Restoration London: Everyday Life in the 1660s

by Liza Picard

How did you clean your teeth in the 1660s? What make-up did you wear? What pets did you keep?Making use of every possible contemporary source, Liza Picard presents an engrossing picture of how life in London was really lived in an age of Samuel Pepys, the libertine court of Charles II and the Great Fire of London. The topics covered include 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 belief. The London of 350 years ago is brought (and sometimes horrifyingly) to life.'A joy of a book ... It radiates throughout that quality so essential in a good infinite curiosity' Observer

Genres: History, Nonfiction, London, 17th Century, British Literature, Historical, Research

501 pages, Kindle Edition

First published June 9, 1997

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 spent many years working in the office of the Solicitor of the Inland Revenue and lived in Gray’s Inn and Hackney, before retiring to live in Oxford.

Her legal training encouraged her to seek original evidence, rather than rely on other peoples' research. This she says ‘is always to be recommended. It’s hard work but can be fascinating.’ Restoration London, the result of many years' interest and research into London life, was her first book.

Reviews

[Petra X · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I like about Liza Picard's books is that she tells you what is was like to live in the period she was writing about including all the interestesting minutae to do with sex, love and if not rock n roll, then what everyone did for fun. But she does not, as with most historians, include the political minutae of the times. Politics are described with broad strokes and which politician said what and to whom about which war in some far flung outpost of empire is thankfully absent from Picard's histories.

They are particularly wonderful if you are reading novels set in a particular period and you want to know how people lived, what they wore, what they ate, what they did with their chamberpots (between the Romans flush toilets and ours, in general the disposal of the contents was a horrible process and there can't have been many places that didn't have an ammoniac and manure-like stench).

History books often describe what the rich and their servants wore and ate, occasionally peasants coming in for the anthropological treatment as well, but rarely the ordinary independent person. And this is where Liza Picard shines, she illuminates the every day lives of people like us, neither beholden to the rich nor scraping a day-to-day existence.

The book can be read cover to cover or dipped reading an interesting chapter here and there. If you enjoy knowing about other cultures and other times, you might well enjoy this.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book, I've read it multiple times and enjoy it every time. The author describes how life was in Restoration London, for not just the aristocracy, but also the poor and middle class. She describes how their every day lives were, not just the special parts, like marriage. I recommend this for history buffs and for students needing information for reports.

Re read 2016. I do enjoy this book, but it's not my favorite by the author. I don't know if it's because it was her first book and she hadn't found her style or if the era it's about isn't one of the ones I'm super interested in. It's still a great book and good general social history of the era.

[Lolly's Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 covered with an inch-thick layer of cream cheese frosting...and then trying to eat it. (I know, you don't frost fruitcakes, but just go with it.) What I'm saying is, small bites is the only way to safely consume this tome. However, the pleasure derived from devouring Picard's work is well worth the mental overindulgence. (I apologize for all the food references, but, post-holidays, can you blame me?) Upon completing Restoration London, the reader will have an unbelievably detailed and intimate knowledge of the workings of that city during a narrow period of time, 1660-70 (with a little leeway fore and aft). Using Samuel Pepys as her guide and mentor, she has taken his already detailed observations and expanded upon them using numerous contemporary sources, including first-hand accounts, reports, surveys, maps, censuses, memoirs and more. From royalty to the lowest of the low, every aspect of life has been covered exhaustively. Should you ever want to know the average ceiling height required in the houses put up after the Great Fire or the price of importing pepper, it's all here. And so much more. The book both satisfies the curiosity and entertains the mind, making it an invaluable reference for writers, researchers, trivia seekers and general history enthusiasts.

[Brian Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

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 others, but it is an endlessly enjoyable look at 1660s life that evokes the senses and explains living in those times better than most books do.

[Caroline]

This is an excellent book, but I couldn’t read it.

I couldn’t even follow the reading rule that I have picked up here on Goodreads “read 50 pages before you decide to give up on a book, (or if you are over 50 read one page for every year of your age)”. I couldn’t do it. By page 16 I was flaking. Even after two cups of coffee and a decent breakfast I was flaking.

The book is densely packed with information. It looks like Liza Picard has really done her research, but for me it read much more like a reference book than any sort narrative read. It also doesn’t help that in the paperback the typeface is quite small.

I think it would be an invaluable resource for writers and students – especially if they were seeking specific information. The book is arranged under headings like ‘gardens’, ‘men’s clothes’, ‘crime’, ‘formal schooling’ etc....and you could just dive in to your topic of choice. But to read it through from start to finish was a challenge I couldn’t face.

I am not going to give the book any sort of rating. I got on with it really badly, yet I can see it might be invaluable to others.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

London, 1660 and I'm glad I wasn't alive then. The usual age to marry was 26 and a woman was four times as likely to die in the 1st decade of marriage than men. If she made it to 30 (middle age) she had a pretty good chance of living to 60. Lots of interesting facts about the black plague and you will be surprised to learn what the principal cause of death was...hint..."cough, cough...I can't breath and my lungs hurt". In her usual great style, Liza Picard does an amazing job of putting you on the dirty streets of London in 1660.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

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 researched history of domestic life. I recommend it.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

What it says on the cover.

Fascinating look at life in Restoration London.

Well worth a read if you find period or the place interesting.

Highly recommended.

[Alisa Kester · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am so annoyed right now I had to write a mini-review of page 67 (which is as far as I have gotten, so far). Page 67 says, speaking of the difficulty of getting into a small boat: "Imagine yourself in a long, full skirt and stays that prevent you from bending".

Some of you are probably already laughing (Bonnie?), knowing how the rest of this review is going to go.

I thought better of this author, I really, really did. The previous 66 pages were fabulous, and I learned a great deal, or at least...I think I did. My new knowledge is now more than a little suspect. How does the author suppose that, if you are unable to *bend* in a corset, you are able to sit? And yet, just a few more words down the page, she blithely has her imaginary stays-handicapped "you" easily accomplish this clearly impossible task!

One more time for the record: you CAN bend in a corset. Can you slouch? No - and that's the *only* handicap you're going to experience in a well-fitted corset, and if you listen to your mother, you shouldn't be slouching anyway, so that's all right, isn't it?

Update upon finishing it:

Four stars, because I did learn a great deal of interesting things, and it's inspired me to get copies of Samuel Pepys' unabridged diaries - something I've been wanting to do for some time.

I do recommend however, when reading this book, to take all the author's personal opinions with a grain of salt...she seems to be one of those women who must force their modern views onto the women of different eras, and make false assumptions about how unhappy the women of yesterday must have been. For instance, in the chapter on marriage and divorce, she rants on about how, without divorce as an option, women had to suffer being "irrevocably tied to a husband who turned out to be a violent, drunken, syphilitic, promiscuous lout who dissipated her dowry, brutally exercised his matrimonial rights, and abused her children". She gives no mention at all of the fact that the husband was himself equally bound, and of course there were many wives who proved just as abusive, drunken, or promiscuous, and were also legally impossible to discard. She also gives no mention of the fact that when divorce began to become an option, it was the *women* who were horrified and disapproving of this new custom. It is a fundamental and serious mistake to assume that just because *we* wouldn't have liked living under certain conditions, that the majority opinion from women of the actual time would agree with us.

[Geoffrey Sutton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the focus on every day life with details interspersed with a dollop of rye humour.

[Karen Brooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

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, government papers, letters, tourists of the times’ impressions, Picard paints a wonderful picture of one of the most eminent cities in the world from 1660-1670, London.
Emerging out of the chaos of the last decade and a half, which saw one king (Charles I) beheaded and an Interregnum government headed by The Protector, Oliver Cromwell established, before the heir to the throne, the apparently, pleasure-loving but also diplomatic and lusty Charles II was restored, Picard immerses the reader in life during this last stage – a stage that involved the casting off of parliamentary rule and Puritan shackles and return to monarchy and all that entailed.
We enter stately homes, shops, ships as well as wander the streets and learn everything from what the rich, “middling” and poor ate (or didn’t), their superstitions, sexual habits, toileting, washing, and even how they cleaned their teeth. We discover the sicknesses they succumbed to (not forgetting the Plague that struck in 1665), the dreadful remedies offered; what they bought, wore, how they addressed each other and even their secret desires. Religion played a huge role in this period of conflict and xenophobia, and Picard doesn’t hold back on addressing this either and how and where people prayed and the kinds of communities they established.
The insights she gives are so beautifully written and, at times, imagined, and she has this wonderful quirky way of sometimes commenting on habits and idiosyncrasies of individuals or, indeed, the general populace, that had me bursting out laughing.
I will read this again in hardback (when the copy I ordered arrives) as I read this on Kindle and marked up so many passages, I need to be able to enjoy them again, but this time in print where I can access her extensive footnotes as well.
Highly recommended for lovers of history or even those who enjoy entertaining and really informative reads that keep an eye on the reader and the time they are writing from as well.
Can’t wait to read more by this wonderful lawyer-cum-historian.

[Jeanne Adamek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I tremendously enjoyed the time I spent reading this book! I am a curious person, and have to admit that sometimes when reading history I am not always totally satisfied. There is always something I want to know and I see that I seem to share this with the author Liza Picard. She answered questions that I would think of and wrote the whole thing in a droll compelling way that kept me reading. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in the time period, likes history or, like me, is just plain nosy about REALLY living in this time. I found Restoration London so interesting that I am planning on looking into the other books from the author

[Hazel Bright · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reads like a bullet point list.
* The author generally does not elaborate on anything.
* For example, she mentions that the plague was not as lethal as some other disease, I think it was tuberculosis.
* You would probably want me to go look that up or something, or explain why Black Death was not as big a deal as the other disease. Too bad.
* Shoes were straight. There were no left or right shoes in those days. She mentioned that a couple of times.
* I enjoyed this book. After the above, you probably want to know why. Too bad.

[Autumn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fantastically interesting and breezy read about life in London, 1660-1670. The author does a great job of describing what daily life was like for Londoners of all socio-economic groups. She has a very sly sense of humour, and because she covers a relatively short period of time, is able to cover a lot of ground. Topics include food, medicine, taxes, marriage, the law, gardening, and astrology.

[Michael Reilly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liza Picard (1927-2022) was an English lawyer and historian. She wrote four books on London life between 1660 and 1900, Restoration London, Dr. Johnson's London, Elizabeth's London and Victorian London.

This 1997 book was the first in the series. By coincidence, it is the last of the four that I read.

Her formula is to focus on the day-to-day practical things people do in a city. What did they wear? What did they eat? What did their houses look like? What furniture did thy have? Where did they have their toilet?, what was on their walls? Where did they work?, how did they give birth and die?, what were their hobbies and entertainments? what were their religious beliefs and practices? and much more

Picard is very good at tracking down evidence that could help answer the questions. She looks at advertisements, sermons, maps, legal records, poems, diaries and anything else she can find.

The lives of the very rich are the best documented but she focuses on looking at the middle and lower classes. These books are filled with interesting stuff.

A "flying coach and horses" took 14 bouncy hours to get from London to Oxford. It is about an hour by train now.

Life expectancy of a child born in London in 1660 was 35 years. It is 78 now.

Ceruse was a common woman's make up. It was made with white lead and frequently caused lead paint poisoning.

Bad news, bathing was uncommon and everyone stank. Good news, "if everybody smells, it is hardly noticeable or offensive."

Picard uses Samuel Pepys diary as the backbone of this book. It is a great resource for understanding what daily life was like.

This is an interesting book, but it is my least favorite of the four because, unlike her later books, it does not have as much on what life was like for the poorest Londoners. This could be because of the focus on Pepys who was upper middle class or lower upper class. Still a good book, but I would read the Doctor Johnson book first to truly appreciate what Picard was doing.

[sminismoni · Rating 4 out of 5]

An encylopedic account of daily life in the period 1660-1670. It covers all the mundane, everyday activities, implements, social niceties, basic laws, clothing etc. The facts are peppered with small author asides and observations, bringing a little life to what would otherwise be a rather pedantic, shopping-list style account. Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's Guides cover similar historical periods, but tend to be more about how people behaved and got things done, and have a more conversational narrative style. This focusses slightly more on implements, social rules, building styles, daily schedules etc. Both are worth a read for different perspectives on the time period.

[Rachel of Winterley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderful source for anyone interested in everyday life in the 1660s for whatever reason, whether as a historical novelist or just a history enthusiast who is somewhat fed up with endless monarchs, battles and feckless nobility and more interested in life as it was lived by the vast majority of the populace. Picard is both learned and witty - like a perfect dinner guest, with entertaining stories and a wicked sense of humour. She wears her erudition very lightly indeed, and takes us on a colourful journey through the many day-to-day aspects of 18C experience. Am about to embark on her Dr Johnson's London. I just wish she had had time to write about every historical period in this way!

[Robert Hepple · Rating 4 out of 5]

First published in 1997, 'Restoration London' looks at the social history of London over the years 1660-1670. The author supports a lot of the information imparted with a vast number of citations, and yet is not afraid of questioning any sourced info that seems impractical, exaggerated or dubious for whatever reason. The breadth of coverage is breathtaking, and belies the fact that it can only scratch the surface of the subject in so few pages. What is more, the writing style makes this a real pleasure to read.

[Kt Dixon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenal guide to 1660's London. Picard brings the city to life through this handy reference guide, which has been comprehensively researched and cited.

The book does rely a fair bit on Pepys diary, which is understandable as it is probably the best first-person narrative and primary source of the period, with John Evelyn falling closely behind.

Some may find the tidal wave of information a bit dry in parts, but I think this book is so richly packed you'd be forgiven for skipping parts that don't take your fancy.

5/5

[Suzanne Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learnt so much from reading this book. First part was stronger, covering fascinating details about the architecture of London pre and post fire, the details of how people lived, their clothes, diet, attitudes and past times. I also discovered that Samuel Pepys was not a nice man … and that was why I gave it 4 stars as I didn’t feel the author recognised that as such. So, I don’t believe he was seducing a maid in his house, he was raping her… for what servant would wish to encourage the groupings of her employer even then?

[Mick Meyers · Rating 4 out of 5]

really tried to get into this book,it was written with chapters covering different parts of life during restoration period.some I found more interesting then other.very detailed and the author really gets you the time period.the sub chapters are episodic and breaks them into short bursts.it is one of those books you look through and cherry pick what you want to read.it makes history more alive then when I was at school and it was learning dates by wrote,and dryly taught.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Jule · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love Liza Picardy history books - broad perspectives of different times in British history

[Rusty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Casual survey of daily life in 1660's London.

[Kellie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating book detailing just about everything you could want to know about restoration London.

[Gayle Wyatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Utterly engrossing, very well researched and written. This has been an invaluable aid in my own research into the period.

[Melly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy to read and so well done.

[Simon Harrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great and funny book, and probably best read as a toilet read.

[Adrian]

Picard, a lawyer by trade not an historian has written a series of social histories. She writes plainly and with wit. This decade in England saw the return of the King, the great fire of 1666 and the plague of 1665. The fire had one truly great benefit it killed the rats which carried the plague and London was never hit again. Fascinating facts abound. Women used cosmetics which killed them due to their lead content. Sewage was buried under houses. Street lighting didn't exist and yet mail moved well despite terrible roads. Men dressed as much for fashion as women did and executed criminals' heads were stuck on pikes on the Tower and left to rot.

[Bettie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read by Sean Barrett.

If you have read Pepys then you are best giving this one a miss as most of the content is either direct quotes from those diaries or passages revamped into the author's own words. It is a 3* nevertheless.

Elizabeth's London: Everyday Life in Elizabethan London - 4*

Dr. Johnson's London: Coffee-Houses and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female Education - 4*

Restoration London - 3*