Long Live the Prince Consort: Rewriting the Empire

Dawson Gunn, legitimate son of a decorated noble house, is poisoned. A man from a much later century wakes up in the body. He starts by dealing with the servants who had been robbing the household, then goes straight at the family matriarch, who is used to no one answering her back. He recites essays nobody in this era has heard, an inscription about a humble room and a preface written at a riverside pavilion, and the literary world does not know what to do with him. When enemy troops threaten the border he uses the pale flames that rise off marsh ground at night to frighten them off. Physics and chemistry travel well, he decides. Between the writing he can quote and the science he can build, he sets about dragging the old order into something else.