14 - Regency London

Summary

The Regency is one of the few periods of British history to survive in popular memory: to confirm that all one needs to do is to scroll through the first thousand titles thrown up by a search for the term on the LibraryThing website. What you’ll find there is an epoch of aristocratic duels and décolletage, crowded with Byronic dandies gambling away fortunes in gentlemen’s clubs, impetuously driving four-in-hand, dancing to the disturbingly erotic rhythm of the waltz, often against the backdrop of the sweeping streetscapes and neo-classical townhouses that John Nash brought to London’s West End. This image is by no means new: one can trace its origins in contemporary caricatures of high life and scandals (with the Regent’s mistresses as favourite targets) as well as in the ‘silver-fork’ school of novelists which from the late 1820s specialized in representations of Society for a middle-class readership. And it flowers in the Victorian reaction against what was perceived as Regency immorality. We can think, for instance, of William Thackeray’s condescending representation of a superannuated Regency dandy – the ‘Old Major’ – in Pendennis (1848–50).

More recently a rival image of the period has emerged. Here the Regency becomes what E. P. Thompson called ‘the heroic period of popular radicalism’. This is no longer the Regency of Beau Brummell or Lady Caroline Lamb but of spy-plagued reformers, emerging out of poverty and social stasis to struggle against privilege in the face of government repression. It’s a world which includes respectable figures such as the Benthamite, Francis Place, organizer of the Westminster electors and activist for parliamentary and educational reform, proprietor of one of the first shops in London to boast a plate glass window, and whose Autobiography is most graphic in its descriptions of how frequently girls from the labouring classes in the London of Place’s youth were compelled to turn to sex work, and of how important drink was to London’s poor.