Abstract
In just a few carefully crafted lines, William Wordsworth captured the dilemma of the sailors who, themselves conscripted, later participated in press gangs and brought in new conscripts:
A Sailor he, who many a wretched hour
Hath told; for, landing after labour hard,
Full long endured in hope of just reward,
He to an armèd fleet was forced away
By seamen, who perhaps themselves had shared
Like fate; was hurried off, a helpless prey,
‘Gainst all that in his heart, or theirs perhaps, said nay.1
We could subsume the process described in Wordsworth’s poem under the rubric of “forging the nation”—the subtitle of Linda Colley’s influential book Britons—though a pressed sailor might ask who is doing the forging, and who is under the hammer. At a more visceral level, Wordsworth’s lines evoke one of the central problems that we must consider when nationalism and masculinity intersect. The very call to arms that supposedly distinguished (and exalted) male identities above female ones, the call that promised to multiply the individual male’s virility into a majestic masculine host—an army, a fleet—too often found its origin in the humiliation of the conscript. However powerful the military might be, its individual members could not be unaware of their own disempowerment. Saying “yes” to the nation required at least a temporary suppression of the individual “nay.”
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Roger Knight, The Pursuit of Victory: The Life and Achievement of Horatio Nelson (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 257;
Isaac Land, “What Are We at War about?” London Review of Books, December 1, 2005.
Knight, Pursuit, 531; Holger Hoock, “Nelson Entombed: The Military and Naval Pantheon in St. Paul’s Cathedral,” in Admiral Lord Nelson: Context and Legacy, ed. David Cannadine, (New York: Pal-grave Macmillan, 2005), 115;
Timothy Jenks, “Contesting the Hero: The Funeral of Admiral Lord Nelson,” Journal of British Studies 39, no. 4 (October 2000): 427, notes that traditionally, a lord of the manor was escorted to his tomb by a complement raised “from the tenantry.”
Hoock, “Nelson Entombed,” 124. As stratified as Nelson’s Navy was, upward mobility through the ranks would become more difficult in future generations. Fiction and children’s games about this bygone era encouraged Victorian boys to imagine that they would enjoy similar opportunities for advancement: Mary Conley, From Jack Tar to Union Jack: Naval Manhood in the British Empire, 1870–1918 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 107–114.
Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 324.
Gareth Stedman-Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 96, 102.
Matthew Brown, “Not Forging Nations but Foraging for Them: Uncertain Collective Identities in Gran Colombia,” Nations and Nationalism 12, no. 2 (2006): 223–240.
Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Linda Colley, “Whose Nation?: Class and National Consciousness in Britain, 1750–1830,” Past and Present 113 (November 1986): 117, acknowledges “dividing and ruling” as a tactic in the post-Napoleonic era—as if those circumstances were different—but presumably those who roused the volunteers in the 1790s and 1800s did so in the expectation that the war would, one day, be over. Mass mobilization always comes with an expiration date, even if the commitment to mobilize is temporarily left open-ended.
John Knox, Observations on the Northern Fisheries (London: J. Walter, 1786), 6.
These model villages are discussed further in Jean Dunlop, The British Fisheries Society, 1786–1893 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1978).
Brenda Assael, “Music in the Air: Noise, Performers and the Contest over the Streets of the Mid-Nineteenth Century Metropolis,” in The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram, 2003), 183–197.
John Thomas Smith, Vagabondiana, or Anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London (London: J. & A. Arch, 1817), 33.
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2003) is also of interest. I will discuss Equiano’s relationship to Britishness in a forthcoming publication.
Charles Cunningham, A Narrative of Occurences That Took Place during the Mutiny at the Nore (Chatham: William Burrill, 1829), 116.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale Unversity Press, 1992), 5, 372.
Michael Lewis, The Navy in Transition, 1814–1864: A Social History (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 166–193;
Eugene Rasor, Reform in the Royal Navy: A Social History of the Lower Deck, 1850 to 1880 (Hamden, CN: Archon, 1976), 34–35;
John Winton, “Life and Education in a Technically Evolving Navy, 1815–1925,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, ed. J. R. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 250–279.
Isaac Land, “‘Sinful Propensities’: Piracy, Sodomy, and Empire in the Rhetoric of Naval Reform,” in Discipline and the Other Body: Humanitarianism, Violence, and the Colonial Exception, ed. Anupama Rao and Steven Pierce (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).
Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002);
Michael H. Fisher, Counterflows to Colonialism: Indian Travelers and Settlers in Britain, 1600–1857 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004).
Shompa Lahiri, “Patterns of Resistance: Indian Seamen in Imperial Britain,” in Language, Labour and Migration, ed. Anne J. Kershen (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 155–178;
Sarah Palmer, Politics, Shipping, and the Repeal of the Navigation Laws (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).
Laura Tabili, “We Ask for British Justice”: Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Thomas Trotter, Medicina Nautica: An Essay on the Diseases of Seamen (London, 1797), 38.
I. J. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 141.
Matthew Henry Barker, Greenwich Hospital, A Series of Naval Sketches, Descriptive of the Life of a Man-of-War’s Man. By an Old Sailor (London: James Robins, 1826), 200.
Copyright information
© 2009 Isaac Land
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Land, I. (2009). Conclusion. In: War, Nationalism, and the British Sailor, 1750–1850. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101067_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101067_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-99950-7
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-10106-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)