fighting talk Timothy Lovelace has recently attended to Tennyson’s meditations on the
double-edgednature of battle wrath (both its honourable and its destructive
potential), and noted that ‘the glories of battle often appear on the perimeters of
Tennyson’s pictures, his center of focus is usually rusting swords, vales of bones,
or failing kingdoms’.^66 This focus was to become an increasingly central aspect of
late Victorian poetry, as the glories of battle gave way to a more sustained look
at the complex figure of the soldier. Often labelled as a career for malcontents
or misfits, soldiering had a long history of stigma. Pay and conditions were very
poor, and the iniquity of the purchase system was one of many reflections of
class prejudice operating at all levels of the military life.^67 Wellington referred
to his men at Waterloo as ‘the scum of the earth’, and the rank-and-file were
frequently associated with alcoholism and sexual licentiousness (brothels provided
cheap spirits; by 1862, a third of home-based troops were hospitalized on account
of venereal disease^68 ). At mid-century, Robert MacDonald recalled his experience
as a recruiter: ‘it was only in the haunts of dissipation or inebriation, and among
the lowest dregs of society, that I met with anything like success’.^69
After the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, the dregs were invested with a
new dignity. An enthusiastic reporter forThe Timesnoted: ‘Any hostility which may
have existed in bygone days towards the army has long since passed away. The red
coat of the soldier is honoured throughout the country.’^70 This is overpitched, but
it highlights a shift. Samuel Smiles honoured the redcoat in his own way by ending
Self-Help(1859) with examples of the soldier as ‘the true gentleman’, referring to
the rank-and-file as ‘rough, gallant fellows’ and pointing out that in the war and
the Mutiny ‘even the common soldiers proved themselves gentlemen under their
trials’.^71 Smiles’s vocabulary hovers between old and new conceptions of the soldier,
but his sense of the figure’s ‘trials’ was shared by many, and growing calls for army
reform and improvement of the soldier’s lot culminated in the abolishment of the
purchase system in 1871. These revaluations found their way into poetry; Francis
Hastings Doyle, who in 1867 succeeded Arnold as Professor of Poetry at Oxford,
wrote a number of poems on the nameless men who fought in Victoria’s name,
and his ‘The Private of the Buffs’, like many other pieces, focused on the soldier as
an individual, rather than as part of a collective—‘poor, reckless, rude, low-born,
(^66) Timothy Lovelace,The Artistry and Tradition of Tennyson’s Battle Poetry(New York and London:
Routledge, 2003), 165.
(^67) See Peter Burroughs, ‘An Unreformed Army? 1815–1868’, in David Chandler and Ian Beckett
(eds.),The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994),
160–88, and John R. Reed, ‘Military’, in Herbert Tucker (ed.),A Companion to Victorian Literature
and Culture(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 183–93.
(^68) See Edward M. Spiers,The Army and Society 1815–1914(London: Longman, 1980), 77 and 162.
(^69) Robert MacDonald,Personal Narrative of Military Travel and Adventure in Turkey and Persia
(Edinburgh: Black, 1859), 296. 70
71 The Times, 22 Oct. 1856, 6.
Samuel Smiles,Self-Help, ed. Peter Sinnema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 331.