Life in Regency England

Strictly speaking Regency England lasted from 1811, when George III lapsed into incurable madness, into 1820, when the old King died and the Regent became King George IV. The term "Regency" however, has become one of much wider application. It stands for a style of building, decoration, dress, and even social life which extended before and after the dates of the Regent's government, and which marked the momentous transition from Georgian to Victorian England. It is this distinctive quality which Reginald White brings out. He enables the reader to enter into the lives and minds of the people of whom Regency England was composed, whether they belonged to the landed nobility, to the increasingly prosperous middle classes, or to the lower orders, working on the land or in the factory. The author's survey contrasts life in London with that in the provinces; it sets the extravagance and self-indulgence of the Regency "bucks" against the far-reaching zeal of the political and religious reformers. But Mr. White not only presents a panoramic view of society; in highlighting the lives of individual men and women he makes the final picture more immediate and life-like. Vividness is further achieved by illuminating quotations from such writers as William Cobbett, Samuel Bamford, and Jane Austen; and by the reproduction of over 150 contemporary illustrations, from paintings, drawings, engravings, woodcuts, and silhouettes. R. J. White is a fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and a University lecturer in history. He is an authority on early nineteenth-century England, and the author of, among other works, Waterloo to Peterloo.