1700 : Scenes from London Life [Paperback] Waller, Maureen

London in 1700: a city of gin-soaked taverns and coffee house philosophers, where you could watch a public hanging in the morning and an opera in the evening. Maureen Waller reconstructs the daily life of a city on the brink of modernity — from the stench of the Thames to the glitter of court intrigue, from street hawkers to society ladies navigating treacherous marriage markets. This is history as lived experience: what people ate, wore, feared, and desired in a metropolis that was equal parts squalor and sophistication. Waller has a gift for the telling detail — the cost of a loaf of bread, the etiquette of dueling, the mechanics of Georgian hygiene (or lack thereof). For anyone fascinated by the texture of the past, or who wishes Pepys had kept writing another few decades, this is an absorbing immersion into a vanished world that shaped the one we live in now.