ABSTRACT
The Journal of a Soldier of the Seventy-First occupies a more canonical position in the historical literature of the Peninsular War than Porter’s Letters. Published in 1819, it was one of the first and most popular private soldier’s memoirs written in Britain after the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. It has since gone on to become one of the most well known and highly regarded of the Peninsular War memoirs identified by Charles Oman in his Wellington’s Army, 1809–1814. Oman himself declared an ‘enormous interest’ in the Journal, a book he praised for its ‘literary merit’ and ‘vivid literary style’. 1 Christopher Hibbert republished the Journal in an abridged version in 1975 (which was again reprinted in 1996), in large part because of these literary qualities:
Readers of books about Wellington’s army have long been familiar with the anonymous soldier of the 71st Highlanders whose vivid record of his experiences has enlivened so many narratives of the Peninsular War. Yet the journal from which military historians have so often quoted has been out of print for so many years and, in its entirety, has been known only to the specialist. It deserves a far wider readership than it has previously enjoyed. 2
