Abstract
While the French army drove across Europe bringing war and revolutionary upheaval to millions, the British and Irish civilian experience of war and invasion, with the exception of the short-lived French invasion of the west of Ireland and a brief landing in Wales, was largely confined to the personal and public imaginary. The war was brought home to Britons in other ways - by the militarization of everyday life; through the letters of friends and relatives fighting abroad; and in press reports, literature and drama - but the central activities of war (killing, wounding, requisitioning and occupation) tended to remain beyond their immediate experience. Distanced from the brutality of war, British civilians were able to enjoy its vicarious excitements, an abdication of moral responsibility sharply exposed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Fears in Solitude’. Yet while Coleridge’s poem appears, at first glance, to promote anti-war sentiments, it is in fact a warning against national complacency at a time of crisis, when a French invasion appeared terrifyingly imminent. According to Coleridge, Britons needed to exert their imaginations to apprehend the terrible fate that would befall them if war genuinely came home, so that they could prepare to‘repel the impious foe!’
Secure from actual warfare, we have lov’d
To swell the war-whoop, passionate for war!
Alas! For ages ignorant of all
Its ghastlier workings …
We, this whole people, have been clamorous
For war and bloodshed; animating sports,
The which we pay for as a thing to talk of,
Spectators and not combatants! …
… Boys and girls,
And women, that would groan to see a child
Pull off an insect’s leg, all read of war,
The best amusement for our morning meal!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Fears in Solitude: Written in April 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion’1
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Notes
S.T. Coleridge, Fears in Solitude, Written in 1798, during the Alarm of an Invasion, to Which are Added, France, an Ode; and Frost at Midnight (London, 1798), 5–6.
See, for example, Karen Hagemann, ‘Occupation, Mobilization, and Politics: The Anti-Napoleonic Wars in Prussian Experience, Memory and Historiography’, Central European History, 39 (2006), 580–610, 586.
For Germany see Ute Planert, ‘From Collaboration to Resistance: Politics, Experience, and Memory of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Southern Germany’, Central European History, 39 (2006), 676–705. For a revisionist account of popular resistance to the French elsewhere in Europe see, Charles Esdaile (ed.), Popular Resistance in the French Wars: Patriots, Partisans and Pirates (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Charles Esdaile (ed.), Popular Resistance in the French Wars: Patriots, Partisans and Pirates (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
On the role of the print culture and the press in constructing the nation as an ‘imagined community’ see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1991).
Mark Rawlinson, ‘Invasion! Coleridge, the Defence of Britain and the Cultivation of the Public’s Fear’, in Philip Shaw (ed.), Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 110–137, p. 115.
[William Cobbett], A Warning to Britons against French Perfidy and Cruelty (London, 1798).
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The credibility of this account has been questioned in a recent history of the Fishguard landing, where it is identified as the probable product of local mythmaking. J.E. Thomas, Britain’s Last Invasion: Fishguard 1797 (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), 149–56. However, reports that women and children dressed in red flannels had been mustered along the cliffs were already in circulation just a few days after the landing. See Ann Knight, Haverford West, 28 February 1797. NLW, Aberystwyth. MS 13209D, 3.
Gwyn A. Williams, The Search for Beulah Land: The Welsh and the Atlantic Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 130.
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Michael Paris, Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture, 1850–2000 (Reaktion: London, 2005). The phrase ‘pleasure culture of war’ was originally used by Graham Dawson to describe developments in the later nineteenth century, Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1994).
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Elizabeth Ham, Elizabeth Ham by Herself, 1783–1820, ed. Eric Gillet (London, 1945), 52.
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Samuel Bamford, Early Days (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co, 1849), 244–5.
John Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-war Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1982), 54.
Betty T. Bennett (ed.), British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism: 1793–1815 (New York; London: Garland, 1976).
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A.D. Harvey, English Literature and the Great War with France: An Anthology and Commentary (London: Nold Jonson, 1981), 135.
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See Kate Williams, ‘Nelson and Women: Marketing, Representations and the Female Consumer’ in David Cannadine (ed.), Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 67–89.
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Lucy Aikin to her mother, Stoke Newington, November 1805 in Philip Hemery Le Breton (ed.), Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin (London, 1864), 81.
Jenks, Naval Engagements, 225. In Dublin, William Drennan also reported the widespread breaking of windows during the Trafalgar illuminations. William Drennan, Dublin to Martha McTier, 10 November 1805, Drennan-McTier Letters, vol. 3, 388.
Joseph Farington, 7 July 1813. Garlick and Macintyre (eds.), Diary of Joseph Farington, vol. 12, 4388.
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John Ramsay, 15 December 1805, in Barbara L.H. Horn, Letters of John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, 1799–1812 (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1966), 172.
On the relationship between these two discourses of providentialism in the United States see Nicholas Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007).
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There is evidence of similar verses cropping up outside churches on the days appointed for national Thanksgiving. In January 1798, the Cambridge Intelligencer published a much longer anonymous poem, found, the paper claimed, in ‘St Peter’s church yard in Colchester’ which began ‘Rejoice ye Pharisees! And sing/the glories of your Church and King … with pure hands present to God,/Your tatter’d trophies, drench’d in blood’. Lynda Pratt, ‘Naval Contemplation: Poetry, Patriotism and the Navy, 1797–99’, Journal of Maritime Research, 2, 1 (2000), 84–105.
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© 2013 Catriona Kennedy
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Kennedy, C. (2013). Bringing the War Back Home. In: Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_8
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