Restoration London

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAY 4, 1998

Picard, a former barrister, attempts to provide not a history but a description of how people lived in London in the decade (1660-1670) following the restoration of the Stuarts. Parceled among four broad thematic sections, like "The Urban Environment" and "The Human Condition," are self-contained chapters on such subjects as gardens, parks and public spaces; housework, laundry and shopping. Each is subsequently divided into brief articles. Picard relies on primary sources, notably Pepys's (called "Samuel" throughout) famed diary, along with various other contemporary documents and records. The result is lively and informative, with a distinctly eccentric feel. This enthusiastic, conversational work conveys the immediacy of a guided tour as the author points out the furnishings of the age and dispenses colorful anecdotes. She veers between fact and hypothesis, insight and cliche, with regular personal asides. The observation, for example, that "the best hats were made from beaver fur" from Canada is followed by the news that "Samuel's hat fell off into a puddle one day, when he was riding, and was ruined.... He should have been wearing his velvet riding hat." Life was not necessarily nasty, brutish and short; it was both circumscribed and enriched by elaborate codes of behavior (as observed in "The Social Context"), and made interesting by the inventiveness and limitations of 17th-century science and technology (covered in chapters on medicine and dentistry). Rummaging in the ragbag of history, Picard has come up with a hybrid that is entertaining, if taken in small doses. 39 b&w illus.