Donald A. Low
That Sunny Dome
A Portrait of Regency Britain
London 1977
Stron XV+208, format: 15x23 cm
20 czarno-białych ilustracji
Książka jest używana: stan bardzo dobry
The Regency period, for all its short span, was rich in incident and personality, full of vitality and colour. It was a time of experiment and rapid change, of social brilliance and social unrest. Never was high society more profligate — with the Regent himself setting an example of unparalleled extravagance. For the poor, the Industrial Revolution brought unendurable hardship and deprivation. And in all walks of life, from the highest to the lowest, men were engaged in a new and exciting quest for their own personal kind of freedom and self-expression.
In this fresh and original approach to the Regency years, Donald Low draws particularly on the insights offered by the work of contemporary journalists, poets and novelists,.which he maintains provide some of the truest evidence on which to base a historical view. From Waterloo to Peterloo, from dandies like Beau Brummell and the fashionable world of the clubs and spas to the plight of the crofters of Sutherland and the textile workers of Lancashire — the contrasts were many and often acutely felt. The varying faces of Regency society are here illustrated both from the lives and work of writers such as Byron, Cobbett and Wordsworth, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen, and from the achievements of other figures of the period including Rowlandson, Turner and Constable, John Nash and Thomas Telford.
Perhaps no other decade in the past has such a distinctive identity. In some ways strangely modern yet at the same time full of period flavour, its ethos is vividly captured by Donald Low in this informative and stimulating new book.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Foreword ix
Chronological Table xiii
1 The Regent and the Regency 1
2 The Public Prints 28
3 The Dispossessed 50
4 Brummell or Byron? The Search for a Hero 76
5 Home Thoughts from Abroad: Byron Rejected 97
6 Poetry, Painting and Nature 122
7 Fiction for All 146
8 The Lure of the Road 172
Epilogue 198
Book List 202
Index 204
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