Abstract
This work seeks to illuminate the early years of the nineteenth century from the perspective of a wide-ranging cast of characters from across British society during the wars with France.
Jessop’s book almost exclusively covers the Napoleonic War (1803–1815), but it does include the final years of the French Revolutionary War (1792–1802) leading up to the Peace of Amiens, which serves to place the conflicts in the context that Britain (as this book’s focus) was expecting the peace to last and an already long war was over. Naturally, this was not so, and the war that was to follow into the second decade of the nineteenth century is documented from a number of perspectives, ranging from a Danish pilot employed by the Navy to a judge whose memories of the war serve as reminders of British identity in the years after the war has ended and the innovations of steam become more popular.
This is where the book’s first problem becomes clear, however, as it seems unable to decide what it wants to be and what kind of narrative it wants to weave. Each chapter begins from the perspective of one of the ‘characters’ that Jessop has created, no doubt to apply the broader strokes of the historical narrative to the lives of an individual. These characters are based in truth, we are told, although the reader will struggle to see reference to a real historical character, as the references and bibliography are often obscure and seem unrelated to the subject at hand. For example, Chapter Six concerns a man from the North Riding of Yorkshire who married an American girl after ‘the last war’, presumably the French Revolutionary War, but it could for all I know mean the American Revolutionary War (p.79). When asked why he travelled to America, the Yorkshireman says ‘Weren’t no work, see’, to which the interviewer, likely a recruiter for the Navy, replies ‘Likely story. Besides, once a subject, always a subject’ (ibid.). This is a quote, according to the footnote and bibliography, taken from Theodore Roosevelt’s The Naval War of 1812, published in 1882. This is problematic, as the source, whilst pertaining to the conflict it has been lifted from to dramatize, is far from primary, and is inappropriately used when building a historical narrative around a specific character, however obscure they may be in the historical record.
This demonstrates the largest concern I have with the book, as the blending of historical fiction with historical fact is mishandled, with characters seemingly pulled from the author’s imagination with limited basis in the primary source material on which it is supposedly based. However, this approach certainly has potential, and it is easy to see what the author hoped to achieve. By applying the larger historical narrative of key episodes in the wars with France, such as the Battle of Copenhagen of 1801 (Chapter One), to an individual story, such as the Danish pilot serving with the Royal Navy (pp. 1–6), the author seeks to go beyond a purely naval history of these oft-recounted conflicts to engage with the social and moral issues of war, such as the pilot’s feelings about fighting against his countrymen – a common occurrence during the wars with France. This approach aims to shed light on the lesser-heard stories of the conflict, beyond the officers and men of the Royal Navy, to better illuminate the challenges of these conflicts on other societal groups. The problem is that these individuals have little basis in fact and adequate referencing, being nothing more than archetypes, for which it seems dangerous to apply the story arcs that the author has devised without more rigorous source analysis. However, it is a promising approach, and if utilised in tandem with analysis of individuals with greater real-world basis in the historical record, could prove to be a fresh approach to humanising historical figures in microhistories fleshed out with fictional detail.
Unfortunately, the bibliography is worryingly out of date, with secondary sources exclusively taken from the years after the end of the war all the way up to Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire 1793-1812 (1902). Originally, I assumed this was designed to illustrate the Victorian view of the war and the formation of British identity, but given how sources such as Roosevelt, as discussed above, have been used, it seems instead that the author has instead paid little attention to the historiography, both in the nineteenth century, and more recently. There is no sign of consultation of landmark works from the last couple of decades, such as N. A. M. Rodger’s The Command of the Ocean (2004) or Roger Knight’s Britain Against Napoleon (2013), both works which have informed modern scholarship on the period in question and would have proven useful to help the author contextualise their work. Similarly, the adherence to secondary sources from the nineteenth century has worked to the detriment of the overall accuracy of Jessop’s work, with myths such as Nelson’s often-repeated raising of the telescope to his blind eye to ‘see’ Admiral Hyde Parker’s signal at the Battle of Copenhagen (p. 9), being completely mythological (see for example, Knight, The Pursuit of Victory, 2005, p. 379), much like the fiction that Napoleon Bonaparte was short (p. 131). Once again, the approach taken by Jessop has potential, however, as the application of Victorian historiography to the popular image of the war after its end could be an interesting perspective, especially in tandem with the modern scholarship.
Overall, the book can serve as an introductory text for the casual reader only just researching the Napoleonic period, although much of what the book covers has been addressed in greater detail by other authors. Therefore, the strength of this work is its application of these broader events to the individuals of the era, although that should also be used with caution due to the dubious nature of the truthfulness in the stories of these characters who apparently existed, but in obscurity. Its lack of originality in its recounting of the history behind it, and its adherence and perpetuation of myth let it down, but as a way to ease a new reader into the subject of the Napoleonic War, it is a good introduction.