Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T21:20:10.493Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

13 - Writing, reading and the scenes of war

from Part II - Geographies: The Scenes of Literary Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2009

By
Mary Favret
Edited by
James Chandler
Get access

Summary

To understand how war found its place in British literature in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we might follow William Cowper’s lead when, in The Task (1785) he organizes the scene of war around the figure of the post-boy.

Hark! ’Tis the twanging horn! O’er yonder bridge …

He comes, the herald of a noisy world,

With spatter’d boots, strapp’d waist, and frozen locks,

News from all nations lumb’ring at his back.

True to his charge the close-pack’d load behind,

Yet careless what he brings, his one concern

Is to conduct it to the destin’d inn,

And having dropp’d the expected bag – pass on.

He whistles as he goes, light-hearted wretch,

Cold and yet cheerful: messenger of grief

Perhaps to thousands, and of joy to some ….

The arrival of the post-boy (never named, but ever recognizable) opens Cowper’s meditations in Book IV, ‘The Winter Evening’, where, half-convincingly, the poet cobbles out of ‘Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness’ and ‘sweet oblivion’ a rural retreat from hostile weather and imperial hostilities (lines 140; 250). The arrival of the post-boy, however, daily disrupts Cowper’s efforts to represent war retrospectively: ‘Is India free?’ he asks, prompted by seeing the mailbag; ‘And does she wear her plumed / And jewelled turban with a smile of peace, / Or do we grind her still?’ (lines 28–30).

Keywords

daily readingcloudy battlefieldBritish literaturewomen writerswar painWilliam Cowperwartime fatalitiespost-boy
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature , pp. 314 - 334
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Arnold, Matthew, Essays in Criticism, Second Series, London: Macmillan, 1903.
Auerbach, Nina, Communities of Women, Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Austen, Jane, The Oxford Illustrated Jane Austen, ed. Chapman, R. W., 3rd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923; rev. 1969; rpt 1988.
Baillie, Joanna, Ethewald Pt 1 and Count Basil, in Dramas in Three Volumes, London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, Green, & Longman, 1836.
Bainbridge, Simon, British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Visions in Conflict, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Bennett, Betty T. (ed.), British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism, 1793–1815, New York and London: Garland Press, 1975.
Bewell, Alan, Romanticism and Colonial Disease, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Blake, William, The Four Zoas and Milton, in The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. Erdman, David, rev. edn, City, Garden, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1982.
Byron, George Gordon, The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols., ed. McGann, Jerome, Oxford: Clarendon Press and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980–93.
Christensen, Jerome, Romanticism at the End of History, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Churchill, T. O., The Life of Lord Viscount Nelson, London: Harrison and Rutter, 1810.
Clarke, John Stanier, and MacArthur, John, The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, K. B., London: T. Caddell and Wm Davies, 1809.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 11 vols., ed. Rooke, Barbara, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul and Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2001.
Coleridge, , stresses both these terms in ‘The War and International Law’, The Friend (1803), and ‘Fears in Solitude’ (1798)Google Scholar
Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.
Cowper, William, The Task in Poetical Works, ed. Sumner Milford, Humphrey, 4th edn, London: Oxford University Press, 1967.
De Quincey, Thomas, ‘The English Mail Coach’, in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, ed. Lindop, Grevel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Favret, Mary A., ‘Everyday War’, English Literary History 72 (2005).Google Scholar
Favret, Mary A.,‘War in the Air’, Modern Language Quarterly 65 (2004).Google Scholar
Fulford, Tim, ‘Romanticizing the Empire: The Naval Heroes of Southey, Coleridge, Austen and Marryat’, Modern Language Quarterly 60 (1999).Google Scholar
Gillray, James, ‘The Plumb Pudding in Danger’ (1805) or ‘The Modern Prometheus, or the Downfall of Tyranny’ (1814).
Godfrey, Richard T., Gillray, James and Hallett, Mark, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature, London: Tate Publishing, 2001.
Hahn, H. George, ‘The Progress of Patriotism and Biography: The Battle of Trafalgar in Southey’s The Life of Nelson’, War, Literature and the Arts 9 (1997).Google Scholar
Hemans, Felicia, Selected Poems, Letters, Reception Materials, ed. Wolfson, Susan, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Jankovic, Vladimir, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1822, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Kroeber, Karl, British Romantic Art, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986.
Lamb, Charles, ‘Distant Correspondents’, in The Complete Works and Letters of Charles Lamb, New York: The Modern Library, 1963.
Liu, Alan, Wordsworth: The Sense of History, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989.
Lukács, Georg, The Historical Novel, preface by Fredric Jameson, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Makdisi, Saree, Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Muir, Rory, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998.
Pasley, Charles W., Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, London: T. Egerton, 1813.
Radcliffe, Ann, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Dobree, Bonamy, London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
Reed, Arden, Romantic Weather: The Climates of Coleridge and Baudelaire (Hanover and London: University Presses of New England, 1983).
Ross, Marlon, The Contours of Masculine Desire: Romanticism and the Rise of Women’s Poetry, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Russell, Gillian, Theatres of War: Performance, Politics and Society, 1793–1815, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Scott, Walter, The Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels, ed. Garside, P. D. et al., Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press and New York: Columbia University Press, 1998–.
Shaw, Philip, Romantic Wars: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1789–1822, Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2000.
Shaw, Philip, Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
Smith, Charlotte, The Poems of Charlotte Smith, ed. Curran, Stuart, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Southey, Robert, History of the Peninsular Wars, in Select Prose of Robert Southey, ed. and intro. Zeitlin, Jacob, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916.
Southey, Robert, The Life of Nelson, London: John Murray, 1813.
Southey, Robert,Review of C. W. Pasley, Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire, Quarterly Review 5:10 (1811).Google Scholar
Walzer, Michael, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, New York: Basic Books, 1977.
Watson, J. R., Romanticism and War: A Study of British Romantic Period Writers and the Napoleonic Wars, Basingstoke, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Wordsworth, William, Poetical Works, ed. Hutchison, Thomas, rev. edn de Selincourt, Ernest, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1936; rpt 1981.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×