10 - The eighteenth century and the romantics on war

Summary

All literary production in the “long” eighteenth century (1688-1832) was, to varying degrees, engaged with the subject of war. Most of the major writers of the period in the British Isles and Ireland, ranging from Swift to Austen, from Pope to Barbauld, addressed the topic of war, either directly or indirectly. Beyond what is now recognized as the literary canon, the preoccupation with war is even more striking. This is apparent in Roger Lonsdale's groundbreaking New Oxford Book of Eighteenth Century Verse (1984), which highlighted the representation of battle and the experiences of the military and their dependents as persistent themes in what Lonsdale described as a “submerged” tradition - the work of minor poets and contributors to newspapers and journals. The major conflicts of the period were registered by an outpouring of such verse, which supplemented the role of official dispatches and private communications to constitute the “news” of war for readers at home. M. John Cardwell has noted the importance of an “explosion” of such literature - “ballads, ephemeral verse, prose satire and prints” - in the shaping of public opinion during the Seven Years War (1756-63), while Betty T. Bennett located 1,360 texts for her edition of the war poetry of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). Earlier conflicts were not exceptional in this respect: the Duke of Marlborough's successes in the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-13) were commemorated in more than forty poems.