Abstract
In the weeks and months following the battle of Waterloo, flocks of British tourists descended upon the battleground. Having followed from afar the contests that ravaged the continent, here was an opportunity to encounter the tangible remnants of battle, to experience with greater immediacy both the glory and destruction of war. In keeping with the era’s vertiginous sense of the past rapidly receding beneath the wheels of history, Waterloo was soon subject to accelerated historicization. Tourists hastened to see it before it vanished into the realm of the distant and unknowable past. Once there, however, many were struck by the sheer quantity of books and loose pages that lay scattered amongst the detritus of war and‘literally whitened the surface of the earth’, as one observer put it. These were letters, pages of novels and bibles, and sheets of music that had fallen from soldiers’ knapsacks. Many of the tourists could not resist making their own inscriptions on this famous site. On the walls of the Hotel de la Belle Alliance, where Wellington’s meeting with the Prussian General Blücher marked the victory of the coalition forces, James Simpson and his travelling companion inscribed a verse from The Vision of Don Roderick (1811), Walter Scott’s patriotic tribute to Wellington’s Peninsular success.1
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Notes
James Simpson, A Visit to Flanders in July 1815, Being Chiefly an Account of the Field of Waterloo, with a Short Sketch of Antwerp and Brussels (Edinburgh, 1816 [8th edn]), 107.
As Stuart Semmel observes: ‘Early journeys to Waterloo had been self-guided affairs, patched together by travellers who had few published sources besides newspaper battle accounts through which to filter what they saw. With the passing of time it became increasingly less possible to feel that one was viewing the naked battlefield. Too many layers of mediation had sprung up to separate the tourist from the historical landscape’. Stuart Semmel, ‘Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting and Memory after Waterloo’, Representations, 69 (Winter, 2000), 9–37, 26.
The accounts considered here, however, suggest that this layer of mediation was already in place during the early phase of Waterloo tourism and, indeed, can also be identified in eye-witness accounts of the battle itself. John Keegan, The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo and the Somme (London: Pimlico, 2004 [1976]), 119.
Charlotte Anne Eaton, Narrative of a Residence in Belgium During the Campaign of 1815; and of a Visit to the Field of Waterloo. By an Englishwoman (London, 1817), iii–iv.
Georgian Capel to Lady Uxbridge, November 1815. George Charles Henry Victor Paget, Marquess of Anglesey (ed.), The Capel Letters: Being the Correspondence of Lady Caroline Capel and Her Daughters with the Dowager Countess of Uxbridge from Brussels and Switzerland 1814–1817 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), 150.
Philip Shaw, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 53.
Journal of Thomas Creevey, Brussels, 22 April 1815. John Gore (ed.), Thomas Creevey’s Papers, 1793–1838 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1948]), 127.
[Charlotte Anne Eaton] The Battle of Waterloo Containing the Series of Accounts Published by Authority, British and Foreign, with Circumstantial Details Relative to the Battle … (London, 1816 [8th edn]), Xxxix.
Duke of Wellington to Lady Frances Webster, 19 June 1815. Duke of Wellington (ed.), Supplementary Despatches and Memoranda of Field Marshal, Arthur Duke of Wellington (London, 1863), vol. 10;
Jeremy Black, Waterloo: The Battle that Brought Down Napoleon (London: Icon, 2011), 178.
On the role of the Napoleonic wars in securing the continued dominance of the British aristocracy see Colley, Britons, 192. On women’s contribution to the promotion of dynastic honour see Judith S. Lewis, Sacred to Female Patriotism: Gender, Class and Politics in Late Georgian Britain (New York and London: Routledge, 2003).
See Philip Harling and Peter Mandler ‘From “Fiscal-Military” State to Laissez-Faire State, 1760–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 32 (January, 1993), 44–70;
Norman Gash, ‘After Waterloo: British Society and the Legacy of the Napoleonic wars’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 28 (1978), 145–57.
J.E. Cookson, ‘Early Nineteenth-Century Scottish Military Pensioners as Homecoming Soldiers’, Historical Journal, 52, 2 (2009), 319–341;
Joanna Innes, ‘Prisons for the Poor: English Bridewells, 1555–1800’, in Francis Snyder and Douglas Hay (eds), Labour, Law and Crime: An Historic Perspective (London, 1987), 108.
J.W.M. Hichberger, Images of the Army: The Military in British Art, 1815–1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1988), 141.
Nick Mansfield, ‘Military Radicals and the Making of Class, 1790–1860’, in Catriona Kennedy and Matthew McCormack (eds), Soldiers and Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1850: Men of Arms (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 57–75.
Holger Hoock, Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World, 1750–1850 (London: Profile, 2010), 132–61.
J.E. Cookson, ‘Scotland’s National Monument, 1816–1828’, Scottish Tradition, 24 (1999), 3–12;
J.E. Cookson, ‘The Edinburgh and Glasgow Duke of Wellington Statues: Early Nineteenth-Century Unionist Nationalism as a Tory Project’, Scottish Historical Review, 83, 1 (2004), 23–40.
Rev. Edward Patteson, A Sermon Delivered in the Parish Church of Richmond in Surrey, on Sunday the 30th day of July, on Behalf of the Families of Those Who Fell or Who Were Disabled in the Battle of Waterloo or in the Other Arduous Conflicts of the Present Campaign (London, 1815), 27.
Sir William Francis Patrick Napier, History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France, from the Year 1807 to the Year 1814 (Brussels, 1839), vol. 2, 164.
Edward Costello, The Adventures of a Soldier; or, Memoirs of Edward Costello (London, 1841), vii.
Capt. George Wood, The Subaltern Officer. A Narrative. By Captain George Wood of the Line (London, 1825), vii.
Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressments and Its Opponents in Georgian Britain (London; New York: Continuum, 2007), 105.
For a key to and explanation of the painting see Allan Cunningham, The Life of Sir David Wilkie with His Journals, Tours and Critical Remarks on Works of Art; and a selection from His Correspondence (London, 1843), vol. 2, 76.
See, for example, Autobiographic Recollections of George Pryme: Edited by his daughter (Cambridge and London, 1870), 53. Thomas de Quincey, The English Mail-Coach and Other Essays (London: Dent, 1961[1849]);
James Pagan, Aliquis, Robert Reid et al., Glasgow, Past and Present Illustrated in Dean of Guild Court Reports and in the Reminiscences and Communications of Senex, Aliquis, J.B. &c. (Glasgow, 1851), 2 vols, vol. 1, 113.
Tom Taylor (ed.), Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon, Historical Painter, from His Autobiography and Journals (London, 1853), 3 vols, vol. 1, 277–8.
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© 2013 Catriona Kennedy
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Kennedy, C. (2013). Conclusion: A Waterloo Panorama. In: Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_9
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