Abstract
During the Napoleonic Wars, Nelson was presented in a manner that appealed to a female audience. His image was pervasively sentimentalised in consumer goods marketed to a female purse, and women writers presented him in various ways that correspond to the domestic, amorous, and political desires of their audience. Such extravagantly sexualised and romanticised representations of Nelson were ubiquitous at the time but have since been overlooked by modern scholarship. This chapter proposes that such neglect is undeserved. Women’s portrayals of Nelson are not inconsequential, nor the unmediated results of pro-war government propaganda, but vital interventions into the public representation of the hero and important revelations about their opinions towards the Napoleonic Wars. Largely deprived of official representation and a political voice, women wrote novels that exploited patriotic sentiment and sexual feeling about Nelson, expressed dissent and appreciation, offered fantasies about how sailors should behave, and tested new theories about Nelson, heroism, and the role of sailors in the wider culture.
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Notes
See Colin White, The Nelson Encyclopaedia (London: Chatham, 2002), pp. 176–8;
Flora Fraser, ‘If You Seek His Monument’, in The Nelson Companion, ed. Colin White (Stroud: Sutton, 1995), pp. 129–51.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (1992; repr. London: Vintage, 1996), p. 268.
Margarette Lincoln, Representing the Royal Navy: British Sea Power, 1750–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), pp. 137–60.
Colley, Britons, particularly pp. 251–96; Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire of Virtue: The Imperial Project and Hanoverian Culture c. 1720–1785’, in An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815, ed. Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 128–64,
and Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 105.
Grazer Zeitung, 18 August 1800. Cited in Thomas Bliimel, Nelson’s Overland Return in 1800 (Slinfold: The Nelson Society, 2000), pp. 8–9.
Lady Elizabeth Foster, journal entry, 12 November 1800, cited in Dorothy Stuart, Dearest Bess (London: Metheun, 1955), p. 88.
Carola Oman, Nelson (1947; repr. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1950), p. 270.
Rina Prentice, A Celebration of the Sea: The Decorative Art Collections of the National Maritime Museum (London: HMSO, 1994), p. 33.
Park Honan, Jane Austen: Her Life (1987; repr. London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 162.
Cited in Hugh Tours, The Life and Letters of Emma Hamilton (London: Gollancz, 1963), p. 121.
Lionel Cust (ed.), Catalogue of the Collections of Fans and Fan-Leaves Presented to the Trustees of the British Museum by the Lady Charlotte Schreiber (London: Longmans, 1893), p. 4; see Prentice, Celebration of the Sea, p. 32.
R.K. Henrywood, Relief-Moulded Jugs, 1820 (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1984), p. 199.
For a reproduction of this jug, see Desmond Eyles, Royal Doulton Character and Toby Jugs (Kent: Westerham Press, 1979), p. 29.
See Shirley Bury, Jewellery: 1789–1910, 2 vols (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1991), vol. I, pp. 174–5.
See Prentice, A Celebration of the Sea, p. 33; Ann Louise Luthi, Sentimental Jewellery (Princes Risborough: Shire Publications, 1998), p. 9.
See Tom Malcomson, ‘Commemoration Meant Commerce for Some, Advertisements from The Times after the Death of Nelson’, The Nelson Dispatch, 6, part 9 (1999), 386–90 (p. 387).
Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), particularly pp. 187–93 (p. 193).
On shopping and social identity, see Grant MacCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 19;
on ‘social emulation’, see The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. John McKendrick, John Brewer, and J.H. Plumb (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 11.
On how the period saw two key debates, to define the meaning of consumerism and come to an acceptable ideological construction of the female subject, see Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 5.
On the ‘discriminatory’ policies of the wartime state, see Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 114–21.
Anna Maria Porter, A Sailor’s Friendship and a Soldier’s Love, 2 vols (London, 1805), vol. I, pp. 199, 200, 2–3, 89, 144.
Colin White, The Nelson Encyclopaedia (London: Chatham, 2002), p. 56.
Eliza Parsons, The Convict; or, The Navy Lieutenant (London, 1806), 4 vols, vol. I, pp. 13, 11.
Colin White, ‘Nelson and Shakespeare’, in The Nelson Dispatch, 7, part 3 (2000), 145–50 (p. 150).
John Isbell, ‘Introduction’, to Corinne; or, Italy, ed. Sylvia Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. vii.
Madame de Staäl, Corinna; or, Italy, translator unknown, 3 vols (London, 1807), vol. I, pp. 58–9, 320, 54–7, 298, 3, 9.
N.A.M. Rodger, The Wooden World: An Anatomy of the Georgian Navy (London: Harper Collins, 1986), p. 79.
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (Essex: Longman, 1998), pp. 455–6.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 50–79.
See J.H. Hubback and Edith C. Hubback, Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers (Stroud: Hodgkins, 1986), pp. 61–7.
On Austen’s representation of the Navy, see Brian Southam, Jane Austen and the Navy (London: Hambledon, 2000).
Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, 11–12 October 1813, in The Letters of Jane Austen, ed. Deidre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 235.
Austen, Northanger Abbey, ed. Anne Ehrenpreis (1972; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 123.
Austen, Persuasion, ed. Gillian Beer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), p. 87.
Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. Kathryn Sutherland (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), p. 51.
Austen, Sanditon, ed. Margaret Drabble (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 169.
William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. John Carey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), pp. 325, 119–20, 598, 183, 642.
Wilkie Collins, No Name, ed. Mark Ford (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 516.
See Andrew Lambert, Nelson: Britannia’s God of War (London: Faber, 2004), p. 353.
Barbara Taylor Bradford, A Woman of Substance (London: Granada, 1979), pp. 78, 400–1.
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Williams, K. (2005). Nelson and Women: Marketing, Representations and the Female Consumer. In: Cannadine, D. (eds) Admiral Lord Nelson. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508705_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230508705_5
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