They also curate bespoke travel experiences for individuals, couples, and groups of any size, including journeys beyond Bath. So whether you're planning a romantic getaway or organizing a trip for your whole book club, they can build something just for you. And if you've ever wanted to step straight into the world we're about to talk about, to walk the streets Jane Austen walked and genuinely with genuinely expert guides bringing Regency Bath to life, Strictly Jane Austen is where you start.

They also make a wonderful gift for the Janeite in your life. You'll find them at strictlyjanausten.com and we'll put a link in the show notes. Now to today's subject. We talk a lot on this show about the Regency. It's a backdrop to Jane Austen, to Bridgerton, to a thousand romance novels and costume dramas. But what actually was the Regency? Strictly speaking, it was a brief window from 1811 to 1820 when George III's

descent into apparent madness meant that his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, ruled in his place as Prince Regent. And yet for such a short period of time, it cast an extraordinarily long shadow through history, culture, and travel. It gave us some of the greatest writing in English language, world-changing battles, scientific breakthroughs, scandals that still entertain us, and as my guest argues, the very foundations of the modern world. My guest today,

Is the person best placed in the world to give us this overview. Robert Morrison is a literary historian and biographer, Queen's National Scholar at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, and from 2019 to 2024 was the British Academy Global Professor at Bath Spa University. And he is the author of The Regency Years, named by The Economist as one of its books of the year and shortlisted for the Historical Writers Association Crown Award.

as well as a prize winning biography of Thomas de Quincy and an acclaimed annotated edition of Austen's Persuasion, there is nobody better to walk us through what the Regency era was, what it was really like, and why it still grips us two hundred years later. Robert, welcome to the Anglotopia Podcast.

fulfill the duties of the monarch. And when that happens, you enter what's called a regency. So for example, heaven forbid, if something were to happen to King Charles III, the present monarch of Britain, and he was incapable of fulfilling his duties, then his eldest son, the current Prince of Wales, would in all likelihood be made Prince Regent. That is, Parliament would enact a Regency Act that meant that though King Charles remained King,

the next in line to the throne took over the duties that he was no longer able to fulfill. So the most famous regency in Britain, in British history, is the one that we're talking about. And it started on the 5th of February, 1811, when Parliament very reluctantly said, okay, we will make King George III's eldest son, Prince Regent. And he stayed Prince Regent until his father died.

on the 29th of January, 1820. At that moment, the Prince Regent, who had gone from Prince of Wales to Prince Regent, went from Prince Regent to George IV. And he was on the throne for 10 years, dies in 1830. Then we have his brother William, and then Victoria takes us through the rest of the 19th century. So one of the things that's interesting about Regency to me is that we have names for decades, like the swinging 60s or the roaring 20s or the dirty 30s.

They are constructions that help us talk about different areas of time. But the Regency is a constitutional political reality as well. It means that the sort of the structure of the state was changed. And I think that you know, gives it a greater weight than just coining a name for the period. It is a constitutional reality as well as a way of thinking about furniture and architecture and much else.

when we a lot of historians, including you, think kind of say that the Regency era wasn't just that nine year actual period of the Regency, that it

Romanticism is defined by six poets, William Blake, William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge and then in the second generation Byron and Percy Shelley and John Keats. And at the middle of Romanticism is the Regency Decade. And one of the things I wanted to do in the book is to say this decade is different than what came before, and it lays the foundation for a great deal that comes afterwards.

So much happens in this decade that I drew lines around it just because there's no way you can write from 1789 to 1837 and go into the kind of detail that I wanted to go into and to range around the world in the way that I tried to do and not have a publisher go, that's way too big. We're not gonna publish that, that's way too big. So it became a way of thinking about a more concise period.

that is Janus' face in that it looks backward and consolidates much of English tradition at the same time that it has to cope with enormous challenges, financial, economic, military, and so on. So I quite like the idea of writing about a decade. Lots of people have said to me, well, if you were to write another book about another decade, what would it be? And I've said I would write about the 1960s in Britain.

You know, that's not a constitutional reality, but you get the same flowering of artistic creativity at the same time that you've got things like political assassinations and the Vietnam War and so on. So I quite like the idea of diving deep into a period rather than a longer account.

is fantastic. Yeah. He does that kind of thing. Right. Big

How has sort of the historical record become more sensitive to what was actually happening rather than just saying he was crazy?

madness in 1788 when there is what's called the Regency Crisis. And his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, gets very excited that he's going to have access to the country's coffers and he's going to be able to do all kinds of extravagant things. And then George recovers and he has periodic bouts until 1810 when his youngest daughter Amelia dies. And this is a severe blow to him and it pitches him into darkness and he is unable to recover.

People have speculated a long time about what it was. And for many decades, it was thought to be something called porphyria, which is a metabolic disease, metabolic disorder. But it's now more commonly thought that he had some severe form of bipolar disorder, which was augmented or which included hysteria. couldn't stop talking very often. He said very, very rude things and hallucinations, insomnia,

bouts of violence, and I think latterly toward, you know, 1816, 1718, as he gets near his final year, dementia of some form. So he is in a straight jacket in Windsor Castle many, many days and becomes quite a tragic figure. And if he could have seen what his son was up to, he would have been even more distressed, I think. So King George, you know, dies in.

1820, but really as a monarch, the Regency indicates that he was no longer capable of fulfilling those duties from 1810. The Regency Act was February 1811. And then he is really largely unaware of what's happening around him.

is rampaging through Europe and changing the monarch and bringing in someone. The king was very tightly associated with the Tories and his son who did everything to annoy his father had aligned himself with the Whigs. And so there was all kinds of anxiety about what the Regent was going to do when he assumed power. But parliament had no choice. You have to have someone.

I mean, the monarch, as you know, in Britain today is very, very important and, you know, exerts tremendous influence. But 200 years ago, the monarch had real political power and you just could not have somebody who was not in full possession of his faculties. And so parliament had no choice. You couldn't go to one of the other brothers. You have to take the eldest one. And so they, you know, held their breath.

and enacted the Regency.

about the regent. So George, the Prince of Wales, later George IV, he's

the young Prince of Wales goes, I am gonna do everything I can to annoy my dad. And so he does. And by the time he is a teenager, he is drinking a lot, gambling a lot, and enjoying the company of women a lot. He's also very talented. One of his close friends, Beau Brummell said, if he hadn't been the monarch, he would have been a great comic actor. He's very good at impressions. He has a good singing voice. He's just...

you know, he's not at all concerned about poverty. He's concerned with, you know, getting more money from Parliament so that he can, you know, spend money. And in 1795, he marries Caroline. And he marries Caroline because Parliament says you're not getting any more money unless you marry. So he marries and they give him all sorts of money and he pays off his debt. But the marriage lasts, well, generously it lasts a year before they're living in separate places. They have a daughter.

And so he goes on this sort of career of excess. And if you're sympathetic to him at all, you say, well, look, he wanted to play an active role. He wanted to go fight. And Parliament and his father said, there's no way we're letting you do that. You're the next monarch. You just can't be out on the battlefield. And so he said, well, I've got nothing to do but sit here and I can't take an active role in the world around me. I'm just going to have fun.

And so he put on weight, cetera, et cetera, et cetera, disastrous marriage, fighting in public, et cetera, et cetera. And then, you know, his dad becomes ill. And so this wastrel, this dissolute is going to become in effect the sovereign de facto of Britain. And he has a very, very short attention span when it comes to politics. I mean, he just, it's just not of interest to him. But what is remarkable about him.

is that over the course of the Regency and his kingship, he does an amazing job of fostering this climate of connoisseurship and artistic endeavor and creativity. His aesthetic judgments in terms of architecture, in terms of painting, in terms of the theater, in terms of Jane Austen, long, long before the world went, Austen is a significant novelist.

the Regent had a copy of all her novels in all of his residences. And after Mansfield Park comes out, he lets it be known that Jane Austen can dedicate her next novel to him. And so if you open up Emma, which was published in 1816, it says to his Royal Highness the Prince Regent. So he is on one hand, you know.

excess personified and on the other he's going I saw JMW Turner's painting this morning and I really think he's on to something. That range is characteristic of the Regency. So he's betting on horses and he's gambling and he's whoring and he's also sitting at home reading Jane Austen, Walter Scott and Lord Byron. Perceptively, Byron meets him at a party in 1812 and goes I can't believe how much he knew about Greek poets.

It's that combination of extremes. And in the Regency itself, there are great men who have excessive appetites and who achieve remarkable things artistically, politically, financially, and so on. So I would say he gives, there are lots of things that happen. He doesn't give two tosses about people who are living at the lower end of the social spectrum.

He doesn't care about them at all. So there's plenty of things that, you know, that he doesn't reflect, but there is a way in which the region and the regency are.

Whereas a monarchy is not like that. You can't just go, right, we're firing the monarch. The monarch is in place, period, that's how it works. And if Charles can't do it, then it's William. There's not an election, it's a system that from this perspective shows that it is hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old. And that's how it works. And so Parliament

took the only option they had available to them and they made him regent. you know, Britain won just, but Britain with the Blücher and the Prussians won Waterloo. There, you know, were plenty of people who said we are in big trouble, but the regent gave his full backing. Well, first of all, he was aligned with the Whigs and when he came to power, everybody expected him to dismiss the government and call in the Whigs and he didn't. So,

He sent a shockwave through the political party he was allied with. And most people say he just couldn't be bothered. He just couldn't bear the fuss of it. So he just kept his father's ministers. And he also thought if my dad comes out of this mania and finds that he's got a Whig government, he'll lose it. So he kept the Tory ministers. He kept the same prime minister and so on. And so, you know, from certain perspectives, he wasn't the disaster that he might have been.

making connections and you realize how interconnected and extraordinary this decade was. But for me, the biggest reason is because at this moment, people from across social hierarchies start to dream of things like equality. They start to dream of things like a fairer, juster society.

I think Canada's greatest prime minister, who's a man named Pierre Elliott Trudeau, said when he became prime minister, Canada must be a just society. And in the Regency, people start to wonder what that might look like. They also start to embrace things like consumerism and celebrity culture and fashion and gossip in a way, because there are technologies that allow all of that to spread much faster.

They also gather in enormous numbers to protest against the government. It's a very inspiring period when people who have nothing gather. And the most famous example of this is Peterloo, when 60,000 people gather in Manchester to protest the state of the country and to argue that parliamentary reform should come into being. So it's a moment when sort of the traditional way that Britain has been run

is called into question and people start thinking about creating a society that is democratic, that is secular, that is capitalistic, that is opportunistic, and that centers not on this rich, ruling elite class, but on a broader population that believes in things like democracy. And all those things, I try to make the case for in the book,

happen in varying ways and to varying degrees over the course of these nine years. Some of it is because, you know, war and especially a war on the scale of Waterloo and also in the Regency, there's the War of 1812 when the country you're in and the country I'm in go to war. And, you know, as terrible, thing as it is, when it's over, people tend to

think and express themselves in different ways as a result of that challenge to the status quo. And I think that happened in the Regency as well. So Jane Austen, who I think is just so important, writes in this period, the most famous love stories of the last 200 years. To the extent, I think, Jonathan, that when we say, I have fallen in love,

We mean to a considerable extent we've fallen in love like Jane Austen describes it. She has, as it were, defined for more than 200 years what that means. So when Darcy falls in love with Elizabeth and Pride and Prejudice, that's what we think of as falling in love. That's what spawns, I've given up counting how many regency romances there are, but tens of thousands of them. So Austen gives us that way of thinking. Charles Babbage invents

what becomes the modern computer. He starts thinking about a thinking machine. He does that in 1813. And one of the reasons that I decided I'm going to write this book is because 1813 is the year Pride and Prejudice is published. So Babbage dreaming of the modern computer and Austen writing love stories happened in the same year. And I really wanted to bring things like that into collision. So the people went,

Somebody was thinking about a thinking machine at the same time that Elizabeth was saying, Mr. Darcy, I'm not marrying you, you're the last person on earth I'd marry. Beau Brummell is the great dandy of the period of Friend of the Regent. And he develops a way of men dressing that still influences how men dress. Byron is the first major celebrity. There's enough technology and he's a sensational figure.

And so we get a sense of when Byron moves to Geneva, there are people who buy telescopes and camp across the lake and spy on him through telescopes. We can see the start of our fascination with talent and celebrity. Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a poet, a great poet, and he becomes addicted to opium. And other people start writing about opium, not as medicine, but as a recreational device.

And so the origins of the blight of addiction and people celebrating, exploring, deploring a dependence on opiates, that gets going in the Regency. And the most famous example of that is man named Thomas De Quincey, who's somebody I've worked on a lot and who sinks into addiction in that amazing year, 1813. So the first modern people,

know, abuse substances long before the Regency. But the first time it's written about, explored, circulated is in the Regency. Thomas Lawrence is the great Regency portrait painter and our impression of the Regency as an age of elegance and poise is largely indebted to Thomas Lawrence. And Mary Shelley and John Polidori, Shelley writes one of the most famous ghost stories, monster stories of

the world, Frankenstein, and it happens during a ghost story competition when a man named John Polidori, who's Byron's physician, writes a story called The Vampire. So you've got to imagine Jane Austen sitting writing Persuasion at the same time that Mary Shelley is writing Frankenstein and John Polidori is writing The Vampire. The two most famous horror myths of the 19th century, 20th century, 21st century, come out of the same circle.

Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and John Polidori. And finally, JMW Turner revolutionizes British art with his paintings. So we start to see the world afresh. And so I can make that list longer, but I'm sure I've said enough. That's why I was drawn to the period as when the modern age started.

And so the agrarian way of life in Britain, the world where many of Austen's characters live in the country is under enormous threat because of technological advances. So we have the Luddite riots when people in the Nottingham and the Midlands start rioting because they're losing their jobs to technology. one of the things, you know, that resonates for us today, obviously, who's not worried

in some way, you know, stripping livelihoods away. So.

Part of reason the period grips me is because when I watch the news, I think, my God, that got dealt with in the Regency. And science and technology is one of the major stresses. Another major stress is the class society. Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice is way further down the social hierarchies than the man who proposes to her, Darcy.

Darcy walks in and says, do you know how lucky you are? I like you. Can you believe your luck, Elizabeth? I am going to marry you. And in one of the most magnificent moments in all of English literature, Elizabeth says, yeah, I'm not interested. You are not a gentleman. You couldn't possibly have proposed to me in any way that was less gentlemanly. And Darcy's eyes spin in his head because he walks in going, this is going to be a walk.

I'm going to tell her that I like her. She's going to go, great. And she's going to marry me and then she'll do what I tell her. And Austen won't create a heroine like that in Pride and Prejudice. And so Elizabeth says, yeah, go away. I don't want you. Now, would she have done that in real life? Lots of people say that's when Austen's social critique becomes a fairy tale. There's no way Elizabeth would have said no. But in the world of Austen she says no. And Darcy has to go away.

and realize that he can't walk around with those class assumptions and marry the woman that he wants to. And so he changes his mind and he changes his behavior. And when Elizabeth says, here are my aunt and uncle Gardner, and they live in Cheapside, she expects Darcy to go running from the room. And Darcy says, good afternoon, Mr. Gardner, because he knows that he has to change his opinions about class. And that pressure on class culminates

in 1832 when the reform bill is passed. And the world, the aristocracy finally signals just a tiny, tiny, tiny bit that they are willing to give some ground. My supervisor at Oxford always says the great reform bill not anywhere near enough, which is a very widely held position. But it did show that popular protest and radical anger could change the world for the better.

And even changed yeah,

on the hearts and minds and popular imagination of the people. And she figured out way of doing that where, you know, she walks in and reads what the government is going to do, but she doesn't have any say in how that was shaped or, you know, King Charles III doesn't have any say in how that was shaped. And so it is a very, very gradual process. And the fact that there was no revolution is remarkable.

Remarkable for all the stress and the Crimean War and all kinds of other things Britain stayed remarkably stable and you've been to Britain a lot when I first went to Britain I should You know, would this is 1982 and I would look at the newspaper and they would tell me what Queen Elizabeth was doing that day on the front page I remember thinking, you know in Canada is a Commonwealth country You know, well, it's different now, but you know when I grew up I sang God save the Queen first thing

in school and still at Queen's when people graduate they walk in and the first thing they do is sing God Save the King. Right and I always say to my students have you thought about that? Like you should think about that. You walk in and you sing God Save the King. Right it's different systems and you know politics goes a long way to determining fate.

So how do you hold those truths together when you're writing about the period that there's a dark undercurrent?

She's a woman who didn't get to go to university because no women got to go to university. And she is far and away the cleverest person in the room. You know, by definition, she's the cleverest person in the room. And she's got to put up with all kinds of injustices. She writes, she's our greatest writer of romance and she never married. You know, there are strains against her. And I wanted to show her courage as a way of saying,

Someone like Austen got those insights and wrote those novels with knowledge that was very, very hard won. And Charlotte Brontë says, you know, Jane Austen could have dissolved in anger. And Virginia Woolf says the same thing. Jane Austen could have blown up with anger that she never got married, although I think she decided she wasn't gonna get married. But she overcomes that. And in a way, I wanted to show the gritty side of it for Byron.

or for Mary Shelley or for Elizabeth Fry or for Sarah Siddons or any of the other people because they overcame sometimes very significant challenges to write and think and behave in the ways that they did. And so I tried to choose figures where, mean, William Wilberforce is the most important abolitionist. He's also addicted to opium. Lord Byron is the most famous man of the age. He was born with a club foot.

So you're the most famous man of the age, Jonathan, and you walk into the room and you limp. And everybody knows you limp. And Lord Byron is very handsome, but he's also haunted in all kinds of ways. It was probably sexual abuse when he was a little boy, et cetera, et cetera. And so I tried to choose figures that weren't just, well, none of them actually are, but they have sometimes been represented in a way that's a bit too light for me.

1815 and sees Napoleon on the other side of the battlefield. Like not face to face, but standing in the same place. So I decided that in the title, I wanted Jane Austen beside Napoleon because it's possible to read Jane Austen's novels, and not know that Napoleon is ripping the heart out of Europe.

I mean, I think a close reading of Austen makes it pretty clear that he is, but it is possible to put these people in discrete categories, to write about Byron and not talk about Austen, for example. And what I wanted to do was to make it as messy as possible, to make it as intertwined and complicated as possible, to show both the greatness and the struggle of this moment when the modern world is sort of coming in to being.

So I wanted a title that people went, those people don't belong together. And I wanted to say, well, at one level they don't, but on another, they inhabit the same historical moment.

about Napoleon in the in the wider world. So the Regency unfolds against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, which lasted what, fifteen, twenty years? Trafalgar was in 1805 Waterloo's right in the middle of it in 1815 So how profoundly did that long war shape everyday life in Britain, even for people who were never near a battlefield? I know like the Austen family, for example, many of the men in the family were in the Royal Navy. So how pervasive was this war in everybody's mind?

Yeah.

And there are obviously many, people who have fathers, brothers, husbands fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. And so on one level, it is in everybody's mind all the time. It's costing a fortune. Parliament is debating it all the time. Wellington, especially from 1808, 1809 on to Waterloo, is this surging military

hero who becomes Duke after Waterloo, the regional war it's in with the dukedom, which is the highest war for a civilian. And so it's in the air all the time. It's causing all kinds of economic pressure. And as I've already mentioned, at one point it spirals into a secondary war between Canada, or what became Canada and the United States.

So at one point it threatens to careen, you know, really out of control. And Austen, for me, very interestingly, in Mansfield Park mentions the War of 1812 because it's more relevant to her brothers, Charles and Francis, who are both in the Navy. By the time we get to Waterloo, the war is being fought on land. And Austen I think, writes Persuasion in a way to say, don't forget what a crucial role the Navy played in 1805 when

You know, Nelson was fatally wounded and Britain on the sea won the battle of Trafalgar. So it is a way, I think, of Austen emphasizing how important the military was, but especially the Navy in Britain's struggle with Napoleon. The other side of it though,

is that it's very possible to read novels, plays, to read diaries, to read newspaper accounts that don't mention the war at all. People carry on, much like today, right? They are, there's a war happening, but I'm not anywhere near the bombs, I'm not anywhere near the violence. And so I gotta go out and get a, you know, I gotta get some milk today and I gotta go, you know, online and, you know, deposit a check or whatever it is.

In other words, people live, you know, their daily lives and they, if they're not near the battlefield, there is this astonishing way in which the war seems very removed from them. And once in a while it intrudes, certainly into Austen's life, but people are pretty good at going, that war in Ukraine, it's, you know, it's like a long way away. And I don't think about it all the time. Even if I see it on the news, I, you know, go,

That's what's happening. And then I move on with my daily life. So I was really struck often by how important the war was and how often it shaped events and how often people talked about it and then moved on to go to the theater or go for a walk.

And then he just changed, like sometimes my students think, well, if you're a great novelist, you can be a great poet. No, it's not necessarily the case that if you write a great novel, Jane Austen's poetry is not very good. And when, you know, William Wordsworth tries to write a play it is not very good. In other words, these are two different, three different, four different, five different literary, literary acts.

So Jane Austen in her lifetime was not very popular. She became popular as we went down the 19th century and you know until she's a literary superstar by the end of the 20th. So the fact that she wasn't very popular means that in some ways she had a very negligible impact on her age. The impact of Byron, the impact of other female novelists like Frances Burney,

and Maria Edgeworth and Mary Shelley is far, far greater. But as her importance and our recognition of what she achieved has grown, it has in some instances, I think, overtaken historical fact. we have gone, Austen's England was like what happens in Pride and Prejudice. Or Austen's England was like Bridgerton. the...

The fact of the matter is that that is a construction that reveals one aspect of one social class. It wasn't like that. And so Austen's impact on her own age was not very great, but she is, as you say, very often accused of ignoring events. And I think that that's untrue. I think that she does, she is conscious of what's happening around her.

but her way of dealing with it is much more subtle than those of many of her contemporaries. So for example, in Pride and Prejudice, or let's say in Sense and Sensibility, Mrs. Dashwood has three daughters, no sons. Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion has three daughters, no sons. And then wait for it, in Pride and Prejudice, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet have got five daughters and no sons. And nobody,

is very fond of Mrs. Bennet and she is semi-hysterical but there's a reason, John, she's semi-hysterical and that is her husband has to help her get rid of these daughters and he's in his library and not interested and so she gets rightly very anxious about the future of her daughters. Why is it, why is there so much pressure? Well one of the answers is because there are one million men

1 million men. Britain is only a country of 11 million and over the course of Napoleonic Wars, 1 million of them and of course some of them will be old and some of them will be very young. But amongst those 1 million, there are hundreds of thousands that might have made a good husband, but they aren't there. So Austen doesn't walk out and say, I know the Napoleonic Wars are going on and so a lot of the eligible bachelors aren't here. She just carries on and makes us wonder why. She makes us work for that.

insight and I'm not going to reveal to you how many times I read Pride and Prejudice before I went, oh, I know what the problem is. It's the Napoleonic Wars. It's because Britain is at war and that lack of men shapes all six of Austen's novels. That's the way in which Austen deals with that problem in a way that isn't obvious, but that pervades everything she does. These young women have got to get married and there's no guys.

or they're very, very few guys. And that ratchets up the pressure to the point where Mrs. Bennet can't cope.

Jane Austen's greatest novel. And the person said, I'm sorry, Rob, somebody's already doing Pride and Prejudice. And I said, well, that's okay, because Pride and Prejudice is her most popular novel, but it's not her greatest novel. Her greatest novel is Persuasion, which I still believe. So Persuasion is sadder than the other novels. It's more impassioned, I think, than the other novels. It is a story that...

happens after the romance has already taken place. I mean, that's a remarkable innovation, I think that the lead couple and Wentworth and our Anne Elliot and Captain Wentworth have already fallen in love. They've already been engaged and Anne has been talked out of the engagement by, you know, the coldness of her dad and a woman named Lady Russell, who's kind of her surrogate mother. And

you know, when I first read it, I thought, oh, well, she'll bounce back. Austen heroine's bounced back. Well, she doesn't bounce back. She never meets anybody else for eight years, that she thinks is the equal of Frederick Wentworth. And then when the novel opens, he comes back into the area. And, you know, I've read enough of Austen. I always say to my students, well, we're in a Jane Austen novel, right? You don't have to worry that much. They will get together. All Austen's novels end in marriage, like a Shakespearean comedy. They end in marriage.

But Austen shows us what's important for a healthy relationship to work, I think. So one of the things she does in Persuasion that is not as strong anywhere else is that she shows men helping women and women helping men. She shows men doing domestic work and women doing business. One of the most successful, if not the most successful couple in Austen is Admiral Croft and his wife

Sophia Croft and She's the brains. She's the one who's takes an interest in business There's a marvelous scene where they're out driving and the Admiral's driving the garrison He's gonna drive them into a post and she leans over and she takes the reins and she sort of guides them to safety Austen is showing us that Relationships that thrive that work need to be rooted in respect that you can't say to a woman

certainly not an Austen heroine, you know, I've arrived, you're gonna be thrilled that I proposed to you and that's the end of it. There's a defiance about Austen's heroines, it's absolutely gripping. And so she shows us that men and women need to treat each other with respect for a relationship to thrive. And at the end of Persuasion, there's a conversation between Anne and Captain Harville and this conversation takes place in Bath.

And Anne is talking to Harville about faithfulness, about constancy. And Harville says, well, men are way more constant than women. You know, everything I read talks about the fickleness of women. And Anne says, yeah, well, that's because it's all written by men. The pen has been in your hand. The pen has been in the hands of men. And Austen is writing a history for women. And Anne said, you know, men get adventure.

Men get money, men get pleasure, men get business. And women get this sort of airless, closed, isolated world of duty and obedience and piety. And at the end, Wentworth gets together and Anne becomes a sailor's wife. She is the daughter of a baronet, but she becomes a sailor's wife. And it's for me, another example of the modern world of saying, if we want men and women or

any partnership, any romantic partnership or whatever description, we need to treat each other with respect. And that's not startling information, I don't think, or I don't think it should be, but it's something that's very dear to Austen because she wants to figure out how people can live in positive relationships and in Persuasion she shows us. And that letter, Wentworth writes her a letter at the end.

And when I was in Bath, I went to all the Regency sites with this group of people and you stand in front of what was the White Hart Inn. And I recited Wentworth's letter, but I didn't really recite it because I can't get through it without cracking because I just think it's so beautiful. Charlotte Brontë says, Jane Austen isn't a very impassioned writer. That letter is as impassioned as anything in the Bronte's.

So you can walk around the sites of Northanger Abbey you can walk around the sites of Persuasion. And I have to say, you walk down the street and it's what Austen would have seen. She wouldn't have seen the satellite dish on the outside and it wouldn't have been tarmac. But my wife, I went for lots of walks in Bath at twilight. And we went up the gravel walk where Anne and Wentworth.

walk when the relationship is coming back, when they're coming back to one another. And it is not a real stretch to imagine that it looked almost exactly this way in 2000, or in, you know, 1816, 1814, 1805 when Austen lived there. So Bath holds us because all the beautiful architecture is still, or not all of it.

great deal of that architecture. Austen's houses, you can go see all four addresses where she lived, for example. Austen publishes six novels, all six of them mention Bath. Austen didn't like Bath. I mean one of the ironies is, but this is sort of part of my point, like my students say, well she didn't like it, why she writes so much about it? And I say because she didn't like it. That's why we don't necessarily write about what we like, sometimes we write about what we don't like.

the boredom of it, the staleness of it, the snobbery of it. She didn't like any of that. She didn't like the weather. She got there and it was raining. She rejected some of it. Her dad died there. It was very difficult for her. And it certainly changed the fortunes of the family until 1811. So Austen is the heyday of Bath as a spa, town, and a place where you go to get better and a place where you go for pleasure.

is in the 18th century. By the time you get to the Regency, it's still a very popular place, but it is not what it was in 1860, for example. But when I did these tours of Bath, Jonathan Lynch, the first time I did it, I got asked to do it and I thought, well, you know, I guess I better prepare where I like to walk. But I didn't really expect.

than anybody would sign up. Anyway, they emailed me and said, well, we've got 30 people, but would you take 35? And I just couldn't believe that people, you know, they were gonna hear my accent. Anyway, I did it three times. It was fabulous each time. People were really, really interesting. And we went to all the buildings in Bath. I didn't go to a building unless it had a plaque that was representative of a regency figure. So I'll just say very briefly that Thomas Lawrence,

a great portrait painter, lived in Bath before the Regency. William Beckford is the richest man in England, says Byron. He lived in Bath. Hester Piozzi lived in Bath. She's a diarist, a good friend of Samuel Johnson, and she's in Bath in the Regency and writes remarkable accounts of what it was like to be in Bath at that time. There's the Bath Grammar School, where one of Keats's close friend, Richard Woodhouse, graduated from

There's a man named William Parry, Sir William Parry, who was the most important Arctic explorer of the Regency. And you'll remember that Frankenstein begins in the Arctic. The Northwest Passage and exploration is very important. And the person I studied, Thomas De Quincey, went to Bath Grammar School. Wilberforce has time in Bath. Samuel Taylor Coleridge spends time in Bath. Sarah Siddons, one of the greatest.

female actors in British history, spends significant amounts of time in Bath. Frances Burney is a novelist that Austen greatly admired, the most important female novelist before Austen. She spent a lot of time in Bath. Mary Shelley starts Frankenstein and then comes back, lives in Bath and sits outside in a house that is no longer there, outside the pump room in the central square right in front of Bath Abbey and works on Frankenstein.

And then of course there's Jane Austen. Bath, as you will know Jonathan, is built on hills. So you have to walk quite slowly sometimes, but you can see a remarkable number of people who have a strong connection to Bath in less than an hour.

I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. You know, we need nostalgia. We need to be able to hearken back to a space imaginatively, I think, that gives us hope and and courage and restores us. And the Regency, as constructed by Austen or by Bridgerton or by a whole bunch of other writers, is a moment of stability. It's a moment of beauty where great artists wrote great

Things. It's a moment of elegance where people are very well mannered and where, you know, there is a way of address that sounds very foreign to us now, but that speaks of a world of elegance. And that's very, very appealing. And Bridgerton in various ways does something very similar. Bridgerton is about a class way above Austen.

There aren't very many aristocrats. It's Mr. Darcy in in Pride and Prejudice There aren't very many aristocrats. And there's certainly not the Duke of Hastings or something like that. But you only get that if you say, I'm not going to pay much attention to the poor people. And you know, that strikes me as pretty problematic. Percy Shelley, one of the great poets of the Romanic era, pays attention to poor people. And the lives they are living aren't very pleasant.

And then, as now, poverty hardens and deadens and damages people all the time. And it's not that Austen was insensitive to it, it's just that Austen didn't fire her creative muse. She wrote about what she knew. And thankfully, although there were times in her life when there was straightened financial circumstances, she she you know, she evaded all of that.

And I suppose that the final thing to say about that is the grittiness of it doesn't undermine Austen's achievement, for example, or JMW Turner's achievement. To me, it makes it even greater. To me, it says, I know these things were there, but I still found a way of writing stories about hope. I still found ways of talking about relationships that

fill people's minds 200 and whatever years later. The fact that these people had to struggle is not a good thing in and of itself for them, I'm sure, but what it means is that the knowledge they have is hard won and I think more valuable for overcoming what, you know, what is difficult in your life, what is difficult in my life. Everybody's life has got challenges in it. Some far, far more substantial than others.

But these people who produce these timeless versions of England that we see in Constable's paintings or Austen's novels, their life was as complicated as yours and mine. And I tried to bring out some of that complication rather than just saying, Isn't it nice how everybody calls Mr. Darcy, you know, by his surname you Elizabeth Bennet after she marries him is still gonna call him Mr. Darcy. That's how it worked. And you know,

I can see the appeal of that, but yeah, I I think I would prefer how we do things now.

came to Canada, came to North America, came to the United United States. One of the most famous is John Keats' brother, who settled in Kentucky. And one of the things that they loved, especially about America, less about Canada, because the climate is much more severe. And so you know there was there was

a chance for people to make their livelihood in America. There was something even then, I think, which which Regency people would have called what we now call the American dream. And so Keats' brother and many, many other people who moved to America, emigrated to America, sort of retained an affection for Britain, but also set themselves in opposition to it. Britain was still

A monarchy, whereas America was a democracy. The one real sticking point for a lot of Britons was slavery and the ways in which this just seemed to be accepted and okay. And that was problematic for Keats' brother and for many, many other people. It's just that you could make money in America, you could have land in America, there weren't aristocrats in America, there wasn't a king who could never be replaced.

There was a democratic system. And that held immense appeal for people who had been victimized by an aristocratic system that gathered a whole bunch of wealth in not very many hands. And America seemed to offer a better way forward than that. And I would say that sense of America as a land that was, you know, constitutionally set up in opposition to Britain.

was a better alternative than Regency Britain.

There wasn't modern medicine, there wasn't modern ventilation of housing, disease spread, the smells were awful, the sights were awful, there's no social safety net. If you're hungry, it's possible to starve in the streets. And I would like to think my book sort of throws light on the fact that Regency Britain.

Is as complicated as 20th century, 21st century North America, that the lives people lead are complicated in all kinds of ways. And that the blight of poverty afflicted millions of people in the Regency, and it continues to do so, like the blight of disease, like the blight of addiction, like the blight of injustice, like the blight of racism. And I I really wanted to show Regency Britain as prefacing the modern world.

And that means I have to show it prefacing the good things and the bad things. and I guess the one thing for me that redeems a Regency is this amazing cultural flowering and this amazing ability to protest and to demand something better. That's what makes a Regency compelling for me.

There's no better way than one of their immersive guided tours of Jane Austen's Bath with period costumes and afternoon tea available if you want the full experience, plus bespoke options for any group size and curated experiences beyond Bath as well. They also offer gift vouchers, which make a perfect present for the Austen lover and your life. Visit strictlyjanausten.com to book or learn more. The link is in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, like, or comment and tell us your favorite corner

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