In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815 by Jenny Uglow, review: 'crowded with characters'

A hugely ambitious account of the era of 

press-gangs, rumoured French invasion 

and 'Mad King George'

By Nicholas Shakespeare

Always, the past is closer than we think. A Tasmanian widow I know was married to an Englishman who fought in the First World War. My best man, when he was 11, met someone who had met a drummer-boy at Waterloo. And the Welsh circumnavigator Tristan Jones told me how in the Thirties he was apprenticed to a captain Tansy who had worked alongside a sailor who was in the rigging at Trafalgar.

Part of the historian’s work is to lend blood and bone to such ghosts, and to fathom why their shadows still track us. Jenny Uglow’s last book was the fastidious story of a Cumbrian spinster who used her alkali fortune to build a stubbornly individual church at Wreay, which kicked off the Byzantine revival. By contrast, In These Times is as different in scope as a trout stream to the mouth of the Amazon: nothing less than a survey of Britain during the Napoleonic Wars.

One rainy night in 1793, an emotional William Pitt stood in the House of Commons and declared war on France. For the next 22 years, barring a brief interlude in 1802-3, the two nations were engaged in a conflict that touched people in all parts of Britain. Writes Uglow: “Everyone shared in the war.” Curious to discover how it affected those at home “waiting, working, watching”, she has chosen a cast of representative families – soldiers, farmers, writers, bankers, mill-owners – and followed their fortunes. She describes her hugely ambitious project as “a cavalcade with a host of actors – a crowd biography”.

Napoleon knew that the British coast lacked real defences. “It is necessary for us to be masters of the sea for six hours only, and England will have ceased to exist.” Terror of a French landing was reflected in James Gillray’s illustration Promis’d Horrors of the French Invasion, which showed St James’s Palace in flames, and its sequel, Consequences of a Successful French Invasion, in which a whip-wielding overseer announces: “Me teach de English republicans to work.”

Rumours spread faster than the system of beacons (which could relay to London in 15 minutes news of a French fleet sighted off Portsmouth). Napoleon was building a bridge from Calais.

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