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O n e Aftereffects Wellington and Englishness W’ death diversified considerably the field of possibilities for imaginative investments in him. As Graham Dawson has observed, the death of military heroes in the nineteenth century inevitably resulted in a proliferation of ennobling narratives in which their deeds “were invested with the new significance of serving the country and glorifying its name. Their stories became myths of nationhood itself, providing a cultural focus around which the national community could cohere.”¹ The cogency of this double process of national investment and mythmaking depended, in large measure, on its articulation within a familiar typological framework, wherein the dead hero could be associated paradigmatically with national hopes and aspirations. In turn, its hegemony could be guaranteed only through the habitual exclusion of narratives that con- flicted with the national hero’s sanitized image, with his demonstrated worthiness as a subject for public veneration. An examination of Wellington’s discursive constitution in the posthumous literature can therefore begin with Thomas Hughes’s best-selling  You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. work of fiction, Tom Brown’s School Days (), a text that negotiates an exemplary type upon which the students of Rugby could pattern themselves . Hughes’s novel undertakes an analogical exercise, borrowing the concepts popularly used to describe one ideal character—the indomitable Wellington of Waterloo—for the description of another—the morally and physically robust public-school boy. This chapter sets Tom Brown’s apparently spontaneous assimilation of the Wellington legend alongside similar acts of deification in eulogies in the Illustrated London News, the Times, and Herbert Maxwell’s important Life of Wellington. It closes with some reflections on the politics of omission with reference to Harriette Wilson’s scurrilous, invariably neglected Memoirs of . The ways in which these authors exhume and enhance the legend of Wellington as, in Maxwell’s words, modern history’s “dominant personality”—and the ways in which they, in turn, are taken up or assiduously ignored by other writers—provide us with useful insights into the process of mythmaking itself. Long celebrated as Victorian fiction’s quintessential celebration of English manliness-in-embryo, Tom Brown’s School Days is a prominent voice within what Herbert Sussman has called the competition among multiple possibilities for male gender formation.² The novel is broadly acclaimed for making an important contribution to the philosophy of muscular Christianity, “the interrelated development of the individual’s physical and spiritual strength,”³ and it reads like a direct response to James Anthony Froude’s famous challenge to British authors to produce a particular breed of historical novel, “plain broad narratives of substantial facts, which rival legend in interest and grandeur.”⁴ Hughes’s narrator, himself “a devout Brown-worshiper” and an enthusiastic Old Boy, praises the Rugby prefect system developed under headmaster Thomas Arnold in the s, which rigorously prepared students for what Hughes calls “yeoman’s work”—able leadership at home and bold defense of empire abroad.⁵ As numerous critics of the novel have demonstrated, Arnold’s Rugby rapidly gained prominence in the Victorian imagination as an “unsurpassed institution of man-making” thanks to Hughes’s nostalgic reminiscences about his own years as a public-school boy.⁶ Tom Brown’s School Days, however, is of particular interest in the context of the present study for its occasional references to the Napoleonic  The Wake of Wellington You are reading copyrighted material published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press. Unauthorized posting, copying, or distributing of this work except as permitted under U.S. copyright law is illegal and injures the author and publisher. era. Published almost half a century after Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo , Hughes’s novel repeatedly represents public-school life as “a battle- field ordained from of old.” Arnold, a “tall, gallant form” with a “kindling eye,” is viewed by Brown’s comrades as a “fellow-soldier and the captain of their band.” A schoolhouse football match elicits battlefield imagery reminiscent of the nation’s victory against the French in Belgium:“Reckless of the defense of their own goal, on they [the opposing house team] came . . . straight for our goal, like the column of the Old Guard up the slope at Waterloo.” After winning the match, Tom and his chums indulge in a night’s singing.“The Siege of Seringapatam...

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