Acknowledgments, often stuck at the back of a book between the endnotes and the index, are always worth checking out. Sometimes touching, often self-serving, they can also offer a window on the intellectual antecedents and influences of a work.
Jenny Uglow in hers thanks the historian David Kynaston, whose successful series of books –Austerity Britain, Family Britain, Modernity Britain – uses everyday encounters to throw light on the British postwar experience. Regular readers of Kynaston will know that in return Uglow appears as a character in Modernity Britain, recalling her experience as child living near Windscale, in Cumbria, when a fire ripped through Britain's first nuclear reactor.
Uglow is a prize-winning and bestselling biographer who needs schooling from no one. Yet her recent work has focused on less prominent subjects – her last book, on Sarah Losh, was subtitled Forgotten Romantic Heroine – and perhaps it is not too much of a stretch to see the influence of Kynaston's method in her ambitious new study. In These Times, while retaining Uglow's flair for characterisation, is in many ways the application of Kynaston's multifaceted approach to the 18th century.
“It is a cavalcade with a host of actors – a crowd biography if such a thing is possible,” she writes in her opening chapter. “It follows the back and forth of war and domestic politics, seeing how news reached the people, how fear bred suspicion and propaganda fuelled patriotism, how victories were celebrated and the dead were mourned, how some became rich and others starved.”
The result is a big, bold work, rich in detail, insight and characterisation, that reminds us how central the Napoleonic era remains to the way we think – and how often their problems remain ours today.
Books on the late-18th and early-19th centuries, unsurprisingly, have always resonated in Ireland. The 1798 rebellion, the Act of Union, Robert Emmet’s execution and the struggle for Catholic emancipation combine to make this a dramatic and important period in Irish history, and one well served by recent State-funded commemorations. Add those Irishmen who played a central role in the British story, including Wellington, Castlereagh and Burke – each arguably the most important commander, diplomatist and thinker of his time – and it’s easy to see why the era has always fascinated.
The time’s preoccupations have resonated more widely in Britain recently. The Scottish independence referendum has drawn people back to 1707 and the foundation of the British state, with much discussion about the constitution and the centrality of the Scottish Enlightenment.
Then there are global affairs: with the Middle East in turmoil, Afghanistan always teetering on the brink of collapse, and the revisionist powers of Russia and China looking to rip up the existing world order, western policymakers are seeking a way out of the morass. Many commentators, not least Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state and strategist nonpareil, point them back to the likes of Castlereagh, who serves as an example of how statesmen with a mastery of strategy can restore peace after an era of revolution and war.
Uglow is good at using everyday experiences to make broader points about life in Britain, not least in how the realities of war intruded. After Lord Howe successfully engaged the French Atlantic fleet in 1794, he brought seven dismasted French ships and their crews back to Portsmouth, where they were put on show for tourists.
‘‘When we went below deck, the scene was truly frightful,” one visitor wrote. “Our curiosity did not last long; the smell, with the sight of the dying and the groans of the wounded, soon put to an end to our naval visit.” No wonder, Uglow notes, “such scenes were not mentioned in the celebrations, which set a pattern for the rest of the war.”
If you’re interested in why the Scottish cotton industry lost out to Lancashire – English weavers added “fustian” to the cotton – or how the “Jockey Club of Oldham laid on a dinner for fifty-nine elderly people, and ‘when dinner was over they had each a pint of good ale, their ages together amounted to 3,971 years’,” then it’s all here in rich and quirky detail.
Wellington meets Nelson
Yet it is still Uglow’s mastery of characterisation that brings
In These Times
superbly to life. Politicians, soldiers and sailors, poets and writers (although not enough musicians), entrepreneurs and financiers, men of God, landlords and tenants are all chronicled, with even the best known given a fresh presentation.
Nowhere is this better done than with the most famous Englishman of all, Admiral Lord Nelson, whose portrait in miniature is a masterpiece. Take the perfect way she tells the story of how Nelson, in London to collect his orders before Trafalgar, runs into Wellington and, not realising who he is, starts boasting about his exploits and the superiority of the navy.
“Years later Wellington remembered being appalled by Nelson’s swagger,” Uglow writes, “until Nelson, having briefly left the room and discovered who he was, completely dropped his boasting. Amused at the transformation, by the time he left Wellington was charmed: ‘Luckily I saw enough to be satisfied that he really was a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden and complete metamorphosis I never saw.’ It was the only time they met. Nelson sailed three days later from Portsmouth.”
Perhaps it’s ironic that Uglow’s brilliant portraits end up raising a question about her overall argument that “the big names are here – Pitt, Fox, Nelson, Wellington, Wilberforce and others – but history is not a matter of individual lives, however powerful or heroic.” By the end of the Napoleonic era, having won what turned out to be the most important battle, 10 years earlier, with Nelson at Trafalgar, Britain had displaced France as the leading European power.
It was dominant industrially, now "ruled the waves", and had enhanced moral authority after the abolition of the slave trade. Certainly broad forces were at work in this process, but reading the hugely enjoyable In These Times more than ever suggests that the statesman George Canning was right: it is men, not measures, that count most. For this was a generation that, like William Wilberforce on hearing that the Act to Abolish the Slave Trade had received royal assent, always wanted to know "What's next?"
Richard Aldous teaches history at Bard College, in New York. His books include The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli and a biography of Tony Ryan
