Went the Day Well?
Witnessing Waterloo
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In these pages, acclaimed historian David Crane gives us an astonishing, intimate snapshot of the people and places surrounding the battle that changed the course of world history. Switching perspectives between Britain and Belgium, prison and palace, poet and pauper, husband and wife, Went the Day Well? offers a highly original view of Waterloo, showing how the battle was not only a military landmark, but also a cultural watershed that drew the line between the rural, reactionary age of the past and the urban, innovative era to come. Lyrically rendered in Crane’s signature prose style, this essential account freeze-frames the ordinary men and women of 1815 who went about their business, attended lectures, worked in fields and factories—all on the cusp of a new, unforeseeable age.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While taking an hour-by-hour look at the Battle of Waterloo, which was fought June 17, 1815, British historian Crane (Scott of Antarctica) focuses less on the conflict itself than on what came to be called "the age of Waterloo" in Britain. Crane's account of Napoleon's defeat is somewhat disjointed, but he more than compensates with his superb, kaleidoscopic look at domestic life of the period. He introduces readers to the lives of such noteworthy figures as the poet Lord Byron, who, at the time, was in an unhappy marriage and heavily in debt after an affair with his half-sister. Readers also meet lesser-known but culturally significant individuals, including Benjamin Haydon, a painter of monumental historical scenes; prize-fighter Jack Shaw, who was killed in a cavalry charge at Waterloo; and writer Caroline Lamb, who that day was "putting the final touches on the longest suicide note in history." Particularly interesting is the case of suspected, and possibly framed, murderess Eliza Fenning and the way it was used politically by Whigs and Tories alike. Crane accents his well-paced, fluid style with nice poetic touches, and he succeeds admirably in showing both the socioeconomic fissures in early 19th-century Britain and the ways that Waterloo inaugurated a sense of the county's "manifest destiny" of becoming the 19th century's leading imperial power. Maps.
