Abstract
In the waning days of March 1815, news arrived in England that could only have shocked Londoners and provincials alike: Napoleon Bonaparte had escaped from Elba and, as the Times of London reported, onlookers could only watch in “horror the reestablishment of that Monster in human shape, on his blood-stained throne.”1 Napoleon’s return, which took place less than a year after his abdication on April 6, 1814, threatened to reignite a war that had already lasted eleven years (1803–1814) and reinforced British anxiety about the stability of France since the violent days of the French Revolution in 1789.
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Notes
See Boyd Hilton’s A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 237.
Ballard is familiar enough with the work of Washington Irving (1783–1859) to cite from his Salmagundi (1809), which suggests that he had a disposition to humorists and to travel narratives.
Rather, as Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman begin to suggest in their collection, The Age of Cultural Revolutions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), it should be broadly conceived as part of a “cultural revolution” that redefined the self (and the idea of society) in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2002), provides a fascinating overview of the circle of scientists and engineers that included Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, and Matthew Boulton.).
See Ian Kelly’s Beau Brummell The Ultimate Man of Style (New York: Free Press, 2006) for a thorough treatment of Brummell’s life.
See Steven Parissien’s Regency Style (London: Phaidon, 1992) for a comprehensive overview of fabrics, furniture, architecture, and decorative objects in the Regency.
Silliman, Journal of Travels in England, Holland, and Scotland (New Haven: Converse, 1820).
Simond and Hibbert, An American in Regency England: The Journal of a Tour in 1810–1811 (London: Maxwell, 1968).
Cooper, Gleanings in Europe, England (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982).
Colton, A Voice from America to England (London: H. Colburn, 1839).
Bartlett, What I Saw in London Or, Men and Things in the Great Metropolis (Auburn, NY: Derby and Miller, 1852).
Rush, A Residence at the Court of London (1833; London: Century, 1987), 45.
Southey, Letters from England (1807; London: Cresset, 1951).
Hoare and Thompson, The Journeys of Sir Richard Colt Hoare Through Wales and England, 1793–1810 (Gloucester [Gloucestershire]: A. Sutton, 1983).
For the sake of comparison, it is worth looking as far back as Daniel Defoe’s (1660–1731) A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–1726) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), to mark some of the changes in the landscape, the process of travel, and social customs.
For a very brief summary of London in the early nineteenth century, see Roy Porter’s London: A Social History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
Feltham, The Picture of London, for 1809 Being a Correct Guide to All the Curiosities, Amusements, Exhibitions, Public Establishments, and Remarkable Objects, in and Near London (London: Printed by W. Lewis for Richard Phillips, 1809).
Competing for the London tourist audience was Samuel Leigh, whose Leigh’s New Picture of London; or, A view of the Political, Religious, Medical, Literary, Municipal, Commercial, and Moral State of the British Metropolis: Presenting a Luminous Guide to the Stranger, on all Subjects Connected with General Information, Business, or Amusement. To which is subjoined, a description of the Environs. Embellished with Numerous Views, a Correct Plan of London, and a Map of the Environs (London: Samuel Leigh, 1818) remained in print from 1818 until 1833.
Shepherd, Metropolitan Improvements Or, London in the Nineteenth Century (1827–31; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1968).
Knight, Pictorial Half-Hours of London Topography (London: Knight, 1851) is a useful source that contextualizes the structures of the city and how they changed through the Victorian era.
See Prince Hermann Pückler-Muskau’s A Regency Visitor. The English Tour of Prince Pückler-Muskau Described in his Letters 1826–1828, ed. Peter Quennell (New York: Dutton, 1957)
and Frederick Raumer’s England in 1835, Being A Series Off Letters Written To Friends In Germany, During a Residence in London and Excursions into the Provinces (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1971).
Dickens, Pickwick Papers (New York: Penguin, 2000), chap. 15.
Tyler and Kierner, The Contrast (New York: New York University Press, 2007). 100.
Dickens, Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi (1838; New York: Stein and Day, 1968).
See Malcolm Thomis’s The Luddites: Machine- Breaking in Regency England (New York: Schocken, 1972).
For the single most comprehensive and engaging overviews of the practices of reading in this period, see William St. Clair’s The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Barbauld, Kraft, and McCarthy, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William M. McCarthy and Elizabeth Craft (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview, 2002), ll. 39–49, 162–63.
See Galperin’s The Historical Austen (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 3–5.
See Thompsons’s Gentrification and the Rise of Enterprise Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22.
For a comprehensive view of the relationship between Dorothy Jordan and the duke of Clarence, see Claire Tomalin’s Mrs. Jordan’s Profession: The Actress and the Prince (New York: Knopf, 1995),
See John Nash’s Views of the Royal Pavilion (London: Pavilion, 1991).
See William Albert’s The Turnpike Road System in England 1663–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).
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© 2009 Alan Rauch
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Rauch, A. (2009). Introduction to England in 1815. In: Rauch, A. (eds) England in 1815. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230618039_1
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