4 - The Crimean War: Helping the Women Left Behind

Summary

The Crimean War Was The First of two mid-century cataclysms which aroused strong reactions in Britain, and which brought increased insecurity and anxiety to soldiers’ wives, whether they were in the conflict zones or at home in the British Isles. This war, which, for the British, lasted from 1854 to 1856, and the Uprising in India, that followed hard on its heels in 1857–58, had a sharp impact on the ways in which soldiers and their wives were perceived by the British public. In the Crimean War, the common soldier was valorised for the first time, and people rapidly came to think that such heroes selflessly serving the nation's interests were owed a moral debt, which could be honoured through supporting the families they left behind. This necessarily involved recasting the image of the soldier's wife, although new understandings were often as out of touch with reality as the prewar discourse which had denigrated these women as drunken termagants. Support for soldiers’ families by the British public was not entirely altruistic, however, since such assistance was almost the only practical vehicle through which the latter could express its hyper-patriotism in the early period of this initially very popular war. In this chapter, the focus will be on the ways in which families left behind were assisted after troops departed for the East in 1854. The next chapter will concentrate on how soldiers’ wives and their children actually coped – those left behind in the British Isles, those who went with their regiments to the East during the Crimean War, and the British women and children caught in conflict zones during the Uprising.

While the Crimean War had a dramatic impact on the ways in which soldiers and their wives were seen by the British public, some of the shifts lasted only as long as the conflict. As noted, this war was, at its outset, immensely popular, since it seemed to pit liberal, freedom-loving Britain against Russia's brutal autocracy. Swept up in a vortex of hyper-patriotism, the public came to see the country's soldiers in a new light. In the first half of the nineteenth century they had been characterised as licentious, irresponsible, and brutal. With the coming of the first major European war in thirty-nine years, however, the image of soldiers was recast. They were now ‘crusaders in the cause of right’, ‘Christian soldiers fighting righteous wars’.