Dan Snow's History Hit - Time Travel to Regency Britain with Ian Mortimer

Episode Date: October 27, 2020

Ian Mortimer joined me on the podcast to take us back in time to the Regency period. It was a time of exuberance, thrills, frills and unchecked bad behaviour.

Hi everybody and welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm thrilled we've got Ian Mortimer on the podcast. He's an absolute legend. He's an independent scholar, he's a historian, and he's written several best-selling books here in the UK and done well all around the world as well. He's got a Time Traveller's Guide series where he takes the medieval England, other periods as well, and he's written his most recent one on Regency. We're in the long 18th century now, folks. This is my favourite period, so I'm very, very excited to talk to the great man about this. If you enjoy Regency fashion, political ideas, radicalism, scientific advances, etc., there's plenty of that kind of stuff on History Hit TV. If you go over to historyhit.tv, it's a new digital history channel, you can become

a subscriber, which is awesome. You use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, because you're a podcast listener. We give you a month for free, so you can check the whole thing out for free. And then the second month, just $1, one euro, one pound for that entire month. I mean, it makes so much sense. So head over there and it's got all the back episodes of this podcast without ads on them. You can go for all of your viewing and listening pleasure on there as those dark winter nights closing up here in the Northern Hemisphere. And it gets too hot down South in the Southern Hemisphere. So stay inside, keep out of the sun, it's bad for you. Watch History Hit TV. In the meantime, everybody, here is Ian Mortimer. Ian, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

Well, thank you very much for having me. This is long overdue. One of Britain's best-selling, most famous historians. My apologies, not having you on before. But you're a generalist. You know everything about everything. But we're going to talk about the Regency today. I never had you down as a Regency kind of guy. This is really pushing me to the extremes of where I'm comfortable. I mean, I love the Regency. I mean, I've always loved the Regency.

Having grown up in a household in which sat at a Regency table on Regency chairs. And, you know, so it was part of our life and it was where my family's consciousness sort of started. So we still had discussions around the dinner table when I was small about what we did in 1817 or what we did in 1825. And so it was very present with me. So I really wanted this to be the most modern, probably, I could write of a time traveller's guide. But even so, the thing about a time traveller's guide is you have to pretend to know everything. I mean, I'm a professional historian. I need to know the limits of my evidence

and therefore it's really testing to try and write about this period as if you really can go there and it's by far the hardest thing I've ever done. I've got to ask you though, what were you doing in the Regency? That's very exciting your family's sense of its history there. Well the Mortimers were living in Plymouth they were making their way up from being lower middle class they were using their skills as dyers, cleaners. This is actually really interesting because historically as you know men never wash anything it's always women's work in every operation of life women

always do the cleaning but then as towns started to sort of get urbanized in the 1810s 1820s it starts to be a sort of thing that men can take a business pride in and they start to look at the washing industry cleaning generally as being something that perhaps they can profit from and therefore a few bold ones venture into this world of women's work. Except they never call it cleaning. They never call it washing. They use everything else. They call themselves dyers.

They call themselves sort of upholsterers, whatever it is. And that's what my lot were doing. They were using their skills as fullers and traditional skills and just got into the dyeing business and cleaning business. And as the railways took off, they cleaned up, funnily enough. But it was actually my three greats grandmother who really got the whole thing off the ground. She was the business brains. That's very cool. I've got some goldsmiths in the late 18th, early 19th centuries, and I've got nothing around at all from those days, I'm very annoyed to say. I know, but how cool to have goldsmiths.

So let's talk about Regency. It's one of those weird things about the names of periods that some just stick and are sort of more famous than others. But I mean, are you literally just sticking to the period when the future George IV assumed the Regency when his father was disabled, George III? I'm doing the long Regency because I'm much more interested in culture than I am the politics. So for me, the culture is the period from the French Revolution through to the point at which the English government or British government could no longer resist the forces of change. I would have gone up to 1832, but I called a halt at George IV's death in the summer of 1830. George IV was really the character who was doing more to stop change and reform in the 1820s

than anyone else so his death opened the chance for lord grey to get back into power and therefore bring forward the reform bill which was much needed but it's the culture of that period 41 years from the french revolution and it's the number of changes that come out of the french revolution that was the second biggest surprise i had of the whole thing. But yeah, I just loved reading about the period and imagining being there. The time traveller's guides that you write, the whole point is it's just, it is totally immersive. Have there ever been things when you're like, I just don't know what dog collars look like? And if so, is the Regency period just full of lovely sources? Yes, it is full of lovely sources. If

there's something I really don't know that I have to put in, I will do an educated guess and you'll get a damn great big footnote. I mean, all my books have got hundreds and hundreds of footnotes. If it's something that I don't know, that I don't feel is essential or delightful or entertaining or interesting, then I will leave it out. I mean, the thing is with all these books, I write them twice the length and then cut them down. So I mean, the first draft of this was 225,000 words. And the editor said, look, it's got to be realistic. 150,000 is the maximum we're going to tolerate. So therefore, there was a lot of arguing, as usual. And then they said, if you don't cut it, we'll bring in somebody who will, which is, of course, the biggest incentive to me to get my red pen out. So all these things have to be honed down and you're left with things that

i'm confident about which are interesting which are entertaining revelatory and structural in understanding how society comes about and you mentioned the word immersive absolutely because although on the face of it a time traveler's guide is a very easy way of learning about the past, the real drive and the power of them comes from you juxtaposing your values and experiences with the past, which is something I'm really proud of doing because most academics never touch this subject. never touch this subject they just never go there and therefore you have 18th century academics all at sea when it comes to slavery i mean judging people by their own standards well you can't do that and make it meaningful to modern day society you have to bring in our standards when you're discussing slavers because the audience needs to have these juxtapositions so a time traveler's guide is yeah it's it's it's great fun and immersive, but also I hope it's really going to provoke some questions and some thought at a deeper level.

So we're the time travellers. We've left behind Elizabethan England and medieval England of your previous books. We've arrived in the Regency period. What are the things that you think we'd find most unfamiliar, apart from the fabulous male fashion? Oh, and female fashion. Come on, you've've got to think look at those muslin dresses of the first decade of the 19th century and think no i could i funny enough i completely agree with that i just think women still dress very well today whereas men dress in the most boring suits imaginable so that again it's one of these consequences of the french revolution i mean how do you dress with elegance, with style, if people who are demonstrating their elevated position in society and their taste are getting

their heads cut off? You can't actually operate in the same way. The French arbiters of fashion in the 1790s very quickly pick up onto the practicality of clothing and the importance of being seen to act and clothing that supports action rather than status and Bo Brummel is the man who realizes how this can be brought in line with English values understatement refinement elegance not showiness and so Bo Brummel brings in trousers and he gets rid of breeches and he has fastidious ideas about dress which are absolute cleanliness no more sort of unwashedness for a gentleman you've got to be clean you've got to have perfectly cut clothes trousers everything if you want shiny buttons they should be made of

brass not gold or silver and so he's turning against all that showiness and i think we should be grateful for this revolution because it does put the emphasis back on what you do and what you say rather than who you are in society, status-wise. So yeah, I take it that our clothing has got a lot more dour and boring, but I think also it's enhanced the individual. You know what? Funnily enough, I'm not sure I agree. I would love to dress like a dandy, a late 8th century. Anyway, what would you find most extraordinary as we hit the mean streets of the Regency period? Well, the thing that would really strike you all the way through wherever you went is the extremes of society. Now, at the bottom end of society, you have plenty of people who are homeless. And that's true, often of societies. but the degrees of poverty and the degrees of want are so extreme.

And if you want to measure this in a way across the whole of the last thousand years, I looked at life expectancy at birth of the poorest section of society in the industrial towns and compared it to the wealthiest. Now, if you look all the way through the last thousand years, in Middle Ages, your peasant could expect to live about 85 to 90% as long as the aristocrat. In the Elizabethan period, even when people were living longer, into their 40s, life expectancy at birth, again, the peasantry were living about 85 to 90% as long. Today, in the modern world, our life expectancy at birth, if you're in the poorest areas of the country most deprived areas

it's 85 to 90 percent of life expectancy at birth and those living in the richest in the regency none of this 85 to 90 percent it's below 50 in london it's 50 percent life expectancy at birth in ashton underline in the streets without sewers was 13 13 now i can't get my head around that you know it just the levels of deprivation whole of liverpool and the third or fourth biggest city in the town in the country life expectancy at birth for the working classes was 16 i mean the levels of poverty and the crowdedness in the courts of liverpool we would just come as a big shock to anybody who can't imagine deprivation on that level in this country.

It's far worse than anything we had in the Middle Ages, far worse than anything in the Restoration or the Elizabethan periods. So I'd never really been prepared historically for the depths of deprivation in the Industrial Revolution. And I would defy anybody not to be shocked by that. And that would have been very visible. It would have been very, very obvious. You'd have smelt it. You'd have smelt the sewage in these overcrowded areas. I mean, the 1790s were areas of Liverpool with 700 people per acre. And yet Manchester and London would have seemed very small to us, would they, in terms of our ability to walk across them? About a tenth of the population there is today, but obviously much more

crammed in and much more densely populated. Your experience of a city would be on a different scale. I think that the one thing you would take away from the Regency more than anything else was the extremes of opulence and extremes of want. What do you think would have felt enduring and familiar? In fact, on the whole, would the time traveller have felt at home or in a completely weird parallel universe, do you think, when they land? Depends how much money you've got. Let's say you're middle of the road, middle class. You're going to land pretty much on your feet, I think, because you'll be familiar with the debates that are happening. You'll very quickly become aware of movements for, for example, the abolition of slavery, the position of women's society. So a lot of these debates, which are still with us today about racism, treatment of

minorities, are very much on the agenda there. Again, this is another thing that comes out of the French Revolution in a big way. Now, I don't think that's true of the 17th century or earlier. Would you have seen people on the streets with physical and mental health problems? On the mental health side of things, this is very interesting because this is the period where everything starts to change. At the beginning of this period, you had three or four mental health hospitals in the whole country. You had Bedlam, most famously in London, one in Manchester, and the York Retreat in the 1790s. And it was the York Retreat that really set the pattern for how things should be brought within the realms of care. A bedlam in 1800, you'd have found

hundreds of people literally chained up. In fact, everybody would have been chained up, men and women just with an overgown to protect them, nothing to hide their modesty, left to soil themselves on heaps of straw, the public entertained at a price of a shilling so they could go and see them. Absolutely despicable, treated like animals. But by 1816, Bedlam had been rebuilt and its inmates were no longer chained up. Arguably the most important piece of medical legislation that ever has been was in this period, 1815, the Apothecaries Act, which brought in a standard form of medical education for all GPs. So you've got huge changes on the medical front.

Eye hospitals, ear hospitals, hospitals to help with contagious illnesses. All of these things are getting off the ground in this period. Are we in the middle of a revolution in the countryside as well? Would it look very different to kind of medieval village community strip farming? What about coal mines? I mean, Ironbridge Gorge, for example. I mean, the Industrial Revolution is underway, frankly, before anywhere else in the world here. When we're talking about Industrial Revolution, we must remember that it is about industry. It's not about mechanisation. Profit is the power

driver. So long before you've got steam engines powering the mills, you've got water and you've got hundreds, thousands of people inhabiting these, or working in, yeah, practically inhabiting these huge huge great buildings in the north i mean some of them still stand in manchester i'm sure you're familiar with the long ones along the canal there 10 stories high 130 feet long 24 hours the extremes of england at this time are as i say bewildering because you've got on the one hand the garden of eden and on the other hand people working around the clock, women and children in mines and no social care of that sort, no prevention of industrial accidents

or industrial ill health at this period. Were they consciously aware of the enormous changes that were going on in the landscape there society or do you think we all feel like we're living through enormous change? Excellent question, One of my favourite questions to answer. I really like this whole thing because until the French Revolution, people weren't really that aware of change. They understood that change was going on from the 16th century when they could see ruined abbeys, which once had been thriving centres and ruined castles, etc. But people never realised that things were moving faster until we get to this French Revolution period. And then suddenly, everybody realises that, hang on, what was normal 10 years ago is no longer normal. And that's economically, socially, in terms of how you deal with political

questions, dress even. In fact, there's a fantastic book, supposedly written by a Spaniard, but it's actually written by Robert Southey, the poet laureate. And he describes England as if he were a Spaniard going around the place. And he says that surely no country has ever undergone so much change as Britain has since 1760. He looks back to the beginning of the reign, because he's writing in 1803. The book was published in 1807. He says that without a violent revolution, no country can ever have undergone so much change as England has done. He's really the first person, I think, within an English context, who describes that change is getting faster. And I think every generation since then has believed it has seen more change than any other, largely because of

technology, of course. But he really puts this sort of marker down that surely no country has seen as much change as England has since 1760. I think we need to be very careful because the changes of the modern world, in terms of perception of the way we live our lives and the physical things we do, turning on lights or whatever it is, cooking. Yeah, we've seen a bewildering number of changes. But how do we compare these with the changes of say the 16th century where you know you've got religious changes which might mean very little to us where religion doesn't change very much but for them most important thing in their

lives it was hugely important well really devastating or you know the black death i mean the black death didn't just come along and kill half the population. It disrupted society to such a great extent. You don't know whether God wants you to live or die. You know, you don't know whether you're doing the right thing in God's eyes. You don't know whether the craft you were brought up to operate all your life is what you really should be doing, or do you do something else? Do you sell your labor at another manorial lord? What is the name of the book? The book is The Time Traveller's Guide to Regency Britain. It's the fourth in the sequence, all of which are about, if you really could travel there, where are you going to stay?

What are you going to wear? What are you going to eat? Which diseases might kill you? Which doctors might kill you? And in this period, the quacks may well do so. And basically, what are you going to do to have fun when you're in this strange place? Thank you very much, Ian Mortimer. Everyone's saying thank you on the live stream. So that's great. Really, really kind of you.

Thank you, Ian. And good luck with the book. Thank you very much. Thank you. Just a quick favour to ask while you're here, everyone. Thank you for listening. If you could possibly, you don't want to ask, I'm sorry for doing it, but if you could go to wherever you get your podcasts,

give it a rating, five stars, little review, lowing, then the algorithm will be happy with us. The algorithm that controls our destinies will smile upon us and give forth its bounty. We'll go up the charts. People find the podcast easier. Lots of people listen, and that's really good. So thank you so much for listening and really appreciate the favor.