Abstract
The fittest man in the world for the command’ of the Mediterranean, Lord Minto declared of Horatio Nelson on 24 April 1798, following Nelson’s inventive assault on Spanish ships off Cape St Vincent. ‘Admiral Nelson’s victory [at Aboukir, the mouth of the Nile] … [is] one of the most glorious and comprehensive victories ever achieved even by British valour’, the London Chronicle exulted later that year. Nelson’s breath-taking exploits on the high seas, his courage and aggression in combat, and his quixotic generosity to his men, had quickly catapulted him to fame, enmeshing his reputation with the best of the English national character. ‘[W]ith the brilliant qualities of a hero, Lord Nelson unites a feeling and generous heart, a quick discernment of occasion, and popularity of manners’ affirmed the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1801, surveying the acclaim of the people on Nelson’s tour to Fonthill.1
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Notes
Gilbert Eliot to Lord St Vincent, quoted in Edgar Vincent, Nelson: Love and Fame (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 219; London Chronicle, 2–4 October, 1798; Gentleman’s Magazine, 71 (1801), 207–8.
Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), chap. 3.
The following three paragraphs are based on Wilson, Sense of the People, and Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003).
For a recent assessment of Wolfe as hero, see Nicholas Rogers, ‘Brave Wolfe: The Making of the Hero’, in Kathleen Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 239–59.
Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 72.
J.S. Clark and J. McArthur, The Life of Admiral Lord Nelson, KB from His Lordships’s manuscripts, 2 vols (London, 1802), vol. I, p. 9.
See Gerald Jordan and Nicholas Rogers, ‘Admirals as Heroes’, Journal of British Studies, 28 (1989), 215–24.
Gerald Jordan, ‘Admiral Nelson as Popular Hero: The Nation and the Navy, 1795–1805’, in New Aspects of Naval History (Baltimore: United States Naval Academy, 1985), pp. 109–10.
Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas, The Dispatches and Letters of Vice Admiral Lord Viscount Nelson (8 vols, London: 1845–46), vol. I, pp. 377–8.
George P.B. Naish, Nelson’s Letters to his Wife, and other documents 1785–1831 (London: Navy Record Society, 1958), pp. 203–4.
Terry Coleman, Nelson (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), pp. 124–8. The Times, 13 March 1797; The Sun, 15 March 1797.
E.g. Frank McLynn, 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004).
Mary Thale (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society 1792–99 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 429–32, 434.
Morning Chronicle, 4 February 1800; Whitehall Evening Post, 5 February 1800. For Fox’s speech, see William Cobbett, Parliamentary History of England (London, 1803), vol. XXIV, pp. 1391–6.
J.E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 214–15.
Linda Colley, Britons (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 284.
Vincent, Nelson, p. 341; Thomas Kosegarten, Meine Freuden in Sachsen (Leipzig, 1801), quoted in Coleman, Nelson, p. 393.
Sir Frederick Pollock (ed.), Macready’s Reminiscences and Selections from his Diaries (London, 1875), vol. II, p. 78. For a more detailed treatment of the all-important tour of 1802,
see David Howarth and Stephen Howarth, Nelson: The Immortal Memory (London: Conway Maritime Museum, 1988).
Evelyn Berckman, Nelson’s Dear Lord (London: Macmillan, 1962), pp. 180, 240, quoted in Jordan, ‘Admiral Nelson’, p. 116.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1968), p. 84.
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Wilson, K. (2005). Nelson and the People: Manliness, Patriotism and Body Politics. In: Cannadine, D. (eds) Admiral Lord Nelson. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508705_4
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