Mini-Review: Meet the Georgians by Robert Peal

 (A Mini-Review because I can't think of enough to say to warrant a full-sized one)

Meet the Georgians by Robert Peal is very attractive. The cover features very striking linocut images by Christopher Brown. These images are also found in the book, with each chapter proceeded by a linocut of the subject of the chapter and they are lovely, but they are simplified, and this is the case with the text.

Robert Peal starts by pointing out how history in schools jumps from Stuarts to Victorians without the Georgians being represented at all. As someone who works in a primary school, I can definitely attest to this - I remember a children’s non-fiction book about toys that made this jump, thus skipping the first mass-produced toys and the first specialised toy shop, Noah’s Ark. Peal seeks to redress this imbalance a little and introduce the reader to the (long) eighteenth century, one which he promises the reader is ‘wild’. 

The people selected are both interesting and diverse and includes some of my favourites like the ladies of Llangollen and Olaudah Equianio. Lady Hamilton gets a chapter inspired by the exhibition about her, as are pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read, who Peal first found about in the 1992 exhibition that got me into pirates as a child. I enjoyed the chapter about Hester Stanhope, even if it smoothed some of her rough edges. The choices were good, the telling brisk and entertaining, it does what it wants to very well, it provides a space to meet the Georgians.

As someone who has wallowed with them for a while, it was pretty superficial, all the efforts to make them seem cool and hip do grate and I could enjoy an introduction to Emma Hamilton without being told she was a ‘superbabe’. There’s also a sense that, in trying to make the people and times appealing, the distinctly unappealing elements are softened. It’s hard to be told that the Georgians were fun, free, sexy, individual people who colonised and enslaved.. it doesn’t quite mesh. There’s also the fact that all the people chosen in book are intended to be representative of the age in some way but were all exceptions, and exceptional.

I wonder which twelve people I’d choose to sum up Britain’s long eighteenth century? I’d certainly pick some of these. I wouldn’t chose Byron though - give me a potted Erasmus Darwin biography instead where he’s described as a super-genius mega-whale’.