The Regency Years: During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern

by Robert Morrison

Overview

A surprising and lively history of an overlooked era that brought the modern world of art, culture, and science decisively into view.

The Victorians are often credited with ushering in our current era, yet the seeds of change were planted in the years before. The Regency (1811–1820) began when the profligate Prince of Wales—the future king George IV—replaced his insane father, George III, as Britain’s ruler.

Around the regent surged a society steeped in contrasts: evangelicalism and hedonism, elegance and brutality, exuberance and despair. The arts flourished at this time with a showcase of extraordinary writers and painters such as Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. Science burgeoned during this decade, too, giving us the steam locomotive and the blueprint for the modern computer.

Yet the dark side of the era was visible in poverty, slavery, pornography, opium, and the gothic imaginings that birthed the novel Frankenstein. With the British military in foreign lands, fighting the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the War of 1812 in the United States, the desire for empire and an expanding colonial enterprise gained unstoppable momentum. Exploring these crosscurrents, Robert Morrison illuminates the profound ways this period shaped and indelibly marked the modern world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393249057
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/30/2019
Pages:	416
Sales rank:	1,100,072
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Robert Morrison is British Academy Global Professor at Bath Spa University in England, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has produced editions of works by Jane Austen and Thomas De Quincey. He lives in Bath, England.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction xiii

Prologue: The Regent and the Regency 1

Chapter 1 Crime, Punishment, and the Pursuit of Freedom 7

Chapter 2 Theaters of Entertainment 65

Chapter 3 Sexual Pastimes, Pleasures, and Perversities 125

Chapter 4 Expanding Empire and Waging War 183

Chapter 5 Changing Landscapes and Ominous Signs 241

Epilogue: The Modern World 301

Notes 307

Illustration Credits 337

Index 343

Editorial Reviews

…a spirited and wide-ranging account of life in—and out of—Regency England…[Morrison] does a splendid job of exposing the grubby underbelly of Georgian life.

The New York Times Book Review - Miranda Seymour

★ 02/18/2019

In this delightful history, literary scholar Morrison argues that England’s Regency period (1811–1820) was “perhaps the most extraordinary decade in all of British history,” and “marked the appearance of the modern world.” In support of this position, Morrison surveys the brief epoch from a variety of perspectives, asserting that it was characterized by many of the contradictions of the Prince Regent’s own personality. English society’s criminal underworld exploited vast economic and political inequities; many others, from the Luddites who smashed the machines that took their jobs, to the radical poet Percy Shelley, attempted to redress them. Pleasure-seekers savored new opportunities for shopping, dancing, gambling, drinking, and sports, and Lord Byron became both a revered literary artist and the icon of the nascent celebrity culture. As the libertinism of the 18th century gave way to the puritanism of the Victorian era, some English men and women experimented with new types of sexual identities, despite the social censure and even capital punishment they risked. At the decade’s end, England was a very different place than it had been at its beginning, and Morrison’s lively and engaging study not only illuminates these many and rapid changes, but convincingly argues that “its many legacies are still all around us.” (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

"The Regency Years has all the high spirits, the verve, and the narrative pace that Morrison celebrates in its most characteristic cultural productions. It offers a bracing, informative, and always entertaining introduction to the period."

Wordsworth Circle - Richard Cronin

"The Regency Years should ignite new interest in an era replete with drama, innovation and, yes, the seeds of much that would catapult not only Britain, but the world, into modernity."

Post and Courier - Rosemary Michaud

"The Regency Years reads like a romance novel of its period without the novel but makes an entertaining nonfiction read with superior prose and dialogue."

New York Journal of Books - Robert Davis

"Elegant, entertaining and frequently surprising."

Miranda Seymour

"An enjoyable book full of anecdotes and scenarios of both the rich and famous, the poor and exploited alike."

History Today - Julie Peakman

2019-02-13

A lively new chronicle brings crisp focus to a significant decade in British history and culture.

Morrison (Queen's National Scholar/Queen's Univ., Kingston, Ontario; The English Opium Eater: A Biography of Thomas De Quincey, 2010) declares that there has not been a study on the Regency in three decades, which is extraordinary given that it is a wildly popular era of study, a time when the quintessential elements of modern Britishness emerged. The short period between 1811 and 1820, when an incapacitated George III ceded to his son, the prince of Wales, brought enormous political turmoil: triumph over Napoleon at Waterloo, Irish famine, roiling Scottish politics, and the War of 1812 across the Atlantic. It also witnessed rich innovations in culture, such as the efflorescence of novelists Jane Austen and Walter Scott; the revolutionary work of poets John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge; and the radical movements against the industrial inequities of Regency society. Morrison proceeds thematically, launching first into the country's poor systems of crime and punishment, as exemplified by the so-called "Bloody Code," which meted out the death penalty for more than 200 major and minor crimes, even to children. The author explores the era's expanding displays of sexual expression within stringent boundaries ("prudery brigades" would triumph during the later Victorian era) as well as underscoring the era's many sexual anxieties, some of which were symbolized in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Morrison also looks at the period's fresh inventions, technologies, and ideas to improve the human condition—e.g., the miner's safety lamp, a prototype for the computer, and the work of the first prison reformer (Elizabeth Fry) and environmental activist (John Clare). During this time, England continued to expand the empire, and internal unrest and economic despair prompted tens of thousands of citizens of Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales to flee to Canada and the United States.

Morrison expertly encapsulates the brief, radical trends and movements of this era of "intense sociability."

Kirkus Reviews

"Readers of this brilliant book will enjoy a rich experience, full of memorable surprises."

Patricia Meyer Spacks

"A lively account of a turning point in British history.… Robert Morrison creates an indelible impression of the Regency."

Times Higher Education (UK) - Clare Brant

"A triumph of historical storytelling."

Deidre Shauna Lynch

"[A] zippy and vivid portrait."

Sunday Times (UK) - Henry Hitchings

"The Prince Regent… ruled over a period of extraordinary creativity and it is that progressive cultural legacy that Mr. Morrison commends to contemporary Britain and the rest of the world."

Wall Street Journal - Ruth Scurr

"This engaging history transports readers to England."

Newsday - Tom Beer

"The Regency Years reads like a romance novel of its period without the novel, but makes an entertaining nonfiction read with superior prose and dialogue."

New York Journal of Books - Robert S. Davis

"Robert Morrison is my ideal of what a scholar should be—lively and interesting, he makes the past relevant to today."

David Morrell

"Superb.… The Regency period lasted for less than a decade but, as Mr. Morrison argues, ‘its many legacies are still all around us.’ It was also, as this book amply proves, marvellously entertaining."

Economist

"Given such plenty, what more could one ask from a work of cultural history?"

Michael Dirda

"Superb.… The Regency period lasted for less than a decade but, as Mr. Morrison argues, ‘its many legacies are still all around us.’ It was also, as this book amply proves, marvellously entertaining."

Economist