Amazon Kindle edition (See cover to the right) offers a sample of the book’s Introduction, and Chapters 1 & 2 in full.ĭr Ian Mortimer has been described by The Times newspaper as ‘the most remarkable medieval historian of our time’. So many other topics are covered: science, medicine and health pleasure gardens and entertainments occupations food and drink clothing etc.Īfter reading this book, I had a comprehensive overview of the Regency era and recommend it to anyone interested in this period. The overcrowding was so severe that the population density was estimated at 777 per acre.
Two privies might serve two or three hundred people. Liverpool’s houses for migrant workers were designed in such a way as to provide no comfort or cleanliness. Coal fires in London so polluted the air that soot floated without falling, and the fog and smoke darkened the skies even at noon.Īs the rich built grand houses or renovated outdated mansions, and hired Capability Brown or Humphrey Repton to transform their grounds, many poor people suffered, for few resources or improvements were provided for them. Mortimer contrasts this memory with the description of a winter in London some twenty years later. Yorkshire Woman Making Oat Cakes, Wikimedia CommonsĪbove: Two images included in the book. “On my entry I mixed with this crowd, and what with the constant changing of the faces around me (most of them strikingly beautiful), the illuminations, the majesty and splendour of the place, and the ever-present strains of music, I felt for a moment as a child would on first looking into a fairy-tale.” This is Karl Moritz’z impression of the rotunda in Ranelagh Gardens, Chelsea (1810): The era’s glittering lifestyle is not neglected and the author takes advantage of the journals and accounts of contemporary eyewitnesses. Mortimer describes both the good and the bad effects of the industrial revolution, and the results of enclosures in England on farmers with small farms and of the Highland clearances on Scottish crofters. Mortimer touches all aspects of British life – from the vitality of the era, expansion of cities, and the explosion of scientific advances, trade, transportation, and the island’s population. I did indeed feel like a time traveller as I was taken through the British countryside, Brighton, London, and Manchester.
This book achieves something unique – a historian’s perspective written in a style of writing that is exciting to read.
Strictly speaking the oficial Regency lasted from 1811 to 1820, but the author, Ian Mortimer, takes the reader on a journey to Great Britain – England, Wales and Scotland – from 1789 to 1830, a time period that is in line with most other historians, literary critics and antiques experts.
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