An Elegant Madness
Prince Of Pleasure

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An Elegant Madness:
High Society in Regency England
BY VENETIA MURRAY | VIKING BOOKS | NONFICTION | 317 PAGES

BY MARY ELIZABETH WILLIAMS | Put yourself for a moment in the high-buckled shoes of a British subject of the pre-Victorian era. An overweight, overamorous leader is waging political war with his enemies; the cult of gossip and celebrity-watching is at a fever pitch; new technology is creating a Luddite backlash; and the prosperity of a large segment of the populace is exceeded only by its extravagant accumulation of debt. Gee, what must that be like?

Though these two new histories of the Regency period are far too subtle and too involved in the business of looking backward to draw contemporary parallels, their timing couldn't be more apt. And the light they shed on that remarkable period is so bright that it can't help but illuminate the present. While one book paints an intimate portrait of a single subject and the other takes a sweeping view of the culture as a whole, both offer fascinating accounts of a time as emblazoned with decadence and frivolity as the period that followed was marked by rigid repression. The authors, Venetia Murray and Saul David, show the reader how to party like it's 1809, and it's a glorious affair.

Murray's "An Elegant Madness" in particular is a treat, in part because of the author's cheeky flair for words. She writes not as a musty poacher of old diaries and church records but as a breathlessly wry reporter dispatching accounts live from the front, in the sort of amused style that would easily have befit that Regency scribe Jane Austen herself. Murray bristles at the very idea of confusing a Regency Beau, Buck or Dandy with "his eighteenth-century predecessors, the Fop, the Fribble, and the Macaroni"; she dismisses Lord Alvanley, who "began life with a fortune and a first class brain, but ... wasted both." As she chronicles the outlandish fashions, the political scandals, the opulent parties and the often hypocritical libertinism hidden behind the famous British reserve, she combines gossipy enthusiasm with uncompromising attention to research and detail. It's the rare writer who can imbue as potentially dry a subject as British history with such personal zest, and Murray's gusto is giddily infectious.

Saul David's "Prince of Pleasure" makes a far more subdued time trip. Painstakingly faithful to the life of the man who eventually became George IV, the book's purposeful, plain-spoken prose rarely breaks out in the kind of wildness its subject was known for. Fortunately, the Prince of Wales is a juicy enough figure to require a minimum of literary embellishment. The book careens between the prince's mind-boggling gustatory and sexual adventures, his secret marriage to a Catholic widow, his struggle to wrest power from his mentally ill father and, in spite of all his excesses, his devoted patronage of the finest talent of his time. The picture that emerges is admirably multilayered -- David allows the prince to be both buffoonishly absurd and intellectually complex.