Review by New York Times Review
nine years ago, the Canadian historian Robert Morrison published a scholarly and engrossing life of England's second most famous opium eater, Thomas De Quincey. (Coleridge's opium-inspired reverie about Kubla Khan earns him the crown.) Now Morrison is back with a spirited and wide-ranging account of life in - and out of - Regency England. These were the years that saw an exhausted, impoverished Britain at war both internally (workers' riots, Highland clearances, troubles in Ireland) and externally, thanks to many ruinous years of battling against Napoleon and almost three years of war against the United States. No wonder that in 1812, after being reluctantly enlightened about the state of the country (the Prince Regent must have wished he'd never asked), the future George IV was "very nearly in convulsions." At that point, with his father having been declared insane, he had only been in charge for a year. While Morrison fails to rescue the image of England's ruler as the portly, self-indulgent lecher waggishly created by the poets and cartoonists of Regency times, he does well to remind readers how much George and his pet architect, John Nash, contributed to transforming London into an elegant and supremely modern metropolis. West of Nash's obsequiously named Regent Street, London society made and obeyed the rules of a mini-Versailles. Even the Duke of Wellington, the hero of Waterloo, took his dismissal from an evening at a smart social club like a man. (The soldier duke's crime: wearing black trousers to one fashionable venue's etiquette-conscious evening instead of the mandatory knee breeches.) While Morrison's tales of high society lack the spice of novelty - few periods of English social history have been more thoroughly trawled - he does a splendid job of exposing the grubby underbelly of Georgian life. East of Regent Street were the crowded rookeries of St Giles. Criminals swapped tips at the infamous Rats' Castle pub, jawing together in the new "flash" language to which today's street slang owes "pig" for a police officer and "pigeon" for a victim. Punishment was harsh. London's jails (28 of them in 1816, by one journalist's count) were augmented by the ships called "hulks," from which Dickens's convict Magwitch fled in "Great Expectations." Writing about Fagin's lightfingered protegés in "Oliver Twist," Dickens must have scoured old news articles about the 6,000 pick-pocketing children whose work for gangland bosses carried a death penalty as late as 1808. Sex in Regency times offers Morrison a field day in salacious details. The reader is not stinted. The Eleusinian Institution offered a visiting lady the chance to enjoy "one or a dozen men as she pleases." A raid on a brothel for working-class men unveiled a "celebration room" where clients could frolic with Miss Selina, Sally Fox and even "the Duchess of Devonshire." With a conscious echo of contemporary scandals, Morrison describes how one highborn bishop fled to France (since sodomy was still a hanging offense) after being discovered in the back parlor of a pub during "the actual commission of that horrid and unnatural crime." "The Regency Years" can be enjoyed without accepting all of Morrison's theories. It's unlikely that Mary Shelley intended Victor Frankenstein's creature to be interpreted as his creator's sex toy. It's startling to read that Byron "may or may not" have made love to his half sister and irritating to be informed that Charles Babbage, not Ada Lovelace, saw his unbuilt Analytical Engine as "the first modern digital computer." Although elegant, entertaining and frequently surprising, "The Regency Years" nevertheless failed to convince this reader that 19th-century England's post-Waterloo emergence as the world's most powerful nation had much to do with its capricious and pleasure-loving ruler. Having a handsome street and a splendid park named in the regent's honor seems just about right for George's epitaph. MIRANDA SEYMOUR'S most recent book is "In Byron's Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Lord Byron's Wife and Daughter: Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 9, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
In this ambitious survey, literature scholar Morrison (The English Opium-Eater, 2010) highlights the patterns linking the Regency period with our own time, presenting the era of country dances and Luddites, gin lanes and the War of 1812 as the germ of our ""desiring, democratic, secular, opportunistic society."" He casts his net widely among economic, social, cultural, and political topics, describing how, then as now, the events of the day inspired widespread concern and debate about concentration of political power and the complex impacts of economic change. He also identifies other patterns in Regency society that echo our own. Understandings of sexuality, sexual expression, and relationships were evolving, including the presence of recognizably modern gay and lesbian identities. Pioneers of civil disobedience foreshadowed the nonviolent resistance of the twentieth century, and aided by new printing technologies, celebrity culture was beginning to emerge. With such touchstones, Morrison gathers a broad range of topics into a strong, cohesive, and fast-moving narrative. An excellent introduction for readers new to the period and a fresh take for Regency enthusiasts.--Sara Jorgensen Copyright 2019 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
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 conditione.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." Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
