IN THESE TIMES by Jenny Uglow (non-fic)

Subtitle:  Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815

What struck me the most when reading Jenny Uglow's latest book is that war in all its guises somehow is the same no matter when it is fought.  It is always the poor who suffer the most, no matter if it is the Napoleonic Wars, fought over 200 years ago or any conflict in today's world.  In the 22 years of the Napoleonic Wars, which was nearly a world war since most of Europe and the United States and Caribbean islands were involved, the suffering and depredation afflicted all the principals.
In England, the subject of this book, there were riots, food shortages, speculation, crop failures, stock crashes, profiteering, new taxes, new money, and disease.  All this despite the fact that there were never any battles in England.

Jenny Uglow, one of my favorite historians, does a masterful job with the gargantuan task of presenting this social history which stretched over many years with the players outside of England and France, changing sides fueled by whatever economic or military crisis they found themselves in.  What Uglow does is to use a framework of diaries and letters of over 30 families who wrote their thoughts and recorded events between 1793 and 1815. She fleshes this out with precise research and presents it all as a fascinating and realistic record of the lives of the commoners and the gentry.  Over and over the reader will discover the validity of that old saw, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."

The book is richly illustrated, though I did have to take a magnifying glass to some of the small prints. Besides consorting with farmers, bankers, soldiers, sailors, and mill workers, the reader will discover the war activities of such luminaries as:  Jane Austin, Lord Byron, Wordsworth, Thomas Paine, Leigh Hunt (who along with his brother was jailed more than once for their anti-war propaganda), Edmund Burke, James Fox, and a wealth of others.  The loss of British lives was horrendous and not only to battle.  Diseases such as yellow fever took their toll as well.  40,000 men were lost to fever in the Caribbean and in the swamps of the Netherlands. Because of the length of the war, it was not unusual for a father to have fought in the beginning conflicts and sons in the latter battles with women losing husbands and sons.

Like all wars, art and literature seemed to grow and flourish as new ideas and ways of thinking came into vogue.  People even managed to travel between the battles and relations with other European nations waxed and waned.

Having recently read a biography of Napoleon, it was interesting to compare and contrast conditions in England and read of reactions to Napoleon whose star fell as Wellington's and Nelson's rose.  I recommend this social history to all who have an interest in the European history of the era, and English history in particular.  Uglow covers a lot of material with great perspective.  She is an able guide to an interesting period of time and its people.