The Regency Years
During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern
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Narrated by:
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Chris MacDonnell
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By:
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Robert Morrison
About this listen
The Victorians are often credited with ushering in our current era, yet the seeds of change were planted in the years before. The Regency (1811-1820) began when the profligate Prince of Wales - the future King George IV - replaced his insane father, George III, as Britain's ruler.
Around the regent surged a society steeped in contrasts: evangelicalism and hedonism, elegance and brutality, exuberance and despair. The arts flourished at this time with a showcase of extraordinary writers and painters such as Jane Austen, Lord Byron, the Shelleys, John Constable, and J. M. W. Turner. Science burgeoned during this decade, too, giving us the steam locomotive and the blueprint for the modern computer.
Yet the dark side of the era was visible in poverty, slavery, pornography, opium, and the gothic imaginings that birthed the novel Frankenstein. With the British military in foreign lands, fighting the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and the War of 1812 in the United States, the desire for empire and an expanding colonial enterprise gained unstoppable momentum. Exploring these crosscurrents, Robert Morrison illuminates the profound ways this period shaped and indelibly marked the modern world.
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- Narrated by: Saul Reichlin
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
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In the summer of 1885, three Frenchmen arrived in London for a few days' intellectual shopping: a prince, a count, and a commoner with an Italian name. In time, each of these men would achieve a certain level of renown, but who were they then and what was the significance of their sojourn to England? Answering these questions, Julian Barnes unfurls the stories of their lives which play out against the backdrop of the Belle Epoque in Paris. Our guide through this world is Samuel Pozzi, the society doctor, free-thinker, and man of science with a famously complicated private life....
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Pathetic narration makes this title unbearable
- By Chris Quigg on 02-27-20
By: Julian Barnes
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The Europeans
- Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture
- By: Orlando Figes
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 21 hrs and 39 mins
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At the center of the book is a poignant love triangle: the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev; the Spanish prima donna Pauline Viardot, with whom Turgenev had a long and intimate relationship; and her husband Louis Viardot, an art critic, theater manager, and republican activist. Together, Turgenev and the Viardots acted as a kind of European cultural exchange - they either knew or crossed paths with Delacroix, Berlioz, Chopin, Brahms, Liszt, the Schumanns, Hugo, Flaubert, Dickens, and Dostoyevsky, among many other towering figures.
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DO LISTEN TO THIS BOOK!!!
- By JK on 10-28-21
By: Orlando Figes
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Thomas Paine and the Clarion Call for American Independence
- By: Harlow Giles Unger
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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From New York Times best-selling author and Founding Fathers' biographer Harlow Giles Unger comes the astonishing biography of the man whose pen set America ablaze, inspiring its revolution, and whose ideas about reason and religion continue to try men's souls.
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well written and researched
- By K D on 09-29-19
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Square Haunting
- Five Writers in London Between the Wars
- By: Francesca Wade
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 13 hrs and 9 mins
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Mecklenburgh Square has always been a radical address. Nestled in the heart of Bloomsbury, these townhouses have borne witness to the lives of some of the century's most revolutionary cultural figures - many of whom were extraordinary women. United by their desire to experiment with new ways of living - and, therefore, of being - these authors and thinkers were trailblazers in their commitment to creative independence.
By: Francesca Wade
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Genius & Anxiety
- How Jews Changed the World, 1847-1947
- By: Norman Lebrecht
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
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Norman Lebrecht has devoted half of his life to pondering and researching the mindset of the Jewish intellectuals, writers, scientists, and thinkers who turned the tides of history and shaped the world today as we know it. In Genius & Anxiety, Lebrecht begins with the Communist Manifesto in 1847 and ends in 1947, when Israel was founded. This robust, magnificent volume, beautifully designed, is an urgent and necessary celebration of Jewish genius and contribution.
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Post-anxiety
- By Amaze on 03-27-20
By: Norman Lebrecht
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Marx's General
- The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels
- By: Tristram Hunt
- Narrated by: Norman Dietz
- Length: 17 hrs and 26 mins
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Friedrich Engels is one of the most intriguing and contradictory figures of the 19th century. Born to a prosperous Prussian mercantile family, he spent his life working in the Manchester cotton industry, riding to the Cheshire hounds, and enjoying the comfortable upper-middle-class existence of a Victorian gentleman.
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Not many choices here anyways.
- By Prof. Neil Larsen on 02-16-13
By: Tristram Hunt
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The Grandees
- America's Sephardic Elite
- By: Stephen Birmingham
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
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In 1654, 23 Jewish families arrived in New Amsterdam (now New York) aboard a French privateer. They were the Sephardim, members of a proud orthodox sect that had served as royal advisors and honored professionals under Moorish rule in Spain and Portugal but were then exiled by intolerant monarchs. A small, closed, and intensely private community, the Sephardim soon established themselves as businessmen and financiers. They became powerful forces in society, with some, like banker Haym Salomon, even providing financial support to George Washington's army during the American Revolution.
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Amazing American History - Jews Made a Profound Impact
- By Jimmy Rosen on 12-27-21
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The Florentines
- From Dante to Galileo: The Transformation of Western Civilization
- By: Paul Strathern
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
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Between the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Galileo in 1642, something happened that transformed the entire culture of Western civilization. Painting, sculpture, and architecture would all visibly change in such a striking fashion that there could be no going back on what had taken place. Likewise, the thought and self-conception of humanity would take on a completely new aspect. Sciences would be born - or emerge in an entirely new guise.
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Narrator ruins the narrative
- By amavita on 03-24-22
By: Paul Strathern
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The Club
- Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age
- By: Leo Damrosch
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 15 hrs and 1 min
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In 1763, the painter Joshua Reynolds proposed to his friend Samuel Johnson that they invite a few friends to join them every Friday at the Turk's Head Tavern in London to dine, drink, and talk until midnight. Eventually, the group came to include among its members Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and James Boswell. It was known simply as "the Club". In this captivating audiobook, Leo Damrosch brings alive a brilliant, competitive, and eccentric cast of characters.
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Wonderful survey
- By Tad Davis on 05-10-19
By: Leo Damrosch
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The Ugly Renaissance
- Sex, Greed, Violence and Depravity in an Age of Beauty
- By: Alexander Lee
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 15 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned as a period of cultural rebirth and artistic innovation, the Renaissance is cloaked in a unique aura of beauty and brilliance. Its very name conjures up awe-inspiring images of an age of lofty ideals in which life imitated the fantastic artworks for which it has become famous. But behind the vast explosion of new art and culture lurked a seamy, vicious world of power politics, perversity, and corruption that has more in common with the present day than anyone dares to admit.
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Author falls into the pit he digs for others
- By Sean on 01-23-16
By: Alexander Lee
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Shakespeare in a Divided America
- What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
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The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned.
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An Entertaining History Lesson
- By David on 08-17-20
By: James Shapiro
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needs a good editor.
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Overview AND Sordid Details
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Fun Story Bad History
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The most accessible reading of Paradise Lost
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What listeners say about The Regency Years
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Kristin
- 12-14-23
Boring
I don’t know if it is better when actually reading the book, but this was boring and I didn’t feel like I learned anything. I really wanted to stop listening. Listening it felt like a bunch of quotations strung together.
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- Brian
- 03-29-22
Good book, not so great reader
This is one of the better books on the period I’ve come across. It does a great job of connecting historical and social developments to artistic and literary developments. It even has some original and astute insights about familiar literary works like Pride and Prejudice, which I wasn’t expecting from a history book.
Unfortunately it was pretty unpleasant to listen to this reader. He’s not the absolute worst I’ve heard, but close. I would highly recommend reading this book rather than listening to it.
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- TheoBabe
- 11-13-23
It lives up to its task
A very balanced, interesting presentation of all aspects of this period with its contrasts and its wide variety of individual talents and communal results coming from them.
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- wylie smith
- 08-07-24
interesting facts, but not a very coherent whole
This book struck me as a bit too episodic. Morrison seems to view the Regency as a whole, but the presentation, for me, was a collection of various stories. The last hour struck me as the best as Morrison wrote about the improvement of roads by Macadam and Telford, and the development of railroads seemed to be a literal path from the previous generation to the next. But describing massive volcanoes and sexual mores - both liberal and prurient - may describe the times, but neither were inked to the past or future in any meaningful way by Morrison.
In the epilogue, Morrison praises the regent for great changes that took place. But many of these kudos resulted as a reaction to the regent's actions, not out of agreement. And the scientific discoveries and applications merely happened in this decade, not because of the regent's policies.
So while I heard about things that I was not familiar with, and was pleased to do so, I am not prepared to give the regent near the credit that Morrison does.
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- Kelly McGee
- 05-18-22
a favorite on repeat
I just love this time period. it's so different from ours and yet so much is still the same
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2 people found this helpful
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- Ladyethyme
- 11-23-23
Ok
The tolerable history I suppose… I did enjoy that it spent an entire chapter with several sections on sexuality, which tends to be left out of many books.
However the narrator seems to have mispronounced several words on purpose, including Byron's 'Don Juan' pronouncing it 'Don Jew-on'- and as it is mentioned pretty much every paragraph for at least a chapter 2, it starts to really great on the nerves…
The author also seems to take some kind of thrill in making lists, I cannot help but be reminded of a high school student trying desperately to pad out an end of term paper. Instead of just saying "the arts and sciences" he goes onto list 10 to 14 different professions, and these lists are pretty much constant depending on the topic. It gets pretty annoying to be perfectly honest…
I don't need a list of 14 to 25 different names, professions, trades, houses, roads, artists, architects, poets, writers, economic viewpoints,… Yeah it's like that except go on for at least another 10.
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- BK
- 06-18-19
What a time!
3.5. About as thorough a look at the years in question as one could hope for (with perhaps one exception: I would have liked to learn more about the daily lives of the masses, but that's OK). The Regency was truly a remarkable period... surely an understatement for a span that included Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Austen, Frankenstein, The Vampyr, the birth of celebrity, Napoleonic wars, a London in which 1 out of every 8 women in London was in the sex trade, Luddites (the originals), Beau Brummel, painters Constable and Turner, a thoroughly dissolute monarch, scientists like Humphrey Davy and Charles Babbage, the steam locomotive, the War of 1812, Waterloo and Peterloo (one a battle, the other a massacre), and so much more. The audio edition is very ably read by Chris MacDonnell.
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11 people found this helpful
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- Casey E.R. Sanders
- 06-04-19
Excellent Overview of Neglected Historical Period
Very well written survey of Britain during the Regency. MacDonnell perfectly captures the tone of the book and the period is filled with exciting and contradictory characters. One of the best history books I've listened to in a long time.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Secutor
- 06-15-20
Richly detailed, unexpectedly contemporary
Details events and activities that colored the lives, politics, and culture of Britons between approx 1806-1820, ranging from socioeconomics to entertainment. Enlivened through extensive use of description, anecdote and commentary by contemporary journalists, essayists, poets, novelists, and observers. Engrossing and informative. The peaceful social protests of the time (and the reactions thereto) are remarkably similar to the ones America is currently experiencing.
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