Tweet [1]
… is from page 44 of Liza Picard’s fascinating account of life in mid-18th-century London, Dr. Johnson’s London [2]:
The kind of space we take as normal, at least separating children from parents at night, and having a room for sitting and watching the television and doing homework, was a luxury only the prosperous enjoyed.
Here [3] – and here [4] – are two earlier blog posts using material from Ms. Picard’s informative 2000 book.
And while life for middle-class Londoners 150 afterward was far superior to what it was while Samuel Johnson still breathed and harangued and shed light, that life – circa 1900 – remained by our standards dangerous, dreary, dirty, and difficult [5].