paperback

This is a lovely book! Lots of pictures of fashion and architecture during the life of the Prince Regent. ( )

I love the writing style of this book, and the way JB Priestley arranged his information. The book is chock full of informative historical tidbits and images. ( )

I quite enjoyed his take on history, I found that he had a light touch without bitterness or morbid judgment. For an overall look at the times, I loved it. He took the time of the Regent year by year and jumbled up everything that was happening in that year, not just with the Regent, but also in art, war, politics, scandals, literature and the populace. I always had a pastoral, innocent image of life in those times. Gulp. Not innocent. Priestley's wrap up in the final chapter was interesting and left one with much to ponder about this time in history.
He has made me want to read Austen again, in light of her times. ( )

In all my years of college teaching (more than forty), there is one course that I would have liked to teach, perhaps an honors seminar, that I never got to: England in the Regency. its history (Waterloo and Peterloo and that little fracas that we US Americans know as the WAR OF 1812), the royal family and the royal scandals, the industrial revolution and political reform, music (the Philharmonic) and art (J. M. W. Turner and George Cruikshank), pastimes and fashions, London and Brighton Beach, and literature—such an outpouring: Jane Austen, William Blake, Lord Byron, Coleridge, Gothic horror (“Monk” Lewis and Rev. Maturin), young John Keats,Tom Moore, Thomas Love Peacock, Sir Walter Scott, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth. There were heroes (the Duke of Wellington) and hoodlums aplenty, dandies (Beau Brummell) and dames (the Lady Caroline Lamb, for instance)—not to mention the Prince Regent himself (his orgies, his bourgeois virtues, his royal duties, his debts, his deceptions, his patronage of he arts, his orientalism, his wife (Caroline of Brunswick) and his mistress (Mrs Fitzherbert).

The Prince of Pleasure by J. B. Priestley (Harper & Row, 1969) captures it all. One chapter each is devoted to each year of the decade (1811-1820), and the charming, readable text is enhanced by a wealth of illustrations, from small black and white portraits in the margins to forty-four handsome full-color, full page plates. Just a brief list of some of these plates will let you imagine the splendor and the diversity of the era: an ornate gold tankard and its cover,Tom Cribb the black boxer, Edmund Kean playing Richard III, the first steamboat on the Clyde, a pit-head of a coalmine, the Waterloo cherry from the Horticultural Society of London, a walking dress from La Belle Assemblée, an 1814 embroidered sampler, a stage coach, a chandelier and the Chinese corridor from the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, John Constable’s painting of a peasant cottage. Portraits suggest the eminence of the era, and its dramatic contrasts: the Prince in his royal Garter Robes (the frontispiece), the somewhat dowdy Princess, a haughty, somewhat seductive Caroline Lamb, Beau Brummell in his finery, a collier of Leeds near a steam locomotive, a fantastically handsome Byron costumed in bright Arabian attire, a sweet, simple, innocent Annabella Milbanke, an impressionistic view of a middle-aged Sir Walter Scott, a well groomed, well-fleshed Coleridge, Joseph Severn’s thoughtful portrait of the studious young Keats at Hampstead; and among these colorful, dignified, healthful appearing persons, one cannot help being haunted by the small black-and-white engraving of the white-bearded, berobed, sightless, deranged old king, isolated and ignored. “Let me alone,” he is quoted as saying, “I am looking into Hell.” Dying finally at the age of eighty-two, he quoted another mad King, Shakespeare’s Lear: “Tom’s a cold.”

But the Prince of Pleasure reigns. Double-page spreads show you fireworks at Hyde Park, the election of Members of Parliament in Convent Garden, and the trial of Queen Caroline in 1820. And there are enough caricatures to give you the humorists’ view of the era. None are better than Cruikshank’s celebration of the marriage of the Regent’s buxom sister Mary to her well-fed German cousin the Duke of Gloucester. Here is the verse dialogue attributed to them:

G: Bread, Cheese & Kisses with good will
Is better than Sour Kraut or Cabbage
So live with me & take your fill
And never ask for German Sausage!!

M. What’s German Sausages to me?
Such foreign things I will not foster
And when I wed the World shall see
I love a bit of Single Gloucester!!

The Prince of Pleasure is simply a delight. From the description of the royal family on November 2, 1910, when the raving, mad King George II was secured in a straitjacket to the Coronation of George IV on July 9. 1921, Priestley’s account of this glamour era keeps one captivated. He does not spare us the grim details, and he does not neglect the quiet, unseen suffering. On February 7 of the coronation year, as the new king is being cheered at the theaters and on parade, across the sea in Rome, in the company of his friend Joseph Severn, John Keats is suffering, bitterly awaiting, expecting, hoping for the death that will ease his pain and anguish.

In the last paragraph of the book, Priestley captures the contrasts that he has developed for almost 300 pages:

“In a city where many people think it is wicked to row a boat on Sunday, young noblemen lose £25,000 in a night at Watier’s, tiny boys of six are forced up chimneys, prostitutes of fourteen roam the streets. Down at Brighton, in his fantastic Pavilion, the Regent is believed to be staging wild orgies, perhaps with kidnapped virgins, when in fact, with his stays loosened over the curacao, he is giving imitations of cabinet ministers to amuse the grandmothers who are his favorites. All appearances tend to be deceptive; too many public personages are either drunk or a trifle cracked; sedate grand ladies smile at sons and daughters who wonder who their fathers are; the Tory rulers adopt measures to suppress all opposition, but at the same time the crowds round the print shops roar with laughter at ferocious caricatures of them; lads brought up on sour bread and rotten potatoes go away to command the seas and help to drive Napoleon’s marshals out of Spain. And between these extremes, a vitalizing electric current seemed to pass from pole to pole; and out of all this rich variety of life that refused as yet form an overall pattern, there shot up like a fountain the greatest English writing since Shakespeare’s time.” ( )

A must for those interested in Regency England