Product Description
This book brings an engaging cast of Regency characters vividly to life through a vigorous combination of words and pictures. Biographical sketches accompany portraits from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery with the whole introduced by an original and thought-provoking essay from Richard Holmes. Together they illustrate all the diversity and exuberance of Regency England - its triumphs, dramas, paradoxes, successes and excesses. It was a period of seismic political change, of revolutionary scientific discovery, of towering artistic achievement, of military triumph and of social scandal. From American Independence to the shocking trial of Queen Caroline, from vaccination to the Battle of Waterloo, from Don Juan to the Abolition of slavery, this book offers a fascinating portrait of a thrilling period in British history.
About the Author
The distinguished literary biographer Richard Holmes is well known for his many books on the Romantic period, including Shelley the Pursuit (1975), Footsteps (1985) and Sidetracks (2000), and his two-volume life of Coleridge, which won the Whitbread Prize and was a New York Times Editor's Choice. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and the first Professor of Biographical Studies at the University of East Anglia. After reading English at Oxford, David Crane taught in various universities in England and America. He is the author of an acclaimed biography of Trelawney, Lord Byron's Jackal, and his book on Byron's widow; The Kindness of Sisters is to be published in the New Year.
