During Austen's day, in the decades that followed the American and French revolutions, a bitter enmity between England and France continued. After a series of military triumphs established his supremacy throughout Europe and Egypt, Napoléon Bonaparte proclaimed himself emp eror of France in 1804. At the same time, King George III of England fell victim to madness, which necessitated the transfer of power to his son George, Prince of Wales, in 1811. Son George was no military man.

With Britain's legendary navy in force, the Napoleonic Wars had little effect on the Prince Regent's freewheeling lifestyle, which some termed dissolute. "George was a free spender, a man who couldn't make up his mind about anything," says Clinton Howell, a New York dealer in English antiques. "He fancied one style after another, and changed his rooms constantly." He despised Napoléon, yet George could not restrain himself from borrowing his Empire style of décor. The style named for his regency, therefore, resembled Napoléon's -- but without the overbearing grandeur and overt allusions to the emperor's military exploits.

A New Cosmopolitanism

As the wars continued, which they did until 1815 when Napoléon lost at Waterloo, young British aesthetes continued to travel through France when they made their grand tours, "even when it was deemed dangerous to do so," Howell says. Archaeology was all the rage, and sites such as the recently unearthed Herculaneum and Pompeii were magnets for the tourist elite. Back in Britain, avid antiquities collectors wanted to showcase their eclectic treasures in richer, more colorful domestic milieus than those to which they were accustomed.

To do so, they turned to furniture pattern books for inspiration. The Regency style evolved as a reaction to the delicate details of the Adam school's early neoclassicism, which was rendered in furnishings patterned after the furniture designs of Thomas Sheraton's  and George Hepplewhite. The period also coincided with the rise of mass production, when shops began to specialize, dividing tasks among a number of workers, rather than assigning one craftsman to each piece. As a result, classical designs began to be "debased," says Howell, adding that "aesthetes turned to new sources of inspiration for unique pieces. Napoléon's exploits in Egypt and the opening up of the Far East provided a wealth of new artistic material from which to work."