The Regency Years: During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern - Robert Morrison
Published in 2019 by W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY
366 pages
ISBN: 978-0-393-35824-7 (paperback); 9780393249057 (hardcover)
LCCN: 2018053659
LCC: DA533 .M775 2019
The Regency era occupies a prominent place within our popular fiction, finding expression in romantic novels, period piece films, and television dramas. The popularity of the Bridgerton series and the vast proliferation of Pride and Prejudice film adaptations (at least 17 at the time of writing) illustrate that we are a culture obsessed with the Regency. Even though the Regency era only lasted 9 years (1811-1820), it still occupies our minds more than two centuries later. Time after time, we return to the glitz and glamor of colorful flowing gowns, ornate mansions, exquisitely executed waltzes at opulent balls, and witty, cutting banter undercut by undeniable sexual tension.
Even if popular media set in the Regency era such as Bridgerton tends to generously blend fact and fiction for entertainment purposes, there is still something about this brief period of time that captures our imaginations. Since most of our exposure to the Regency is through popular fiction, it is important for readers and Regency aficionados to attain a more holistic view of the Regency, in all its panache and terror. In his 2019 book, The Regency Years: During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern, Robert Morrison argues that the Regency was a pivotal moment in history that set the stage for the modern Western world that we know today. By providing a whirlwind tour of these nine years of history filled with vast social upheaval, artistic and scientific discovery, colonialist expansion, and the invention of the modern celebrity, Morrison seeks to reestablish the importance of the Regency in understanding both ourselves and the contemporary world in which we live.
Overview:
The Regency era in British history refers to the years of 1811-1820 when George IV ruled as the “Prince Regent” after his father, King George III, irrevocably descended further into his mental illness and was incapacitated from completing the duties of the monarchy. George IV ruled as the Prince Regent during the interim until his father died in 1820, and was subsequently formally crowned as king. Since he was known to be irresponsible and self-indulgent, the Prince Regent’s powers were highly truncated while his father was still alive, and much of the direct governance of the British empire fell to his ministers.
As such, the Prince Regent filled his time with hedonistic pursuits and was infamously known for his lavish spending, extravagant parties, gluttonous feasting, and chronic alcohol and opium abuse. Despite his sour reputation among his peers and subjects, he was also an enormous patron of the arts, funding extravagant projects that fueled innovation and social prosperity, which left a lasting impact on British society. These nine years of history were filled with highly influential events, such as the publication of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the Napoleonic Wars, the assassination of Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, the Luddite Riots in response to increasing industrialization, the Peterloo Massacre, and the rise to fame of Lord Byron.
Morrison takes the reader through a whirlwind tour of the Regency era, recounting all of these events and more. The chapters are organized thematically, each covering a different aspect of Regency Britain. The First Chapter explores the concept of crime, law, punishment, and protest during the Regency. He begins by recounting the murder of Spencer Perceval in 1812, the only instance of the assassination of a British prime minister. The act was celebrated by a large crowd of people who had gathered in the streets just after his death, as Morrison highlights the persistent economic injustice that was rife within Regency Britain. With the first sights of industrialization only just beginning to come into view, the division between the exorbitantly wealthy and the impoverished and destitute was growing exponentially, leading to vast civil unrest, widespread prostitution and theft, and revolutionary fervor. As such, Morrison covers the various movements and individuals who fought for change (including Luddites, social-justice-oriented Evangelicals, and satirists) while also recounting the reactionary efforts to quell this dissent (most infamously in the Peterloo Massacre).
In the Second Chapter, Morrison highlights the forms of popular entertainment during the Regency era. These included going to the theater to see a play, shopping at newly built galleries (precursor to the mall), and attending fairs and festivals (with varying degrees of revelry). Regency Brits also indulged in other forms of entertainment, such as gambling on card and dice games, horse racing, and sports such as boxing. Morrison recounts these activities in lurid detail, providing us with a snapshot image of entertainment during this period that often echoes our own.
The Third Chapter concentrates on the expressions, repressions, and representations of sexual desire during the Regency. Emphasizing the period’s transitional place in history, Morrison writes, “As the Regency staged the fiercest collision between the eighteenth-century powers of rakery and the proto-Victorian forces of modesty and restraint, so too it witnessed both the highest peak of government-sanctioned, mob-based homophobic violence and the first sustained exploration of alternative sexual identities” (126). Morrison highlights the highly gendered expectations and social movements that sought to regulate and narrowly contain sexual behaviors, as well as how individuals continually pushed these boundaries (or simply ignored them).
The Fourth Chapter zooms out and examines the expanding British empire during the Regency. Pivoting toward military history, Morrison starts the chapter with the battle of Waterloo, setting the Napoleonic Wars in context. He also recounts the War of 1812, noting how it served as a catalyst for Westward expansion in America and further hastened the exploitation and oppression of Native Americans. Morrison also draws our attention toward the East as he illustrates the economic relationships between Britain and its colonies (particularly India), as well as the influx and popularity of opium from China.
Finally, in the Fifth and final chapter, Morrison describes the double-edged sword of rapid industrialization during the Regency period. While these developments propelled scientific discoveries and innovation, they also deepened socio-economic inequalities and had deleterious effects on the natural environment. Morrison details how painters such as J.M.W. Turner and John Constable attempted to capture an imagined, idyllic British countryside through their work, even as the rural countryside was rapidly fading in the wake of mass industrialization, urbanization, and the construction of factories. By highlighting these tensions, Morrison illustrates how the Regency set the stage for the Industrial Revolution and all the progress and destruction it would entail.
Along the way, Morrison takes us through the activities of the era’s cultural titans, including Lord Byron, Jane Austen, John Keats, Mary and Percy Shelley, J.M.W. Turner, John Constable, and many more. Through all of these vignettes of Regency Britain, Morrison argues that the Regency served as a vibrant and crucial transitional period between the traditional monarchical society of England and the dramatic changes that would come to define the Victorian era. He draws parallels between the Regency and our contemporary world, noting, “Almost two centuries ago, the glittering world of the Regency seemed to Byron to disappear with astonishing quickness. Now it is more evident than ever that its many legacies are still all around us” (305).
Commendations:
As a work of popular history, The Regency Years can be commended in several ways. While this book's focus is broad and covers such a wide breadth of topics regarding Regency life, it still manages to be concise and accessible. Whether discussing the vast corpus of poetry and novels that continue to captivate us to this day, the military tactics deployed during the Napoleonic Wars, or the sexual attitudes and risque literature that defined the era, Morrison covers them with tact and sensitivity. He consistently draws connections between the Regency era and our own, which add an element of relevancy to each chapter for the contemporary reader. Despite the sheer amount of content and names that are packed into this volume, Morrison breaks each chapter into small, bite-sized pieces that focus on one narrative thread at a time. This makes the book a rather brisk and breezy read at times without sacrificing necessary context, and it serves as a fantastic primer for anyone interested in an overview of the Regency era.
One of the reasons why the Regency is such a fascinating era is due to the sheer amount of cultural and political change that occurred in such a short span of time. Morrison provides a sweeping and star-studded account of these seemingly monumental figures and the legacies they left behind. For example, the infamous Lord Byron, who was infamous as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” set the template for our modern notion of a celebrity and sex symbol. Mary Shelley published Frankenstein (my favorite book) in 1818, and its themes reflect the scientific and philosophical debates of the Regency era, from the problems of body-snatching to the burgeoning theory of galvanism (using electricity to reanimate dead tissue). Not only does the reader gain context to these writers and their work, but they are also introduced to many lesser-known characters, such as the dandy Beau Brummell, who epitomized the figure of the dandy and used his position as an arbiter of fashion to elevate himself within the Regency social order.
While it’s all too easy to get caught up in the glitz and glamor of elite upper-class fashion and social life, we often overlook that the Regency was an era of immense inequality and injustice, leading to moments of intense social and political upheaval. Since suffrage was tied to property ownership, less than 15% of the male population had the ability to vote. Emerging technology was replacing a large portion of the labor force, leading to a widening division of wealth between capital owners and laborers. While the Prince Regent incessantly womanized and threw lavish parties, the average Regency citizen struggled to secure basic provisions such as food and housing In response to this immiseration and desperation, increasingly draconian laws were passed in an effort to deter crime, further punishing the most poor and destitute. These conditions led to the assassination of a Prime Minister as well as a popular peaceful revolt that the government brutally repressed in the Peterloo Massacre.
In short, the Regency Era was a society of immense social, political, and cultural tensions, as the forces of revolution, nationalism, and colonialism swirled throughout the air. In his account, Morrison consistently keeps a keen eye on this social dimension of the Regency era that often goes underappreciated and understudied. All too often in popular history books (especially about Britain), authors can too quickly gloss over the evils of colonialism and imperialism. The British Empire extracted natural resources such as sugar, tea, rum, and opium from the colonies, immiserating the local populations in these peripheral territories to feed the insatiable appetite of the imperial core.
Morrison is careful to point out that while the Regency saw immense growth in the fields of transportation, medicine, and industrialization, these were often employed in the service of imperial goals. In addition to covering the wide array of famous figures that populated the Regency, I also deeply appreciated Morrison’s attention toward lesser-known figures and radicals of the time who challenged the dominant and oppressive social order in which they lived, such as William Hazlitt and William Cobbett, who often fought for substantial social and political change. This made the work a nice respite from other popular history books that give too much credit to imperial powers in shaping the modern world as if they did so independently without exploiting resources and labor from the Global South.
Critique:
On the other hand, The Regency Years suffers from a few setbacks. First and foremost, the book’s organization is a bit uneven and scattershot. The book contains only five main chapters, each covering a large, general theme of the Regency. While each chapter is broken down into untitled sections, they often are disconnected and quickly jump from topic to topic. In its ambitious attempt to cover the entirety of the Regency, the book’s brisk pace unfortunately comes at the expense of depth. While many aspects of Regency society are touched upon and given a quick examination, there is often not enough room to dig deeply into any single topic. As such, while it makes the book great for a quick reference or as a beginning point for further study, there is not likely much new here for the seasoned Regency expert.
Additionally, while the writing is accessible and mostly engaging for the average reader, many sections are needlessly dry and dull. At its worst, several chapters end up more like a string of loosely connected anecdotes and an incessant list of names. This problem is especially pronounced in the first chapter, which is disappointing since it should set the tone for future chapters. Instead, there seems to be little connection between each chapter, and Morrison offers no larger unifying theme or argument other than pointing out how the Regency produced famous works. As such, while it can serve as an entertaining introduction to the period, The Regency Years doesn’t advance the field beyond what’s already well-documented.
What Morrison does offer in terms of a cogent theme is also not free from contention. When a historian writes about a specific era, they must take a stance regarding their conception of historical development. This manifests itself in the debate between exceptionalism and continuity in attempting to narrativize history. Essentially, is history marked by distinct and delineated eras of substantive change or do they flow and overlap in one long continuity of time? As an advocate of the latter, I find that historians can often be guilty of prioritizing their own period of expertise as exceptional. While this is completely understandable (indeed, I can be a fierce defender of the Middle Ages) it can also lead to massive blind spots. While there are indeed periods of time where change occurs at a more rapid pace than others, Morrison can too often fall into the trap of making the Regency a wholly distinct era. There is not much context given outside of this narrow span of nine years, so it is often difficult to ascertain what exactly makes the Regency period palpably different from what came before or after it.
As such, his grand central thesis finds itself stretched too thin. Unfortunately, Morrison falls prey to the pop-history trend of “x marks the start of the modern world” (again, see my critique of The Swerve). Morrison attempts to wrap up the various themes covered in the book by arguing that the Regency set the stage for the modern world as we know it today through the immense influence of its writers, artists, and scientists. This seems to be quite an arbitrary claim, as these ideas and developments were swirling around far before the Regency and would continue to evolve long after Prince Regent’s reign. While there undoubtedly were significant achievements during this period, it stands as a small segment of the larger development of science, literature, and art during the long 19th century.
Finally, there are many small mistakes and inaccuracies which, while not undermining the book as a whole, can give the reader doubts about his larger claims. Several of his assertions are highly speculative, such as Lord Byron serving as inspiration for the character Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as Morrison writes, “His [Byron’s] reputation as a handsome, brooding, antisocial elite stands clearly behind Austen’s portrait of Darcy in Pride and Prejudice” (122). Never mind the fact that Austen first drafted the book when Byron was only eight years old, there is a whole niche of studies dedicated to Austen and her works, where it has been argued that Mr. Darcy is based on either John Parker, 1st Earl of Morley or Tom Lefroy. Morrison seems to rely on the assertion that Mr. Darcy embodies the archetype of the Byronic hero, despite acknowledging that devilishly handsome bad boys have been a tried and true staple of Gothic novels, most notably derived from John Milton’s depiction of Satan in Paradise Lost (120).
Likewise, several other small details are quickly glossed over, which weakens the book’s potency as an argument. While Morrison is clearly more interested in addressing the literature of the era than any other aspect (indeed, he constantly brings up the Shelleys and Frankenstein at every possible opportunity), he finds himself more out of his comfort zone when it comes to the issues of philosophy, religion, and international politics. Whether wholly glossing over the thorny issue of the Bible’s stance on homosexual behavior, leveling out the nuance and contentious legality of England’s acquisition and continued possession of the Elgin Marbles, the lack of philosophical and scientific context for the development of galvanism, or continually referring to the Irish language simply as “Gaelic,” these small details add up over the course of the book. While Morrison’s ambitious scope necessitates brevity, it too often sacrifices depth and academic rigor, despite his lengthy bibliography and references. As such, Morrison’s occasional hubris in these small details only serves to undermine the credibility of the rest of his grand claims made throughout the book.
Conclusion:
Overall, The Regency Years serves as an entertaining introduction to Regency Britain, giving the reader a broad overview of British society during these nine brief years. While seasoned Regency experts will likely find this work lacking in depth and novelty, the average reader will likely find this book useful as a helpful reference for further study of the era. Morrison’s breezy writing style and brief sections make this a quick and accessible read, offering the reader plenty of famous names and events that have come to define the Regency years. What the book lacks in depth it makes up for in its vast scope, giving the reader plenty of opportunity to further explore different aspects of Regency society. For those who want to gain a greater understanding and context for their Regency romance fiction, this book serves as a widely informative and entertaining read.
Despite its brief lifespan, the Regency produced so much literature and art that continues to inspire and impact our world today. Beyond the glamor and glow of these achievements, however, Morrison also reminds us of the vast social and political upheavals that defined the era as well, as the legacies of colonialism and imperialism also continue to make their presence known today. As always, in order to understand our present, we must be attentive to the past. Morrison’s survey of the Regency gives us an opportunity to contemplate how we continue to be visited, and yes, even haunted, by the ghosts of our past.