The Georgians feel closer to us now than the Victorians

‘The two most fascinating subjects in the universe are sex and the 18th century,’ declared the novelist Brigid Brophy when the ban on Fanny Hill was lifted in 1963. Penelope Corfield’s big, handsome, enjoyable book goes a good way to illustrating Brophy’s assertion. Part source book, part interpretive history of the long 18th century (1688-1837), it is also a guide and gazetteer to the continuing presence of Georgian England in our towns and minds.

The world before 1688 is largely unfamiliar to us. The 18th century, however, with its lovable rogues, its introduction of constitutional monarchy, its rights of man and its sexual libertines, is akin to ours. Despite recent trends suggesting we may soon be dressing the piano legs again, we are closer to the Georgians than to the Victorians.

Corfield’s grasp and authority are evident throughout. Despite making occasional reference to modern intellectual heavyweights such as Gramsci or Habermas, she maintains a lightness of phrase that makes her book never less than enthralling, even in the midst of a long list of Georgian achievements. For it is the deeds rather than the misdeeds by which Corfield is most taken. While she never shies from the horrors of slavery, for example, her interest is in those who helped abolish it. The subtitle feels like a sop to current academic fashion.

So what did the Georgians ever do for us? Well, they united the four home nations (George III was probably the first king to ‘glory in the name of Briton’, which did not stop Squire Weston in Fielding’s Tom Jones referring to ‘Hanover rats’). The Union Flag took its final form in 1801, when St Patrick’s cross was added. There is hardly an area of Georgian life that does not find echoes or evolution in our own times.