Informative, interesting and entertaining history

I greatly enjoyed the author’s Time Traveller Guide to the Medieval England and am glad to say that this guide to the latter part of the 17th Century, following the restoration of King Charles II, is equally engaging. The author has a lively style of writing well-suited to narration and this period of history is full of events and changes in society that make it a fertile source of material.

The author has collected a mass of personal stories that enable one to imagine what life was like. It’s remarkable just how much written material there is from this period, not least Samuel Pepys diaries which provide some of the colourful details, but he was not alone in keeping detailed accounts of the life and times.

Most accounts of history focus on monarchies, wars and major events, whereas this book also gives a lot of details of daily life: what work people did, what they ate, wore, how they got rid of bodily waste and managed when they were ill. The book is redolent with the smells and sounds of the time. There are interesting facts about what life was like in the different strata of society from the fabulously wealthy to the desperately poor.

The narrator does an excellent job.

31 people found this helpful

A Tour De Force of the Seventeenth Century!

Where does The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The 'top ten percent'! As with all Mortimer's Time Traveller's books this is another wonderful trip into a lost world that is brought to life through painstaking research and well utilised primary material/ sources. A brilliant book.

12 people found this helpful

Immersive history of a much puffed up era

Mortimer has a thamaturigal gift for transporting us back in time, it's as if we walk the streets. although grim, he forcibly disabuses myths of their being unhygienic. it largely boils down to their having different ideas eg miasma (bad smells) rather than bacteria. points such as this reinforce our reflections on how we'd behave.


Although I struggle to find much sympathy within me for the persons who make up the greater part of this book, Mortimer has given me cause for revaluation. The likes of Pepys and Evelyn are shown most humanely, their foibles enliven them. We hear much a do Pepys debauchery with maids, unfortunately this was an age of great legal inequality so neither the women nor his wife could protest. We have much occasion to reflect on whether we'd have been much different, this is a theme Mortimer is very good across his three time travellers books and his centuries of change.

There's more hard facts than one gets with say Ruth Goodman or Lucy Worsley; these do not disrupt the flow.

layback, eyes closed and imagine your self transported

19 people found this helpful

I’d give this era low rating on Trip Advisor.

But not the book, which is informative and lively. The dreadful Charles II has returned from exile, and for a while, many people breathe a sigh of relief. Life during the Commonwealth has been decidedly dull at best, fun is banned and it’s a world in black and white. With Charles, of course, fun is compulsory (even when it’s not enjoyable, especially for women).
He was not a wise monarch, like his father before him (IMHO, the worst Scotsman ever born!), but the colour is back in the world.
The Great Plague, the Great Fire of London, Pepys, venereal disease, scurrilous plays and poetry, but we also learn how ordinary people lived in all sections of the population, this time including Scotland, because at this date, the Crowns have been merged, but not the Parliaments.
It seems that, in history, the pendulum swings from stiff respectively to wild licentiousness (they’ve got William and Mary coming up).
I enjoyed the panorama of life at an interesting point in time.

8 people found this helpful

excellent and so very entertaining and informative

I have learned such a lot about how much progress was made in the sciences and with book publishing.

4 people found this helpful

Excellent look into 17th century life .

Fabulous insights- very familiar in some ways, but in others, thank God, a different world- some nasty! practices were going on then- I won't spoil it for you. listen up! x

4 people found this helpful

another stonker

Mortimer never failed me before, and he hasn't with this offering, either. Full of facts set in to a breathing (if not Blazing) world, I learn more details of what I am already familiar and entirely new things; perspectives and situations I'd never considered or imagined. Also, I always want to argue at least one point with him. Very good indeed.

3 people found this helpful

Enjoyable way to learn history, but looses its way

Ian Mortimer's 'Time Traveller' series is always an enjoyable and light hearted way to top of historical knowledge and in particular the details which usually get edited out of more 'academic' histories -there are always some intriguing facts that stay with one - and the narration is excellent. This one seemed to forget it was a 'time travellers guide' for about the last 45 minutes though and became increasingly just a 'history of' - which was a shame - but I am not sure how he could have dealt with composers and writers in any other way - the time traveller could hardly have attended endless concerts!

3 people found this helpful

Disappointed

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I have listened to the other Time Traveller guides and found them extremely interesting and educational but this book is more a history of Restoration Britain not a guide to how it would be to live in the era. More than five hours into the book and there has been nothing about living conditions, food of the era, how to behave or anything I would have expected from the previous books which is a shame.

If you’ve listened to books by Ian Mortimer before, how does this one compare?

It is nothing like the other time traveler books so maybe it should have been published under another title. Too much time given to politics, agricultural changes, and the nobility.

What does Greg Wagland bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you had only read the book?

The reader made the story more interesting.

Do you think The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

No, not unless the author is going to reformat it to follow the same formula as his other books in the series.

Any additional comments?

I like Ian Mortimer's writing but feel this book was too remote from the reality he displayed in his other Time Traveller books.

3 people found this helpful

Fascinating

A really interesting book for lovers of social history. Highly recommended with a great narrator.

2 people found this helpful