ABSTRACT
A new style of military memoir appeared with the publication of Moyle Sherer’s Recollections of the Peninsula (1823) and George Gleig’s The Subaltern (1825). Receiving unprecedented praise from review periodicals and enjoying considerable commercial success, Sherer’s book reaching a fifth edition in 1827 and Gleig’s a third in 1828, 1 these two works enabled the personal story of war to be interesting and acceptable to the reading public in a way that earlier military memoirs seldom achieved. They shifted the campaign narrative tradition of military memoirs into something that was, like private soldiers’ memoirs, centrally concerned with the personal experiences of the soldier at war. But rather than detailing personal experiences through a pronounced sentimental moralizing, something that dominated earlier military memoirs, Sherer and Gleig asked their readers to share their military enthusiasm. Adapting conventions of the picturesque travelogue to their writing, they sought to cultivate their readers’ appreciation of the aesthetic appeal of war.
