Introduction

Overview of the book

Chapter 1 is a preliminary essay on the primary sources used for the study of British culture in relation to Napoleon, and the sites where Napoleon figured. The second chapter uses the lens of Plymouth and south-west England to study the reaction to Napoleon’s presence in Britain in 1815, drawing on editorials, correspondence and reports in newspapers and periodicals; the production and advertising of portraiture and visual record (including moving panoramas); and poetry. This chapter reflects on the longer memory of a fallen emperor’s presence at Plymouth: in subsequent chapters the perspective is the period to 1840.

This book does not dwell on how Britons responded to the era of captivity from 1815. Those sympathetic to Napoleon afterwards supposed that ‘national self-regard’ prevented a public admission that governor Hudson Lowe’s management was petty and undignified.¹⁷ Radicals ironized the ‘honour of being gaolers to that fine fellow Napoleon’.¹⁸ Chapter 3 instead starts in 1821 when notification of Napoleon’s demise and burial replaced rumours of ill-health. It focuses on the radical and loyalist politics of Napoleon’s reputation and legacy, studying how radical newspapers and publishers handled the death in a strange moment in post-Peterloo politics. A link between Napoleon’s death and the ‘injured’ Caroline, queen-consort of George IV, is rarely noted. Self-dramatizing British radicals, incarcerated or threatened with prison in the post-war era of political repression, connected their fates to queen and ex-emperor. An appropriate emotional response to death is grief: the chapter explores how far this was genuinely felt for Napoleon by Britons.

Chapter 4 surveys British representations of Napoleon’s deathbed, corpse and solitary grave. The tomb in its melancholy setting was engraved, painted and modelled in materials from alabaster to bronze.¹⁹ Napoleon’s demise and burial place triggered countless odes, elegies and other poetic musings.²⁰ Some of these, alongside travellers’ prose about St Helena, claimed authenticity from physical pilgrimage. Novels and short stories went to the spot so frequently that a visitor acknowledged, ‘It is so well known, both from description and drawings, that it is almost unnecessary to make any remark on it.’²¹ Entertainments like fairground and indoor panoramas, dioramas and stage shows displayed Napoleon’s life, death and apotheosis.²² Death was the natural end in spectacular representations of his career in London’s minor and patent theatres.

The fifth chapter returns to political uses for Napoleon. Scholars have shown Napoleon’s importance as a way through which Britons discussed parliamentary or limited monarchy, the universal basis of rights and liberty, and ‘legitimacy’ during the war and the decade following Waterloo. Stuart Semmel describes Napoleon as a ‘compelling focus’ for political debate by a generation after 1821 but leaves understudied several important areas.²³ I uncover Napoleon’s discursive importance in Catholic emancipation and Irish efforts led by Daniel O’Connell for repealing the Act of Union; study how memory of Whig sympathies for Napoleon and his wartime intentions regarding ‘parliamentary reform’ and reputed prophecies from St Helena were used; and show that Wellington’s military reputation and apparent irresponsiveness to the zeitgeist constantly brought Napoleon into controversy in this most partisan of periods. Napoleon’s defeat was fifteen years before the crisis leading to the Great Reform Act in which reputations forged in the war by earl Grey and Wellington played their parts. Recent work examines Waterloo’s cultural history in the British world. Reynolds has scrutinized the role of civilians from artists and provincial Tories to entrepreneurs in a ‘nationalization’ and collective memory of a military victory. Magnifying the power of Napoleon as enemy enhanced British glory; this was underscored (or undermined) by an imprisonment controlled by the British.²⁴ I am interested in how Napoleon operates in the political realm rather than as an aspect of military history.²⁵ This includes, contrary to Reynolds’s point about the safe relegation of Napoleon to St Helena, radicals’ rehearsal of his dicta and treatment there. Given the July Revolution context, British commentators could hardly avoid recalling Napoleon. Examination of his place in extra-parliamentary radical politics is brought up to the early Chartist era.

Chapter 6 approaches Napoleon’s posthumous life through a mechanical Bonaparte from 1833. If various literary remains exposed private, inner and moral aspects of Napoleon, three-dimensional Napoleons in statuary ‘made the person of BONAPARTE familiar to every eye’.²⁶ In France, the politics of Bonapartism was expressed through the Place Vendôme column’s vagaries: the restored Bourbons removing the idol ‘on the brazen pillar’.²⁷ Englishmen published verse in response to Napoleon’s reinstatement in 1833 and scratched inscriptions on the monument’s summit.²⁸ Waxworks like Madame Tussaud’s toured Britain. A reviewer in 1823 described the ‘expressive countenance of Napoleon, the meek and lovely figure of his Empress, the martial figure of his favourite Mameluke’, in her coronation scene based on Jacques-Louis David’s painting.²⁹ A decade later, an obscure French inventor brought over a breathing effigy simulating a dozing First Consul in his glory days, a figure visitors could prod and manipulate as it toured the British Isles.

Picking up the third chapter’s observation on the political message in 1821 detected in the fallen emperor’s stage representation, Chapter 7 looks at dramatizations of Napoleon in the 1830s. Critics saw, in responses by audiences, writers and proprietors, aspects of national character and morality, and a crisis in the dramatic arts. Fascination (‘rage’, ‘epidemic’) with Napoleon was in full flow.³⁰ ‘Every person and thing connected with the history of Napoleon,’ a Bombay Gazette reviewer said in 1830, ‘is so intensely interesting that notwithstanding the innumerable publications on the same subject, we grasp at every new work with his name upon the title-page, and read it with an unsated thirst of curiosity.’³¹ The Court Journal commented in 1831 that Napoleon was ‘lion of the hour’ again, in fashionable novels, swaggering ‘through one hundred and ten acts at the Theatre Royal Covent Garden’ and ‘like a half-starved grasshopper in a parody at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane’. His hat was rescued by an old clothesman, his kerseymeres resuscitated for an actor. Benjamin Haydon aquatinted him and he was ‘got up’ in ‘every green from Grub-street to the Tottenham’. Previously, ‘in the universal and shuddering imagination of England’, murderer, poisoner and despotic tyrant, ‘Napoleon is – The Fashion!’³²

The dead Napoleon’s glories or crimes lived through theatrical spectacle and novels, as the Court Journal mentioned, and a stream of original British and translated biographies. Most famous were those by Hazlitt and Scott. Several were by the hack writer William Henry Ireland, and at the end of this period came edited histories by the poet Robert Hengist Horne and others. In an ‘age so prone to surrender every thing to the press’, material overwhelmed biographers.³³ These included memoirs by Napoleon’s erstwhile friend and private secretary Bourrienne, the former Second Consul and archchancellor Cambacérès, the diplomat and general Caulaincourt, but, above all, Napoleon’s voice from heroic exile in Longwood through Las Cases and O’Meara.³⁴ Every year, new Napoleon-related material was reviewed in the British press. Such work sold – O’Meara’s reportedly in tens of thousands – even with doubts about authenticity.³⁵ When Napoleon’s memoirs appeared, a facsimile of two pages was included to quell suspicions, reviewers analysing internal evidence and comparing with his despatches.³⁶ Appraised in thoughtful and extended essays or promoted in snippets by dailies and provincial papers, biographical and autobiographical materials joined historiographic assessments of Napoleon’s warfare, empire and place in modern European history. These texts are the subject of Chapter 8, on English lives of Napoleon.

Chapter 9 briefly examines several important aspects unexamined in the earlier chapters: the role of relic collectors, an association between Napoleon-interest and mania, and the gendered aspect to British interest in Napoleon. The tenth chapter surveys Napoleon’s uses in British culture about 1840 with his ‘ashes’ returned to the French. By way of conclusion, I study the impact of wartime childhoods terrorized by the bogeyman of ‘Boney’ and changing assessments created by the passage of time for those who became Victorians, who lived in a society full of Napoleon-related commodities and representations. The conclusion also attempts a preliminary task of surveying important aspects of the Victorian cultural afterlife of Napoleon, although this is a venture for another book.

Historical and cultural contexts

Napoleon was important to British culture in the first half of the century. He was, first, an existential threat or revolutionary hope and, as just noted, a monster for a generation of children. The editor of Drakard’s Stamford News was not exaggerating in 1815 when he wrote that Napoleon’s name ‘has scarcely been out of the mouth of any single individual of these islands, for one whole day for these last ten years’.³⁷ His stunning career was the modern exemplar of military genius or destiny for essayists writing military and political histories, or moralizing on ambition.³⁸ The Napoleon of Regency and late-Romantic popular and elite culture was mediated by print-image and text; created orally through song and stage performance; witnessed in travel overseas; and connected to through relics and other artefacts. Oral culture included conversation, though an essayist in 1829 judged Napoleon’s character a subject ‘marked stale in the index expurgatorius of every country coterie’.³⁹ In terms of texts, this was the period between anonymous and signed works of exile such as his British doctor Barry O’Meara’s Napoleon in Exile: Or, a Voice from St Helena (a bestseller from 1822) and translation of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s Des idées napoléoniennes (1839).

This book spans the Holy Alliance’s heyday and downfall of Louis Philippe’s monarchy: a wider European environment influencing British representation of Napoleon.⁴⁰ The July Revolution was seen by Napoleon’s American biographer Henry Lee as changing British press treatment by removing ‘falsehood and imposture’ on the origins of war with France in 1796 and linking the new revolution to current demands for British parliamentary reform.⁴¹ By 1840, repatriation of the remains brought a new dynamic. Humble Bonapartists and members of the ex-imperial family were in Britain, causing a steady stream of newsprint anecdote. A colourful example is the hundred-strong band of French, German and other foreigners, ‘commemorating the invention of printing and for entering into a subscription to erect a monument to the memory of the Emperor Napoleon’, at The Grapes public house in Soho in June 1840, which ended in a riot against the police.⁴²

The movement from Legitimacy’s victim to dynastic origin for Napoleon III’s imperialism (with Louis-Napoléon’s election as president in December 1848, coup and, a year later in 1852, proclamation as emperor) complicates how British Bonapartists, who are only one of the groups of interest here, viewed their hero.⁴³ But Napoleon’s fame transcended fanatical supporters and haters. His figure in coat and bicorne appeared in burlesque and serious art, the latter attempted by the painter Benjamin Haydon whose affinity with the great man was ambivalent.⁴⁴ Haydon alleviated woeful finances with prints of Napoleon musing at sunset on St Helena. The impress of Napoleon continued to the grim moment of his suicide note in 1846.⁴⁵ My study ends before, then, following Semmel’s assessment that while Napoleon was controversial for contemporary historians and inspirational for artists, he was no longer the ‘subject of broad cultural contention’ after the 1840s.⁴⁶

To adequately outline the social and cultural contexts of post-Waterloo, late-Romantic, ‘long Regency’, steam-powered, march-of-intellect Britain would take many pages. It was a time of economic recession, with high unemployment and severe hardship for the poor, with consequent political and social disorder. Evan Wilson calls the transition to peace ‘messy’ and ‘horrible’, in studying the demobilization of sailors and soldiers, and the laissez-faire state and taxpayers’ responses to a burden of national debt, into the mid-1820s.⁴⁷ Other historians of the Regency and post-war era reach for the adjectives ‘volatile’ and ‘lively’ to describe it.⁴⁸ Self-assessments were inevitably variable across the quarter century. It was an age, said the Edinburgh Review in February 1815, of ‘refinement; indeed, and of great attainments of luxury’.⁴⁹ For the radical writer William Hazlitt in 1826, its cant and repression made the times dangerous for a reformer – to be even a friend’s friend of a reformer.⁵⁰ For Bulwer, the ‘spirit of the age’ was political economy. The writer George Browning identified a ‘course of improvement’ as distinctive, and he praised a Britain ‘in the van of nations’ in 1834.⁵¹

For cosmopolitan men and women of fashion, valuable items could be purchased (and cheaply, given the regime changes) through an international market in objects associated with Napoleon and his empire. A satirist bewailed, in 1827, a mania causing demand for ‘French every thing’.⁵² Members of the ton read fashionable works of literature and expensive memoirs, histories and other textual productions in which Napoleon figured: as dictator, military and political genius, tragic hero or Satanic anti-hero. A patriotic and more affluent middle class acquired relics at nearby European sites, above all, in Waterloo. As books became cheaper, the middle class and those below them in society owned or accessed editions of Napoleonic biography. The varied commodifications of Napoleon through sensation and spectacle like panorama, museum assemblage and other exhibitions, through printed portraiture and novel, can be connected with key developments in entertainments (recognized by a ‘visual turn’ in literary scholarship on this era),⁵³ in printing technology and publishing innovation. There was the south-of-the-Thames ‘Cockney’ burlesque on elite appropriations of Napoleon in monopolistic theatrical venues and a Tory critique of Cockney elegies to Napoleon.

Napoleon was present not only in ironic figuring of bloodshed in Peter’s Field as Peterloo in 1819 but also in various agitations, from Catholic emancipation and support for Queen Caroline to parliamentary reform. He was made to speak from the grave on liberal reform and the economic consequences of total war, but in ‘Ten Years of Whig Government’ in the Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, his latter days are echoed in the Whigs’ misfortunes by 1840.⁵⁴ Allusion to Napoleon surfaces in early Chartist periodicals during Victoria’s initial years as monarch.

Historiography

‘Napoleon Buonaparte has been well-published,’ it was observed in 1832.⁵⁵ This section surveys scholarship on Napoleon in relation to British culture in general, Romantic literature and art, British and French theatre, and works of local and British constituent-nation histories.

Two English-language works merit highlighting: Philip Dwyer’s Napoleon: Passion, Death and Resurrection 1815–1840 (2018) and Sudhir Hazareesingh’s The Legend of Napoleon (2004). Given his primary interest in French history, Dwyer sketches the reaction to Napoleon’s death among Whigs and Radicals and supporters of the British government in a page. His work surveys the evolving literary cult of Napoleon in the 1820s: the gospels of St Helena apostles such as Las Cases with a European-wide readership and profound impact; proliferation of illustrated, anecdote-driven biography and war memoirs; and exploitation by Louis Philippe’s regime in the biography’s final section, ‘Redemption 1821–1840’. Britain was a source, Dwyer notes, of many manufactured Napoleon artefacts smuggled to Bourbon France.⁵⁶

Focused like Dwyer on the French dimension to this cultural and political afterlife, Hazareesingh’s extensive research in departmental archives uncovered the ‘extraordinary’ and ‘prodigious’ scale of the material culture of Bonapartist sedition and the cultivation and spread of myths.⁵⁷ For Hazareesingh, strategic alliance between republicans / Jacobins and followers of Bonaparte made Napoleon’s appeal significant in the Restoration and July Monarchy. This was possible because the myth of a liberal empire offered in the Hundred Days of March–June 1815 reinvented Napoleon to ‘symbolize new social and political ideals’. A legend also spontaneously developed during his Atlantic exile as French people saw a Promethean martyr, a figure of national pride who might return.⁵⁸ Despite defeat in 1815, he was the leader to avenge Waterloo and foreign occupation, safeguard Revolutionary land grants to peasants and abolition of feudalism, and represent individuality and ‘freedom’.⁵⁹

As Hazareesingh notes in a brief comment on the legend outside France, ‘Napoleonic enthusiasm assumed significant proportions during the first half of the nineteenth century’ in Britain.⁶⁰ His third chapter uncovers the ‘cult of seditious objects’ during the Restoration and the upsurge in Napoleonic objects after 1830. Intriguingly, there are English connections (and a network by which manufacture of these items in Germany, Italian states, Belgium and Switzerland met French demand despite state repression).⁶¹ I am interested in the material culture of British engagement with Napoleon. Some objects of British public display on Napoleon came from a France in which the man and his family were banned from public representation in the Restoration and reintroduced circumscribely for political ends by the July Monarchy. The situation fascinated the British. Handling of Napoleon’s family and his image in artefacts and on stage, by successive regimes, was a measure of French liberty for British commentators.

Works on loyalist and radical treatment of Napoleon in the decades of war need not be discussed here, but one intriguing book taking analysis beyond 1815 is Edward Tangye Lean’s digressive The Napoleonists (1970), uncovering a ‘psychology of defection’, a ‘Napoleonist syndrome’.⁶² Lean identified a small, metropolitan-centred group of sympathizers, seeking peace with France from their seats in the Commons and Lords, or as essayists or poets, advocating for the Consul and Emperor. Lord Byron unsurprisingly features, ‘mimicking Napoleon in his adversity’, in continental Europe in 1816.⁶³ Lean noted Queen Caroline’s adoption of pro-Napoleon gestures from those in her circle such as Samuel Whitbread, but he did not pursue associations made in the press between the deaths of Napoleon and the ‘wronged queen’, which I do in my third chapter.⁶⁴ The social class of Napoleonists ranged from aristocrats – which Lean examined especially at the point when Lady Holland and her husband sought to convince Hudson Lowe of the cause before he went out as governor of St Helena – to Romantic poets and essayists, and French or Italian refugees like the lithographer Agostino Aglio and poet Ugo Foscolo.

British Napoleonists seemingly had little in common apart from admiring the emperor, but Lean delineated shared characteristics like support for American independence, isolation from denominational mainstream and, more contentiously, a yearning for a substitute father outside Britain.⁶⁵ Lean identified authoritarian-minded outcasts with counter-courts and diagnosed displacement, repression and the need to revolt.⁶⁶ My study could have been about those supporters such as Lord Holland.⁶⁷ Or Britons linked personally to Napoleon’s family such as the Dudley Coutts Stuarts, whose uncle was Napoleon. ‘When placed in the attitude à la redingote grise, the little boy [their son] presents an exact miniature of the hero of Marengo,’ readers learned in 1833. Napoleon was uncle-in-law to the Irish MP Thomas Wyse.⁶⁸ But that would be to focus on an atypical group.

Stuart Semmel’s richly sourced Napoleon and the British (2004) takes Napoleon’s role in the British imaginary in works of millenarianism and eschatology, song, theatre and fiction into the 1840s, though the focus is on material from London and England. Although plausibly arguing for a similarity between Scottish and English writers about Napoleon, Scotland figures little and Ireland is missing.⁶⁹ Early histories of Napoleon are looked at briefly by way of epilogue. Semmel focuses on political culture, and for my study, the chapter on the exiled Napoleon’s use in radical discourse is especially important. Semmel shows that Napoleon was used to condemn the Regency government as un-British and akin to continental absolutism. Liberty’s peril was symbolized by exile without prior parliamentary approval, and a harsh custody in St Helena was ‘read as a test of the health of Britain’s constitution and its national character’.⁷⁰ Suffering Napoleon was compelling on moral and aesthetic grounds for poets and others.⁷¹ Semmel’s limited exploration of the continued ‘focal point for political discussion’ justifies my forays in Chapters 3 and 5 into political discourse and controversy of the 1820s–30s.⁷² Semmel studied relic-gathering and distribution in the era of captivity and posthumously, by Britons, as well as exhibition of objects as varied as carriage, clothes and horses. Separately, he has detailed Waterloo’s near-immediate ‘mythic’ quality, the layering of meaning through poetry and histories, and relic-hunting and ‘instant historical tourism’ associated with the battle.⁷³ Semmel’s work is the starting point for my extended treatment of Napoleana and exhibitions, which he sees as catering to a taste for sublime sensation, the ‘grasping an elusive history by means of an encounter with its tangible traces’ and a ‘widely shared hunger for things Napoleonic’, into the 1840s.⁷⁴ Semmel emphasizes Britons’ ambiguous feelings towards a long-demonized figure. Napoleon’s actions, achievements and treatment were reflected upon in ways that revealed ‘anxiety and doubt about their own nation’s conditions’. Despite the national pride in warring with and defeating the French, complacent self-congratulation was not the only reaction.⁷⁵

Harriet Martineau argued in 1838 that in representative governments, ‘where politics are the chief expression of morals, the songs of the people cannot but be an instructive study to the observer’, although she cautioned against taking ‘one aspect of the popular mind for the whole’, like using Charles Dibdin’s songs as expressive of the English.⁷⁶ The work of historians studying the Napoleonic conflict’s impact and Napoleon’s place in British popular culture includes Oskar Jensen’s Napoleon and British Song, 1797–1822 (2015).⁷⁷ Semmel explored briefly Napoleon’s continued presence in a ‘surprisingly positive role’, as victim of British treachery and cruelty, in ballads into the 1840s and beyond. Jensen’s monograph takes us away from the metropolis to the ‘streets, fairs and public houses’ of Britain.⁷⁸ His nuanced analysis asserts that ‘subaltern memories’ in popular song show a Napoleon ‘better loved and respected by the general populace than Wellington, Pitt, or the Prince Regent’.⁷⁹ These ephemeral songs, like other cultural artefacts, contested and constructed political and other opinions, although he argues that sympathy with Napoleon was not necessarily support for a ‘radicalised political programme’.⁸⁰ For a ‘singing nation’, Napoleon became hero and everyman, another victim of a repressive regime.⁸¹ The treatment of Napoleon and the war in songs reveals popular mentalities about the state. Celebrating British naval victories, Napoleon was made a worthy and admirable foe at ‘Nelson’s coattails’. But loyalists miscalculated by creating so many songs with Boney as chief figure of ridicule and horrified fascination. Making him a satirical target drawing on gendered tropes of domestic emasculation as imperial husband and father helped create pity for a man separated from his family (even in some loyalist songs of 1814) and meant that posthumous sympathy in popular culture endured.⁸² This was not always the sympathy of radical politics. For a population facing wartime separation through press-gang, or death of loved ones in military service, Napoleon figured as ‘antihero: as folkloric mischief-maker’. His character and the personal circumstances of separation, not politics or ideology, appeared in popular song.⁸³ Jensen finds no new anti-Napoleon songs (or demand for their reprints) in post-1815 broadside collections and indications of threatening status or ‘lasting subversiveness’ through British and Irish song long after Napoleon’s death.⁸⁴

Jensen’s work offers a focus beyond a ‘narrow corpus of Romantic verse or journalism as representative of the British experience’.⁸⁵ Semmel argued that Napoleon’s place in a Romantic pantheon of heroes was down to the tropes of tragic suffering and rapid reversal, a state of fallen greatness opening a ‘vein of sympathy’ to Napoleon in late-Georgian political culture. This was also manifested in art.⁸⁶ The field of Romantic studies in relation to Napoleon includes Simon Bainbridge’s Napoleon and English Romanticism (1995), the first full-length treatment of an obsession with Napoleon – and their concern with Napoleon’s place in British public imagination – by the Lake poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Robert Southey, and, from a contrary position, by Lord Byron and William Hazlitt. ‘In representing Napoleon,’ Bainbridge writes, ‘these writers made him represent something else, be that a political doctrine, an aesthetic creed or even the writer himself.’⁸⁷ Bainbridge explored differences and similarities between major Romantic writers’ private and public assessments of Napoleon, while acknowledging a vast body of varied writings from squibs to epics and mock epics revealing his centrality to Romantic culture. While the study is mainly about textual representation before 1815, as these writers ‘constructed, appropriated and contested different Napoleons as a crucial part of their sustained and partisan engagement in the political and cultural debates of the day’, Bainbridge examined Hazlitt’s relationship to Napoleon in his essays and Life of Napoleon Buonaparte. He compared the essayist’s use of Miltonic imagery of Satan with the satanic figure of anti-Napoleonists.⁸⁸ Byron’s obsession has been studied by several literary scholars – Clara Tuite considering this in a study of ‘scandalous celebrity’.⁸⁹ The reactions to Napoleon and the Revolution from other poets and writers, like Thomas Moore, Percy Shelley, Charles Lamb, James Hogg and John Keats, have attracted attention.⁹⁰ A younger generation of Romantic poets and writers has been studied. Branwell Brontë and his sisters were fascinated by Wellington and Bonaparte. Their father’s periodicals and newspapers were replete with the Napoleonic era’s military side; periodicals and memoirs celebrating and assessing this military history have been researched.⁹¹

My discussion of Napoleon’s British biographies and histories of the Napoleonic regime and era, in Chapter 8, draws on scholarship on historiography, biography and publishing. That complication of British responses to Napoleon – his relationship to the French Revolution, which I have sometimes felt in the course of research – has not always troubled historians assessing nineteenth-century British handling of the revolution.⁹² Hedva Ben-Israel detected no clear-cut party lines in Revolutionary historiography in Britain, with differences in present-day politics in the 1820s only superficially appearing as Tory or Whig interpretation, the Tory Quarterly Review and Whig Edinburgh Review showing the ‘same history in fact if not in tone’.⁹³ Yet the first university-based Englishman to write a history of the revolution, the increasingly conservative Whig William Smyth, Regius Professor in Cambridge, in the later 1820s avoided the Napoleonic era in lectures because he could not understand it.⁹⁴ The two pre-eminent British biographers of Napoleon in my period were Walter Scott and Hazlitt. Ben-Israel summarized Scott’s historiographic work as ‘reflective … not a bigoted anti-Revolutionary work’.⁹⁵ Hazlitt’s obsession with Napoleon has been examined as essayist (and a little bust of Napoleon is smashed in his anonymous and scandalous Liber Amoris; or, The New Pygmalion of 1823), as well as in his multi-volume reply to the Scott biography.⁹⁶ ‘He be damned,’ was the Great Unknown’s response to Hazlitt’s intention. Duncan Wu’s biography shows Hazlitt’s futile efforts to upset the juggernaut of Scott’s work in notices and essays in the press.⁹⁷

Napoleon cultivated his image as individual hero and saviour of France; texts and imagery transforming messy reality into mythic encounters, such as his bravery on the bridge at Arcole, swiftly disseminated across Europe.⁹⁸ Napoleon’s impact on British painters and visual art has been explored through the figures of J. M. W. Turner and Benjamin Haydon. Turner followed Haydon in depicting Napoleon at St Helena in a sunset, in 1842.⁹⁹ Napoleon fascinated early-Victorian essayists and novelists, Elisabeth Jay arguing for his ‘reappearance in British literature in the 1840s’. This generation includes Thomas Carlyle, William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens.¹⁰⁰ Ben-Israel discusses the lack of interest by John Stuart Mill: preoccupied by history as a young man, he saw the Napoleonic period as lacking philosophic instructiveness.¹⁰¹

Chapter 7’s study of Napoleon on stage follows the interest of scholars like Martin Meisel, William Howarth, Susan Valladares, Katherine Astbury and others with Bonaparte in nineteenth-century drama. Another theme is the response to Napoleon’s career and character in theatrical metaphor. The course of recent French history was compared to a ‘grand and complicated drama’ by Lucy Aikin in 1815.¹⁰² Astbury explores the commedia dell’arte and fairground-derived harlequin in British and French anti-Napoleonic or Bonapartist cartoons. Valladares examines the ‘politicization of theatre … the theatricalization of politics’.¹⁰³ Valladares has written on the relationship of the Hundred Days to the censored sites of London patent theatres whose popular entertainment, ‘within the reach of a broad social spectrum’, was a ‘multimedia experience that called upon various levels of visual, musical and verbal literacies’.¹⁰⁴ The visual literacy required is illuminated by Meisel’s earlier study of work like Horace Vernet’s Napoleonic battle-scene paintings at Versailles’s Musée historique, models for elaborate staging in French and English plays about Napoleon in the 1830s. As Meisel notes, citing Ferdinand Laloue at the Cirque-Olympique in Paris, in using ‘widely familiar pictorial images as a form of external authentication, the Napoleonic myth could pass itself off as history … recognition of the image, a shared epiphany, would unite the audience into a community of worshippers’.¹⁰⁵ Meisel is the starting point for considering plays of the 1830s combining a heroic individual with the masses, the melodramatic with panoramic, through the hippodrama of Philip Astley’s London venue and Antonio Franconi’s Cirque-Olympique.¹⁰⁶ Meisel suggests the great man and ‘master will’ appealed little to English theatregoers thereafter. But I demonstrate the habit – in English newspaper commentary – of equating Napoleonic ‘heroic will’ with actor-managers, which he notes in passing. My tenth chapter shows the renewed stimulus to British stage-Napoleons in 1840.¹⁰⁷ Another study, by Maurice Samuels, explores the French staging of Napoleon in the July Monarchy, ‘a radically heightened form of visual realism … the appearance of the past with a remarkable attention to detail’, in examining a ‘spectacular mode’ of historical representation typified by new optical technologies and commodification.

Alexandre Dumas’s epic Napoléon Bonaparte, ou Trente Ans de l’Histoire de France with its fifty-five scenes at the Odéon was one of five plays about Napoleon in Paris in late 1830 and early 1831. He figured as the principal or passing character in almost six hundred French theatrical works from the late-eighteenth century to the late-nineteenth century. Dramatic representation ranged from hostile Restoration treatment, through such incidents as the duc d’Enghien’s death, to the exploration of Napoleon in ‘documentary’ mode rather than episodic and anecdotal after the 1830 Revolution.¹⁰⁸ For French Romantic dramatists and critics, lessons for the present were conveyed by staging, allowing identification with the past through ‘material specificity’.¹⁰⁹ French trends in subject and staging matter for my study because of the French basis of the Covent Garden experiment and the keen awareness in British newspapers of Parisian theatre.¹¹⁰

Meisel’s work is important for visual responses in the 1820s–30s by artists like Vernet and Denis-Auguste-Marie Raffet, sources for tableaux in French and British Napoleon plays and image-making in printed lives of Napoleon of the late 1830s. Raffet and Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet provided renderings of French soldiers in the ‘new and virtually unregulatable medium of lithography’, but Raffet and Vernet’s work was wood-engraved by French and British artists for serialized English-language lives of Napoleon.¹¹¹ Samuels discusses the transformation of French historiography into a spectacle ‘for a price’, focusing on wood-engraving-illustrated biographies catering to a cult of Napoleon.¹¹² This medium permitted images in text and enhanced a more anecdotal approach to history: ‘The image moves – literally – to the center of the historiographic experience’.¹¹³ British versions, reproducing chapter vignettes and other illustrations, are examined in Chapter 8. Similarly, in promoting British biographies of the late 1830s, there was vigorous marketing combined with lowered costs from cheaper paper, enabling a wider readership and prominence for artists whose designs were more profusely featured than in earlier histories.¹¹⁴

Samuels’s thesis on the ‘spectacular past’ brings in waxwork, optical technologies of phantasmagoria or magic lantern and panorama during and after the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras.¹¹⁵ Several of my chapters mention panoramas as a way Britons encountered historical events. My sixth chapter studies a variation on the ‘composition figures’ of Tussaud, not ‘frozen in time’ since to uncanny verisimilitude of anatomy and face (modelled in a material which was not wax) was added a trick of movement.¹¹⁶ This episode has not had attention before, but waxwork is analysed as a way of presenting British history and its relationship to Napoleon in Pamela Pilbeam’s study of Madame Tussaud and Billie Melman’s chapter on ‘History as a Chamber of Horrors’.¹¹⁷ Tussaud amassed artefacts while modelling past and present celebrities. The illusion of reality, Pilbeam argues, was strengthened by authenticated clothing and other items.¹¹⁸ ‘A visitor,’ she writes, ‘could feel much closer to Napoleon in Baker Street than in Les Invalides.’¹¹⁹ She suggests a psychological element to the experience: the Napoleon of wartime propaganda now a tamed or domesticated beast.¹²⁰

Tussaud belongs to a history of collecting and exhibiting Napoleona, whether of apparel, carriage and contents in the ever-growing collection publicly displayed in the Golden Room in Baker Street, the relatively small-scale collection in the house-museum of the architect Sir John Soane at Lincoln’s Inn Fields or amassed at vast cost by John Sainsbury in nearby Red Lion Square, Holborn.¹²¹ In these cases, historic figures were interpreted and presented through catalogue or brochure. Judith Pascoe insightfully studies Romantic-era collecting and exhibiting of ‘association relics’ and the self-aggrandizement accompanying this, through the highly profitable metropolitan and provincial exhibition of Napoleon’s captured carriage and its intimate contents, by William Bullock, and emulation by Byron in 1816. There was an insatiable appetite for the relics of one who ‘associated himself with so many physical objects that the supply of Napoleonic possessions was bottomless’.¹²²

If this contrasted with a more muted demand for Wellingtoniana, the duke’s post-war collection of objects, places and people associated with his opponent is noted by Andrew Roberts and other biographers.¹²³ Iain Pears’s essay on Wellington and Napoleon argues that contrasting their personalities, military achievements and political careers was an ‘enduring element’ in nineteenth-century British mythologizing. The unheroic, uncharismatic and domesticated duke became representative of selflessness and solidity of national character, supposedly displayed at his state funeral, compared with mere dazzle in Napoleon’s posthumous return to Paris. That there were parallels in their lives (as Pears notes, they were born in the same year and had French military academy education) was observed by contemporaries.¹²⁴ My chapter on the politics of the 1830s covers a period unexamined in Pears’s short essay, when admiration for the Crown’s loyal political servant, self-made military leader, English gentleman and world-famous aristocrat (aspects of a Victorian discourse on Wellington, untroubled about the real man’s contradictions) confronted Whig and radical scorn. Though Pears notes ‘he was more closely identified with current government policies and hence more of a target for factional abuse,’ in the context of Catholic Emancipation and rural poverty in the 1820s, the polemical roles Waterloo and Bonaparte played in the parliamentary reform crisis and the agitation for repeal of the union with Ireland are understudied.¹²⁵

My second chapter might be an exercise in local history, except that in this case the local became central to national concerns. Studies of the Napoleonic era include Richard Gaunt’s fine essay on Nottingham and Nottinghamshire after Waterloo, charting the town’s muted response compared with local reaction in 1814 and extended public euphoria elsewhere, because of pressures caused by the long war and post-war dislocation. Napoleon was whipped and burned in effigy after his defeat in the battle of Leipzig in 1813, and open expression of sympathy or support for him was minimal.¹²⁶ Yet a local radical paper reprinted a letter against the St Helena incarceration from the radical Black Dwarf.¹²⁷

Local publishers of Napoleon histories are the hinterland to my chapter on printed lives. Napoleon anecdotes, paragraphs or verse appeared in The Selector, or Cornish Magazine and Falmouth’s The Gossip, while Dundee Recorder reprinted Napoleon’s protest about English hospitality on the Bellerophon, and Berwick’s Border Magazine printed verse imagining the writer at the tomb in the early 1830s.¹²⁸ The Leeds Mercury’s publisher Edward Baines produced a two-volume history of the French wars which acknowledged Napoleon’s achievements such as the abolition of slavery.¹²⁹ J. W. Robertson’s biography (updated to include an engraving and a description of St Helena) issued from Newcastle, a town whose intelligentsia supported a magazine reviewing publications on Napoleon.¹³⁰ Napoleon and British Song refers at several points to provincial Bonapartists or pro-Napoleon sentiment, as well as regional printers and singers. Jensen’s final chapter evokes Newcastle’s plebeian culture, its public-house venues for singers and a thriving print culture of newspapers and songs.¹³¹ This song culture was non-partisan and lacking in loyalist or radical topicality in the Revolution’s first decade but evolved into a nuanced response to the Napoleonic regime, with Tyneside supporters like the printer John Marshall, and an anti-authoritarian critique of the war. With peace, Napoleon became a way of ‘fram[ing] post-war hardship’, as Novocastrian workers became more politicized but also expressive of local identity.¹³² Jensen compares Marshall’s broadside obituary of Napoleon with the local publisher and historian Eneas Mackenzie’s sympathetic biography of 1816: as ‘concerned with an intimate depiction of their subject’ and indicating resistance in northern England to a loyalist ‘black legend’. In 1818, bankrupt Novocastrian bookseller John Bell’s stock and private library included Napoleonic coins, engraved portrait, colossal and small plaster figures, and death-masks of Bonaparte.¹³³

A British-wide scope

The historiographic survey noted previous scholarly focus on England and the metropolis, and the emergence of more British-wide and local studies. The second chapter offers a peripheral English viewpoint. More work is needed on Napoleon’s treatment in Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The Scottish literary elite, reviewers and writers of Whig and Tory Edinburgh periodicals, figure throughout my study, and Walter Scott and his publishers are prominent in the chapter on Napoleon’s English-language lives. Poems came from lesser Scottish writers. The young bookseller Thomas Atkinson’s Sextuple Alliance, published in Glasgow in April 1823, presented anti-Napoleon poems supposedly by a group of friends, discussing Barry O’Meara’s Voice from St Helena and aware that assessments were shaped by differing ‘political sentiments’.¹³⁴ A critical appraisal of Napoleon appears in an entry on modern France in The Glasgow Geography (1825) by ‘several literary gentlemen’.¹³⁵ Hermione Ballantyne naturally included an epitaph to Byron and verse on Napoleon’s grave in Kelso Souvenir.¹³⁶ Scottish aristocrats and gentry participated in assembling Napoleonic objects and iconography. The bachelor and diarist John Waldie’s pompous catalogue of possessions at his estate in Kelso records Napoleons in medallions, shell-cameos, bronze equestrian form, as alabaster tomb, plaster head and bust (the latter from Canova’s studio and bought in Florence) in 1835. Waldie was a brother of Charlotte Eaton, bestselling writer on Waterloo and a novelist.¹³⁷

Napoleon’s impact on ‘long nineteenth-century’ Irish culture is briefly surveyed by Thomas Bartlett, summarizing connections during the Revolution and empire, including links formed through marriages by Napoleon’s siblings; the ill-fated Irish Legion; presence in folklore (ballads and stories) that echo tales circulating in France and which show Napoleon as a figure of hope for Catholics; his Irish doctor on St Helena (O’Meara); and commercialized representation as elsewhere, with military re-enactment and waxworks represented in playbills from the 1820s to the 1840s.¹³⁸ Newspapers and periodicals carried Napoleon-related verse and tales in Dublin.¹³⁹ A study by Jonathan Wright exposes interest in Napoleon among reformers in Belfast.¹⁴⁰ Welsh response to Napoleon as opposed to the French Revolution awaits study for the period after 1815. Mary-Anne Constantine summarizes evidence of responses in wartime, travel-writers’ anecdotes, a Welsh-language biography of Napoleon, anti-Napoleon ballads and reflections on the Hundred Days in the short-lived weekly Seren Gomer, the first Welsh-language newspaper, showing the coverage in its international news sections and in relation to the abolition of slavery.¹⁴¹