Abstract
‘Glorious News, Wellington in France and Bonaparte out of Germany!!’1 Such was the tone of many broadside songs in early 1814, developing a giddy, celebratory rhetoric in keeping with the crowds around the mail coach and the eager anticipation of peace. Comedy kept its place, especially in songs describing the Dutch revolt, two of which were later republished in an Edinburgh songbook.2 Yet on the brink of victory, the mood of the establishment press was savage, with half of London’s writers baying for Napoleon’s head.3 The song entitled ‘Glorious News’ ends in glee as the trapped emperor ‘trembles for his neck’. Batchelar’s ‘Swaggering Boney’ proclaims that ‘He will never be easy till in death he’s fixt.’4 With the coming of peace and Napoleon’s exile as the ruler of Elba, many felt cheated of blood. Certainly Britain’s foremost poets were not inclined to magnanimity. From one extreme, Shelley wrote:
I hated thee, fallen tyrant! I did groan
To think that a most unambitious slave,
Like thee, should dance and revel on the grave
Of Liberty…5
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Notes
Thomas Preston, The Jubilee of George the Third (1887), li.
Penelope Corfield, Vauxhall and the Invention of the Urban Pleasure Gardens (2008), 37.
Stuart Semmel, ‘Radicals, Loyalists, and the Royal Jubilee of 1809’, Journal of British Studies 46 (2007): 543–569, 554; Idem, ‘British Radicals and “Legitimacy”: Napoleon in the Mirror of History’, Past & Present 167 (2000): 140–175.
Emma Griffin, England’s Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes, 1660–1830 (Oxford, 2005), 94.
Colley, ‘The Apotheosis’; Malcolm Chase, ‘From Millennium to Anniversary: The Concept of Jubilee in Late Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century England’, Past & Present 129 (1990): 132–147.
Nicholas Rogers, ‘Crowds and Political Festival in Georgian England’, in Tim Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke, 2001), 233–264, 234.
Cox Jensen, ‘“Strategies”’; Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’, Sociological Theory 7 (1989), 14–25, esp. 16.
Eneas Mackenzie, A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Town and Country of Newcastle, 2 vols (Newcastle, 1827), vol. 1, 78.
Semmel, Napoleon, 171–173, Jill Hamilton, Marengo: The Myth of Napoleon’s Horse (2000), 195.
Alger, Napoleon’s British Visitors, 302; Hugh Fortescue, Memorandum of Two Conversations between the Emperor Napoleon and Hugh Fortescue (2nd edn, 1823).
J.M. Thompson, ‘Napoleon’s Journey to Elba in 1814 Part II. By Sea’, American Historical Review 55 (1950): 301–320.
Neil Campbell, Napoleon at Fontainebleau and Elba (1869).
Thomas Moore to Lady Donegal, 27 March 1815, in W.S. Dowden, The Letters of Thomas Moore, 2 vols (Oxford, 1964), vol. 1, 355–356.
Charles Lawler, ‘The German Sausages; or the Devil to Pay at Congress!’ (1815); Idem, ‘Bonaparte in Paris! Or, the Flight of the Bourbons!’ (1815), 3.
Semmel, Napoleon, 2; William Hone, Buonapartephobia. The Origin of Dr. Slop’s Name (9th edn, 1820).
Richard Findlater, Joe Grimaldi, His Life and Theatre (2nd edn, Cambridge, 1978), 183.
For contemporary perceptions, see Mary Favret, ‘Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination’, Studies in Romanticism 43 (2004): 479–482.
Stuart Semmel, ‘Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory after Waterloo’, Representations 69 (2000): 9–37.
Appendix no. 115. I am indebted to Peter Wood for bringing the Falkirk garland to my attention. See also Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Songs Collected From Sussex’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society 2 (1906): 184–209, 193.
Cited in Vic Gammon, ‘The Grand Conversation: Napoleon and British Popular Balladry’, RSA Journal 137 (1989): 665–674, 669.
Frank Kidson, ‘Appended Note’, Journal of the Folk Song Society 2 (1906): 188.
Thompson, The Making, 331; Palmer, The Sound of History, 298; Gerald Porter, The English Occupational Song (Umeå, 1992), 125–126.
Sudhir Hazareesingh, The Legend of Napoleon (2004), 63–64; Alger, Napoleon’s British Visitors, 83–84.
Appendix nos. 140, 56; Frank Kidson et al., ‘Yorkshire Tunes’, Journal of the Folk-Song Society 2 (1906): 278.
Gammon, ‘The Grand Conversation’, 666, citing Maurice Hutt, Napoleon (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1972), 170–171.
Karl Dallas, The Cruel Wars: 100 Soldiers’ Songs from Agincourt to Ulster (1972), 137.
Mary Favret, ‘War in the Air’, Modern Language Quarterly 65 (2004): 531–559, 535; 536–537, 551.
Hogg, The Mountain Bard, viii; Tibble and Tibble, The Prose, 19; William Cobbett, ‘Letter to Alderman Wood, on the Subject of Teaching the Children of the Poor to Read’, 8 December 1813.
Paul Keen (ed.), Revolutions in Romantic Literature: An Anthology of Print Culture, 1780–1832 (Ontario, 2004), 27.
Theresa Kelly observes that, even in making a pygmy of Napoleon, caricaturists were implicitly acknowledging his immense stature: ‘By these turns of image and text, the figure of Napoleon could serve as a representative for the aspirations and rhetoric of the unrepresented.’ Theresa M. Kelly, ‘J.M.W. Turner, Napoleonic Caricature, and Romantic Allegory’, English Literary History 58 (1991): 351–382, 377.
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Jensen, O.C. (2015). ‘Now Boney’s Awa”: Triumph, Tragedy, and the Legend Established, 1814–1822. In: Napoleon and British Song, 1797–1822. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137555380_5
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