The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain

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; thesartorial elegance ofBeau Brummell and the poetic licence of Lord Byron; Britain's military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo; thethreat of revolution and the Peterloomassacre. In the latest volume of his celebrated series of Time Traveler's Guides, IanMortimer turns to what is arguably the most-loved period in Britishhistory: 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 ofthe stifling world ofVictorian morality. At the same time, it was a period of transition that reflected unprecedented social, economic, and political change. And like all periodsin history, it was an age of many contradictions—where Beethoven's thundering FifthSymphony could premier in the same year that saw Jane Austencraft 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 theyshopped and how theyamused themselves; what they believed in, and what they were afraid of. Conveying the sights, sound, s andsmells of the Regency period, this is historyat its most exciting, physical, visceral—the past not as something to be studied but aslived experience.