A light, easy-to-read overview of “what life would have been like if you visited Regency England and hung out with the upper-middle to upper classes.”A light, easy-to-read overview of “what life would have been like if you visited Regency England and hung out with the upper-middle to upper classes.” A solid, thorough historical overview this is not; a readable, well-researched overview, however, this is. Wilkes sources her descriptions and notes (i.e. “a meal served by X on Y date had the following menu”), and always, always provides dates (which I’ve found to be an issue with these kinds of light books, which sometimes treat the entire 19th century (!) as a solid block of time).
Basically, if you’re reading this book to get a sense of how rich and well-off people lived in regency England - to give a little more context to Jane Austen, or for that matter to your favorite regency romance novel - this is a really good choice. If you want anything more profound or in-depth about the era, look elsewhere. However, the book is pretty clear about what it is and is not, and it does well at what it sets out to do. ...more
While this is about a specific massacre which happened in 1781, it is also more broadly about the end of the slave trade in England and the growth of While this is about a specific massacre which happened in 1781, it is also more broadly about the end of the slave trade in England and the growth of the abolition movement in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The brief summary is that the Zong was a slave ship which, in 1781, ran low on water and made some navigation errors and responded by throwing several hundred slaves overboard. That isn’t why it became famous, though. It became famous because the ship’s owners then sued the insurance company for reimbursement for the people the crew had murdered. The growing British abolitionist movement, notably Granville Sharp, seized on the case as vivid proof of the horrific inhumanity of the slave trade. The book is vivid and readable, although the content is horrifying (as you can guess from the topic)....more
A pleasant overview of eighteenth-century women artists, divided into useful categories for anyone who wants to know more about the lives of women artA pleasant overview of eighteenth-century women artists, divided into useful categories for anyone who wants to know more about the lives of women artists during the century (or who is writing a novel about a woman artist in the eighteenth century - seriously, it's perfectly organized for that). It's a little glib and relies pretty heavily on its sources, by which I mean that, for example, I suspect many of the upper-class amateur artists who are mentioned are discussed because there are biographies of them rather than because they had any particular prominence or importance in the era. A chapter on nineteenth-century women artists was interesting but so superficial it might have been discarded. Over all, an easy and interesting read, but I did find myself writing down a lot of names to read up on further - if you're looking for an in-depth look at the life of a particular woman artist or new insights, you're not going to find those here. ...more
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