Conference Report
1814: War, Peace and Publication
Institute of English Studies, Senate House, London
Saturday 17 May 2014
Co-organiser of the conference Nicola Watson opened proceedings by stating how she felt
the related ‘Spanish sessions’ of the previous day on 16 May (‘The Peninsular War:
triumphalism and betrayal in text and image’) had ‘shifted the centre of gravity’ for
discussion on to a wider stage: the wars under discussion on Friday had to be seen as ‘world
wars’ with global effects. Once hostilities (not necessarily ‘war’) had ceased, the political
repercussions were great for the whole of Europe. Hints of this were certainly touched on in
the Saturday conference papers, with the words ‘war’ and ‘Napoleon’ never being far from
our minds.
In the first paper of the day, ‘Between Two Deaths: Napoleon on Elba’, Philip Shaw aimed
to explore the ‘new forms of life’ emerging between the unexpected defeat of Napoleon in
April 1814 (his abdication) and the 100 days of his return to Paris in 1815 when he
attempted to restore his rule. This was a year before his actual defeat and death at
Waterloo. While Napoleon remained alive on his new island principality Elba, this ‘first
defeat’ remained ambiguous for many in Britain and Europe. The responses to this
‘unfinished business’ in England ranged from Cobbett’s hope that the fallen emperor might
still inspire Britain’s downtrodden population, to the melancholy disenchantment of Byron’s
‘Ode to Napoleon Bonaparte’, to appeals for his execution (Southey and Walter Savage
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Landor), to the brash attempts in popular verse and print depictions wish-fulfilling the
termination of Napoleon’s career on the gallows. Not unexpectedly perhaps, the (mostly
anonymous) French prints of the fallen Napoleon show him as a full-bodied leader in exile.
But at the core of his paper Philip moved to an examination of a more sophisticated French
satirical print showing Napoleon as the ancient Greek hero Philoctetes, dwelling in latterday exile on Elba. Produced between May 1814 and February 1815, the print shows
Napoleon as Philoctetes with an injured leg, and by reading this (and his open wound)
through Sophocles’s play of Philoctetes (with which Napoleon was very familiar), Philip
argued convincingly that as with Oedipus Rex, the purpose in the print was to have the
audience ‘see in the scapegoat’s disfigurement the very principle of their own restoration’.
His conclusion was that the anonymous print could similarly have revealed Napoleon not
only as a reviled but also a sacred figure, well before his definitive demise at Waterloo. (This
though reminded me of René Girard’s book translated as Violence and the Sacred.) This
powerful point was amplified, if anything, by his noting how the frequently reproduced
image of Horace Vernet’s painting of Napoléon sortant de son tombeau showing ‘a queasily
cherubic-looking Napoleon rising from the grave,’ suggested that the long-dead man had yet
to meet his second death, ‘the day of the Emperor’s “blessed return” being yet to come.’
This treatment of Napoleon as the timelessly superhuman figure who came to assume such
popularity in the later 19th century, finally left us, as Nicky Watson commented in the
discussion on this insightful paper, with a kind of model for the ‘spectrality’ of the
mythologized hero who haunts us, refusing to go away.
Emma Clery’s paper moved the discussion on from war to money by considering the topic
of ‘Speculation in 1814: The Gamble of Mansfield Park and the Economics of Defeating
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Napoleon’. Emma established that financial speculation was as widespread in its way in the
England of 1814 – noting how stock jobbers were ridiculed and vilified in Cruikshank’s
caricatures - as it is now, when manipulative bankers have become the villains. Such
financial speculation as Jane Austen’s brother Henry dealt in as a seasoned but sometimes
over-reaching playboy banker could not have helped the British government with the
economics of defeating Napoleon. But Emma made it clear that having him near at hand
both as her financial advisor and as an example of a market trader from whom she could in
different ways learn, helped Jane Austen the novelist to focus astutely the successful
‘working’ and forward thrust of her latest excursion into the fictional marriage market field,
Mansfield Park. The card game of Speculation that is at the centre of the novel as well as the
argument of her paper, has Austen the mistress of creative amused irony pushing the
fictional Henry Crawford (partly modelled on her brother) forward as a ‘superb player of
speculative games,’ and with her creative instincts engineering him toward his destiny as
Fanny’s husband. But as Emma shows, also at hand is a British government concerned to
both defend and promote a positive, nationalistic view of the stock exchange, while also
needing to raise sufficient solid money to support Wellington’s campaign in Spain. The
astute and mega-rich banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild was not only willing to support
British currency, but also provided subsidies to the war coalition to the tune of £11.6
million. This enabled the ‘peace’ to be secured, once it came. For Rothschild these moves
were patriotic and solid investments, not speculation. In an innovative paper, Emma Clery
demonstrated that Austen the novelist not only revealed the world of 1814 as one of
‘speculation’, but showed also that she was a shrewd investor in her own imaginative
talents as a novelist who needed to retain the demanding reading audience she had steadily
acquired by 1814.
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Following a lunchtime visit to the British Museum, where many of us viewed fascinating
examples of satirical prints about Napoleon and the war, we returned to hear Simon
Bainbridge on ‘Excursions in 1814’. Simon’s paper took his previous work on the responses
of British poets to the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars in a new direction by seeking to
relate the development of mountain climbing and the literature of mountains to the war
with France, and doing this by exploring Wordsworth’s The Excursion, a major publication of
1814. Drawing out his key points of argument from a close reading of the nine-book, 9000
line blank verse colossus, Simon noted early on how mountains and mountaineering had
always been crucial themes in Wordsworth’s poetry as a symbol of liberty often associated
with the mountains of the Swiss republic. By now Wordsworth felt that the free born
Englishman had inherited the ‘lost’ liberty of the Swiss mountaineer. Climbing and
mountains are the underlying dynamic theme of The Excursion, just as ‘speculation’ is of
Mansfield Park, said Simon. Comprising as it does a significant chunk of The Recluse,
Wordsworth’s long-term poetic project, The Excursion therefore enacts through the
language and perspectives of mountaineering, the liberating experiences which the climbing
and traversing of the Lakeland peaks can bring. The Wanderer frequently enjoins his walking
companions the Poet and the Solitary to ‘climb every day’. The injunction conveys Wordsworth’s
own deep conviction then that the performativity of mountain climbing can bring a powerfully
uplifting moral means of ‘developing the character, philosophy and faith’. At a time of division and
war, this can only help to elevate the free-born Englishman’s mind to combat these negative impacts
on humanity, replacing them with ‘capacities/More than heroic!’ (IV. 826-7). As Simon explained,
however much they might change later, there could be no clearer evidence of Wordsworth’s
convictions concerning the physical and visionary agency of mountain climbing as an aspirational
political activity than his decision to finally publish The Excursion at the moment of Napoleon’s
abdication and defeat in April 1814. For those of us previously disinclined to undertake the challenge
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of ascending the demanding heights of The Excursion, I dare say we were alerted by Simon’s
fascinating paper to the benefits of returning to one of Wordsworth’s seemingly less approachable
works; it certainly sent me back to my 250 page octavo edition for a while with a lighter, more
expectant heart.
The final paper of the day, William St Clair’s ‘1814: Romantic Byronism goes visual,’ returned us to
the challenges of how to interpret and read the world of the Romantic visual image ‘then and now’.
William opened his talk by telling us that although the most famous portrait of Byron today is the
one showing him in Grecian costume wearing a moustache, a painting that was indeed completed in
1814 when his fame as a writer of oriental romance was soaring, for many decades it was seldom
seen. Indeed , we learned that the picture was bequeathed to Byron’s daughter Ada on the
condition that she was not allowed to see it until she was 21, and then only with her mother’s
permission under supervision. Apparently, her mother worried that the picture of Ada’s father was
‘too romantic, and would encourage her to fantasize’ - about what, we weren’t told. Even after the
picture was engraved in 1841, it was still rarely seen, and therefore ‘played almost no part in the
construction of visual Byronism.’ In fact, his ‘visual fame’ did not accompany his ‘literary fame’, the
two portraits of him that were hung in the Royal Academy in 1814 (the so-called ‘cloak portrait’ by
Thomas Phillips, and an oil by Richard Westall) each being described in the exhibition as ‘Portrait of a
Nobleman’. However, for the Westall portrait, master engraver Charles Turner did not merely copy
the oil painting, but emphasized features only hinted at in the oil: scenic rocks, and the daylight
breaking through. Such added emphases, as William stressed , were to be explained by the
prevailing taste for the sublime in nature. He concluded by tracing what he called the ‘political
economy’ of engraving, since this was the historical form of printed image that really made the
‘Byron brand’ possible. In 1824, the year of Byron’s death in Greece, the technique of engraving on
steel had been perfected, which enabled the mass production of high quality engravings, compared
to the necessarily smaller copy runs using softer copper plates. This sudden leap forward in the
technology of printing fortuitously enabled the enterprising proprietors of ‘The Mirror of Literature’
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to give away free a Byron engraving with every 2d copy of their miscellany journal. Around 50,000
impressions were distributed, as compared to the one to two thousand maximum obtainable from
copper engravings, price one shilling, ‘which for most people amounted to half a week’s wages’. It
was ‘probably the biggest productivity improvement in the transmission of images until the arrival of
digital in the 1980s’, William revealed. He said much more too about the viewing of Byron prints in
the earlier period, for example by way of rental from circulating libraries and the ones to be found in
commonplace books, an example of which was forthwith circulated among conference attendees for
viewing, along with other Byron images from William’s own collection. This was an enlightening and
thoroughly enjoyable tour through ‘visual Byronism.’
In the mid-1980s when I was working on my PhD at Essex University, I was made very aware of
how impactful the Essex Sociology of Literature conferences had been. From 1976 onward these
conferences had focused on critical historical moments: 1642, 1936, 1848, the fourth in the series,
the published proceedings of the 1981 conference of which I find I can still return to with profit:
‘1789: Reading Writing Revolution’. Two generations on, and although enacted on a much smaller
scale in an era when the culture and politics of Britain have undergone substantial change, this day
conference on ‘1814: War, Peace and Literature’ once demonstrated the intellectual value of
scrutinizing and debating the texts of significant historical moments.
Maurice Hindle
The Open University
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