In "Bygone London Life," antiquary and social historian G.L. Apperson gives us glimpses of a day-to-day London that was already long gone when his book was first published in 1903-the raucous, vibrant city of Elizabethan eating-houses, literary taverns, private museums, mincing Restoration fops, and rowdy Georgian rakes. Here are types and institutions from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries: poets and sedan-chair operators; coffee-house wits and night watchmen; "pretty fellows" and shoeblacks; kickshaws, macaronies, ordinaries, bucks and bloods, and cabinets of curiosities-a kaleidoscope of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century life for the historian, the historical novelist, or anyone who takes delight in the gone-but-not-forgotten past of a great modern city.
Bygone London Life : Pictures from a Vanished Past