Reality+ by David J. Chalmers: a ‘gripping’, ‘brain-tenderising’ book

(Image credit: Simon Maina/AFP via Getty Images)

published 4 February 2022

Penelope Corfield, an emeritus professor at Royal Holloway, has set herself a “formidable task” in this book, said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. Her aim is to cover the “whole of British life” from the 1680s to the 1840s. And for the most part, she succeeds: this is a well-researched account of a “dazzling” period – one of great advances in science and industry, as well as “military glory and overseas conquest”.

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A particular strength of Corfield’s account is that she “finds lots of room for eccentric and contradictory voices”. She highlights such unconventional figures as Worcestershire resident John Tallis, who spent 30 years in bed with a peg on his nose, believing that “fresh air” was dangerous. “Even the handshake gets a look in”: Corfield attributes its rise to improved standards of hygiene, as well as the “meritocratic character of the booming towns and cities”.

The 18th century can feel closer to our age than the Victorian period that followed, said Wynn Wheldon in The Spectator: it was the age of constitutional monarchy, the rights of man, “loveable rogues” and “sexual libertines”. Resisting the fashionable tendency to put the past down, Corfield celebrates the achievements of the period, and stresses how they echo “in our own times”. It was the Georgians who “united the four home nations”, and designed the Union flag; today when we consider our most beautiful towns and cities, it is generally “Georgian terraces” we think of.