Regency Recollections: Captain Gronow's Guide to Life in London and Paris

Captain Rees Howell Gronow was a dandy, a debtor, a duellist and a raconteur who lived the high life in Regency London and Paris. He was also a talented writer and his memoirs form the liveliest picture of Regency society ever produced.


A contemporary noted that Gronow 'committed the greatest follies, without in the slightest disturbing the points of his shirt collar.' An epitome of style, the personification of the man about town, he devoted his life to fashionable and exciting pursuits. And he lived in exciting times. He was a Waterloo veteran , knew the obnoxious Prince Regent, mixed with the imperious Beau Brummell, was a friend to both Byron and Shelley, and, generally, was at the very heart of high society. Inevitably, Gronow's lively memoir is inhabited by a cast of belles, beau sabreurs, courtesans, dandies, duellists, eccentrics, gamblers, heroes, millionaires, mistresses, matriarchs, and more.


As a debtor seeking refuge in Paris, Gronow would produce these
astonishing anecdotes which remain an outstanding source for historians. This edition presents Gronow's Regency recollections in an accessible form, aimed at the general reader as much as the aficionado. Here, all the fascinating details of Regency life put on their gaudy show: how to get invited to a ball, how to fight a duel, how to make a successful elopement, how to win (and just as importantly, how to lose) at the gambling table, how to wear the right trousers. It is more than a manual to Regency style, it is a record of a life well lived and a life brilliantly remembered.

Christopher Summerville is a historian and writer specialising in the early nineteenth century.