The Napoleonic Wars

Abstract

This chapter is divided into three sections: the rise of the military memoir , patriotism and the military spectacle , and trauma and alcoholism . It considers the siblings’ voices alongside the voices of the ‘soldier author’, who wrote and published personal memoirs of the Napoleonic Wars. First, the chapter evidences that the siblings engaged with these military memoirs , exploring what authors they read through their imitations and transcriptions. The chapter then goes on to demonstrate how the siblings responded to these memoirs on a deeper level, discussing how their readings contributed to their conflicting representations of war, first through their celebratory writings and then their more poignant, darker reflections. The final section evidences how the siblings were aware of war trauma and alcoholism in an age where it was little discussed and absent from medical terminology.