George III: The British Library Historic Lives

by Christopher Wright

King George III, who reigned in Britain from 1760 to 1820, is perhaps best remembered today for being the monarch who lost the American Colonies and for his own uncertain sanity. Attacked by his political opponents as a "tyrant," opposition politicians at the time and Whig historians subsequently portrayed him as seeking to undermine the British constitution by enlarging the power of the Crown. Over the last decades, however, historians have looked again at his life and reign. What has emerged is an altogether more sympathetic portrait. George III was far from being the intellectual mediocrity of legend. He was interested in, and an active supporter of, the latest advances in science. A voracious buyer of books, his collection was in due course to double the size of the national library. His death produced a national outpouring of grief that has rarely been equalled until modern times. This study seeks the truth about this most controversial of rulers, while giving an account of the King's personal and political life and seeking to place it in its social, constitutional, and international context.

144 pages, Hardcover

First published August 22, 2005

About the author

There is more than one author on Goodreads with the name Christopher Wright.

Christopher Wright is the author of dozens of horror fiction books for children and young adults. He writes under the pseudonyms Johnathan Rand and Christopher Knight. Almost all of Wright's books (save American Chillers) take place in his home state of Michigan.

Reviews

[Jeremy Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The difficulty in reading this book, as an American, is in trying to avoid the parallels of revolutionary and post-revolutionary American life with the King whose “tyranny” is emblazoned as the declaratory cause for our very existence as a collection of United States. For example, no mention is made regarding the War of 1812, the effort of Great Britain to attack merchant ships and thus spark another war against its former colonies, all while King George was displaced in madness by a Regency. Similarly, during his first major bout with insanity, when he was being held in straight jackets and separated from his wife, the American Constitution was being ratified and a new government was being formed under George’s counterpart, General Washington. So while I do concede this was not a biography written to illustrate the relationship between king and colony, nor between king and his popular associations in history, there are gaps that leave much to be desired, even while the text itself is informative and straight forward.