"The Unrefined Regency" Topic

"One wonders what more can be added to a rich seam of Regency history already well-mined. However, Robert Morrison manages to make an enjoyable book full of anecdotes and scenarios of both the rich and famous, the poor and exploited alike. Most of his primary sources are literary: Byron, Shelley, Carlyle, Coleridge, Cobbett, Scott and Wordsworth are given their due, but he gets his women in as well, including Jane Austen, Fanny Burney, Mary Shelley and Maria Edgeworth. He also dredges up lesser-known mortals such as Pierce Egan, who recollects life in London with highlights of excessive gambling, use of ‘flash language', bare-fisted boxing and overall libertinism.

Morrison's breadth of reading is impressive, covering crime and punishment, theatre, sex, war and empire as well as the shifting landscape of the Industrial Revolution. The highs of the era seen in great feats of engineering are set against the riots of the unemployed as they are plunged into depths of poverty with the introduction of new-fangled machinery and the Corn Laws. The uprisings of the aggrieved masses at demonstrations threatened authority, whose reaction was to cut them down at the Peterloo Massacre in 1819…"
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From the History Today website.