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Dr Johnson's London by Liza Picard6/29/2023 Her informality breathes life into dry descriptions, and her sharp eye lends itself to shrewd selection from source passages. Picard's conversational style, as bursting with rhetorical questions as a primary teacher, belies the breadth of her reading and research. This goes some way to redressing a balance which historically has tended to favour the rich and famous, who left behind the majority of buildings and ephemera. Starting with a "virtual" sedan-chair tour of the city, she proceeds to elucidate every aspect of urban life, with particular attention paid to the poor, and the "middling sort", a fledgling middle class. She pursues them solely for their era, stretching 30 years from 1740 to 1770, pivoted on the publication of Johnson's Dictionary in 1755. Samuel Pepys gives way to Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, though, entertainingly, she shows no affection for the pair. The lives that once thronged its streets are the stuff of her books, and Dr Johnson's London updates her 1997 volume, Restoration London, by one hundred years or so. Liza Picard certainly isn't tired of London.
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