The Crimean War in the British Imagination (review)

As many scholars have noted, the Crimean War (1854–56) was distinctive for its reworking of national allegiances, its modern technologies for battle and for war reporting, and for the deep-seated ambivalence it stirred in contemporary commentators and the generations that followed. For these and other reasons, it is frequently hailed as a modern war, one predictive of later cultural rifts created by wars that lack cohesive popular support. In The Crimean War in the British Imagination, Stefanie Markovits provides a valuable account of the predominance of that war in mid-century Victorian cultural forms. Her book brings together discussions of the fiction, poetry, and visual arts of the late 1850s to demonstrate not only the topicality of the Crimean conflict, but also its shaping role in discourses not typically associated with politics.

The Crimean War was, as Markovits argues, experienced through printed texts in radically new ways: the detailed reports of Times special correspondent William Howard Russell took center stage, but a wide range of other voices and textual forms accompanied them, both in the pages of that newspaper and in other periodicals. Private (or apparently private) letters sent home by soldiers from the front were reprinted in the newspaper; letters to the editor debated matters of governmental policy; and poems, essays, and visual images conveyed still other responses to the conflict. Because these representations were circulating while the war was still ongoing, the Crimean cultural archive contains especially rich intertextual palimpsests: letters written by soldiers who refer to Russell’s descriptions of their battles, the collecting of newspaper images of the conflict by soldiers at the front, the representation of the Times within cartoons and paintings, and the reworking of journalistic language into some of the period’s most famous literary texts, such as Alfred Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854). Markovits emphasizes the communal aspects of this media culture, which offered new modes of participation in the public sphere. Although her survey of journalism, fiction, poetry, and visual arts related to the Crimean War is necessarily limited in its scope, her well-chosen examples illuminate the reflexivity and recursivity of these texts.

In a January 1855 letter, Arthur Hugh Clough claimed, “Our literature, at present, is the war column in the newspaper,” and the previous month William Makepeace Thackeray had complained, “literature is going on flaggingly in England just now, on account of nobody caring to read anything but telegraphic messages” (qtd. in Markovits 63). Markovits argues that not only was “novel” content to be found in the newspaper’s pages, but even some of the generic markers previously accorded to fiction. Russell’s accounts draw upon the stylistics of descriptive realism as well as the paratextual apparatus of the serial narrative’s titles and illustrations to constitute the one and only story that most readers were really following in the mid-1850s. The effects of this can be seen in G. W. M. Reynolds’s novel Omar: A Tale of the War, serialized from January 1855 to January 1856, and George Whyte-Melville’s The Interpreter: A Tale of the War (1858), which both include large portions of near-journalistic descriptions of this larger public narrative.

But rather than simply cataloging and describing the novels that explicitly represent the war, Markovits offers a more interesting and more ambitious project, examining how the Crimean War offered new models of heroism that would ultimately modify the genre of the domestic novel. If a feminized, domestic realism characterized the novel’s usurpation of masculine, heroic epic prior to the Crimean War, the introduction of a realistic (and real) space for active heroism opened up possibilities for both Charles Kingsley’s muscular Christianity and sensation fiction. Most interesting is her reading of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857) as reworking the possibilities for feminine “heroinism” that Florence Nightingale represented in public culture. Markovits forcefully reminds us...