Ordinary Claims: War, Work, Service, and the Victorian Veteran

Analyzing a selection of memoirs by Victorian veterans along with journalistic, medical, and administrative accounts, this essay traces the languages of labor and service, reward and sacrifice, self-interest and community that shaped how writers related war to ordinary, everyday experience. In negotiating these languages, the memoirs register grievance, as their authors make claims on their communities and assert continuity between military and nonmilitary life. An extended reading of Mary Seacole's self-positioning as a veteran in Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) suggests the ways in which the figure of the veteran points toward a horizon of collective responsibility, gesturing beyond the languages of labor and service that enable and restrain its claims. Finally, I argue that the ordinariness of Victorian veterans' stories of labor, service, and mutual obligation may afford us a refreshed vision of the politics of the common good today.