The Victorians are often credited with ushering in our current era, yet the seeds of change were planted during the earlier Regency period (1811-1820) when the profligate Prince of Wales-the future king George IV-succeeded his father. Around the Prince Regent surged a society of contrasts: evangelicalism and hedonism, elegance and brutality, exuberance and despair. Capturing the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of artists-the Shelleys, Austen, Keats, Byron, Turner-scientists and inventors-Stevenson, Davy, Faraday-and a cast of dissident journalists, military leaders, and fashionistas, Robert Morrison captivatingly illuminates the ways this period shaped the modern world.