Awarded for Valour_ A History of the Victoria Cross and the Evolution of the British Concept of Heroism

TEETHING PROBLEMS, 1856–1867 73
1860, although the actual definition of heroism still eluded the powers-
that-were. Their case-law arose from large-scale conflicts, but for all their
glory (and all their casualty figures) these major wars were aberrations. It
was in the small wars of empire that the Victoria Cross received its final
nineteenth-century refinement, and it is to these small wars that our focus
must now shift.