Dr. Johnson's London: Coffee-Houses and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female Education
by Liza Picard
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Book Summary Information
Author: Liza PicardEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-08-21
ISBN: 0312291531
Number of pages: 408
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Book Reviews of Dr. Johnson's London: Coffee-Houses and Climbing Boys, Medicine, Toothpaste and Gin, Poverty and Press-Gangs, Freakshows and Female Education
Book Review: About the era of Samuel Johnson, not about Johnson himself
Summary: 4 Stars
Picard covers an era of British social history, the 1700s, that has received relatively little attention. The book is divided into four parts: The first part covers London's infrastructure, and the other three parts cover the three major socioeconomic categories: poor, "middling," and rich, although the rich get rather little page space. There are over 50 illustrations.
This book is reminiscent of an encyclopedia: For each heading there is a description of one-to-five paragraphs, making this an easy book to jump around in as the spirit moves you. A less charitable description would be to say that the style is disjointed. The amount of detail is impressive, and the reader is given a thorough introduction to daily life of that era. The author often launches into remarks that are intended to be humorous. I imagine this was done so the book would not be dry reading, but her comments often seem gratuitous or disruptive to the flow of the material. There is very little here specifically about Samuel Johnson; this is a book about his era, not about him.
I preferred a very similar book, "1700: Scenes from London Life" by Maureen Waller. Waller's book covers the identical material (50 years earlier) and has a more cohesive style of writing.
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