This book examines the widespread response in British artistic media to the death in childbirth in 1817 of Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales, daughter of the Prince Regent and heiress to the throne, showing how both in print materials like poetry and sermons and extra-literary artifacts like visual art, ceramics, metalwork, and textiles her life and death were invested with the qualities of myth even as her memorialists appropriated her experiences in the process of producing consumer commodities for an emerging mass audience.

The Georgian era, we are told, was a “polite and commercial” era. The supposedly refined aristocracy governed the nation while the bourgeoisie, at the center of the largest empire the world had ever known, expanded the nation’s overseas trading interests while currying royal favors. It was an era which witnessed the flowering of art, literature, and music. But at the heart of the British Empire was something rotten: Vice, corruption, and crime reigned supreme. Someone had had enough and decided to expose this and so, in 1832, a curious book appeared for sale titled The Secret History of the Court of England. Written by Olivia Serres under the pseudonym of “Lady Anne Hamilton,” this was a sensational chronicle of the crime, vice, and debauchery designed to shock and titillate its reader. It contained a number of accusations against establishment figures: Was George IV guilty of bigamy? What was the Prince’s true relationship with one Mrs Robinson? Did the Duke of Cumberland’s servant Mr Sellis really commit suicide or was he MURERED IN COLD BLOOD? All these questions, and more, will be answered in Lady Anne Hamilton’s Secret History of the Court of England, originally published in 1832 and reprinted at long last!

This lively history of Europe’s royal families through the 18th and early 19th centuries reveals the decadence and danger of court life. As the glittering Hanoverian court gives birth to the British Georgian era, a golden age of royalty dawns in Europe. Houses rise and fall, births, marriages and scandals change the course of history. Meanwhile, in France, Revolution stalks the land. Life in the Georgian Court pulls back the curtain on the opulent court of the doomed Bourbons, the absolutist powerhouse of Romanov Russia, and the epoch-defining royal family whose kings gave their name to the era, the House of Hanover. Beneath the powdered wigs and robes of state were real people living lives of romance, tragedy, intrigue and eccentricity. Historian Catherine Curzon reveals the private lives of these very public figures, vividly recounting the arranged marriages that turned to love or hate and the scandals that rocked polite society. Here the former wife of a king spends three decades in lonely captivity, King George IV makes scandalous eyes at the toast of the London stage, and Marie Antoinette begins her final journey through Paris as her son sits alone in a forgotten prison cell. Life in the Georgian Court is a privileged peek into the glamorous, tragic and iconic courts of the Georgian world, where even a king could take nothing for granted.