Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination This page intentionally left blank Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination

Philip Shaw Q Philip Shaw 2002 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2002 978-0-333-99435-1 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. MacmillanT is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-43236-3 ISBN 978-0-230-51346-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230513464

This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataShaw, Philip. Waterloo and the Romantic imagination / Philip Shaw. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-349-43236-3 1. English literatureÐ19th centuryÐHistory and criticism. 2. Waterloo (Belgium), Battle of, 1815, in literature. 3. Napoleonic Wars, 1800±1815Ð Literature and the wars. 4. Napoleonic wars, 1800±1815ÐArt and the wars. 5. Waterloo (Belgium), Battle of, 1815, in art. 6. RomanticismÐGreat Britain. 7. Battles in literature. 8. War in literature. I. Title. PR468.W38 S53 2002 820.90358Ðdc21 2001059842 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 32 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Contents

List of Illustrations vii Preface and Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations xiii

Introduction: the Return of Waterloo 1 States of War 6 Victory sublime! 9 The Wound 19 1 Walter Scott: the Discipline of History 35 The Vansittart of verse 35 The wounded horseman 39 The spirit of contested lands 48 The dance of death 53 Coda: forging The Antiquary 61

2 Exhibiting War: Battle Tours and Panoramas 67 The regimented gaze 71 Unlimiting the bounds of painting 78 `The perfect disciplinary apparatus' 83

3 Southey's Vision of Command 92 La Belle Alliance 92 A poet's fame 97 `Upon the field of blood' 101 `Now, said my heavenly teacher, all is clear!' 105

4 Coleridge: the Imagination at War 114 Beating the retreat 114 Strange explosions 120 A state of peace 130

5 Wordsworth's Abyss of Weakness 140 The pleasures of war 140 The pure intent 144 Poetizing the political 147 Contesting visions 155 Binding the work 162

v vi Contents

6 `For Want of a Better Cause': Lord Byron's War with Posterity 165 Napoleon's farewell 167 The trumpet of a prophecy 172 Glory's dream unriddled 175 The spoiler's art 178 Conclusion 192 Contested pleasures 194 Women in war 196 Beyond Waterloo 203 War! What is it good for? 209

Notes 212 Bibliography 242 Index 253 List of Illustrations

1 J. M. W. Turner, The Field of Waterloo, oil on canvas, 1818. Copyright # Tate, London 2001. 23 2 J. L. H. BellangeÂ, La Garde meurt et ne se rend pas!, oil on canvas. Cliche BibliotheÁque nationale de France, Paris. 27 3 Sir Charles Bell, soldier with missing arm, lying on his side, grasping a rope, inscribed `XIII, Waterloo . . . ', watercolour, `11 Aug.' 1815. Copyright # Wellcome Library, London, by kind permission of the Trustees of the Army Medical Services Museum. 40 4 Sir Charles Bell, soldier suffering from a head wound, part of his scalp shaved, watercolour, 1815. Copyright # Wellcome Library, London, by kind permission of the Trustees of the Army Medical Services Museum. 41 5 Sir Charles Bell, arm wound, 1815, inscribed `XII Waterloo', watercolour, 1815. Copyright # Wellcome Library, London, by kind permission of the Trustees of the Army Medical Services Museum. 42 6 Unattributed, Bonaparte's Observatory, To View the Battle of Waterloo, June 18, 1815, engraving, London 1819. Christopher Kelly, History of the French Revolution, 2 vols. London: Thomas Kelly, 1819. University of Leicester Library. 69 7 J. C. Stadler, after E. Walsh, La Belle Alliance, taken on the Spot, th June 25 , hand-coloured aquatint, London 1815. The Repository of Arts, 14. London, 1815. Plate 20: `La Belle Alliance'. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 70 8 Robert Mitchell, A Section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square, coloured aquatint with etching and engraving, London 1801. Robert Mitchell, Plans and Views in Perspective of Buildings Erected in England and Scotland. London 1801. Plate 14: `A Section of the Rotunda in Leicester Square'. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 84 9 Jeremy Bentham, Section of an Inspection House, watercolour, 1787, Bentham Mss. 119. University College London Library. 86

vii viii List of Illustrations

10 John Burnet, after Henry Aston Barker, Explanation of the Battle of Waterloo, painted by Mr. Henry Aston Barker, woodcut, London 1817. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 87 11 Bell [?], Entrance to Hougoumont, engraving, London 1816. Robert Southey, The Poet's Pilgrimage to Waterloo. London: Longman, 1816. 104 12 George Cruikshank, Making Decent!!, engraving, London 1822. Copyright # The British Museum, London. 198 Preface and Acknowledgements

July 17th, Monday, Brussels. A very hot morning . . . Departed at a quarter past eleven for Namur by the way of Waterloo . . . the wide fields were covered with luxuriant crops, ± just as they had been before the battles, except that now the corn was nearly ripe, and then it was green. We stood upon grass, and corn fields where heaps of our countrymen lay buried beneath our feet. There was little to be seen; but much to be felt, ± sorrow and sadness, and even some- thing like horror breathed out of the ground as we stood upon it! . . . The ruins of Hougamont had been riddled away since the battle, and the injuries done to the farm-house repaired. Even these cir- cumstances, natural and trivial as they were, suggested melancholy thoughts, by furnishing grounds for a charge of ingratitude against the course of things, that was thus hastily removing from the spot all vestiges of so momentous an event. Feeble barriers against this tendency are the few frail memorials erected in different parts of the field of battle! and we could not but anticipate the time, when through the flux and reflux of war, to which this part of the Con- tinent has always been subject, or through some turn of popular passion, these should fall; and `Nature's universal robe of green, humanity's appointed shroud', enwrap them: ± and the very names of those whose valour they record be cast into shade, if not obliterated even in their own country, by the exploits of recent favourites in future ages.1

As historical commentators are fond of reminding us, the battle of Water- loo, fought on 18 June 1815, brought to a dramatic close one of the lengthi- est periods of conflict in the history of Western Europe. When a few days later news of the Allied victory over Napoleon reached London, the effect was electric: heads of state wept, official business was suspended and crowds thronged the streets; some, like the artist Benjamin Robert Haydon, read and reread Lord Wellington's Despatch, hoping to find, in the words on the page, a focus for their wildest imaginings. The battle had brought to an end some 22 years of conflict, a period which forged the idea of the nation, as Linda Colley observes. Yet, like many an ending, the long anticipated relief ± from the labour of antagonism, the effort of defining oneself against the hostile Other ± was accompanied by unexpected feelings of grief, disappointment and melancholy. In the wake of Waterloo, one might say, the nation was forced to confront the possibility that wartime alone supplied the condi-

ix x Preface and Acknowledgements tions for the assertion of unanimity; the peace, as Haydon and countless other commentators were to discover, did not mark the restoration of civil society, because the idea of civil society, as the revolution debate confirmed, could not be substantiated. Understood in this way, the war against France was precipitated and sustained by a legitimation crisis. So what of the aftermath of war? The melancholy that Waterloo arouses in its Romantic commentators is evident in Dorothy Wordsworth's account, quoted above. Visiting the field with her brother in 1820, Dorothy is struck by how time and nature conspire to erase the specificity of Waterloo; five years have passed and an event premised on the cessation of conflict and the establishment of pacific or `normal change' shows every sign of giving way 2 to the flux and reflux of war. As Dorothy attests, war, like Nature (the quotation here is taken from The Excursion), abhors a vacuum; the end of history is thus from a Romantic point of view unthinkable and perhaps undesirable. Faced with this problem at the close of the campaign, British observers registered equal amounts of pleasure and pain; the battle was Sublime ± this was to become a frequent figure in Waterloo discourse ± precisely because it exceeded, even as it generated, the ascription of narra- tive closure. The sublimity of Waterloo was felt at numerous levels: from the bewilder- ment of the radical press to the triumphalist bellows of Lord Castlereagh and the Waterloo `bards'. Only, it seems, by rereading and representing, could the significance of the event be brought into the purview of symbolic understanding. Yet something of Waterloo remains to trouble this endeav- our, prompting a number of writers and artists ± from the pro- establishment Scott and Southey, to the oppositional Leigh Hunt and Lord Byron and the equivocal Turner ± to give voice to the fragility of the post-bellum consen- sus. The question that is posed by the end of war, and to which these writers and artists respond, is this: how does a wartime state, parlayed into unanim- ity through mutual distrust of the enemy, address the exposure of the absent or impossible totality that is pre-war and postwar society? How, in other words, should we live in the aftermath of victory/defeat? In postwar British culture the anxiety on which this question is founded exhibits itself in a number of ways, from the ambivalent presence of the dead and wounded soldier in paintings, sketches and guidebooks to the unbidden melancholy of the first official `thanksgivings'. But it is in the work of the Romantic poets that ideas of nationhood, authority and the relations between violence and identity are most severely tested. It is the argument of this book that the Waterloo writings of Scott, Southey, Coler- idge, Wordsworth and Byron speak volubly of the impossibility of private and public imaginings; to hear this voice again we must reflect in turn on our current preoccupation with the limits of culture and the ends of war. Preface and Acknowledgements xi

It is always difficult to give due acknowledgement, not least when the debts one owes are so numerous and run so deep. My sense of indebtedness is compounded by my sense of the quirkiness of this book's evolution. The idea of Waterloo as a subject for inquiry emerged during the final stages of a PhD thesis at the University of Liverpool in the late 1980s. It was not, however, until 1994, following an informal conversation with Nicholas Roe, that the idea of writing a book about Waterloo and Romanticism began to take shape. I am grateful to him for accepting publication of an explora- tory essay on this topic in the first issue of Romanticism. During this period, I benefited considerably from the inspiration and guidance of Vincent Newey; his work on the Romantic poets is never far from my thoughts. I am thankful to him for support at every stage of the way. I wish to extend thanks to the following colleagues and friends at the University of Leicester: William Myers, Mark Rawlinson and Greg Walker of the Department of English for reading and commenting on parts of the manuscript; Alison Yarrington and Geoff Quilley of the Department of the History of Art for helpful contributions and generous assistance; Susan Pearce, past Director of the Department of Museum Studies, for guidance on the material culture of Waterloo. I am grateful to the contributors of Romantic Wars, especially Simon Bainbridge, David Collings, Diego Saglia and Eric C. Walker, for pointing my thoughts in the right direction. I would like to thank Steve Boulter, in particular for help and advice during the preparation of the final version of the text. Peter Foster, of the National School Hucknall, guided me at a time when I began to think seriously about the study of literature: with patience and good humour he taught me how to read. In this respect I am grateful also to Geoff Ward: discussions with him at the University of Liverpool helped shape my appreciation of poetry and taught me much about critical thought. My research was supported by travel grants from the Department of English and the Faculty of Arts at the University of Leicester. I acknowledge this assistance with gratitude, and wish to extend my thanks to the staff of the following libraries and institutions: the BibliotheÁque nationale de France, Paris; the British Library; the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, especially David Rhodes; Leicester University Library; University College London Library; the staff of the Yale Center for British Art, especially Scott B. Wilcox; the Library of the Wellcome Institute; the Prints and Drawings Rooms at Tate Britain; Captain (Retd) P. H. Starling of the Army Medical Services Museum. I want especially to thank Eleanor Birne and Becky Mashayekh at Palgrave Publishers for easing the transition from MS to print with efficiency and care. I also thank the anonymous Palgrave reader for his thoughtful evaluation of the manuscript. Parts of the intro- duction and parts of Chapter 5 appeared as `Leigh Hunt and the Aesthetics of Post-War Liberalism' in Romantic Wars, ed. Philip Shaw (Aldershot: Ash- gate, 2000), pp. 185±207 and `Commemorating Waterloo: Wordsworth, xii Preface and Acknowledgements

Southey, and ``The Muses' Page of State'' ', in Romanticism, I, 1 (1995), 50±67. By permission of Ashgate Publishers and the editors of Romanticism.A version of Chapter 3 was published as `Displacing Waterloo: Southey's Vision of Command', in Placing and Displacing Romanticism, ed. Peter J. Kitson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 106±28. By permission of Ashgate Publishers. Thanks are due to the following colleagues and friends whose kind sup- port and advice have buoyed me along: David Amigoni, David Appleby, Ashley Armstrong, Bernard Beatty, Stephen C. Behrendt, Adrian Berry, Fred Botting, Gordon Campbell, Ashley Chantler, Stephen Cheeke, Michael Davies, M. C. Drak, Steven Earnshaw, Nicholas Everett, Timothy Fulford, Jerome de Groot, Martin Halliwell, Keith Hanley, Clare Hanson, Angie Ken- dall, Peter J. Kitson, Jacqueline M. Labbe, Sue Lloyd, Ian Maclachlan, Philip Martin, Elisa Milkes, Jeanne Moskal, Brian Nellist, Stephen Prickett, Sharon Ruston, Joanne Shattock, Peter Smith, Jane Stabler, Martin Stannard, Helen Stoddart, Mark Storey, Elaine Treharne, Timothy Webb, Mark Weber, Nigel Wood, Duncan Wu. Above all, I want especially to thank my wife Louise and our daughters Betty and Olive, a loving family whose shared eccentricities help me stay on the good foot. This book is dedicated to them, and to my parents Keith and Sybil Shaw, who made it all possible. Abbreviations

BL Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols, eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, Bollingen Series. London: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1983. BLJ Byron's Letters and Journals, 12 vols, ed. Leslie Marchand. London: John Murray, 1973±82. CL Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 6 vols, ed. E. L. Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956±71. CN Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge,6 vols, ed. Kathleen Coburn. New York: Pantheon Books, 1957±73. EoT Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Essays on His Times ± in The Morning Post and The Courier, 3 vols, ed. David V. Erdman, Bollingen Series. London: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1978. F Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, 2 vols, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, Bollingen Series. London: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1969. HCW The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, 21 vols, ed. P. P. Howe. London: J. M. Dent, 1930±34. LCRS Life and Correspondence of the Late Robert Southey, 6 vols, ed. Rev. Charles Cuthbert Southey. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1850. LoL Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808±1819 on Literature, 2 vols, ed. R. A. Foakes, Bollingen Series. London: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1987. LoPR Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1795 on Politics and Religion, eds Lewis Patton and Peter Mann, Bollingen Series. London: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1971. LS Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White, Bollingen Series. London: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1972. LWS Letters of Walter Scott, 12 vols, ed. H. J. C Grierson. London: Constable, 1932±57.

xiii xiv Abbreviations

MY I The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, Part I, 1806±1811, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edn revised Mary Moorman. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. MY II The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years, Part II, 1812±1820, ed. E. de Selincourt, 2nd edn revised Mary Moorman and Alan G. Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. NLRS New Letters of Robert Southey, 2 vols, ed. Kenneth Curry. New York and London: Columbia University Press, 1965. SiR Studies in Romanticism TWC The Wordsworth Circle W Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Watchman, ed. Lewis Patton, Bollingen Series. London: Routledge and Princeton University Press, 1970.