British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community

2 Women Poets during the War Years

c h a p t e r t w o Women Poets during the War Years 1212 The Culture of War From 1 February 1793 through 18 June 1815, Britain was almost continually at war, except for the brief period from 25 March 1802 to 18 May 1803 that marked the ill-fated Peace of Amiens. The rest of these twenty-two-plus years witnessed a succession of variously configured coalitions ranged first against Revolutionary France and subsequently against Napoleon’s expanding empire. By 1811, as noted in chapter 1, England stood on the brink of collapse. Battling on virtually alone against France, beset at home by social turmoil and a deepening economic crisis, poised for a new war with the United States, and doubly blasted by having an apparently irreversibly mad king and a throne occupied by his despised eldest son, the nation was indeed in perilous straits. The government had from the start routinely encouraged public displays of nationalism to strengthen both its hand and those of the economic interests who stood to gain the most from war profiteering. Throughout the nation, particularly after the government had begun exploiting people’s fears of a French invasion, the public pageant of warmaking took on a theatricality that Linda Colley has described as “sad and revealing” (308). Many men were drawn to military service, despite the obvious risks, by the sheer excitement of going off to defeat Boney, whom innumerable caricature prints and anti-Napoleonic harangues alike had convinced them would be no match for them: To them, coming forward to defend Great Britain offered a brief chance to attempt something big, some slight opportunity to escape drudgery and mundane obligations and become for a time a person who mattered. . . . For a brief time, they could imagine themselves what so many folklore heroes were—doers of daring deeds, men of destiny, winners not losers. And they relished it. (308) Women Poets during the War Years 79 Driven as it was after 1803 by fear of invasion, British volunteerism swelled; the cause was defense of home and family, nation and heritage. Unlike those troops who had been shipped off to foreign soil in campaigns of liberation, these men saw themselves as the nation’s last line of defense, and they were prepared to fight to the end: We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.1 This was Winston Churchill a century and a half later, but Romantic-era Britons saw the issues in virtually the same way; only the opponent was different. Nationalistic fervor became street theater. The Tory government built public support by continuing to whip up Francophobia as it had done since the Revolution . This exercise in social control was not without consequences for women, since reactionary moralists and politicians alike had criticized women’s interest in public policy and political action as an “unnatural” reflection of their French sisters’ objectionable involvement in revolutionary politics. Thus writers like Richard Polwhele, Thomas Gisborne, and Hannah More insisted on the separation of gender spheres to maintain both political stability and moral order in the nation.2 Women had an appropriate role to play in the nation’s defense, according to conventional thinking, but that role was an extension of their traditionally gendered roles as wives, mothers , and nursemaids, as in the case of the many women who formed “committees of clothing” to provide for the troops’ needs. But even such activities had far-reaching consequences, for in caring for the needs of military men who were neither spouses nor relatives “women demonstrated that their domestic virtues possessed a public as well as a private relevance,” which lent their activities a distinctly civic role (Colley , 261). Women also participated in the many propagandistic public ceremonies and pageants designed to serve as conspicuous manifestations of national resolve. Over sixty thousand citizens attended a “military festival” that included both men and...