‘graver things...braver things’ the troopships from Southampton.^26 Notuntil the war was over and Henniker had
come safely home did Hardy feel it appropriate to write more openly about what
his age still failed to mend; and even then, his protest found ways of acknowledging
the actuality of both war’s slaughter and war’s bravery.
News of the peace treaty that brought the war to a close reached Max Gate on 2
June 1902, Hardy’s birthday, and he set a flag flying in celebration. Almost at once,
he began working onThe Dynasts. Between July that year and September 1903, he
completed the six acts that made up the first part, which was published in January
- This connection between the Boer War andThe Dynastshas been observed
before. Jon Silkin aligned the ‘final didactic and anti-war emphases’ of Hardy’s
work with general post-war disillusionment in the early years of the twentieth
century,^27 and Kenneth Millard saw the same atmosphere prompting Kipling’s
turn from writing poetry, such as theBarrack-Room Ballads(1892), to writing
prose: ‘following the Boer War...there was little public interest in poetry of the
services’.^28 It was then in oddly unpromising conditions that Hardy began his epic
of Napoleon. After the war in South Africa had reached an avowedly ignominious
conclusion, amidst widespread doubts about the ‘methods of barbarism’ employed
by the British Army, he embarked upon his fullest exploration of military life.^29
Onemotivemayhavebeen,oncemore,thechanceofaddressingcontemporary
concerns.^30 Stories of Britain being invaded, for instance, were popular in the
first decade of the twentieth century, andThe Dynastsbegins with the threat of
Napoleon’s landing. These Edwardian thrillers pitted England against Germany,
conflicts among a number of European powers being reduced to a duel between
these two. Hardy composedThe Dynasts, he said, intent upon correcting the
imbalance in all the current histories of the period:
But the slight regard paid to English influence and action throughout the struggle by so
many Continental writers who had dealt with Napoleon’s career, seemed always to leave ́
room for a new handling of the theme which should re-embody the features of this influence
in their true proportion. (1, Preface)
(^26) See his letters written around Christmas 1899 to Florence Henniker and Winifred Thomson, in
Collected Letters, ii. 240–3.
(^27) Silkin,Out of Battle, 33; M. Van Wyk Smith also notes a link betweenThe Dynastsand the Boer
War in his excellentDrummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War(Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1978), 145. 28
Kenneth Millard,Edwardian Poetry(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 13. David Trotter analyses
this moment in Kipling’s career in his ‘Kipling’s England: The Edwardian Years’, in Phillip Mallett
(ed.),Kipling Considered(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), 58 ff.
(^29) See Paula M. Krebs,Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33–54. Campbell-Bannerman, then leader of the
Opposition, used the phrase ‘methods of barbarism’ in Parliament, on 17 June 1901, during discussion
of Emily Hobhouse’s report into the British concentration camps in South Africa.
(^30) Charles Lock asserts that an ‘allegorical reading’ ofThe Dynasts, which shows ‘how the epic of the
Napoleonic Wars can be interpreted in terms of the Edwardian sense of power and imminent decline
of the British Empire...is certainly possible’ (Charles Lock, ‘Hardy Promises:The Dynastsand the
Epic of Imperialism’, in Pettit (ed.),Reading Thomas Hardy, 84).