FIGHTING WORDS: TWO PROLETARIAN MILITARY NOVELS OF THE CRIMEAN PERIOD

Extract

About a decade after Waterloo, there arose in England a subgenre of fiction that can be called the military novel. George Robert Gleig is credited with originating the genre with a fictionalized autobiography entitled The Subaltern, which appeared serially in Blackwood's Magazine in 1825 and was subsequently published as a book. Military memoirs were appearing from soon after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the military novel was an outgrowth of that literature. Many of the authors of military novels had themselves served in the army, but the most notable of them all, Charles Lever, had not been a military man, though he consorted with officers often enough. Beginning with The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, which was serialized first and then appeared as a single volume in 1839, Lever produced a string of popular novels about the army, with young officers as their heroes. The novels of this subgenre concentrated on officers, though there are amusing rankers, that is, enlisted soldiers, as well in Lever's novels likely to be clever Irishmen. For the most part, though, rankers are background figures and have largely stereotypical lower class ways. There are obligatory romance and inheritance plots in these narratives, with the hero usually ending up married and with an estate of his own, either through direct inheritance, or the discovery of a hitherto unknown fortune. This genre lasted about fifteen years, petering out by mid-century.