, to the right of male guests to kiss a host's female family members. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Everyday Life in Elizabethan London

Elizabeth's London

'A holiday in the complex, joyful, indelicate medieval world' John Higgs, author of Watling Street Chaucer's People is an absorbing and revealing guide to the Middle Ages, populated with Chaucer's pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales. These are lives spent at the pedal of a loom, maintaining the ledgers of an estate or navigating the high seas. Drawing on contemporary experiences of a vast range of subjects including trade, religion, toe-curling remedies and hair-raising recipes, bestselling historian Liza Picard recreates the medieval world in glorious detail.

Everyday Lives in Medieval England

Chaucer's People

'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.

Restoration London

A portrait of Victorian London describes how the mid-nineteenth-century city was transformed by expanding suburbs, transportation innovations, and advances in medicine, in an account based on previously unpublished diaries that offer insight into the era's transitional role between older and modern codes of conduct. By the author of Elizabeth's London. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

The Tale of a City 1840--1870

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

Liza Picard

About

Books

Join the club