The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain

Oct 6, 2024 2:23 AM

Author:Ian Mortimer,Ian Mortimer

Brought to you by Penguin.

In the latest volume of his celebrated series of Time Traveller's Guides - after the Middle Ages, Elizabethan England and Restoration Britain - Ian Mortimer turns to what is arguably the most-loved period in British history: the Regency (aka Georgian England). Bookended by the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 and the death of George IV in 1830, 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 licence of Lord Byron; Britain's military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo; and the threat of revolution and the Peterloo massacre.

A time of exuberance, thrills, frills and unchecked bad behaviour, 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; it was dominated by population growth, urbanisation and industrialisation, fear of social unrest and demands for political reform. 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 were afraid of. 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.

Reviews

Mortimer's accessible guidebook format brings...[Regency Britain] vividly to life

—— History Revealed

Ian Mortimer has made this kind of imaginative time travel his speciality.

—— Daily Mail

[An] excellent book... Mortimer's erudition is formidable, and he rarely writes a dull sentence

—— Andrew Taylor, The Times, *Book of the Week*

An entertaining and enlightening read

—— Choice Magazine

[Mortimer] succeeds, rather brilliantly, in making a mass of information accessible and entertaining

—— Kate Hubbard, Oldie

Ian Mortimer's Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain tells you all you need to know about criminals, disease, beggars and other late Georgian delights if you ever find yourself visiting the 1790s

—— Simon Heffer, Daily Telegraph, *Books of the Year*

[Mortimer] has already written guides to the medieval, Elizabethan and Restoration periods, and now he's bringing that same mix of telling anecdote and pithy research to Regency Britain, that funny wedge of time squeezed between the Georgians and the Victorians

—— Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

Thrilling...when you read it, you imagine yourself among your ancestors, and they are as awful and ingenious as we are

—— Tanya Gold, Daily Telegraph

Excellent ... Mortimer's erudition is formidable, and he rarely writes a dull sentence ... Georgette Heyer's research for her novels would have been so much easier with this book on her shelf. As for Jane Austen, she would have found in its pages not only her own world, but other Regency worlds she probably never knew existed. And now, two hundred years later, so can we

—— The Times

Every page of The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain is crammed with enlightening information

—— Daily Mail

As entertaining as it is inventive

—— Harry Adams , York

Put away your Austen: this eye-popping microhistory spares no detail of the slums, squalor and bad dentistry of Regency Britain; a lost world springs from the page

—— Daily Telegraph

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