The Regency Years

During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern

By: Robert Morrison

Narrated by: Chris MacDonnell

The Victorians are often credited with ushering in our current era, yet the seeds of change were planted in the years before. The Regency (1811-1820) began when the profligate Prince of Wales - the future King George IV - replaced his insane father, George III, as Britain's ruler.

Around the regent surged a society steeped in contrasts: evangelicalism and hedonism, elegance and brutality, exuberance and despair. The arts flourished at this time with a showcase of extraordinary writers and painters such as Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. Science burgeoned during this decade, too, giving us the steam locomotive and the blueprint for the modern computer.

Yet the dark side of the era was visible in poverty, slavery, pornography, opium, and the gothic imaginings that birthed the novel Frankenstein. With the British military in foreign lands, fighting the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the War of 1812 in the United States, the desire for empire and an expanding colonial enterprise gained unstoppable momentum. Exploring these crosscurrents, Robert Morrison illuminates the profound ways this period shaped and indelibly marked the modern world.

©2019 Robert Morrison (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Boring

I don’t know if it is better when actually reading the book, but this was boring and I didn’t feel like I learned anything. I really wanted to stop listening. Listening it felt like a bunch of quotations strung together.

Good book, not so great reader

This is one of the better books on the period I’ve come across. It does a great job of connecting historical and social developments to artistic and literary developments. It even has some original and astute insights about familiar literary works like Pride and Prejudice, which I wasn’t expecting from a history book.

Unfortunately it was pretty unpleasant to listen to this reader. He’s not the absolute worst I’ve heard, but close. I would highly recommend reading this book rather than listening to it.

It lives up to its task

A very balanced, interesting presentation of all aspects of this period with its contrasts and its wide variety of individual talents and communal results coming from them.

interesting facts, but not a very coherent whole

This book struck me as a bit too episodic. Morrison seems to view the Regency as a whole, but the presentation, for me, was a collection of various stories. The last hour struck me as the best as Morrison wrote about the improvement of roads by Macadam and Telford, and the development of railroads seemed to be a literal path from the previous generation to the next. But describing massive volcanoes and sexual mores - both liberal and prurient - may describe the times, but neither were inked to the past or future in any meaningful way by Morrison.
In the epilogue, Morrison praises the regent for great changes that took place. But many of these kudos resulted as a reaction to the regent's actions, not out of agreement. And the scientific discoveries and applications merely happened in this decade, not because of the regent's policies.
So while I heard about things that I was not familiar with, and was pleased to do so, I am not prepared to give the regent near the credit that Morrison does.

a favorite on repeat

I just love this time period. it's so different from ours and yet so much is still the same

Ok

The tolerable history I suppose… I did enjoy that it spent an entire chapter with several sections on sexuality, which tends to be left out of many books.
However the narrator seems to have mispronounced several words on purpose, including Byron's 'Don Juan' pronouncing it 'Don Jew-on'- and as it is mentioned pretty much every paragraph for at least a chapter 2, it starts to really great on the nerves…
The author also seems to take some kind of thrill in making lists, I cannot help but be reminded of a high school student trying desperately to pad out an end of term paper. Instead of just saying "the arts and sciences" he goes onto list 10 to 14 different professions, and these lists are pretty much constant depending on the topic. It gets pretty annoying to be perfectly honest…
I don't need a list of 14 to 25 different names, professions, trades, houses, roads, artists, architects, poets, writers, economic viewpoints,… Yeah it's like that except go on for at least another 10.

What a time!

3.5. About as thorough a look at the years in question as one could hope for (with perhaps one exception: I would have liked to learn more about the daily lives of the masses, but that's OK). The Regency was truly a remarkable period... surely an understatement for a span that included Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Austen, Frankenstein, The Vampyr, the birth of celebrity, Napoleonic wars, a London in which 1 out of every 8 women in London was in the sex trade, Luddites (the originals), Beau Brummel, painters Constable and Turner, a thoroughly dissolute monarch, scientists like Humphrey Davy and Charles Babbage, the steam locomotive, the War of 1812, Waterloo and Peterloo (one a battle, the other a massacre), and so much more. The audio edition is very ably read by Chris MacDonnell.

Excellent Overview of Neglected Historical Period

Very well written survey of Britain during the Regency. MacDonnell perfectly captures the tone of the book and the period is filled with exciting and contradictory characters. One of the best history books I've listened to in a long time.

Richly detailed, unexpectedly contemporary

Details events and activities that colored the lives, politics, and culture of Britons between approx 1806-1820, ranging from socioeconomics to entertainment. Enlivened through extensive use of description, anecdote and commentary by contemporary journalists, essayists, poets, novelists, and observers. Engrossing and informative. The peaceful social protests of the time (and the reactions thereto) are remarkably similar to the ones America is currently experiencing.