In The Crimean War and Its Afterlife: Making Modern Britain, Lara Kriegel offers a detailed account of the many and varied ways in which the Crimean War has functioned as a “palimpsest for British history” (10). She examines the “afterlife” of the conflict: the ways in which the war “resonates and accumulates in consensual and conflicting ways” across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries (5). In doing so, she propels this mid-Victorian war to the very center of historical and contemporary questions of belonging in Britain.
Kriegel has organized the book into three parts: “Persistence,” “Avatars,” and “Angels.” In each part she charts its titular theme across two chapters, though throughout the book persistence and avatars function as bywords for all of the afterlives under discussion and for the groups and individuals who came to embody the war's symbolism and key national values. In chapter 1, “The Adventurers,” Kriegel explores the meanings attached to the Crimea by successive waves of visitors. During the war, soldiers and tourists drew upon tropes first espoused in Anglophone accounts by early nineteenth-century travelers to bring the Crimea to life for an audience of “armchair warriors” (28), as individuals at war and at home sought to make sense of shifting European geopolitics, martial masculinities, and the justness of the conflict through wartime encounters. In the postwar years, reckoning with the aftermath of the conflict became central to returners’ narratives and persisted well into the twentieth century, as the Crimea was ravaged by two World Wars and played host to the Yalta Conference in 1945. While the proliferation of tourism in the later twentieth century offered Britons the chance to encounter the Crimea anew, the legends of the Crimean War continued to serve as a key lure and a bridge to an imagined past.
In chapter 2, “The Dutiful,” Kriegel turns to the participants of the charge of the Light Brigade. These men were adopted as special heroes among war veterans and were framed as the embodiment of apparently quintessential English values—duty foremost among them. Successive endeavors by individuals, the media, and businesses to connect to the chargers’ legacy have both upheld and caricaturized narratives of the chargers’ heroism, from the “bid for belonging in a sanctified national past at a moment of imperial decline” (79) that characterized one 1968 biography of one of the chargers, to the “kitschy bottoms of mass culture” (85) that the charge descended to in the wake of Tony Richardson's feature film, released in the same year. Nevertheless, the chargers have functioned as persistent, if malleable, repositories of national mythology and symbolism.
In part two, Kriegel explores the “staying power” (90) of the Victoria Cross, tracing its lasting association with the values of duty and heroism, first formulated during the Crimean War. Introduced with an egalitarian ethos, the Victoria Cross nevertheless became a status symbol and denoted belonging to an exclusive fellowship. Its power over the popular imagination, however, came from its ability to subsume military violence within tales of heroism and, crucially, morality and good character that could reflect the present moment. It became a political “tool of unity” (103), symbolizing ideals of Britishness, monarchy, and imperial cohesion. It also denoted an attempt by the state and by monarchs to uphold these ideals over the course of the twentieth century, amid a changing society and fracturing empire.
In chapter 4, “The Custodians,” Kriegel considers the care of soldiers’ graves. Amid the collective grief that the war occasioned and framed by the Victorian ideal of “the good death” (125), the custodianship of war graves provides an important lens on mid-Victorian ideas of masculinity and British foreign affairs. Soldiers forged a “shared culture of suffering” (130) with those at home through their care toward the dead, and sentimentality and tenderness emerged as key components of martial masculinity. Debates surfaced over where responsibility for the care for the dead lay, and the gradual intervention of the state in the preservation of war graves positioned the Crimean War as “a transition point in the maintenance of death” (124–25) between the mass graves of the Napoleonic Wars and the establishment of the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission.
Florence Nightingale is the focus of chapter 5, “The Heroine.” Kriegel considers Nightingale as an “avatar of womanhood in many forms” (162) across the centuries. Her actual wartime labor—with its demand for ability, courage, and leadership—challenged the gendered boundaries of heroism, but the media, writers, and postwar examples of material and visual culture often affirmed her femininity for consumption as a domestic idyll. After the war, weakened by illness, she spent much of her life as a recluse. Despite her continued work to improve medical care, her Crimean legend only grew in strength throughout her absence in public life and particularly upon the occasion of her death in 1910. Mourning her became a “shared civic and emotional project” (177), bridging social boundaries and two centuries with a narrative that fused Nightingale with British history, memory, and character. Later, attempts to understand the so-called real Nightingale saw her lauded further by some while her legend was questioned by others, notably Lytton Strachey in his Eminent Victorians (1918). Depictions of Nightingale throughout the subsequent decades increasingly underlined that she was “very much a woman of her age, even as she towered over it” (184). For nurses, Nightingale was adopted as a pliable figurehead with an international reach as a foremother well into the 1990s, tethering modern Britain to its Victorian roots in a narrative of progress. By the millennium, however, “the nursing profession itself . . . dealt Nightingale a decisive blow” (198) as her middle-English persona was deemed unrepresentative of the many ethnic groups whom the profession relied upon.
It is on this note that Kriegel turns to Mary Seacole in chapter 6, “The Foremother.” Seacole stood as a different kind of foremother to Nightingale. She was adopted as such among members of the nursing profession through local movements from the 1970s, and her reclamation subsequently gained in pace; she was originally promoted as a “Black Florence Nightingale” (201). But in the twenty-first century, for society more broadly, Seacole's own careful self-fashioning in her autobiography, past efforts toward her rediscovery, her struggles, and her successes found new recognition, particularly with the discovery of her portrait and its unveiling at the National Portrait Gallery in 2005. She was a “figure worthy of national stewardship . . . and an exemplar addressing community needs” (226). This point was not reached without significant debate, for Seacole was and is “at once, a vector of controversy and a vehicle for inclusion” (220), as are the ways in which she framed herself and the ways in which she has been framed for different communities as a Black woman, a caregiver, a writer, and an entrepreneur. But through those same framings, Seacole has the capacity to prompt reassessments of history and of society, and to stand as an icon for a multiethnic Britain.
The afterword is compelling, as Kriegel traces the renewed vigor with which the Crimean War reverberated amid the politics and events of the year 2020. Through Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter movement, the language of duty, the image of Nightingale as a national leader, and the significance of Mary Seacole in promoting reassessments of British history and society again found forceful—and controversial—expression. The Crimean War lives on as Britons negotiate change and disruption through reference to another shared experience of trauma and to the lasting, if pliable, values and figures whom that trauma seared into the national consciousness.
