Far From Trafalgar and Waterloo By Karin Altenberg- A Review of “In These Times” by Jenny Uglow
http://www.wsj.com/articles/book-review-in-these-times-by-jenny-uglow-1422050734
Waterloo marked the end of more than two decades of fighting on land and at sea, nearly as exhausting for those who remained at home as for those who fought Napoleon
On a recent visit to Belgium, I found myself on top of “La Butte du Lion,” a man-made hill overlooking the fields of Waterloo. Here, on a hot day in June 1815, tens of thousands of soldiers marched to their deaths; many were barefoot, having lost their boots to the mud churned up by gun carriages. The Duke of Wellington reportedly grieved the “immense” loss of life rather than celebrating his crowning victory over Napoleon’s armies. For days after, the lanes around the battlefield were slippery with grease draining from the great corpse-pyres built to stop the spread of disease in the hot weather.
I find battlefield tourism eerie and discomfiting—but civilian fascination at the site of bloodshed is by no means a new phenomenon. Tourism began at Waterloo a few days after the battle, and Wellington himself subsequently guided parties of the well-to-do from England and its allies. For years after the battle, there was a trade in trinkets and souvenirs from that gruesome field—everything from buttons and bullets and standards (Sir Walter Scott collected four of them) to bits of bone and even skulls. A former soldier ran an inn nearby to accommodate tourists.
In These Times
By Jenny Uglow
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 740 pages, $40
Today we know the ways in which the Battle of Waterloo and the later Congress of Vienna shaped the future of European history. In 1815, however, the battle marked the end of 22 years of intermittent but exhausting fighting on land and at sea—a series of conflicts that affected nearly all parts of the world. Thomas Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, for instance, which more than doubled the territory of the United States, was only possible because Napoleon needed funds for his campaigns.
History notoriously has a tendency to highlight wars and their heroes, but war affects individual lives. Jenny Uglow’s monumental “In These Times” speaks of those lives as she conjures up the English home front during the two decades of the Napoleonic Wars. It is a remarkable distillation of hundreds of letters, diary entries and other documents produced by people from varying walks of life. These are mostly everyday stories of fortunes made and lost, of politics, finance and religion, of weather and work—of loyalty and betrayal, grace and vanity, callousness and compassion, joy and grief. Some of the stories were polished for the public eye, but most are frank and unedited. With virtuosity and élan, Ms. Uglow weaves these diverse strands into an acutely observed narrative. She has the confidence to let her curiosity guide her through a fragmented, multifaceted history and the generosity to share her open gaze with the reader.
On a popular level “In These Times” can be described as the shadow play to Jane Austen’s novels—or perhaps more accurately the reality underpinning her fiction. Think of when Fanny Price’s brother William seeks a commission from a rich relative in “Mansfield Park” and is subsequently promoted; or when Lydia’s infatuation with the regimentals in “Pride and Prejudice” leads to scandal and elopement; or when the navy careers and booty prizes of Adm. Croft and Capt. Wentworth in “Persuasion” raise them through the echelons of society until they are reluctantly accepted into the rural gentry.
But while the war altered the stars of many people for the better, others were left poor, broken or bankrupt. At the turn of the 18th century we find press-gangs haunting the land to seize young men for service; we meet weavers, farm laborers, cotton-mill workers and miners struck by poverty and injustice, vulnerable to a state that would send out the militia against the protesting poor. The wars fostered modernization and innovation in many areas of society, but as Ms. Uglow points out: “It would take twenty years before the first real moves towards political reform, religious toleration, education and concern for the poor, and improvement in the conditions of workers.”
A great variety of voices—and a fair number of “huzzas!”—emerge from these pages. Wordsworth, in the poem “London 1802,” rather uselessly called on Milton’s spirit for assistance in an age of moral decline; Coleridge tirelessly tried to reveal Napoleon as a tyrant not to be trusted in war or peace. Scott drilled and drank with his smartly uniformed cavalry volunteers in Edinburgh. (At a safe distance from the real enemy, they practiced chopping the tops off turnips.) The schoolboy Byron, already a provocateur, kept a bust of Napoleon in his rooms at Harrow. We also meet personalities from Ms. Uglow’s earlier works—the group of scientists, philosophers and industrial innovators who called themselves the Lunar Men, including Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin and Josiah Wedgewood. (The latter’s two sons offered Coleridge an annuity when he was released for a rather undignified spell of army service.)
Ms. Uglow shows us, in 1798, a nation celebrating Nelson’s victory in the “Glorious Battle of the Nile” by carousing and bell ringing, by lighting candles and bonfires and roasting oxen in villages and towns all over England. Those who could afford it—including Jane Austen—dressed “à la Nile” in exotic headgear and cloaks. In 1807, we are presented with a less ostentatious expression of pride and loyalty: a letter sent by the sailors of the port admiral’s barge, who had rowed the exiled Louis XVIII, disguised as the Comte de Lille, safely to harbor in Yarmouth. The mysterious passenger rewarded the rowers a considerable £15 for their troubles, whereon they wrote this charmingly colloquial note to their admiral:
Please Your Honour, — We holded a talk about that ther £15 that was sent us, — and hope no offence, your honour. We don’t like to take it, because as how we know, fast enuff that it was the true King of France that went with your honour in the boat; and that he and our own noble King (God bless them both! And give every one his right,) is good friends now; and, besides that, your honour gived an order, long ago, not to take any money from nobody — and we never did take none.
Although the times were fraught with the threat of invasion or general commotion, the battles were not fought on English soil, and there is a stunned bafflement evident on the home front at the many casualties, the maimed and the sick. Death is ever-present, not just in the fields of war. Ms. Uglow describes it beautifully: “The lives of so many people were punctuated by the deaths of children: from a baby or a son of six to a soldier in battle, a sailor at sea. Choking stops in the flow of days. Then a jolt, a change of key and back to daily life, however haunted, to writing, weaving, banking, farming. Or political intrigue.”
As the war effort demanded ever more funds and materials, Prime Minister William Pitt was forced to bring in new taxes. Among these, the hair-powder tax proved to have far-reaching consequences, starting a masculine fashion for short hair. After the miserably cold spring of 1799, when “the birds failed to sing,” the harvest was unusually poor, and the government passed the Brown Bread Act of 1800, forcing millers to sell only wholemeal flour because of the scarcity of wheat, which caused much annoyance among those who could afford to buy bread.
All the time, industry became increasingly specialized and mechanized, with innovations being developed every year. In 1803, British artillery received improved ordnance: the “shrapnel shell” named after its inventor, Henry Shrapnel. The increasing need for shoes and boots for the armed forces resulted in mass production, and in 1810 M.I. Brunel invented a sole-riveting machine for this purpose. In 1814, George Stephenson, then engine-wright at Killingworth Colliery, built the steam locomotive “Blücher” to improve the haulage of coal from the mine. He named it in honor of the Prussian general who commanded the Prussian forces alongside Wellington at Waterloo.
At last, in the autumn of 1815, when Napoleon had been deported to St. Helena and the tourist trade was blossoming at Waterloo, a reborn British nation emerged: “With its industrial power, technological wizardry and financial clout Britain was squeezed out of the French wars like a pip from a lemon into a century and a half as a major world power.”
And thus ends a fascinating era, gloriously captured by an author who never tries to simplify the complexity of the past. A story that appears, at times, astonishingly contemporary is suddenly not—a barefoot child is hanged for stealing shoes or a man is press-ganged on his way home from work, forced, at that very moment, to leave his family for years. We are vigorously reminded that each era has its own conditions, but by letting her commentators speak for themselves, Ms. Uglow helps us get to know the people of the past and to recognize—in their joys and struggles—something of ourselves. This, in my view, makes her a great historian.
—Ms. Altenberg is the author of the novel “Island of Wings.”
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