A Book for a Rainy Day; Or, Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833
A Book for a Rainy Day; Or, Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833
John Thomas Smith arrived into the world in a hackney coach in 1766, and spent the next sixty-seven years observing a city and society in constant transformation. This antic, generous memoir chronicles his long life through the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the emergence of modern London. Smith was an antiquarian by temperament and profession, a man who collected vanishing corners of the metropolis like other men collected butterflies. The result is a book alive with street criers and forgotten notable figures, with demolished alleyways and the ghosts of coffee houses where radical ideas once simmered. His tone shifts effortlessly from wry amusement to genuine melancholy as he records what industrial progress and time itself are sweeping away. This is not a formal history but something rarer: a single conscious mind's reckoning with the texture of lived experience across generations, preserving details no statistician would think to record. For anyone curious about the real fabric of Georgian and Regency London, filtered through a personality both eccentric and deeply sympathetic, this book remains an inexhaustible treasure.
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Smith, John Thomas. A Book for a Rainy Day; Or, Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833. Lex, lex-books.com/book/a-book-for-a-rainy-day-or-recollections-of-the-events-of-the-years-1766-1833-a2d1161b-f6e7-4995-80fa-fe7f7f738d50.Smith, J. T. (n.d.). A Book for a Rainy Day; Or, Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-book-for-a-rainy-day-or-recollections-of-the-events-of-the-years-1766-1833-a2d1161b-f6e7-4995-80fa-fe7f7f738d50Smith, John Thomas. A Book for a Rainy Day; Or, Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/a-book-for-a-rainy-day-or-recollections-of-the-events-of-the-years-1766-1833-a2d1161b-f6e7-4995-80fa-fe7f7f738d50.
