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Abstract
During and after the Napoleonic Wars, there was an outpouring of military-based biographical writing never before seen in British history. Over 200 military memoirs were published either as standalone entities or in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The United Service Journal. As a result, the experiences of ordinary soldiers were brought to the forefront of Britain’s public consciousness. Although many of these memoirs glorified war, a number revealed the psychological damage war inflicted on the British male population and explicitly exposed the horrors of combat to a domestic readership. Furthermore, this explosion of life writing also exposed a connection between suffering and alcoholism, consolidating trauma as a post-war, national problem. The Brontës, typically recognized as canonical, Victorian authors, first participated in this military-based literary movement. This article attempts to reposition and establish two of the siblings – Charlotte and Branwell – as significant post-war commentators. By focussing on their military reading, it will become clear how they vicariously processed and reimagined war trauma and addiction through their Glass Town and Angrian sagas. Not only will this article argue that the introduction of military biography into British society generated wide-scale recognition of war trauma, despite its absence within contemporary medical discourse, but it will also argue that the young Brontës’ literature is an important historical source for understanding and re-evaluating the public response to post-war military masculinity.
Notes
1. Emily and Anne Brontë initially collaborated with Charlotte and Branwell before they broke away to form their own kingdom, Gondal, in 1832. There are no surviving Glass Town manuscripts, however, written by the pair, suggesting that they played a more oral role in their older siblings’ imaginative games. I hereby acknowledge their involvement, but attribute sole authorship to Charlotte and Branwell.
2. Wellington and Napoleon are also characters within the juvenilia in their own right. See my article ‘Napoleonic Periodicals and the Childhood Imagination: The Influence of War Commentary on Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Glass Town and Angria’, Victorian Periodicals Review (/i), 48.4 (Winter 2015), 469–86.
3. Although the Brontës also engaged with canonical authors who touched on soldierly suffering – such as Homer, Shakespeare, Byron, Scott – I have chosen to narrow the focus of this article to what the siblings read in the contemporary media.
4. See Karen Fang, Romantic Writing and the Empire of Signs (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 2010), p. 187.
5. Charlotte, in her unfinished ‘Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington’, references John Malcolm’s Tales of Field and Flood (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1829) and an anonymous memoir from The New British Novelist (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830). See Charlotte Brontë, ‘Anecdotes of the Duke of Wellington’, in EEW, 3 vols, ed. by Christine Alexander (Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1987), I, p. 89. According to Victor Neufeldt, George Gleig’s ‘The Subaltern’ is frequently mimicked in Branwell’s early literature: both siblings would have been familiar with its contents. See, as an example, Branwell Brontë, A Historical Narrative of the War of Encroachment, in WPB, 3 vols, ed. by Victor Neufeldt (London: Garland, 1997), I, p. 374, 388.
6. Charlotte Brontë, ‘He could not sleep!’, PCB, p. 234. The battle of Evesham is the last major battle of the 1836–7 wars, reinstating Zamorna as king of Angria.
7. Geoffrey H. Hartman, ‘On Traumatic Knowledge and Literary Studies’, New Literary History, 26.3 (Summer 1995), 537–563, p. 540.
8. Branwell Brontë, ‘The Wool is Rising’, WPB II, p. 29. I have reproduced quotations from Neufeldt’s transcriptions of Branwell’s work, which retain all original mistakes.
9. Jill Matus, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 185.
10. Matus, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction, p. 12.
11. See E. Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2005), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. by Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernard Giesen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), and Christopher Herbert, War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
12. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. 3.
13. Matus, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction, pp. 9–10.
14. Chris Cantor, Evolution and Posttraumatic Stress: Disorders of Vigilance and Defence (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 9.
15. See, for example, Philip Shaw, Suffering and Sentiment in Romantic Military Art (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013) and G. Daly, The British Soldier in the Peninsular War (London: Palgrave, 2013).
16. See Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, ‘Case of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome after Crimean War and Indian Mutiny’, British Medical Journal, 319 (1999), 1645–47, and Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely, ‘Psychiatric Battle Casualties: An Intra- and Interwar Comparison’, The British Journal of Psychiatry, 178 (2001), 242–47.
17. Laurent Tatu and Julien Bogousslavsky, ‘World War I Psychoneuroses: Hysteria Goes to War’, Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma, ed. by Julien Bogousslavsky (Karger: Basel, 2014), XXXV, p. 157.
18. Philip Shaw, ‘Longing for Home: Robert Hamilton, Nostalgia, and the Emotional Life of the Eighteenth-Century Soldier’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39.1 (March 2016), 25–40.
19. Shaw, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. The etymology of the word has been traced by George Rosen in ‘Nostalgie: a “forgotten” psychological disorder’, Psychological Medicine, 5 (1975), 340–54. Lisa O’Sullivan has emphasized the importance of the condition with regard to medical and political change. By redirecting emotion and emerging ideas on insanity Idéologue writers could promote an intense form of nationalism. See Lisa O’Sullivan, ‘The Time and Place of Nostalgia: Re-situating a French Disease’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 67.4 (2011), 626–48, p. 626. Finally, Jonathan Lamb has drawn a connection between nostalgia and eighteenth-century naval diseases in his research on Scorbutic nostalgia. See Jonathan Lamb ‘Scorbutic nostalgia’, Journal for Maritime Research, 15.1 (2013), 27–36.
20. Although evidence is sparse, the baptismal registers list William Firth of Haworth as a militiaman in 1813 and John Appleyard of the nearby Bank Leeming as a militia sergeant in 1816. Gravestones in Haworth churchyard also indicate a military presence. One is listed as John Bland, ‘late sergeant in the 1st Dragoon Guards. Served in the Army 30 Years. He died Octr 3rd 1821 Aged 68 Years’.
21. Simon Bainbridge. British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 43.
22. Bainbridge, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, p. 43.
23. Chad May, ‘The Horrors of my Tale’: Trauma, the Historical Imagination, and Sir Walter Scott’, Pacific Coast Philology, 20 (2005), 98–116, p. 106.
24. Charlotte Brontë, ‘Lily Hart’ and ‘A Leaf from an Unopened Volume’, EEW II, I, p. 3, 331.
25. Brontë, WPB I, pp. 393, 385.
26. Brontë, WPB I, p. 392.
27. Brontë, WPB I, pp. 393–94.
28. Neil Ramsey, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture 1780–1835 (London: Ashgate, 2011), p. 13.
29. Catriona Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (London: Palgrave, 2013), p. 17.
30. Samuel Hynes, quoted in Catriona Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, p. 18.
31. Herbert, War of No Pity, p. 27, 23.
32. Herbert, War of No Pity, p. 205.
33. Matus, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction, p. 185.
34. For more information regarding the Brontës’ reading, see Christine Alexander and Margaret Smith, ‘Books Read by the Brontës’, The Oxford Companion to the Brontës (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 54–56.
35. See footnotes 3 and 5.
36. Brontë, WPB I, pp. 393–94.
37. Malcolm, Malcolm’s Tales of Field and Flood, p. 160.
38. Malcolm, Malcolm’s Tales of Field and Flood, p. 50.
39. Gleig, ‘The Subaltern’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August 1825, p. 197.
40. Gleig, ‘The Subaltern’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August 1825, p. 197.
41. The Brontë family owned this version and copied images from it to practise their drawing.
42. George Gleig, ‘The Brothers’, Friendship’s Offering: And Winter’s Wreath: A Christmas and New Year’s Present (London: Smith, Elder & Co, 1829), pp. 37–58.
43. Erin Nyborg has argued in her PhD thesis that this memoir influenced Anne Brontë’s war poem, ‘Z – a’s Dream’, written in 1846. For more information see Erin Nyborg, The Brontës and Masculinity (Oxford, 2016), p. 88.
44. See Robert Hemmings, Modern Nostalgia (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 7.
45. The tale is structured in a similar format to Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), predating Dickens’s story by 11 years.
46. Brontë, ‘The Green Dwarf’, EEW II, I, p. 142.
47. Brontë, ‘The Green Dwarf’, EEW II, I, p. 142.
48. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. by Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 109.
49. See Martin Willis, ‘Silas Marner, Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine: George Eliot’s Ethics of Care’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 20.3 (2015), 326–40.
50. Brontë, ‘A Leaf from an Unopened Volume’, EEW II, I, p. 331. Alexander Wellesley, also known as Victor Frederick Percy Wellesley, is the elder twin son of Zamorna and Mary Percy. He is introduced at Zamorna's coronation as the King of Angria in My Angria and the Angrians (1834). It is interesting how this article’s previous section on trauma demonstrates that Zamorna also struggles with his own emotional responses to battle. Yet, he is quick to silence his son.
51. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), p. 303.
52. Catriona Kennedy, ‘John Bull into Battle: Military Masculinity and the British Army Officer during the Napoleonic Wars’, in Gender War and Politics, ed by. Karen Hagemann, Gisela Mettele and Jane Rendall (London: Palgrave, 2010), p. 128.
53. See Holly Furneaux’s Military Men of Feeling (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
54. See Tom Mole’s Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Ramsey, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture 1780–1835, p. 13.
55. Charles Edwards, ‘The Last Words of Charles Edwards Esq.’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, October, 396–419.
56. Brontë, WPB III, p. 216.
57. Brontë, WPB III, p. 215.
58. Brontë, WPB II, p. 280.
59. Brontë, WPB III, p. 216.
60. Brontë, WPB III, p. 111.
61. For example, his strained relationship with his father causes Augusta, his first wife, to murder him. After she commits the deed, she herself is murdered.
62. Brontë, WPB II, p. 107.
63. Brontë, EEW II, I, pp. 87–88.
64. The island’s secluded location and overwhelming population of ‘retired’ Verdopolitans make it a popular destination for Percy to reflect upon his actions and, more ominously, plot his evil schemes.
65. Brontë, EEW I, p. 165.
66. Brontë, EEW II, I, pp. 87–88.
67. Scott Hughes Myerly, British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 73.
68. Brontë, WPB II, p. 323.
69. Charlotte Brontë, ‘Henry Hastings’, in Tales of Angria (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 204.
70. Although, in his adult life, Branwell was partial to a drink, in 1847 he lapsed into chronic alcoholism. He died on 24 September 1848, probably of tuberculosis aggravated by alcohol withdrawal.
71. William Shakespeare, Othello, ed. by Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), II. 3, p. 262.
72. For example, see Brian Martin, Napoleonic Friendship (Durham: University of New Hampshire, 2011), p. 156.
73. The New British Novelist; Comprising Words of the most Popular and Fashionable Writers of the Present Day (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830), XXII, p. 136. For Charlotte’s citation, see Brontë, EEW I, p. 89.
74. The New British Novelist, pp. 174–75.
75. Gleig, ‘The Subaltern’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March, p. 295.
76. Gleig, ‘The Subaltern’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March, p. 295.
77. Brontë, Tales of Angria, p. 23.
78. Brontë, Tales of Angria, p. 23.
79. Brontë, Tales of Angria, p. 73.
80. Andrew Uffindell, The National Army Museum Book of Wellington’s Armies (London: Pan Books, 2005), pp. 318–19.
81. See Dudley Green, Patrick Brontë: Father of Genius (Stroud: History Press, 2010), p. 114.
82. The New British Novelist, pp. 174–175.
83. Brontë, WPB I, p. 217. Gleig, ‘The Subaltern’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August, p. 197.