Military Authors and the Commemoration of War, 1825–35

Reflecting in 1823 on the recent publication of Southey’s History of the Peninsular War (1822), the Quarterly Review hoped that the book would come to serve as a ‘literary monument’ to the wars, one that adequately commemorated the unparalleled historical significance of the Peninsular War and the nation’s ‘stupendous exertions’ in the ‘holy cause’. ¹ Although Southey’s History failed to achieve the widespread approbation envisioned by the Review, a considerable body of soldiers’ writing emerged during the 1820s and ’30s that answered this appeal for a literary monument to the wars. Reviewers increasingly remarked, typically with some surprise, that they were witnessing an outpouring of personal accounts of the Napoleonic Wars. Narratives of the Peninsular War remained central to this body of work, to the extent that by 1830 it was being suggested that the British reading public must be in possession of everything there could be to know about the ‘personal history of the Wellington armies’. ² The military author assumed a prominent position in British literature, with the soldier’s personal narrative, his ‘military memoir’, ³ forming a recognisable and commercially successful genre. These memoirs, many believed, constituted a distinct and important new ‘class’ of literature, a class that ‘every Englishman reads with pleasure’. ⁴