Georgian era

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Georgian era
1714 – 1830 (1837)
Including Regency era
Preceded by Restoration
Followed by Victorian era

The Georgian era is a period in British history from 1714 to c. 1830–37, named eponymously after kings George I, George II, George III and George IV. The sub-period that is the Regency era is defined by the regency of George IV as Prince of Wales during the illness of his father George III. The definition of the Georgian era is often extended to include the relatively short reign of William IV, which ended with his death in 1837.

The term "Georgian" is typically used in the contexts of social and political history and architecture. The term "Augustan literature" is often used for Augustan drama, Augustan poetry and Augustan prose in the period 1700–1740s. The term "Augustan" refers to the acknowledgement of the influence of Latin literature from the ancient Roman Republic.[2]



The flowering of the arts was most vividly shown in the emergence of the Romantic poets, principally through Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake, John Keats, Lord Byron and Robert Burns. Their work ushered in a new era of poetry, characterised by vivid and colourful language, evocative of elevating ideas and themes.

The paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds and the young J. M. W. Turner and John Constable illustrated the changing world of the Georgian period – as did the work of designers like Capability Brown, the landscape designer.

Fine examples of distinctive Georgian architecture are Edinburgh's New Town, Georgian Dublin, Grainger Town in Newcastle Upon Tyne, The Georgian Quarter of Liverpool and much of Bristol and Bath.

Social change[edit]

It was a time of immense social change in Britain, with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution which began the process of intensifying class divisions, and the emergence of rival political parties like the Whigs and Tories.

In rural areas the Agricultural Revolution saw huge changes to the movement of people and the decline of small communities, the growth of the cities and the beginnings of an integrated transportation system but, nevertheless, as rural towns and villages declined and work became scarce there was a huge increase in emigration to Canada, the North American colonies (which became the United States during the period) and other parts of the British Empire.

Evangelical religion and social reform[edit]

The evangelical movement inside and outside the Church of England gained strength in the late 18th and early 19th century. The movement challenged the traditional religious sensibility that emphasized a code of honor for the upper-class, and suitable behaviour for everyone else, together with faithful observances of rituals. John Wesley (1703–1791) and his followers preached revivalist religion, trying to convert individuals to a personal relationship with Christ through Bible reading, regular prayer, and especially the revival experience. Wesley himself preached 52,000 times, calling on men and women to "redeem the time" and save their souls. Wesley always operated inside the Church of England, but at his death, it set up outside institutions that became the Methodist Church.[3] It stood alongside the traditional nonconformist churches, Presbyterians, Congregationalist, Baptists, Unitarians and Quakers. The nonconformist churches, however, were less influenced by revivalism.[4]

The Church of England remained dominant, but it had a growing evangelical, revivalist faction the "Low Church". Its leaders included William Wilberforce and Hannah More. It reached the upper class through the Clapham Sect. It did not seek political reform, but rather the opportunity to save souls through political action by freeing slaves, abolishing the duel, prohibiting cruelty to children and animals, stopping gambling, avoiding frivolity on the Sabbath; they read the Bible every day. All souls were equal in God's view, but not all bodies, so evangelicals did not challenge the hierarchical structure of English society.[5] As R.J. Morris noted in his 1983 article "Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780-1850," "[m]id-eighteenth-century Britain was a stable society in the sense that those with material and ideological power were able to defend this power in an effective and dynamic manner," but "in the twenty years after 1780, this consensus structure was broken."[6] Anglican Evangelicalism thus, as historian Lisa Wood has argued in her book Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel After the French Revolution, functioned as a tool of ruling-class social control, buffering the discontent that in France had inaugurated a revolution; yet it contained within itself the seeds for challenge to gender and class hierarchies.[7]


The Georgian period saw continual warfare, including the Seven Years' War, known in America as the French and Indian War (1756–63), the American Revolutionary War (1775–83), the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). The British won all the wars except for the American Revolution, where the combined weight of the United States, France, Spain and the Netherlands overwhelmed Britain, which stood alone without allies.[8]


The expansion of empire brought fame to statesmen and explorers such as Clive of India and Captain Cook, and sowed the seeds of the worldwide British Empire of the Victorian and Edwardian eras which were to follow.

The trading nation[edit]






Politics and social revolt[edit]

With the ending of the War with France, Great Britain entered a period of greater economic depression and political uncertainty, characterised by social discontent and unrest. The Radical political party published a leaflet called The Political Register, also known as "The Two Penny Trash" to its rivals. The so-called March of the Blanketeers saw 400 spinners and weavers march from Manchester to London in March 1817 to hand the Government a petition. The Luddites destroyed and damaged machinery in the industrial north-west of England. The Peterloo Massacre in 1819 began as a protest rally which saw 60,000 people gathering to protest about their living standards, but was quelled by military action and saw eleven people killed and 400 wounded. The Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820 sought to blow up the Cabinet and then move on to storm the Tower of London and overthrow the government. This too was thwarted, with the conspirators executed or transported to Australia.


Historians have long explored the importance of the Scottish Enlightenment, as well as the American Enlightenment,[17] while debating the very existence of the English Enlightenment.

Scottish Enlightenment[edit]

English historian Peter Gay argues that the Scottish Enlightenment "was a small and cohesive group of friends – David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, and others – who knew one another intimately and talked to one another incessantly.[18] Education was a priority in Scotland, both at the local level and especially in four universities that had stronger reputations than any in England. The Enlightenment culture was based on close readings of new books, and intense discussions that took place daily at such intellectual gathering places in Edinburgh as The Select Society and, later, The Poker Club as well as within Scotland's ancient universities (St Andrews, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen).[19] Sharing the humanist and rationalist outlook of the European Enlightenment of the same time period, the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment asserted the importance of human reason combined with a rejection of any authority that could not be justified by reason. In Scotland, the Enlightenment was characterised by a thoroughgoing empiricism and practicality where the chief values were improvement, virtue, and practical benefit for the individual and society as a whole. Among the fields that rapidly advanced were philosophy, economics, history architecture, and medicine. Leaders included Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid, William Robertson, Henry Home, Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson, John Playfair, Joseph Black and James Hutton. The Scottish Enlightenment had an impact on England and the American colonies, and to a lesser extent in continental Europe.[20]

English Enlightenment[edit]

The very existence of an English Enlightenment has been hotly debated by scholars. The majority of textbooks and standard surveys make no room for an English Enlightenment. Some European surveys include England, others ignore it but do include as enlightenment intellectuals such representative Englishmen as Newton, Locke, Jonathan Swift, although they do include coverage of such major intellectuals as Joseph Addison, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope, Joshua Reynolds, and Jonathan Swift.[21] Roy Porter argues that the reason for the neglect was the assumption that the movement was primarily French-inspired, that it was largely a-religious or anti-clerical, and it stood in outspoken defiance to the established order.[22] Porter admits that after the 1720s, England could claim few thinkers to equal Diderot, Voltaire or Rousseau. Indeed, its leading intellectuals, such as Edward Gibbon,[23] Edmund Burke, and Samuel Johnson were all quite conservative and supported the standing order. Porter says the reason was that Enlightenment had come early to England, and had succeeded so that the culture had accepted political liberalism, philosophical empiricism, and religious toleration of the sort that intellectuals on the continent had to fight for against powerful odds. The coffee-house culture provided an ideal venue for enlightened conversation. Furthermore, England rejected the collectivism of the continent, and emphasized the improvement of individuals as the main goal of enlightenment[24]


The final Jacobite rising is crushed at the Battle of Culloden.
Australia and New Zealand are claimed as British colonies.
The Peterloo Massacre occurs.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ a b c E. B. Pryde (23 February 1996). Handbook of British Chronology. Cambridge University Press. pp. 46–47. ISBN 978-0-521-56350-5. 
  2. ^ Roger D. Lund, Ridicule, Religion and the Politics of Wit in Augustan England (Ashgate, 2013) ch 1.
  4. ^ Asa Briggs, The age of improvement, 1783–1867 (1959), pp 66–73.
  5. ^ John Rule, Albion's People: English Society 1714–1815 (1992) ch 2–6
  6. ^ Morris, R.J. (March 1983). "Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780-1850: An Analysis". The Historical Journal. 26 (1): 99. 
  7. ^ Wood, Lisa (2003). Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French Revolution. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. pp. 42–44. 
  9. ^ Eliga H. Gould, "American independence and Britain's counter-revolution", Past & Present (1997) #154 pp 107–41
  17. ^ Adrienne Koch, ed., The American enlightenment: The shaping of the American experiment and a free society (1965).
  18. ^ Peter Gay, ed. The Enlightenment: A comprehensive anthology (1973) p 15.
  19. ^ Matthew Daniel Eddy, "Natural History, Natural Philosophy and Readership", in Stephen Brown and Warren McDougall, eds., The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, Vol. II: Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707–1800 (2012), pp 297-309 online
  20. ^ David Daiches, Peter Jones, Jean Jones, eds., A Hotbed of Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment 1731–1790 (Edinburgh UP, 1986).
  23. ^ Karen O'Brien, "English Enlightenment Histories, 1750–c.1815" in José Rabasa et al. eds. (2012). The Oxford History of Historical Writing. 3: 1400-1800. OUP Oxford. pp. 518–35. 
  24. ^ Roy Porter, The creation of the modern world: the untold story of the British Enlightenment (2000), pp 1–12, 36-37, 482–84.

Further reading[edit]

  • Andress, David. The savage storm: Britain on the brink in the age of Napoleon (2012).
  • Armstrong, Anthony. The Church of England: the Methodists and society, 1700–1850 (1973).
  • Bates, Stephen. Year of Waterloo: Britain in 1815 (2015).
  • Boyd, Hilton. A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England 1783–1846 (2008) 783pp
  • Briggs, Asa. The making of modern England, 1783–1867: The age of the improvement (1959)
  • Evans, E.J. Britain before the Reform Act: politics and society 1815–1832 (1989)
  • Gould, Eliga H. "American independence and Britain's counter-revolution", Past & Present (1997) #154 pp 107–41
  • Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2009)
  • Hunt, William. The History of England from the Accession of George III to the close of Pitt's first Administration (1905), highly detailed on politics and diplomacy, 1760–1801. online
  • Leadam, I. S. The History of England From The Accession of Anne To The Death of George II (1912) online, highly detailed on politics and diplomacy 1702–1760.
  • Mori, Jennifer. Britain in the Age of the French Revolution: 1785–1820 (Routledge, 2014).
  • Plumb, J. H. England in the Eighteenth Century (1950), short older survey by a leading expert. online
  • Rule. John. Albion's People: English Society 1714–1815 (1992)
  • Turner, M.J. The Age of Unease: government and reform in Britain, 1782–1832 (2000)
  • Watson J. Steven. The Reign of George III: 1760–1815 (1960), scholarly survey
  • Wilson, Charles. England's apprenticeship, 1603–1763 (1967), comprehensive economic and business history.
  • Woodward; E. L. The Age of Reform, 1815–1870, (1938) online edition


  • Bultmann, William A. "Early Hanoverian England (1714–1760): Some Recent Writings", in Elizabeth Chapin Furber, ed. Changing views on British history: essays on historical writing since 1939 (Harvard University Press, 1966), pp 181–205
  • O’Gorman, Frank. "The Recent Historiography of the Hanoverian Regime." Historical Journal 29#4 (1986): 1005–1020.
  • Snyder, Henry L. "Early Georgian England", in Richard Schlatter, ed., Recent Views on British History: Essays on Historical Writing since 1966 (Rutgers UP, 1984), pp. 167–196, historiography

Note: In the twentieth century, the period 1910–1936 was informally called the Georgian Era during the reign of George V (following the Edwardian Era), and is sometimes still referred to as such;[1] see Georgian Poetry.

  1. ^ "Georgian". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (4th ed.). Archived from the original on 2008-03-12. Retrieved 2008-07-04. 

External links[edit]