Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency

A quick heads up for those in the UK or with access to the iPlayer that BBC 4 begins a new series tonight on Elegance and Decadence: The Age of the Regency by Dr Lucy Worsley Chief Curator at Kew Palace. Tonight's episode Warts and All - Portrait of a Prince focuses on the Prince Regent himself. Blurb as follows:

In this first episode, historian Dr Lucy Worsley chronicles the Regency's early years, which culminated in victory over Napoleon in 1815, and explores the complicated character of the Prince Regent, a man with legendary appetites for women, food, art and self-indulgence.

Meanwhile, the long war with France was having a huge impact on the British psyche; travel and trade with Europe were impossibly restricted. Lucy follows in the footsteps of painter JMW Turner who, unable to travel to the continent, toured the south coast in 1811 and captured startling images of a country at war.

George liked to think of himself as a man of fashion, and Lucy takes us through surviving accounts from his tailors that reveal his shopaholic ways. These were the years in which the Prince's sometime friend Beau Brummell, the famous dandy, ruled fashionable London like a dictator, and Lucy samples a bit of butch Regency style by trying on some of the fashions he popularised, as well as joining Brummell biographer Ian Kelly on a tour of London's fashionable Regency haunts. She also discovers Brummell's spectacular fall from favour, after loudly referring to the Regent as someone's 'fat friend'.

Lucy visits the battlefield of Waterloo and discovers that the site became a prototype of battlefield tourism - Turner, Byron and many others all visited in the years after the battle and Lucy handles some grisly memorabilia purchased by Lord Byron.

The series website also has a cute little clip of how to dress like a dandy and tie a regency cravat.

Should be an interesting series but I have to confess that my abiding image of the Prince Regent is always likely to be this XD

Molly's Lieutenant Innes

Earlier this summer while reading Michael Lewis’ Napoleon and his British Captives I was reminded of the lovely piece of detective work that joyful_molly did last year when she tracked down Lieutenant Thomas Innes whose snuff box appeared on the Antiques Roadshow. The pedigree of the snuff box is impressive, it was presented by French Admiral Compte de Grasse to his custodian Mr Alexander Littlejohn, while he was a prisoner of war on parole in Kingston in 1782. Littlejohn then passed the snuff box to his nephew Lt Innes whose own story, as Molly pointed out, is even more fascinating. Commander Innes became a prisoner of war in 1805 when his ship HMS Woodlark was wrecked off St Valery due to pilot error. At the time, Innes had been married for less than a year and his wife travelled to France to spend the entire nine years of the war in captivity with her husband. As Molly said “If that's not love, then I don't know what is!”

( Well I can now add a teeny little bit more detail to the story of Lt Thomas Innes and his devoted wife. )