There’s little doom or gloom in the British Library’s latest blockbuster exhibition, Georgians Revealed, as the reigns of the four Georges from 1714 to 1830 are presented as a rollicking, ribald and riotous period, which, as Amanda Goodrich asserts in the introduction to the exhibition publication, ‘certainly contributed to the making of something we might tentatively call a modern Britain’ (p. 23). This is an exhibition to convert: a powerful plea for the ongoing relevance of the long eighteenth century to British social, cultural, political and economic life.

Visitors hoping for histories from below and a detailed analysis of the position of the working classes in Georgian Britain will be disappointed. Yet to labour this point would be to judge Georgians Revealed against a story it doesn’t claim to tell. Instead, this cleverly designed exhibition holds a mirror up to contemporary Britain and argues that many of its most defining features were established, codified, popularised and commercialised by the Georgians: they shopped until they dropped in what Goodrich describes in the exhibition publication as ‘a new consumer society that was furiously getting and spending, shopping and socialising’ (p. 6); the South Sea Bubble becomes the eighteenth-century equivalent of ‘the financial crash of 2007 that turned the public against the City and its “fat cats”’ (p. 11); taste is an exclusive concept, and visitors are reminded how ‘it was important socially not to display what we might today term “bling”’ (p. 20); and the centrality of sports like horse racing and cricket is refreshingly treated as a serious component of Georgian social practices.

The exhibition space is divided into four quadrants. Portraits of each of the four Georges lead the visitor through a small atrium and could perhaps be taken as suggesting that the monarchy occupied a far more prominent role in the social and cultural life of the nation than most scholars believe. The main exhibition space is dedicated to things: books, buildings, shoes, clothing, playing cards, prints, instruments and furniture, which form an interlocking matrix of objects to illustrate the birth of consumer culture and middle-class society. Given the current declining numbers of those who self-identify as working class, this preoccupation with the middle class is significant. The middle class presented are not the ‘squeezed middle’ of austerity Britain but an aspiration class on the make, enjoying new luxuries, exploring new forms of social interaction and benefiting from a booming urban pleasure ground.

In today’s school curriculum, the Georgian Period is an awkward no man’s land between the English Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, or Henry VIII and Hitler. Consequently, this exhibition works incredibly hard to convince the visiting public that the long eighteenth century was more than Jane Austen (whose writing desk, spectacles and impossibly neat handwritten letters are an exhibition highlight) and powdered periwigs. Moira Goff, lead curator of the exhibition, has spoken of how ‘objects that shed light on daily life in such an exciting time for cultural development’ demonstrate ‘the parallels we can draw between Georgian Britain and today’.

The exhibition sets up the idea of Victorian Britain as the crucible in which a recognisably modern culture is conceived only to backdate these shifts to the eighteenth century. Our multimedia culture of tweets, tabloids and advertising hoardings had its Georgian equivalents. This is most noticeable in the displays on fashion and celebrity. Georgian prints are superimposed on the background of Grazia-esque headlines proclaiming how to ‘get this season’s hottest new looks’. Twenty-first century consumer culture finds its eighteenth-century mirror in the Gallery of Fashion, a series of colour illustrations documenting what contemporary fashionistas were wearing in the new social spaces of Bath and London.

These new spaces are explored from their architectural conception, through their construction and their use. The exhibition works hard to raise the architectural literacy of the visitor, explaining the importance of the classical world but also the lure of the exotic east, as demonstrated by the remarkable cross-section prepared by John Nash of his Brighton Pavilion. A guidebook to Stowe, however, is open at one of the few pages that didn’t contain reference to an overtly political monument, perhaps hinting at the difficulties of conveying the subtleties of the designed landscape to the general visitor. Perhaps the most intriguing exhibit is the one that comes closest to suggesting the challenges of the historian’s craft: a half-open leather trunk of letters and unpaid bills once belonging to the society rake, Scrope Davis, who fled England for debt. These unsorted papers subtly state the need for the historian to analyse, make sense of, and tell stories from a jumble of conflicting sources of information. They also remind the audience that the Georgians Revealed exhibition consciously presents only one part of the eighteenth century: the loutish, boozy, fleshly underclass of Hogarth’s prints are conspicuous by their absence.

But this was, as the final room of the exhibition reminds the visitor, a very small world. Richard Horwood’s map of London printed on the exhibition floor allows the visitor to walk the streets of eighteenth-century London. The exhibition doesn’t stop here. The British Library has created a walking tour map of London that encourages the curious visitor to explore the remaining fragments of the Georgian city. Finally, as a nod to the tercentenary of the accession of George I, the Library’s piazza is filled with Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s Georgeobelisk, a pop-up garden, described as a ‘postmodern vision of an Arcadian landscape’, with sheep grazing on artificial turf, a garden grotto with a putto representing our new twenty-first century Prince George, and a six-metre high topiary obelisk topped with a bust of the first George.

The nature of the exhibition also points towards some of the struggles facing historians of the long eighteenth century. Academics who are familiar with the period take it for granted that this is a period of rich scholarly debate and conflicting ideas. Yet the exhibition has little time to discuss these issues for the assumed knowledge of the average visitor is rather low. So, rather than lamenting the absence of the lower classes, or the thinkers and philosophers, imperial statesmen and revolutionaries from the British Library exhibition, Goff and her curatorial team have set scholars of the eighteenth century a challenge: to raise public levels of understanding for this oft-overlooked century.

Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain is at the British Library, London, from 8 November 2013 to 11 March 2014.

The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Georgians Revealed: Life, Style and the Making of Modern Britain, edited by Moira Goff, John Goldfinch, Karen Limper-Herz and Helen Peden (British Library Publishing, 2013).