The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835

Neil Ramsey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351885676
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Examining the memoirs and autobiographies of British soldiers during the Romantic period, Neil Ramsey explores the effect of these as cultural forms mediating warfare to the reading public during and immediately after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Forming a distinct and commercially successful genre that in turn inspired the military and nautical novels that flourished in the 1830s, military memoirs profoundly shaped nineteenth-century British culture's understanding of war as Romantic adventure, establishing images of the nation's middle-class soldier heroes that would be of enduring significance through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Ramsey shows, the military memoir achieved widespread acclaim and commercial success among the reading public of the late Romantic era. Ramsey assesses their influence in relation to Romantic culture's wider understanding of war writing, autobiography, and authorship and to the shifting relationships between the individual, the soldier, and the nation. The memoirs, Ramsey argues, participated in a sentimental response to the period's wars by transforming earlier, impersonal traditions of military memoirs into stories of the soldier's personal suffering. While the focus on suffering established in part a lasting strand of anti-war writing in memoirs by private soldiers, such stories also helped to foster a sympathetic bond between the soldier and the civilian that played an important role in developing ideas of a national war and functioned as a central component in a national commemoration of war.

PART 1
The Genre of the Military Memoir 1780–1835

Chapter 1
The Sentimental Military Memoir 1780–1825

A new form of military memoir came into being in the late Georgian period as the genre began to reflect an unprecedented concern with individual experience and feelings. Locating the Peninsular War as a pivotal event in these developments this chapter details how that conflict prompted a flood of writing by British soldiers about their personal experiences of the war. This work marks a culmination of longer historical developments in the form of the genre as it gradually came to reflect the influence of sentimentalism in late eighteenth-century British culture. In line with related genres of the period such as history and travel writing military memoirs after the 1770s increasingly included some focus on quotidian details the experience of ordinary individuals and personal reactions to the events documented. These changes were of course far from altering all forms of war reportage and initially had only a peripheral influence upon the form of the military memoir. With the Peninsular War however a dramatic change occurred in the memoir one in which a soldier narrator came to present himself as a naive witness to war. In these memoirs the soldier witness is constructed as a man of feeling who represents war principally as an affective experience and who recoils in horror from its suffering.

Genre theorists have admittedly drawn attention to the considerable difficulties involved in defining genres because of the indeterminate and permeable nature of generic boundaries.¹ Although Yuval Noah Harari has offered a broad definition of military memoirs as essentially texts that recount military events in which the author was a protagonist he observes that ‘the definition of military memoirs as of any literary genre is problematic’.² The term ‘military memoir’ can refer to a diverse array of writing ranging from impersonal histories to autobiographical and even biographical accounts of individuals who may have had widely varying degrees or kinds of military experience. Rather than attempt a comprehensive examination of the boundaries of the genre therefore this chapter will instead follow recent historicist approaches to Romantic period genre.³ Drawing on the genre theories of Tzvetan Todorov and Hans Robert Jauss such approaches examine genre as a ‘historical changing system’ in which the generic identity of any given text represents the historical codification or institutionalisation of a set of discursive properties.⁴ Genres exist therefore as a loosely defined set of norms expectations and assumptions amongst readers writers editors and publishers – norms moreover that can be seen to transform over time in relation to a genre’s shifting social purposes and functions.

Not only was genre central to the marketing production and review of printed material during the Romantic period but much of the era’s unparalleled formal experimentation concerned the expansion and integration of genres.⁵ This chapter will examine the continuity and changes occurring within the established traditions of the military memoir during this period of dramatic generic change. It will draw attention to the ways in which an existing genre built around the campaign narrative tradition of the military memoir began to appropriate elements from sentimental writing and in particular from the cluster of popular genres that can be associated with the figure of the ‘suffering traveller’. Focussing on the shifting boundaries of the military memoir highlights the ways in which one of the most remarkable transformations of the genre was its increasing focus on the suffering of soldiers. Through sentimental literary techniques and the generic focus of the suffering traveller military memoirs sought to bridge the imaginative distance between the British nation and its wars by establishing the reader’s sympathies with the hardships of the nation’s soldiers.

However in spite of the obvious popularity of sentimental forms of military memoir the generic indeterminacy of these texts meant that they were seldom met with unreserved approval by reviewers or military authorities. Personal stories of suffering soldiers although typically exhibiting pride in British military prowess could be politically problematic operating as a disturbing counter-narrative to a hegemonic national history. This was particularly the case with the private soldiers’ memoirs that emerged in the post-war period and which as will be argued in subsequent chapters even came to be associated with radical and anti-war sentiments. Only with a subsequent fixing of the generic boundaries of personal military memoirs in the late 1820s particularly through the consolidation of the officer’s professional identity with the emerging professionalism of the Romantic author were these cultural ambiguities largely resolved. As will be detailed in Chapter 2 the memoir was thus able to form a distinctively middle-class commemoration of Britain’s involvement in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Assessing the broad outlines of these changes will in turn provide context for a more detailed analysis of select memoirs in subsequent chapters. This chapter focusses on the first phase of such memoirs and the response to them in the period 1780–1824.

The Sentimental Military Memoir

The military memoir emerged as a common and popular genre across Europe at the start of the seventeenth century.⁶ Influenced by classical forms of military memoir such as Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War and the common practice amongst early modern soldiers of composing ‘accounts of services rendered’ for their employers military memoirs were written by nobles statesmen and generals as histories of military campaigns in which they had participated. Viewed in relation to the rise of the modern state during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the genre can be seen mediating between the public and the private by documenting the military achievements of prominent public figures. For the most part however personal experience and achievement had little role to play and were entirely subsumed within an emphasis on the grandeur of the state and monarchy.⁷ Battles and campaigns were simply ‘the site for massed movements’ in which the army’s success was dependent upon collective discipline and the commander’s stratagems.⁸ It was rare for accounts of war to offer any focus at all on junior ranking officers until late in the eighteenth century while even biographical accounts of illustrious generals tended to focus on command decisions and idealised images of martial valour drawn from antiquity.⁹

First-hand accounts of war remained a prominent feature of eighteenthcentury literary culture forming an integral part of the expansion in military writing during the latter half of the century.¹⁰ As the century progressed they were also increasingly written by more junior ranking military officers in at least one instance even being written by a corporal in the British army – A Soldier’s Journal Containing a Particular Description of the Several Descents on the Coast of France Last War (1770).¹¹ Yet although the author of a military memoir was also typically a protagonist in the military campaigns documented the genre continued to exhibit little interest in individual experience and feelings. The New and Enlarged Military Dictionary (1802) explained that ‘[m]emoirs in military literature’ were ‘written by persons who had some share in the transactions they relate’ but it principally defined the genre as a ‘species of history’ resembling the classical historical record of a military campaign found in Caesar’s Commentaries.¹² By the eighteenth century the form of the military memoir had consolidated around what Tim Travers describes as a ‘narrative campaign style of history’ that provided impersonal and chronological narratives of the major events during military campaigns and battles.¹³ Memoirs were thus often little different from historical accounts of war beyond titular reference to the work’s origins as a journal or other eyewitness source such as John Knox’s An Historical Journal of the Campaigns in North America for the Years 1757 1758 1759 and 1760 (1769).¹⁴ Where soldiers did record personal experiences such texts were almost invariably framed by the conventions of the spiritual autobiography or confessional narrative such as Philip Doddridge’s Some Remarkable Passages in the Life of the Honourable Col. James Gardiner (1747).¹⁵ As Harari observes they thus often had ‘little to say about their authors’ military careers’.¹⁶

A key change occurred in the genre from the 1780s however as campaign narratives began to occasionally incorporate sentimental reflection on the personal experiences of soldiers. The effects of sentimentalism were felt right across British literature of the late eighteenth century establishing a pervasive concern with forms of virtuous feeling and sympathy. Many forms of writing during the period deployed sentimental literary techniques in an effort to stimulate emotional responses and elicit a reader’s sympathies.¹⁷ Genres that were traditionally concerned solely with factual reportage such as histories and travel writing thus began to occasionally record individual feelings and tales of suffering in order to engage readers in ‘more inward and sentimental terms’.¹⁸ The generic boundaries between forms of writing were moreover increasingly eroded by this shared impulse to engage reader’s emotions.¹⁹

Reflecting these trends military memoirists began to occasionally incorporate brief sentimental tales or scenes into their historical narratives. An example is John Simcoe’s A Journal of the Operations of the Queen’s Rangers from the End of the Year 1777 to the Conclusion of the Late American War (1789) which is almost wholly written in the campaign n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Modern War and the Suffering Soldier
• Part 1 The Genre of the Military Memoir, 1780–1835
• Part 2 The Military Memoir and the Sacrifices of War
• Conclusion: ‘A Plain Unvarnished Tale’: The Military Author and the Romance of War
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index