Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century ed. by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry and Joanne Begiato (review)

The development of the internet has transformed research across the humanities by providing newly immediate and wide-ranging access to a world of archival material. At times, however, the sheer abundance of that material amplifies a long-standing scholarly challenge: does this archival wealth actually contribute to important new understandings of a field? Can it do more than confirm received wisdom, offer more than the pleasures of anecdotal detail?

Martial Masculinities: Experiencing and Imagining the Military in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Michael Brown, Anna Maria Barry, and Joanne Begiato, brings home this challenge, contributing to burgeoning interest in the social history of military life, which rarely figures centrally in long-standing historical preoccupation with military campaigns and strategy. Attention to the individual soldier’s experience naturally foregrounds norms of masculinity, particularly as they might conflict with those governing domestic life, and as they register the psychic pressures of military service. The most rewarding contributions to the volume address popular understandings of this service, which often obscured its harsher realities. Brown and Begiato’s chapter analyzes late-Victorian recruitment material depicting young and old soldiers together as embodying an array of values—national, moral, and martial—cast in familial terms as a masculine bond across generations. Barry’s study of the career of Charles Incledon, “a singing sailor on the Georgian Stage,” offers the volume’s most engaging study of “complex masculinity,” as this popular performer, who left the navy around 1783, came to be viewed as “at once a brave British Tar and a ridiculous Regency rake—a patriotic ballad singer, but also an effeminate showman” (83).

Attention to soldiers’ more personal experience, however, too often reiterates commonplace views, often by contesting phantom opinions—most notably the notion that military and domestic life were radically disjunctive, both socially and psychically. Thus a chapter on “martial masculinities and family feeling” declares, “The notion that soldiers miraculously forgot family as soon as they left British soil was clearly hyperbole” (38). Indeed, but who ever thought otherwise? “Maintaining a correspondence home,” we learn, was very important to soldiers on the front—as we might have guessed, since letter-writing is a staple of nearly every popular representation of modern warfare (where would war movies be without it?). But the author puts forth this truism to “unsettle the idea that soldiering automatically entailed a denial of family life” (40). We are offered no clear sources for this “idea.” Better to begin with the obvious—“thoughts of family and home routinely intruded into military men’s consciousness”—as a prelude to examining what the archives reveal about the peculiar stresses to which these thoughts responded (45).

Another chapter, “Recalling the Comforts of Home,” takes up this issue more directly, noting that “martial and civilian masculine identities were not as disparate as often supposed,” although again it would be helpful to have evidence of that supposition, since the chapter’s conclusions are unsurprising (60). Varieties of nostalgia in soldiers’ journals and correspondence “reinforced the emotional connection with his family back home” (72) and “receipt of material objects” was “an important coping mechanism” (73). This topic is richly treated in Holly Furneaux’s Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (2016), which deserves even more attention than it receives here.

Elsewhere, neglected material derives its significance through the treacherous strategy of argument from absence. An essay devoted to the leg of Lord Uxbridge, severed at Waterloo and accorded the peculiar tribute of a separate burial, focuses on the dearth of attention devoted to this distinctive grave. One might presume that commentators simply found the nobleman’s limb a less solemn affair than the graves of the many thousands of soldiers who perished in the Napoleonic wars. But no, the...