ABSTRACT
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.
