Abstract
What does it mean to privilege personal writings as a source for the study of warfare? What do letters, diaries and other first-person narratives reveal that other official or public documents - institutional records, newspaper reports, literary and visual representations - may not? Most obviously, their value can be understood to lie in the subjective, personal viewpoint which they appear to afford and their proximity, whether physical or temporal, to the events they describe. Yet, Lieutenant Harrison’s letter describing his recent involvement in the bombardment of Copenhagen, quoted above, suggests how even accounts of extreme experiences can be alert to style, audience and reception. Such texts can be viewed neither as repositories of raw, unmediated experience nor as the private outpourings of an authentic self. We therefore need to be attentive to the generic conventions that structured these documents, their envisaged audiences, the languages upon which they drew and the purposes for which they were written.
I feel half ashamed to intrude on your agreeable Pursuits with my Letters, but you live in the Country enough to know & feel one’s Avidity for News concerning the great Mart of Intelligence - London, whence I no longer expect to hear Talk of Impossible Descents of French Imperialists.
Hesther Piozzi, Brynbella to John Lloyd, London, 14 June 1804 1
I will now give you some account of our late expedition. Though you must not expect a minute detail of the operations, as that would be totally out of my power and entirely foreign to my present purpose. I will briefly relate what happened within my own knowledge, and should there be an error in my Orthography, I shall trust to you to make an excuse, provided you show this Epistle to any of your friends, as I am fully aware of my own inability in writing for public perusal.
Lieutenant John Christopher Harrison, Colchester Barracks,
20 November 1807 2
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Notes
On the development of the British Post Office in the late eighteenth century see Susan E. Whyman, The Pen and the People. English Letters Writers, 1660–1800 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), 57–8.
M. Hewitson, ‘”I Witnesses”: Soldiers, Selfhood and Testimony in Modern Wars’, German History, 28, 3 (2010), 310–25.
The description of ego-documents as ‘kaleidoscopic fragments’ that resist resolution into a single picture, or story, of wartime subjectivity comes from James Hinton, Nine Wartime Lives. Mass Observation and the Making of the Modern Self (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 200.
The literature on this subject is extensive and continually expanding. Key works include: Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975);
Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale and Hynes, ‘Personal Narratives and Commemoration’, in Jay Winter and Michael Sivan (eds), War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 205–20;
Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (London: Granta, 1999).
Jessica Meyer, Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Michael Roper, ‘Maternal Relations: Moral Manliness and Emotional Survival in Letters Home during the First World War’, in Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War. Gendering Modern History (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004), 295–316
Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2009).
This relative neglect has begun to be addressed, see Bell, First Total War; Harari, The Ultimate Experience; and Ramsay, The Military Memoir. Some of the generic features of French Napoleonic war narratives are discussed in Alan Forrest, Napoleon’s Men: The Soldiers of the Revolution and Empire (London: Hambledon, 2002)
Philip Dwyer, ‘Public Remembering, Private Reminiscing: French Military Memoirs and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, French Historical Studies, 22, 2 (Spring, 2010), 231–58.
Michael C. Nelson, ‘Writing during Wartime: Gender and Literacy in the American Civil War’, Journal of American Studies, 31 (1997), 43–68, 43.
See for example Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1992), 49–50;
Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook, Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth Century Republic of Letters (Stanford CA, Stanford UP, 1996).
Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth- Century England (New Haven: Yale UP, 2004), 182.
Rev. Thomas Cooke, The Universal Letter Writer: or, New Art of Polite Correspondence (London, 1795), 74, 96.
Martha Hanna similarly notes the influence of nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals and the conversational intimacy they encouraged on French letters from the front during World War I. Martha Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I’, American Historical Review, 108, 5 (2003), 1338–61.
William Wilkinson to his wife, Sally, 15 February 1809, HMS Christian, Torbay. London, NMM, WIL/1/23. In her examination of correspondence between husbands and wives in Germany during WWI, Christa Hämmerle identifies similar pleas for greater epistolary intimacy from soldiers serving at the front to their wives, which, she suggests, may indicate a reversal of poles in the dialogue of the sexes. Christa Hämmerle, ‘”You Let a Weeping Woman Call you Home?” Private Correspondences during the First World War in Germany’, in Rebecca Earle (ed.), Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 152–82, 161.
See, for example, John Mills’ letter to his mother, Puebla, 21 April 1810. Ian Fletcher (ed.), For King and Country: The Letters and Diaries of John Mills, Coldstream Guards, 1811–1814 (Staplehurst: Spellmount, 1995), 30.
David Latimer Wright, Portsmouth, 23 July 1808. NAM, 7205–2. On the complicated bureaucracy that military families had to negotiate in order to claim the bequests of bereaved relatives see Patricia Y. Lin, ‘Extending her Arms: Military Families and the Transformation of the British State, 1793–1815’ (University of California, Berkeley: Unpublished PhD thesis, 1997), 170–7.
Janet Gurkin Altman, ‘Women’s Letters in the Public Sphere’, in Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (eds), Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (London and Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995), 100.
Lieutenant George Hennell, 3 leagues east of Valladolid to his brother, 5 August 1812. Michael Glover (ed.), A Gentleman Volunteer: The Letters of George Hennell from the Peninsular War, 1812–1813 (London: Heineman, 1979), 27.
Mary Favret, ‘War Correspondence: Reading Romantic War’, Prose Studies, 19, 2 (1996), 173–85, 178.
John Aitchison, Sanquinada, 12 September 1810. W.F.K. Thompson (ed.), An Ensign in the Peninsular War: The Letters of John Aitchison (London: Joseph, 1994), 111.
Timothy Jenks, Naval Engagements: Patriotism, Cultural Politics and the Royal Navy, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 14–22.
William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 232–3.
For a brief discussion of the possibility of identifying combat trauma in soldiers prior to its medical classification in the twentieth century see Edgar Jones, ‘Historical Approaches to Post-Combat Disorders’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 361 (2006), 533–42, 534–5.
On the difficulties of defining trauma see Cynthia Caruth, ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History’, Yale French Studies, 79 (1991), 181–92, 181.
Dominick La Capra, History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press, 2004), 122.
Daniel Gordon, ‘The City and the Plague in the Age of Enlightenment’, Yale French Studies, 92 (1997), 67–87, 86–7.
John Rous, Mongualde, 15 March 1813. Ian Fletcher (ed.), A Guards Officer in the Peninsular: The Peninsular War Letters of John Rous, Coldstream Guards, 1812–1814 (Tunbridge Wells: Spellmount, 1992), 50.
David McNeil, The Grotesque Depiction of War and the Military in Eighteenth-century English Fiction (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990), 94–5.
On the key elements of the Gothic novel see Angela Wright, Gothic Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Roger N. Buckley (ed.), The Napoleonic War Journal of Captain Thomas Henry Browne, 1807–1816 (London: Bodley Head for the Army Records Society, 1987), 58.
William Wheeler, Madrid, 23 August 1812. B.H. Liddell Hart (ed.), The Letters of Private Wheeler, 1809–1828 (Aldestrop: Windrush, 1993 [1951]), 94.
William Wheeler, 20 April 1814. Hart (ed.), The Letters of William Wheeler, 149–51. In Gil Blas, the eponymous hero strongly suspects that a rabbit fricassee served in a Spanish inn is a ‘cat, dressed up as the double of a rabbit’. Alain René Le Sage, The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane, trans. Tobias George Smollett (New York, 1820 [1749]), vol. 2, 303. A similar scene referring back to the original episode in Gil Blas can also be found in Tobias Smollet, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (Philadelphia, 1825 [1751]), vol. 2, 92.
On the influence of the picaresque on working-class and military autobiography see Mary Jo Haynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 34–5;
Carolyn Steedman, The Radical Soldier’s Tale: John Pearman, 1819–1908 (London; New York: Routledge, 1988), 41;
David M. Hopkin, ‘Storytelling, Fairytales and Autobiography: Some Observations on Eighteenth and Nineteenth-century French Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memoirs’, Social History, 29 (2004), 186–98.
Robert Brown, An Impartial Journal of a Detachment from the Brigade of Foot Guards, Commencing 20th February 1793 and Ending 9th May 1795 (London, 1795), 246–7.
Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Military Memoirs: A Historical Overview of the Genre from the Middle Ages to the Late Modern Era’, War in History, 14, 3 (2007), 289–309, 300.
Linda Colley, ‘Going Native, Telling Tales: Captivity, Collaborations and Empire’, Past & Present, 168, 1 (2000), 170–93
Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002).
Joe Snader, Caught between Two Worlds: British Captivity Narratives in Fact and Fiction (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2000).
On the literary components of the British captivity narrative see Linda Colley, ‘Perceiving Low Literature: The Captivity Narrative’, Essays in Criticism, 3 (2003), 199–217.
Thomas O’Neill, An Address to the People of the United Kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland, Containing an Account of the Sufferings of Thomas O’Neill, a British Officer, While Confined in the Prisoner of the Concierge, at Paris … and … during his Second Imprisonment as a Prisoner at War (London, 1806), 1.
Lord Blayney, Narrative of a Forced Journey through Spain and France as a Prisoner of War in the Years 1810 to 1814 (London, 1814).
See, for example, Edward Boys, Narrative of a Captivity and Adventures in France and Flanders between the Years 1803 and 1809 by Capt. Edward Boys, R.N. (London, 1827).
The Journal of John Robertston, 1807–1811, 21 Jan 1807. NMM, JOD/202, 30. On the lament tradition in American prisoner of war narrative, drawn from the books of Samuel, Chronicles and Lamentations, see Robert C. Doyle, Voices from Captivity: Interpreting the American POW Narrative (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 61–2.
On biblical reading and journal-keeping as a source of consolation in Robinson Crusoe see Eric Jager, ‘The Parrot’s Voice: Language and Self in Robinson Crusoe’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 21, 3 (1988), 316–33.
In 1795 a concessionary rate of one penny per letter was introduced for seamen, non-commissioned officers and private soldiers. Peter B. Boyden, ‘The Postal Service of Wellington’s Army in the Peninsula and France, 1809–1818’, in Alan J. Guy (ed.), The Road to Waterloo: The British Army and the Struggle against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France (Stroud: Sutton, 1990), 149–54, 150.
Martha Freer to Edward Freer, Knipton, 1809 in Norman Scarfe, ‘Letters from the Peninsula: The Freer Family Correspondence, 1807–1814’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological Society, 29 (1953), 8
Lynn Z. Bloom, ‘”I Write for Myself and Strangers”: Private Diaries as Public Documents’, in Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (eds), Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 23–37, 25.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812 (New York: Knopf, 1991), 8.
Louise P. Carter, ‘British Women during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815: Responses, Roles and Representations’ (University of Cambridge, D.Phil. thesis, 2005), 157.
Michael Paris locates the development of a ‘pleasure culture of war’ in this period. According to Paris, distanced from the brutal reality of war civilians were increasingly able to enjoy its vicarious excitements. Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (London: Reaktion, 2000), 26. The phrase ‘pleasure culture of war’ was originally used by Graham Dawson to describe developments in the later nineteenth century. See Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1994).
Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1994).
Matthew McCormack, ‘Liberty and Discipline: Militia Training Literature in Mid-Georgian England’, in Catriona Kennedy and Matthew McCormack (eds), Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1850: Men of Arms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 159–78.
Andrew Cambers, ‘Reading the Godly and Self-Writing in England, circa 15801720’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (October, 2007), 796–825.
W.F. Cobb (ed.), Memoir of the Late Francis Cobb Esq. Of Margate Compiled from His Journals and Letters (Maidstone, 1835).
Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Cambridge MA; London: MIT Press, 1985), chapter 14, 255–76.
Pieter Fritzsche, ‘The Case of Modern Memory: Review Essay’, The Journal of Modern History, 73, 1 (March, 2001), 87–117, 94–99;
James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998).
John Brewer, ‘Reconstructing the Reader: Prescription, Texts, and Strategies in Anna Larpent’s Reading’, in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor (eds), Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 227–45.
Marilyn Morris, ‘Negotiating Domesticity in the Journals of Anna Larpent’, Journal of Women’s History, 22, 1 (Spring, 2010), 85–106.
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© 2013 Catriona Kennedy
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Kennedy, C. (2013). Narrating War. In: Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_2
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