5 - Thomas Hamilton’s Wordsworthian Novel of War

Summary

In the post-Waterloo era a large body of military tales were published in Britain that recounted veterans’ experiences of the Napoleonic Wars for the general reading public. Chapter 5 examines Thomas Hamilton’s The Youth and Manhood of Cyril Thornton (1827), a fictionalised treatment of the author’s military service. This chapter argues for the central importance of Cyril Thornton not only in inaugurating the genre of military novel, but also for its formative role in the rise of modern war novels more broadly. While war novels are traditionally associated with soldier-authors of the First World War, Hamilton’s novel was nonetheless the first to offer what Paul Fussell views as the basis of all modern war stories – the reformulation of the romance of war around the physical survival of the soldier. By narrating the traumatic tale of the junior military officer, the novel may have quite literally enabled a subaltern to speak, but the novel also simultaneously reduces the officer to a suffering body in ways that reveal the total hold of a militarized biopower over discourses of war, a bio-aesthetics that has continued to reverberate across modern war writing.