For those in and outside Britain, looking on with bafflement as the country and its political parties tear themselves apart over Brexit, the Regency years can be held up like a mirror in which the chaos of the present finds its reflection in the past. The Regency years are the period in British history from 1811, when George III was deemed too mad to rule and the Prince of Wales was made Prince Regent, until 1820, when the Prince Regent became George IV after his father died. Madness takes many forms.
The subtitle of Robert Morrison's “The Regency Years: During Which Jane Austen Writes, Napoleon Fights, Byron Makes Love, and Britain Becomes Modern” announces the book's political, cultural and literary sweep. Mr. Morrison, a Canadian academic and author of “The English Opium Eater,” begins his account of this turbulent time with the first and only assassination of a British prime minister. On May 11, 1812, the Tory Prime Minister Spencer Perceval was shot in the chest in the lobby of the House of Commons. He was carried into the Speaker's apartments, where he died within minutes.
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