Waterloo Visitors, the Immediate Aftermath

Abstract

In this chapter, I focus on artists who reacted to the battle of Waterloo by trying to capture the moment in paintings, engravings as well as in texts. Several writers saw it as an absolute necessity to travel across the Channel to see the battlefield for themselves. Walter Scott was one of the first to get to Waterloo. He used his observations and thoughts in prose texts, pseudo-letters to his family, and a long poem entitled The Field of Waterloo. In this chapter I will examine and discuss Scott’s work in light of its author’s conscious effort at re-creating the battle into a realm of memory which was to help construct a British identity. The success of the poem was such that other authors, admirers of Scott, of Wellington, and of Napoleon, followed in his footsteps both literally by also visiting the battlefield and by writing down the feelings and emotions conjured up by their visit. The chapter will further explore the life writings of Fanny Burney, who was actually in Brussels when the event happened, and the better-known texts by Byron, Southey, and William Wordsworth.

In the history of the world never was there such a period as this of 1815.¹

Parts of this chapter first appeared as “Waterloo as a Small Realm of Memory: British Poets, Tourism and the Periodical Press,” Victorian Periodicals Review, 48:4 (December 2015), 453–468.