![]() ![]() It's interesting to find that pregnant women could ‘plead their belly’ in capital cases to avoid death, and that consequently most gaols had one or two ‘child-getters’ who could ‘qualify the ladies for that expedient’. ![]() Foreign visitors learned this lesson quickly. I am happy to learn, for instance, that some people dined at 3pm, though the fashionable hour was 5 and that if you heard a shout of ‘By your leave, sir!’ while walking the streets, you should rapidly get out of the way so as not to be run over by the ‘chairmen’ carrying a sedan chair. There is nothing in here about eighteenth-century politics or court machinations – just a wealth of detail about how ordinary people in Georgian London dressed, how often they washed, where they went to get false teeth made, how often they ate turtle, what they did to get rid of bedbugs, and how they got around town. If you're one of those people who reads old novels not for the plot, but for the bizarre details that can be extracted about daily life, then Liza Picard's books are a goldmine, not to mention a huge timesaver. ![]()
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