In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 by Jenny Uglow, review: 'crowded with characters' And French troops did indeed land: in February 1797, on the Pembrokeshire coast, where a local shoemaker, Jemima, "a tall, stout, masculine female," rounded up 12 of them with her pitchfork; and the following August in Ireland, a place writhing with insurrection, where French grenadiers under General Humbert briefly seized Ballina, Foxford and Castlebar. To recruit men to combat Napoleon's threat, press-gangs went trawling for two decades through town and country. Uglow's statistics are dizzying. One million men and boys fought in the army and navy, out of a population of 14 million; 311,000 died, and countless others were hideously injured - "in every state of picturesque dismemberment," recalled one Tynesider, "one arm, one leg... or a mere trunk with neither arms nor legs." Uglow's combatants were often diligent writers home, their salt-stained letters both longed for and dreaded, and greedily passed around. Disbanded in 1815, they returned to a Britain where industry and trade had unexpectedly flourished, a landscape where ironworks "had spread like streams of lava," with better roads and bridges, a 4,000-mile canal network, steam engines on the railway, and gas lights in the street. The long campaign had prompted many inventions, writes Uglow. With its industrial power, technological wizardry and financial clout, Britain was squeezed out of the French wars like a pip from a lemon into a century and a half as a major world power. The Napoleonic Wars enriched thousands, not merely successful admirals like Nelson, but his sailors too; after Trafalgar, Parliament voted a staggering £320,000 to be distributed around the fleet. Others who flourished in these dangerous times were gunmakers like the Galton family in Birmingham, mill-owners like John Marshall, bankers like the Hoares, and wheat merchants like Claude Scott, who left a £3 million fortune. Yet many thousands more were made destitute. The Continental blockade resulted in share and bank collapses. In the Scottish Highlands, clearances turned heroes of Corunna and Salamanca into paupers. While the Prince of Wales felt able to celebrate the start of his Regency with an extravagant dinner for 2,000 ("down the middle of the table a real stream flowed... with shoals of goldfish"), it was noted elsewhere by a witness that "most of poor familys are in a state of actual starvation": one man in Lancashire left a suicide note beside a canal with his hat and clogs, blaming "the badness of the times." It was a period punctuated by George III's relapses into insanity, and by food riots and attacks on clothiers who paid too cheaply, often to work on the new machines, so further eroding employment. Many saboteurs styled themselves Luddites, after a weaver, Ned Ludd, who had smashed frames 30 years earlier. The papers brought news of bloody battles in Badajoz and Leipzig, "but in Yorkshire and Lancashire local battles felt just as urgent." The authorities, fearing the revolutionary virus from across the Channel that had infected Tom Paine (and, in the early days, Wordsworth and Coleridge), reacted by ordering widespread hangings or transportation to Australia. Against this background, the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was shot in the Commons lobby by an embittered merchant whose claim for compensation had been rejected. "Oh, I am murdered," said Perceval, and died in three minutes. If only the Napoleonic wars had lasted that long, was the feeling of many. A generous hostess, Uglow expects us to hold in our heads rather a large cast and to have an automatic memory for those invited to her cavalcade, several of whom strike one as gatecrashers. Others are left off her guest list who might have assisted in illustrating her theme, like Captain Barclay who in 1809 walked 1,000 miles through Britain in 1,000 hours, before rejoining his regiment at Ramsgate. As crowded and bustling as a Gillray drawing, In These Times is history portrayed as a torrent, with the opposite bank as well as some of the chief characters slipping from view. At its impressive best, it has the dense feel of Turner's Battle of Trafalgar, where Nelson is a tiny figure; or of Turner's 1812 Snow Storm, ostensibly featuring Hannibal crossing the Alps, as Napoleon then was crossing Russia - a painting in which, writes Uglow, "the leader had disappeared completely, unless he was one among the hundreds of tiny, struggling figures..." In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815 by Jenny Uglow 752pp, Faber, Telegraph offer price: £21 (PLUS £1.95 p&p) (RRP £25, ebook £12.86).