A vivid and immersive history of Georgian England that gives its
reader a firsthand experience of life as it was truly lived during the
era of Jane Austen, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the Duke of Wellington.
This is the age of Jane Austen and the Romantic poets; the paintings of
John Constable and the gardens of Humphry Repton; the sartorial elegance
of Beau Brummell and the poetic license of Lord Byron; Britain's
military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo; the threat of revolution
and the Peterloo massacre. In the latest volume of his celebrated series
of Time Traveler's Guides, Ian Mortimer turns to what is arguably the
most-loved period in British history: the Regency, or Georgian England.
A time of exuberance, thrills, frills and unchecked bad behavior, it was
perhaps the last age of true freedom before the arrival of the stifling
world of Victorian morality. At the same time, it was a period of
transition that reflected unprecedented social, economic, and political
change. And like all periods in history, it was an age of many
contradictions--where Beethoven's thundering Fifth Symphony could
premier in the same year that saw Jane Austen craft the delicate
sensitivities of Persuasion.
Once more, Ian Mortimer takes us on a thrilling journey to the past,
revealing what people ate, drank, and wore; where they shopped and how
they amused themselves; what they believed in, and what they feared.
Conveying the sights, sounds, and smells of the Regency period, this is
history at its most exciting, physical, visceral--the past not as
something to be studied but as lived experience.
