Introduction: Waterloo and Its Afterlife in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical and Newspaper Press

On June 18, 1815, three armies confronted each other on a large plain fifteen kilometers to the south of Brussels between the villages of Waterloo, Braine L’Alleud (Eigenbrakel), and Plancenoit. The commanding officers on the allied side were the Duke of Wellington and Prince Blücher, whose armies represented six nations; the leader on the French side was Napoleon Bonaparte. At the end of that day, the battle of Waterloo was to be remembered as one of the greatest victories in British history.

This year, the bicentenary of Waterloo was commemorated alongside the centenary of the battle of Ieper and the sexcentenary of the battle of Agincourt. Much of what we know about Waterloo was passed on to us through the medium of the press. But curiously enough, World War I seems to have nearly obliterated the memory of this defining battle—so much so that even a large proportion of the British population now believes that Wellington was defeated at Waterloo.¹ This may be on account of the English expression “to meet your Waterloo,” meaning “to meet your defeat.” However, in 1815 and over the course of the nineteenth century, Waterloo was seen as a glorious victory over the French, and Wellington was viewed as its superhuman hero.

In the village of Waterloo, the place that gave its name to the battle, the event has never been forgotten. The house where the Duke of Wellington established his headquarters is now a small museum. In one of its most striking rooms, visitors are shown how Wellington, the day after the battle, sat down to write his report for the Times. Today, tourists can buy a facsimile of the Times issue containing the dispatch. Wellington’s decision to publicize his victory highlights the importance of the press in the early nineteenth century. In this issue of VPR, we have gathered a selection of essays that demonstrate the impact of the battle of Waterloo on the nineteenth-century press. What these papers reveal about the press and its contemporary readers is a rich, complex, and at times surprising engagement with questions of politics, national identity, and genre.

As Philip Shaw writes in Waterloo and the Romantic Imagination (2002), “Waterloo was perceived . . . from the outset, as a mythic event occurring outside the texture of documentary or annualized history.”² Fittingly, then, we turn first to poetry as an attempt to gauge what was understood to be the battle’s deeper mythic or spiritual significance. Marysa Demoor’s “Waterloo as a Small ‘Realm of Memory’: British Writers, Tourism, and the Periodical Press” reveals that the “matter of Waterloo” could take on any number of guises in verse and was duly enshrined in epic, for instance, as early as 1816 with Henry Davidson’s Waterloo: A Poem and David Home Buchan’s The Battle of Waterloo: A Poem. Tennyson also got in on the act—much later, of course, and in more elegiac, if not epic, form with his “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (1852), the first separately published work he produced as poet laureate. For Tennyson, Wellington was a model of measured, hopeful progress, “moderate, resolute, / Whole in himself, a common good,” whose victory at Waterloo was his crowning act of civic patience: “So great a soldier taught us there / What long-enduring hearts could do / In that world-earthquake, Waterloo!”³ Drawing on Pierre Nora’s concept of the “realm of memory,” Demoor zeroes in on verse inspired by visiting the scene of the battle itself, exploring the unique ways that this specific kind of poetic discourse supported the myth-making work of British identity. Some of the most notable poets of the early nineteenth century—including Walter Scott, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth—made Waterloo the subject of travel poetry, as would Byron, more famously, if less patriotically, in the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Waterloo was the most sacred place of English national feeling on the Continent but one that quickly took on a less savory reputation as a site overrun...