The Fiction of Belgium

Abstract

After the 1815 battle a large number of authors in search of a subject and some memorable characters revisited the battlefield in fiction and poetry: W. M. Thackeray, D. G. Rossetti, and Frances Trollope. This chapter zooms in on a selection of those narratives that were sometimes less directly aimed at visiting the Waterloo dead and the battlefield but that nevertheless contributed to the construction of British identity by building on the differences with the Low Countries. In passing I will point out and prove the importance of a Belgian stay in the writings of, for instance, Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Brontë. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair will be under scrutiny with Waterloo as the central event of the novel. But this study will also look at Thackeray’s travel sketches written under the pseudonym of Michael Angelo Titmarsh and published in Fraser’s Magazine. Interestingly, in both Trollope’s and Thackeray’s lives and work one can trace the cemetery trope and nationality thread which I start up in the introductory chapter.