Abstract
In a letter of 1810 Lady Harriet Elliot, daughter of Lord Minto, turned her thoughts to the campaign in the Iberian peninsula, in which many of her acquaintances were engaged. ‘If the Spanish Business has been unprofitable in other respects’, she observed:
it has at least given an opportunity to many of our young men to leave Bond Street and Newmarket and see a little of the world, and I should think that traveling into a Country so new to everyone as the greater part of Spain at a time when their attention & interest is excited by the Scenes that have been passing there, would be more useful to a young man, than a winter at Paris or Vienna was formerly.1
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Notes
On the role of travel in the construction of identities see Brian Dolan, Exploring European Frontiers: British Travellers in the Age of Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000);
Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).
Samuel Broughton, Letters from Portugal, Spain and France, 1812–1814 (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005 [1815]).
On the popularity of travel literature see St Clair, Reading Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 233–4.
George Robert Gleig, The Subaltern: A Chronicle of the Peninsular War (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2001 [1825]), 129.
See Charles Edsaile, The Peninsular War (London: Penguin, 2003), 20–1.
The term ‘contact zone’ is borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt. Though she uses it to refer to the spaces of colonial encounter, it can also be usefully applied to British-European encounters in this period. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 6.
George Rosen, ‘Nostalgia: a “Forgotten” Psychological disorder’, Psychological Medicine, 5 (1975), 340–54;
Andrew Duncan, Medical Commentaries… Collected and Published by Andrew Duncan (London and Edinburgh, 1787), 343–9.
See Charles Chambers, ‘Journal of Remarkable Occurrences on board His Majesty’s Fireship the Prometheus’, 29 August 1807. BL, Add MS, 37014. Anon., Memoirs of a Sergeant (Stroud: Nonsuch, 2005 [1835]), 154.
Jeremy Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud: Sutton, 2003), 76–7.
Walter Scott quoted in Diego Saglia, ‘War Romances, Historical Analogies and Coleridge’s Letters on the Spaniards’, in Philip Shaw (ed.), Romanticism and War: Studies in Culture and Conflict, 1793–1822 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 142.
On dirt as a symbolic signifier of otherness see Adeline Masquelier, ‘Dirt, Undress and Difference: An Introduction’, in Adeline Masquelier (ed.), Dirt, Undress and Difference: Critical Perspectives on the Body’s Surface (Bloomington Ind.: Indiana UP, 2005), 6.
On anti-Catholicism and the Gothic novel see Robert Miles, ‘Europhobia: The Catholic Other in Horace Walpole and Charles Maturin’, in Avril Horner (ed.), European Gothic (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002).
Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam; Atlanta GA: Rodopi, 2000), 40–52
Charles O’Neill, Private O’Neil: The Recollections of an Irish Rogue (Leonaur, 2007 [1851]), 104.
George Woodberry, ‘Idle Companion’, 8 March 1813. NAM, 6807–267, 49.
See J.G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985).
Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), 24–5.
Jonathan Leach, Rough Sketches of an Old Soldier (London, 1831), xi–xii.
Michael Durey (ed.), Andrew Bryson’s Ordeal: An Epilogue to the 1798 Rebellion (Cork: Cork UP 1998), 81–3.
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth- Century Culture (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 3–6.
John Millyard (ed.), Fiddlers and Whores: The Candid Memoirs of a Surgeon in Nelson’s Fleet by James Lowry (London: Chatham, 2006), 39, 84.
Thomas Walsh, Journal of the Late Campaign in Egypt: Including Descriptions of that Country (London, 1803), 235.
Donald Malcolm Reid, Whose Pharaohs? Archaeology, Museums and Egyptian National Identity from Napoleon to World War I (Berkeley, CA; London: University of California Press, 2002), 31.
Eitan Bary-Yosef, ‘”Green and Pleasant Lands”: England and the Holy Land in Plebeian Millenarian Culture, 1790–1820’, in Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 16601840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 260–80.
Lowry, Memoirs, 64. On the shifting emphasis in European constructions of the East from religious to more secular markers of difference see M.E. Yapp, ‘Europe in the Turkish Mirror’, Past & Present, 137 (November, 1992), 134–55, 152.
On aristocratic cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth century see Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism (New York: St Martin’s, 1987), 21–47;
Robin Eagles, Francophilia in English Society, 1748–1815 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000).
See Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven; London: Yale UP, 2006), 27–38.
J ohn Wardell (ed.), With ‘The Thirty-Second’ in the Peninsular and other Campaigns by Harry Ross-Lewins of Ross Hill, Co. Clare (Dublin, 1904), 220.
The impact of demobilization remains an understudied area, some suggestion of the hardship and poverty experienced by disbanded soldiers and sailors can be found in Douglas Hay, ‘War, Dearth and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts’, Past and Present, 95 (May 1982), 117–60, 139–40.
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© 2013 Catriona Kennedy
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Kennedy, C. (2013). Travellers in Uniform. In: Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316530_5
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