Our Tempestuous Day: A History of Regency England - Softcover

"A lively and thoroughly enthralling account of thisparadoxical age ... [that reads] like a whopping good novel." --- New York Times Book Review

Regency England, the period between 1810 and 1820, has long been seen as a decade of hedonism and romance, when dashing beaux and elegant belles played out their flirtations against a backdrop of opulence and style. Yet beneath the surface glitter of the Regency lay an underlying malaise, a pervasive hollowness and sense of loss, along with an explosive undercurrent of popular unrest and political radicalism.

It was indeed a tempestuous, quicksilver era, haunted by war and the human wreckage of war, and by fears of Luddite violence and risings of the overtaxed, underfed poor. A time of financial uncertainty when fortunes were made and lost amid high risk and the ever-present specter of bankruptcy.

And it was, memorably, a decade studded with larger-than-life personalities: the aged king in his slow decline into delusion; the flamboyant Prince Regent in his extravagant Brighton Pavilion; the Duke of Wellington, hero of Waterloo; the debauched, tragically fissured Lord Byron, hero to the women of fashionable London. These and many others are brought to vibrant life in this wide-ranging, captivating social history---a history as dramatic as the times themselves.

"Anyone wanting a lively, decorative introduction to the Regency could not do better than Our Tempestuous Day."---Washington Post