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.

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.

This royal historian’s “lively study of the four Georges who sat on the English throne for over a century is a joy” (Jane Austen’s Regency World). For over one hundred years of turmoil, upheaval, and scandal, Great Britain was a Georgian land. From the day the German-speaking George I stepped off the boat from Hanover to the night that George IV, bloated and diseased, breathed his last at Windsor, the four kings had presided over a changing nation. Kings of Georgian Britain offers a fresh perspective on the lives of the four Georges and the events that shaped their characters and reigns. From love affairs to family feuds, political wrangling, and beyond, it is a chance to peer behind the pomp and follow these iconic figures from cradle to grave. After all, being a king isn’t always about grand parties and jaw-dropping jewels, and sometimes following in a father’s footsteps can be the hardest job around. Take a step back in time and meet the wives, mistresses, friends, and foes of these remarkable kings who shaped the nation, and find out what really went on behind closed palace doors. Whether dodging assassins, marrying for money, digging up their ancestors, or sparking domestic disputes that echoed down the generations, the kings of Georgian Britain were never short on drama. “[A] chronological series of amusing anecdotes. [Curzon is] often whimsical, has a good sense of pace and you can imagine her stifling a smirk while writing this unusual biography.” —History of Royals