Here are 100 books that The Georgians fans have personally recommended if you like
The Georgians.
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Ever since watching the BBC adaptation ofPride & Prejudice, I’ve been fascinated by the Georgian era. At university I always chose modules that connected with the period, which typically focused on the works of Keats, Byron and Shelley. One module introduced me to the essayist William Hazlitt, and my first novel Infelicedrew on his illicit love affair with serving girl Sarah Walker. My début Pandorais vastly different, but both novels required a plethora of research. The books I’ve chosen all helped me bring my writing to life, and I hope aspiring novelists with a passion for the Georgians will find these as useful as I have.
A cultural tour de force, this book includes everything you could ever wish to know about the Georgian era, although it does specifically stick to its latter years (1789-1830). It is a deeply informative read yet the author maintains a lively and engaging tone throughout as he covers a wide range of topics such as the landscape of Regency Britain, travel, law and order, as well as entertainment, health, and sexuality, so it’s just perfect for any reader unfamiliar with the period. In fact, it’s perfect for anyone who already is. Established writers of the genre will surely pick up something new by reading it.
'Excellent... Mortimer's erudition is formidable' The Times
A time of exuberance, thrills, frills and unchecked bad behaviour...Ian Mortimer turns to what is arguably the most-loved period in British history - the Regency, or Georgian England.
This is the age of Jane Austen and the Romantic poets; the paintings of John Constable and the gardens of Humphry Repton; Britain's military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo. It was perhaps the last age of true freedom before the arrival of the stifling world of Victorian morality.
And like all periods in history, it was an age of many contradictions - where Beethoven's thundering…
Ever since watching the BBC adaptation ofPride & Prejudice, I’ve been fascinated by the Georgian era. At university I always chose modules that connected with the period, which typically focused on the works of Keats, Byron and Shelley. One module introduced me to the essayist William Hazlitt, and my first novel Infelicedrew on his illicit love affair with serving girl Sarah Walker. My début Pandorais vastly different, but both novels required a plethora of research. The books I’ve chosen all helped me bring my writing to life, and I hope aspiring novelists with a passion for the Georgians will find these as useful as I have.
On the other side of the coin, there is this behemoth of a book. I’d be lying if I said that its sheer size and tightly-packed text weren’t slightly off-putting, but I consider Cruickshank’s formidable work a must-have for any novelist writing in the Georgian era. Impeccably researched and showing a wide range of social history from the lives of ordinary layman to the wealthy and powerful, it's a truly fantastic resource, and if you’re looking to familiarise yourself with the 'dirty underbelly' of eighteenth-century London (a whole world away from shiny Bridgerton-esque ballrooms and stately homes) then this is absolutely the book for you.
Georgian London evokes images of elegant buildings and fine art, but it was also a city where prostitution was rife, houses of ill repute widespread, and many tens of thousands of people dependent in some way or other on the wages of sin. The sex industry was, in fact, a very powerful force indeed, and in The Secret History of Georgian London, Dan Cruickshank compellingly shows how it came to affect almost every aspect of life and culture in the capital.
Examining the nature of the sex trade, he offers a tantalising insight into the impact of prostitution to give…
Ever since watching the BBC adaptation ofPride & Prejudice, I’ve been fascinated by the Georgian era. At university I always chose modules that connected with the period, which typically focused on the works of Keats, Byron and Shelley. One module introduced me to the essayist William Hazlitt, and my first novel Infelicedrew on his illicit love affair with serving girl Sarah Walker. My début Pandorais vastly different, but both novels required a plethora of research. The books I’ve chosen all helped me bring my writing to life, and I hope aspiring novelists with a passion for the Georgians will find these as useful as I have.
Dora Blake—the protagonist in my book—is an aspiring jewellery designer, which meant it was imperative I understood not just how jewellery looked but how it was made. This book ticks both those boxes and more. Not only is it filled with beautiful photographs to make your inner magpie tingle with excitement, it tells the reader a history of how jewellery was fashioned, what was worn in the daytime and evening, as well as the significance of certain gems for certain occasions. Learn all about cut steel, foiled backs, and harlequin jewels, the language of flowers, memento mori, cameos, and lover’s eyes, all delivered in a wonderfully accessible conversational tone. A truly fascinating book that is also a feast for the eyes!
Georgian Jewellery is a celebration of the style and excellence of the eighteenth century, and of the ingenuity that produced such a wealth of fabulous jewellery.
Heavy academic tomes have already been written about the period, but this book examines it in a more colourful and accessible way. The book aims to show that Georgian jewellery is not only the stuff of museums and safe boxes, but that it can be worn as elegantly and fashionably today as it was 200 years ago.
Much disparate information about the jewellery has been gathered together and the period is brought alive by…
Ever since watching the BBC adaptation ofPride & Prejudice, I’ve been fascinated by the Georgian era. At university I always chose modules that connected with the period, which typically focused on the works of Keats, Byron and Shelley. One module introduced me to the essayist William Hazlitt, and my first novel Infelicedrew on his illicit love affair with serving girl Sarah Walker. My début Pandorais vastly different, but both novels required a plethora of research. The books I’ve chosen all helped me bring my writing to life, and I hope aspiring novelists with a passion for the Georgians will find these as useful as I have.
It’s all in the details. No matter what social circle a Georgian man and woman lived in, knowing how each functioned within their innercircle is key to creating fully fleshed-out worlds. Vickery uses archival material such as diaries, ledgers, letters, court trials, and other sources to show how the Georgians lived in the comfort (or discomfort) of their own homes, and, interestingly, how this also had an effect on their lives outside the home. The author even provides the reader with an insight into how their homes actually looked, from furniture and portraits, right down to textiles and wallpaper.
In this brilliant new work, Amanda Vickery unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. Writing with her customary wit and verve, she introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion, bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lodgings, genteel spinsters keeping up appearances in two rooms with yellow wallpaper, servants with only a locking box to call their own. Vickery makes ingenious use of upholsterer's ledgers, burglary trials, and other unusual sources to reveal the roles…
When I was a little girl, my parents bought me a children’s edition of Pride and Prejudice. Ever since, I have loved Jane Austen’s works. As I grew older, I really enjoyed learning about her, and researching the history of her times. I hope you will enjoy reading these books as much as I did!
This beautifully illustrated book explores Austen’s life and her interactions with the world as a novelist.
Jane’s teenage writings, her music books, and the story of her surviving pelisse (a type of coat) are all discussed, along with the magic of her remaining correspondence. (Sadly, after Jane died, her sister Cassandra burnt many of her letters to protect her emotional life from strangers’ prying eyes).
Austen’s fiction manuscripts, several of which survive, offer clues to how she worked. Jane’s status as a novelist at the time of her death in 1817 is also discussed, and compared with her competitors.
This collection of essays offers an intimate history of Austen's art and life told through objects associated with her personally and with the era in which she lived. Her teenage notebooks, music albums, pelisse-coat, letters, the homemade booklets in which she composed her novels and the portraits made of her during her life all feature in this lavishly illustrated collection.
By interpreting the outrageous literary jokes in her early notebooks we can glimpse the shared reading activities of Jane and her family, together with the love of satire and home entertainment which can be traced in the subtler humour of…
Described as a “literary raconteur” and a “virtuoso,” Tim Rayborn admits to nothing, but it’s true that he’s a versatile writer, award-winning editor, and an acclaimed musician. He’s written dozens of books, appeared on more than forty recordings, plays scores of unusual instruments, and visited five continents. Tim lived in England for nearly seven years and has a Ph.D. in medieval studies from the University of Leeds, which he likes to pretend means that he knows what he’s talking about. He has written a large number of books and magazine articles about history, music, and the arts. He will undoubtedly write more, whether anyone wants him to or not.
Wood is known for his stellar television documentaries, but he’s also a prolific and talented author. This gem of a book delves into some of the most famous legends of English/British folklore, ones that still capture the popular imagination. He then examines some key historical events and people from the earlier Middle Ages, and their importance even now. Written in an engaging style, it’s an excellent introduction to the roots and origins of so much British culture.
Where does the idea of England and Englishness come from? Can we see it beginning in the Dark and Middle Ages? Michael Wood tackles these fascinating questions in two ways. First, with a series of pieces on famous English myths. And secondly by looking at the history of half a dozen places in England: a farmhouse on Dartmoor, a battlefield in Sheffield, a medieval village near Leicester...By these means he describes the origins of a sense of Englishness, and how it has developed through the centuries. "The book triumphs...His England is both a real place and an invented community which…
As a teacher and writer, I am a passionate believer in the ideals of the Enlightenment. In my understanding of these ideals, they include a belief in reason and honest inquiry in the service of humanity. More and more we need these ideals against bigotry, self-delusion, greed, and cruelty. The books recommended here are among those that helped to inspire me with continued faith in the progress of the human species and our responsibility to help each other and the world we live in.
Few historians have brought eighteenth-century British culture and politics alive like Linda Colley in this study of how British identity was created between the 1707 union of England and Scotland and the early nineteenth century.
This book is filled with a sense of continuing relevance as Britain continues to struggle with its identity and place in the world. In the eighteenth century this identity was built around Protestantism, commerce, empire, and the nation’s lonely struggle against Napoleon on the European continent.
But can the peripheries of in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland really be persuaded to adhere to this vision of a unified Britain? In pondering this question, Collier’s book strikes me as essential reading.
How was Great Britain made? And what does it mean to be British? This brilliant and seminal book examines how a more cohesive British nation was invented after 1707 and how this new national identity was nurtured through war, religion, trade, and empire. Lavishly illustrated and powerful, Britons remains a major contribution to our understanding of Britain's past, and continues to influence ongoing controversies about this polity's survival and future. This edition contains an extensive new preface by the author.
"A sweeping survey, . . . evocatively illustrated and engagingly written."-Harriet Ritvo, New York Times Book Review
Described as a “literary raconteur” and a “virtuoso,” Tim Rayborn admits to nothing, but it’s true that he’s a versatile writer, award-winning editor, and an acclaimed musician. He’s written dozens of books, appeared on more than forty recordings, plays scores of unusual instruments, and visited five continents. Tim lived in England for nearly seven years and has a Ph.D. in medieval studies from the University of Leeds, which he likes to pretend means that he knows what he’s talking about. He has written a large number of books and magazine articles about history, music, and the arts. He will undoubtedly write more, whether anyone wants him to or not.
Bill Bryson is an international treasure, a keen observer of the modern quirks and foibles of his fellow humans all over the world. His wit and ability to good-naturedly skewer just about anything and anyone are a marvel to read. This book is perhaps a sequel to his earlier work, Notes from a Small Island, but both provide valuable insights into British culture and its many charms and annoyances. Hilarious!
WINNER: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC TRAVELLER READER AWARD FOR BEST TRAVEL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2016 WINNER: BOOKS ARE MY BAG READER AWARD FOR BEST AUTOBIOGRAPHY OR BIOGRAPHY 2016
Twenty years ago, Bill Bryson went on a trip around Britain to celebrate the green and kindly island that had become his adopted country. The hilarious book that resulted, Notes from a Small Island, was taken to the nation's heart and became the bestselling travel book ever, and was also voted in a BBC poll the book that best represents Britain.Now, to mark the twentieth anniversary of that modern classic, Bryson makes a…
When I was a little girl, my parents bought me a children’s edition of Pride and Prejudice. Ever since, I have loved Jane Austen’s works. As I grew older, I really enjoyed learning about her, and researching the history of her times. I hope you will enjoy reading these books as much as I did!
What were the lives of ordinary people like during Austen’s day?
They were far removed from the elegant folk depicted in her novels. The authors look at topics such as child miners, chimney sweeps, crime and punishment, personal hygiene, and how to do the laundry.
True stories look at the horrors of surgery and childbirth in those days of no anesthesia and little understanding of infection.
Eavesdropping on Jane Austen's England explores the real England of Jane Austen's lifetime. It was a troubled period, with disturbing changes in industry and agriculture and a constant dread of invasion and revolution. The comfortable, tranquil country of her fiction is a complete contrast to the England in which she actually lived. From forced marriages and the sale of wives in marketplaces to boys and girls working down mines or as chimney sweeps, this enthralling social history reveals how our ancestors worked, played and struggled to survive. Taking in the horror of ghosts and witches, bull baiting, highwaymen and the…
I am a Professor of Early Medieval English History at the University of Cambridge. I also work on relations with the rest of Britain, and between Britain and its European neighbours, especially from an economic and social point of view. My interest in early medieval history arose from the jigsaw puzzle approach that it requires: even more so than for other periods, sources are few and often challenging, so need to be seen together and interpreted imaginatively.
Archaeologists have a history of stimulating and provocative big-picture thinking about Britain, and this volume represents one of the latest and most ambitious surveys of the material remains of Britain as a whole. Its author is a veteran excavator with experience on sites from Sutton Hoo to Portmahomack. Carver’s title signals one of his goals: to break free of the ethnic, national labels for this period, and to lay down a new chronological and geographical framework for thinking about the whole of Britain across the period.
Formative Britain presents an account of the peoples occupying the island of Britain between 400 and 1100 AD, whose ideas continue to set the political agenda today. Forty years of new archaeological research has laid bare a hive of diverse and disputatious communities of Picts, Scots, Welsh, Cumbrian and Cornish Britons, Northumbrians, Angles and Saxons, who expressed their views of this world and the next in a thousand sites and monuments.
This highly illustrated volume is the first book that attempts to describe the experience of all levels of society over the whole island using archaeology alone. The story is…
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