THE TIME TRAVELER'S GUIDE TO REGENCY BRITAIN

British historian Mortimer, who has already struck gold with delightful guides to Elizabethan and medieval Britain, takes on the Regency.

The Regency period lasted from 1811 to 1820 when Prince George ruled instead of his mentally ill father, George III. Mortimer rewinds the clock to 1789, when the prince became regent-in-waiting after his father “fell ill.” The author ends with George’s (by then, George IV) death in 1830, an event greeted with contemptuous obituaries in major newspapers. “In marked contrast to his father,” writes Mortimer, “George IV [was] one of the laziest…spoilt, arrogant, self-indulgent, profligate, uncaring and conceited Englishmen ever to have lived.” Despite his unpopularity, he had a few positive qualities, which the author enumerates, and he exerted intense influence over his time. “You can see why those who looked back from the 1860s saw their Regency forebears as an unfettered and wild bunch….It had been a time when gentlemen and ladies, beggars and clergymen, soldiers and tramps, employers and courtesans could all pretty much behave as they saw fit, in a world that gleamed with gold and heroism, drink and sex, excitement and opportunity.” Expanding the period to include the prince’s entire adult life provides a wider canvas for Mortimer’s deliciously revealing research, but there’s no denying that the pace of change during these four decades leads to not one but several “periods,” so the author must provide as much political as social history. No reader should miss his take on the era’s hygiene, diet, medicine, treatment of women, fashion, travel, theater, and music. There was even a musical superstar: Beethoven. Anglophiles will love it all, but Americans without at least a tourist’s familiarity with British geography (especially London) will struggle through the author’s descriptions of the growth and makeup of cities. It’s an avalanche of streets, monuments, districts, parks, palaces, and great houses.

Everything you ever wanted to know—and perhaps much you could do without—about Regency life.