From Samuel Johnson Prize shortlisted author David Crane, this audiobook
is about the Britain that fought the battle of Waterloo--from pauper to
painter, poet to prince, soldier to civilian.
Midnight, Sunday, 17 June 1815. There was no town in England that had
not sent its soldiers, hardly a household that was not holding its
breath, not a family, as Byron put it, that would escape 'havoc's tender
mercies' at Waterloo, and yet at the same time life inevitably went on
as normal.
As Wellington's rain-sodden army retreated for the final, decisive
battle, men and women in England were still going to the theatre and
science lectures, still working in the fields and the factories, still
reading and writing books and sermons, still painting their pictures and
sitting in front of Lord Elgin's marbles as if almost 5,000 did not
already lie dead.
After 10 hours of savage fighting, Waterloo would be littered with the
bodies of something like 47,000 dead and wounded. Meanwhile, as the day
unfolded, a whole nation, countryside and town, artisan and aristocrat,
was brought together by war.
From Samuel Johnson Prize shortlisted author David Crane, Went the Day
Well? is a breathtaking portrait of Britain in those moments. Moving
from England to the battle and back again, this vivid, stunning freeze
frame of a country on the single most celebrated day in its modern
history shows Crane's full range in tracing the endless, overlapping
connections between people's lives.
From private tragedies, disappointed political hopes, and public
discontents to grandiloquent public celebrations and monuments, it
answers Wellington's call as he rallied his troops to 'think what
England is thinking of us now'.
David Crane's first book, Lord Byron's Jackal, was published to great
acclaim in 1998, and his second, The Kindness of Sisters, published in
2002, is a groundbreaking work of romantic biography. In 2005 the highly
acclaimed Scott of the Antarctic was published, followed by Men of
War, a collection of 19th-century naval biographies, in 2009.
