London and the Seventeenth Century

My thanks to the publishers for an advanced review copy of this most accessible and absorbing book, which covers how the political, scientific and economic revolutions which ripped through this fascinating century along with plague and fire made London recognisably the city it has become. The text is very well researched and informed with  the comments of contemporaries, rich and poor. There are a comprehensive index and a very useful bibliography.

We begin with the funeral of Elizabeth I in a city of around 200,000, about to suffer a plague year in which perhaps 33,000 would die. 70%of men and 20% women could sign their name and 10% of the population were apprentices, inclined to rowdiness, especially on Shrove Tuesdays. Livery companies dominated local governance and women dried washing on the pastures and fields of what is now Shaftesbury Avenue. Shakespeare’s King’s Men performed at the Globe in the summer and indoors at Blackfriars the rest of the year. The fervour and outrage occasioned by seemingly minor religious changes under the Stewarts is perhaps well explained by the way plague was seen as a divine punishment and its horrors are certainly more real to us now.

By the end of the century, 500,000 live in London, the largest city in the world, which has around 400 coffee houses, a press, a Royal Society, the Greenwich Observatory, a penny postal service, joint stock companies, women actors in the playhouses, squares of new houses with central garden spaces, lotteries and a craze for porcelain. Women’s literacy has risen to 50% but still, by an analysis of London’s bills of mortality carried out by a button maker, more than a third of those born die before they are 6 and only 7% reach old age. Autumn is the peak season for dying.

In between we have witnessed the part London played in the downfall,of Charles I, the Civil War years and the Putney debates, the ambiguous London view of Protector Cromwell, the restoration, the great plague of 1665,  the huge fire of 1666 and the accession of the House of Orange.

I really enjoyed reading this book and recommend it to anyone interested in the making of London and one of the most tumultuous centuries for these islands.

London and the 17th Century was an interesting and informative read overall. There were some chapters that felt a little dry, but this may be partly because those were the ones in which I already knew most, if not all, of the material from previous reading and research. I particularly enjoyed the sections on things like furniture and changing fashions--the details of everyday life, rather than the political situation--as I had not come across so much detail on those aspects in previous books. Generally, though, the information was well presented and the prose highly readable, with a good balance between giving enough of a description without getting bogged down in dull facts. Recommended to those interested in learning more about England (and particularly London) during the 17th century.

I loved this book, detailing the history of London, in my favourite period of history. Everyday life in London is covered, down to such incidents as the man who had an interspecies blood transfusion,  Then there was the effect of the plague, which is highly relevant to modern times, with covid. I highly recommend the book.