tanyarobinson's review
3.0
I bought this book because I was interested in understanding how Britain evolved from the bawdy society of the Regency era and before to the staid Victorians of the later 1800's. Wilson tries to pin down this slippery subject, though as I read his book I had a sense of him snatching at butterflies, trying to hold on to enough of them for long enough to get a sense of the whole. Amidst his very high-brow writing style (as I read the book I kept thinking I was glad I didn't have to take one of my kids' Accelerated Reader tests on it; I know my comprehension was down because of the sky-high difficulty level) I grasped a lot of anecdotal examples of a freer society before the 1820's and a gradually more self-regulated one after. I can see that with the introduction of a regular police force, increased enforcement of Sabbath observance, the ballooning fashion of moral "cant, " and a crackdown on the more riotous behaviors of the poor, that times were changing. I recognize the rampant hypocrisy that Wilson was so quick to equate with moral reformers of today (I resented his lack of objectivity on this). And I understand that the insecurity of the Napoleonic Wars years caused a lot of philosophical re-evaluation. But even after reading this book, I would have a really difficult time writing an essay on the topic, "What caused the value shift in England from the Regency to Victorian eras?"
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