TABLE-TALK & RECOLLECTIONS

'One forenoon I met Porson in Covent Garden, dressed in a pea-green coat: he had been married that morning, as I afterward learned from Raine, for he himself said nothing about it.' A poet and banker who knew everybody, Samuel Rogers (1763-1855) was a brilliant recorder of things said by his famous and powerful contemporaries from Edmund Burke to Talleyrand, Henry Grattan, Lord Grenville to Richard Porson and John Horne Tooke, from Charles James Fox to the Duke of Wellington. He was all ears, very good at hearing what was said and assiduous about recording it in a kind of laconic shorthand. Originally published in the 1830s and not edited since, and unreprinted since the 1850s, his energetic, entertaining and occasionally eye-popping 'table-talk' gives phenomenal texture to our understanding of Regency high life. Reading it is like eavesdropping on the past. Introduced by the distinguished literary critic Professor Christopher Ricks who has created this new selection, glamorous bottle green clothbound gold tooled edition with publisher's bookmark, 134pp.