ABSTRACT
In his representation of the nation’s soldiers and their personal experience of warfare, Robert Ker Porter’s work both reflected and helped to shape an emergent modern culture of war. The scale of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with their enormous demand for resources, military personnel and political support, meant that the British government was forced to call upon ever larger sectors of the population to assist in the defence of the nation, even though the wars were fought in remote locations. 1 Soldier memoirists like Porter, along with numerous writers and artists of the period, strove to imaginatively breach the experiential gap that thus existed between the public and scenes of foreign war. 2 Jerome Christensen has remarked that we can think of war as becoming modern at precisely the moment that it was transformed into an ‘all-engrossing spectacle’ that sought to elicit widespread national support for war through the ‘strategic representation’ of distant conflict. 3
