Abstract
Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno have both argued that during the twentieth century, war and its mediatization contributed to the atrophy of traditional experience.1 They saw the newspapers as reproducing the overwhelming shock that the mechanization of war had inflicted upon the soldier’s sensorium, leaving audiences in a state of numb and apprehensive distraction, unable to draw upon or integrate their wartime experiences with any form of collective memory or wisdom. In describing the operation of wartime media, however, their focus was squarely placed on the First and Second World Wars. Adorno felt that the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had still been communicable in traditional terms. As a growing number of commentators have argued, however, these earlier conflicts can be recognized as the first media wars, the first in which war was rendered into a daily consumable spectacle to meet an unprecedented demand for war news.2 Coinciding with the birth of the reading nation in Britain, they were able to be apprehended in intimate detail through the daily papers, journals, prints, panoramas, and theatre. The wars established many of the patterns by which modern war continues to be viewed.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
W. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt and trans. H. Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 83–109; T. Adorno, ‘Far From the Firing Line’, in Minima Moralia, trans. A Bunden (1951) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm Accessed 14 November 2013. For a brief discussion of the relationship between Adorno and Benjamin on war and experience, see M. Jay, ‘Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament’, in Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. T. Huhn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 129–30.
See J. Christensen, Romanticism at the End of History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 2000); M. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010); J. Mieszkowski, Watching War (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). For a much earlier, yet still valuable account, see J. Matthews, Reporting the Wars (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957).
S. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003), 103.
L. Hanley, War Writing: Fiction, Gender and Memory (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 27. The phrase originates with Raymond Williams; for recent discussions in relation to war writing of the Romantic era, see M. Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010).
H. C. Robinson. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, Barrister-at-law. F.S.A, Selected and Edited by Thomas Sadler, Vol. 1 (London: Macmillan and Company, 1869), 263.
For an account of the campaign, see C. Esdaile, The Peninsular War: A New History (London: Penguin Books, 2003).
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Shores of the Bay of Biscay’, The Times, 12 August (1808).
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Shores of the Bay of Biscay’, The Times, 7 October (1808).
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Shores of the Bay of Biscay’, The Times, 12 August (1808).
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Shores of the Bay of Biscay’, The Times, 26 September (1808).
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Shores of the Bay of Biscay’, The Times, 3 September (1808).
Ibid.
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Corunna’, The Times, 23 January (1809).
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Corunna’, The Times, 23 January.
K. Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 74.
J. Black, The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 91.
R. Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 122.
Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’; W. Benjamin, ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt and trans. H. Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), 157–202; Goodman, Georgic Modernity, 74–8 and 98–101.
B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1991).
W. Benjamin, ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’; R. Wolin, ‘The Disintegration of Experience. From “Benjamin’s Materialist Theory of Experience”’, Theory and Society, 11.1 (1982), 21–7.
See A. Meek, Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories, and Images (New York: Routledge, 2009), 95.
C. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), 59–60. Freud himself identified a modern element to trauma, specifically linking trauma to mechanical concussions, such as rail accidents, or industrial war, while seeing the symptoms of trauma, the repetitive dreams of visions of the traumatic event, as an unconscious mechanism for mastering unprepared for shocks.
B. Witte, ‘Literature as the Medium of Collective Memory: Reading Benjamin’s Einbahmstraße, “Der Erzähler”, and “Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire”’, in A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin, ed. R. J. Goebel (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009), 91–111, at 96.
Adorno, ‘Far From the Firing Line’. Adorno adds that during the Second World War, soldiers and civilians alike had become actors in a ‘phony’ documentary film, pre-empting Baudrillard’s later claims about the media environment of the Gulf War in J. Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans. and intro. Paul Patton (Sydney: Power Publications, 1995).
R. Koselleck, Future’s Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. and intr. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). On the relationship between Koselleck’s views of the French Revolutionary era and Benjamin’s analysis of experience, see P. Osborne. ‘Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category’, New Left Review, 192 (1992), 65–84.
J. Mulrooney, ‘Reading the Romantic-period Daily News’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 24.4 (2002), 351–77, at 371.
On Napoleon, see S. Bainbridge, Napoleon and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13; on prophecies in relation to the wars, see Favret, War at a Distance, 81–97.
M. Favret, ‘War and Everyday Life in Britain’, in War in an Age of Revolution, 1775–1815, ed. R. Chickering and S. Förster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 395–410, at 403–4; B. T. Bennett, ‘Introduction’ to British War Poetry in the Age of Romanticism: 1793–1815. With a New Bibliography of Additional Poems (2004). Digital Text ed. Orianne Smith. Electronic ed. http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/warpoetry Accessed 14 November 2013.
On this point, see also N. Hessell. ‘The Opposite of News: Rethinking the 1800 “Lyrical Ballads” and the Mass Media’, Studies in Romanticism, 45.3 (2006), 331–55.
On how poetry can be seen as similar to Benjamin’s conception of the story, in its relation to the news, see J. Ramazani, ‘“To Get the News from Poems”: Poetry as Genre’, in A Companion to Poetic Genre, ed. E. Martiny (Chichester; Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 5–6.
R. Palmer, The Sound of History: Songs and Social Comment (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 273.
On the ballad revival, see Maureen N. McLane, Balladeering, Minstrelsy, and the Making of British Romantic Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
A. Benjamin ‘Tradition and Experience: Walter Benjamin’s Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, ed. A. Benjamin (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), 133; H. Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 31–3.
W. Benjamin, ‘The Newspaper’, Selected Writings: 1931–1934, ed. M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith and trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. Vol 2, Part 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 741–2.
J. Rancière, G. Arnall, L. Gandolfi, and E. Zaramella, ‘Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques Rancière’, Critical Inquiry, 38.2 (2012), 289–97, at 297.
M. Favret, ‘War Correspondence: Reading Romantic War’, Prose Studies, 19.2 (1996), 173–85, at 178.
W. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, 89. Judith Butler has, however, drawn on Benjamin to argue that such context fails to ever fully delimit the meanings of war reportage, although her arguments are specifically focussed on war photography and its technical reproducibility. See J. Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London and New York: Verso, 2010), 9.
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Corunna’, The Times, 9 January (1809).
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Corunna’, The Times, 23 January (1809).
Ibid.
Ibid.
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Corunna’, The Times, 26 January (1809).
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Corunna’, The Times, 23 January (1809).
H. C. Robinson, ‘Private Correspondence: Corunna’, The Times, 26 January(1809).
Ibid.
R. Immerwahr, ‘The Practice of Irony in Early German Romanticism’, in Romantic Irony, ed. F. Garber (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing, 1988), 82.
P. Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 7.
H. C. Robinson, ‘On the Spanish Revolution’, The London Review, 2.4 (1809), 231–75.
On the campaign narratives appearing in Britain during the Peninsular War, see N. Ramsey, The Military Memoir and Romantic Literary Culture, 1780–1835 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011), 33–41.
H. C. Robinson, ‘On the Spanish Revolution’, The London Review, 2.4 (1809), 273.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Neil Ramsey
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Ramsey, N. (2015). The Grievable Life of the War-Correspondent: The Experience of War in Henry Crabb Robinson’s Letters to The Times, 1808–1809. In: Downes, S., Lynch, A., O’Loughlin, K. (eds) Emotions and War. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374073_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-67705-4
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37407-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)