Peter James Bowman – författare

Her father is a vain, foolish baronet, obsessed with his lineage but so careless with money that he is obliged to quit his ancestral seat. Her sister is a fretful invalid with a good-natured husband and two disobedient sons. She herself falls in love with a handsome naval officer, and he with her, but her proud family consider his status and prospects inadequate. Heartbroken, the lovers part: he goes to sea while she leads a forlorn life at home. Years later he returns with a fortune in prize money, and after further misunderstandings he claims her as his bride.This is the story of Anne Elliot in Jane Austen’s Persuasion. It is also the story – true this time – of Katherine Bisshopp, the clever, beautiful daughter of an old Sussex family.Drawing on Katherine’s letters and journals and other family papers, this book relates the joys and anxieties of her youth, her harrowing eleven-year courtship with George Pechell, and their happy and prosperous union, which produced two daughters and a son. Splinter chapters draw parallels with Jane Austen’s portrait of society and reveal the extraordinary coincidences of character and circumstance between Katherine Bisshopp and Anne Elliot, while the real woman’s experiences after her marriage are seen as a possible future for the fictional heroine. The reality of history and the deeper truth of literature together yield a detailed picture of the age.

What percentage of the printed and online media is dedicated to celebrity culture today? A tricky calculation; but there is no doubt that the percentage was pretty high when mass media first acquired a recognisably modern form in the Regency period. Peter James Bowman shows how, following the outrageous fame of Lord Byron, an interest in the foibles rather than the achievements of prominent individuals was kindled and sustained by newspapers, satirical prints and society gossip. Here are five pen-portraits of colourful men and women who played leading roles in their day but whose reputations subsequently faded, figures who for this reason better represent their age than those whose importance transcends it. Their peculiar spheres of activity – the stage, politics, diplomacy, art, literature and fashion – are also explored.Harriot Mellon, the illegitimate daughter of a wardrobe-keeper in a company of strolling players, married the elderly banker Thomas Coutts; seven years later, she was the richest widow in the land and a target of ferocious abuse. Dorothea Lieven, the Russian ambassador’s wife, used her intellect, dignity and a talent for flattery to entrance numerous statesmen and become a force in British politics. Richard Grenville, Duke of Buckingham, was a corrupt parliamentarian who squandered a vast income and caused the decline of the mighty Grenville dynasty. Lady Charlotte Bury was mocked by Thackeray as ‘Lady Flummery’ because of her execrable novels – but she was a great beauty who married for love not once, but twice. Sir Thomas Lawrence deserved his eminence as an artist, but had to use all his charm and courtliness to conceal the potentially explosive secrets of his private life. Here is a cast of characters to savour, one that reveals the realities of the period as no Austen novel could.

The two decades after Waterloo marked the great age of foreign fortune hunters in England. Each year brought a new influx of impecunious Continental noblemen to the world's richest country, and the more brides they carried off, the more alarmed society became. The most colourful of these men was Prince Hermann von Puckler-Muskau (1785-1871), remembered today as Germany's finest landscape gardener. In the mid-1820s, however, his efforts to turn his estate into a magnificent park came close to bankrupting him. To save his legacy his wife Lucie devised an unusual plan: they would divorce so that Puckler could marry an heiress who would finance further landscaping and, after a decent interval, be cajoled into accepting Lucie's continued residence. In September 1826, his marriage dissolved, Puckler set off for London. Drawing on the daily letters sent from England to his ex-wife and other manuscript sources in the Puckler Archive in Brandenburg, Peter James Bowman gives blow-by-blow accounts of Puckler's courtships with the daughters of a physician, an admiral, a Scottish baronet, an East India Company stockholder and a retail jeweller.The story is enriched with details of his social life among the resident diplomats, his gambling and money troubles, his love affairs with a French seamstress and a German opera singer, and the hours he spent with the capital's prostitutes. Puckler is the most intelligent of the overseas visitors who noted their impressions of Regency England. His matrimonial quest brings him into contact with such luminaries as Walter Scott, George Canning, Princess Lieven, Nathan Mayer Rothschild, Beau Brummell and John Nash. The object of many rumours and caricatures, the prince sticks doggedly to his task for nearly two years. And just when it seems that he has failed, England fills his coffers in the most unexpected way, and in doing so launches him on a new career. In telling the story of Puckler's adventures in the context of the trend for Anglo-European marriages based on the exchange of a title for money, The Fortune Hunter writes a new chapter in the history of England's relationship with its Continental neighbours.