My daughter and I have been lucky enough to receive a few ‘How to Survive’ ARCs now. We found Georgian Britain more graphic and less humorous than Tudor Britain and Medieval Britain and missed the ‘interviews’ with people from the era. The book was well researched and we found the smuggling and highwaymen sections very interesting but this was more of a textbook than lighthearted ‘how to survive’ guide.

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC.

Covering the entire Georgian history of England is a tough job and author Kim Seabrook does a decent job breaking subjects down into sections for the reader. There's a brief explanation of who the Hanoverian Georgians were and why they got to become kings of England before going to more of the daily life of the time. What did people eat, what was health and hygiene like, what did you do with your daily life. Rushing through those things, Seabrook gets into much more detail about highwaymen, smugglers, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Admiral Nelson, Clive of India (who I admit I'd never heard of), and the more social elite like the Prince Regent and Princess Caroline's marriage and the Duchess of Richmond's ball before Waterloo.

With a bit of everything covered, I couldn't find the reason for why certain stories or topics were covered in such detail and others not. Was it just a case of the author really liking some things more than others? She never explained why she went into such detail over some things (we get troop movements for the battle of Culloden) while others weren't brought up at all (and the wars in America aren't even mentioned).

Other details are simply wrong: Seabrook says the Prince Regent never told his wife their daughter was ill to prepare her for the girl's death. If by "ill" she means "pregnant" certainly Caroline knew- all Europe knew. Their daughter died in childbirth. She describes George III as having porphyria when modern scholars now agree that he did not. Mistakes like these instantly drop the credibility of the book and the author for me and make me wonder what other mistakes were made that I didn't catch right off the bat.

The obvious mistakes in some sections of the book make me hesitant to recommend it to anyone interested in an easy introduction to Georgian Britan. It is possible there aren't many more mistakes- this isn't my strongest area of expertise by any means. But uneven and unbalanced as a whole, I"d still recommend going somewhere else.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review