John Peck

The Crimean: a Novelists’ War

The Crimean War is remarkably well established in the popular imagination. Few people could provide more than the sketchiest details about the Napoleonic Wars, but most could summon up some surprisingly detailed knowledge about the later, less significant, conflict. Central, of course, would be the Charge of the Light Brigade and Florence Nightingale, yet, beyond this, many would know the place names, who the allies were, and possibly even about the administrative failings that characterised Britain’s conduct of the war. That we are so well informed is due largely to the fact that this was the first war to be reported fully in newspapers of the day; in particular, William Russell’s reports for The Times created a vivid sense of the war that remains in the public consciousness.1 In the hands of Russell and then others — Tennyson in his famous poem, the supporters of Florence Nightingale — images were created that passed directly into popular mythology.2

Thackeray and the Culture of War

Thackeray is the one major Victorian novelist who writes extensively about war: the Seven Years War (1756–63) in Barry Lyndon, the Battle of Waterloo (1815) in Vanity Fair, the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14) in Henry Esmond, and the American War of Independence (1775–83) in The Virginians.1 It is, therefore, somewhat surprising to come across Andrew Rutherford’s suggestion that Thackeray’s nsour reflections on traditional poetic treatments of war show his awareness of the novel as a genre committed not only to a different subject-matter, but to a different kind of vision and a truer sense of values.2 nRutherford’s case, in his book The Literature of War, overlaps with some of the points I have been developing: that in the Victorian period, especially from the late 1840s, ‘there was an increasing tendency for the finest literature to focus on those aspects of experience that fell within the limits of civil life’, and that the realistic novel both reflected and helped to determine this trend.3 It seems odd, however, to associate Thackeray with this new direction in the novel, for what is consistently apparent in Thackeray’s works is the difficulty he has in disentangling himself from the military frame of mind.

Kipling’s Militarism

Rudyard Kipling is, without question, the most important writer on military matters in the Victorian period. Thackeray, his only real rival, might deal just as often with soldiers and soldiering, but Thackeray is always reflecting on a military order that belongs to the past, whereas Kipling writes of the present. There is, however, more to the issue than this, for Kipling’s works define a mood for the 1890s; the central aspect of this is his reinvention of militarism. As I have argued in previous chapters, the Victorian period saw the disappearance of the military code of the Wellington era. The army might have continued to cling on to its traditional values, but these values meant little to the country at large.1 In the 1880s, however, militarism began to re-emerge, but in a manner that was more often strident than coherent; for example, enthusiastic support for the British soldier abroad was not matched by any great enthusiasm for the army at home, or by any great readiness to pay for an effective army. The achievement of Kipling — or, at any rate, the achievement that makes him a key figure in the history of militarism — is that he re-establishes a link between the lives and values of the military and the lives and values of the people as a whole. Indeed, Kipling puts society back at one with the army for the first time since Waterloo.

The Army Abroad: Fictions of India and the Indian Mutiny

On 10 May 1857, the Bengal units of the East India Company’s army in India mutinied, massacring British officers, officials and traders, along with their families.1 The immediate cause of the so-called Indian Mutiny was the introduction of new cartridges for the Enfield rifle; the word soon spread that the grease for these cartridges was made from cow and pig fat, a fact that caused consternation among both Hindus and Muslims. At Meerut, the sepoys (Indian soldiers in service with the British army) refused to touch the new cartridges, and 85 of them were given long prison sentences; the following day the Meerut sepoys mutinied. Behind the immediate explanation, however, is a more complex web of political, economic and religious grievances that had developed as the British, with increasing insensitivity, imposed an alien culture upon a subject people.2 The Mutiny spread rapidly through Bengal, Oudh and the North-West Provinces, and, with Indian troops outnumbering the British by a ratio of more than six to one, for a time it seemed as if the British might lose control of the whole of India.3 The Punjabi, Sikh and Gurkha troops remained loyal, however, and the rebellion failed to spread beyond the north of the country. There was, none the less, a bitter struggle with atrocities on both sides — including a massacre of British prisoners at Cawnpore that deeply affected thinking in Britain — before Delhi was recaptured by the British in September 1857 and before Lucknow was finally secured in March 1858.4 It was the end of 1858 before the Oudh rebels were finally subdued.

The Boer War

In every war there are incidents that take hold of, and remain in, the public imagination. They are usually few in number, and sometimes not all that important in themselves, but in a significant way they focus contemporary feelings and define the image of the war for subsequent generations. Most commonly, they mingle a sense of reassurance with a sense of anxiety, frequently combining an illustration of courage with questions about whether courage alone is sufficient; as such, these incidents are likely to express the contradictions that lie at the heart of a nation’s involvement in a conflict. Not surprisingly, these are the episodes that appear most often in novels, poems and plays (and, with the passing of time, in history books and films) about the war in question. It is easy to identify the significant events of this nature in the Victorian era. In the Crimean War, the incident that made the greatest impact was the Charge of the Light Brigade: a triumph of glory over strategy, of bravery over pragmatism, for many it defined the inadequacies of an aristocratic military leadership. The image of Florence Nightingale at Scutari is, of course, equally evocative, with everything that it suggests about the roles the Victorians assigned to women, but also what it tells us about a shift of attention at this time from the moment of military confrontation to the human consequences of war. The significance of Nightingale is most apparent if we consider how difficult it would be to associate any such image with the Wellington era.

The Army at Home: from Disraeli to Hardy

Alongside defending and advancing Britain’s interests in and against other countries, the army has always had a complementary role to play in maintaining civil order at home. It is in the nineteenth century that this assumes the form we are most familiar with: the army is called in, as at Peterloo, to suppress political unrest.1 Scenes of this kind, although less extreme, feature in a number of Victorian novels, or, to be more precise, early to mid-Victorian novels, for, as the century progressed, the police increasingly took over such work.2 In the second section of this chapter I discuss four novels that present military intervention in a domestic context; the interesting thing about these novels, by Gaskell, Eliot, Disraeli and Charlotte Bronte, is that, in a period when most people all but ignore the army, these works actively consider its role. What we might expect to encounter is a straightforward idea that the army must maintain social order, but the nuances of the authors’ attitudes create a far more complicated impression.

Discussing a detail, building a case

We have, essentially, already said everything that need be said about a method for poetry analysis. It is a case ofgetting hold of the poem at the outset, and then building a response. You need to turn to details (a few details will do; there’s no necessity to discuss every word and every line), and then to move out from the details in such a way that your overall sense of the poem advances. We can summarise the process as follows: n n1. n nRead the poem. n n n n n2. n nHere’s my initial response. n n n n n3. n nHere’s how a detail relates to my initial response. n n n n n4. n nThis is how this detail advances my overall understanding of the poem.

Writing a poetry practical criticism essay

We have offered a great deal of advice so far, some of which you may have found useful and a lot of which you might choose to ignore. As we all know, however, what really matters is that day when you have to sit down in an examination and respond on the spot to a poem you haven’t seen before. The obvious, if rather smug, thing to say at this point is that if you have had a lot of practice writing analyses of poems, then you are going to find it relatively easy on the big day. But practice also involves knowing exactly what you are doing in an essay, and why you are doing it. The earlier chapters of this book have already covered many of the issues involved, but this chapter deals directly and exclusively with the technique of writing a practical criticism examination answer. You might choose to reject our advice. It could be that you feel you have been taught a better method, and we are obviously happy to accept that there is more than one way to write a good essay. The advantage of the method we suggest, however, is that it makes active use of the essay format itself to help you write a good essay. Or, to put that another way, the essay structure does a lot of the work of writing the essay for you. This is something that should soon become apparent as you look at the following examples.

Taking things further

We have already touched on the point that practical criticism is the beginning rather than the end of criticism. There was a time — the period up to and including the 1960s — when the critic’s intense response to the isolated text was seen as the most important thing in literary studies. Everything was felt to emerge from the critic’s emotional and intellectual encounter with the words on the page. Nothing outside this one-to-one relationship (for example, the historical context of the text) was felt to be of all that much consequence. It is the legacy of this kind of approach that, perhaps, still makes practical criticism seem a frightening examination paper. There is the feeling that one’s intelligence is on trial in a particularly exposed way.

Structuralism, poststructuralism and deconstruction

WE have decided to look again at Richard II, with a particular emphasis on the differences between our discussion of the play here and our initial discussion of it in chapter 2. At that point we were largely interested in describing the basic moves to make with a text. Here we want to look at the way to build a reading that focuses on the issue of language in the play and how the play might be said, in some senses, to be about language. This, very broadly, can be called a structuralist approach: some structuralist criticism is very technical and concerned with the general principles that operate in literature, but for our purposes we can take structuralism to mean looking at a text to see how it thematises the issue of language, how the problems of interpreting language become the text’s main concern. As we will see, however, much more is involved than just language.