Abstract
Military Men of Feeling represents a most welcome addition to a growing body of scholarship, including work by Joanne Begiato, Mary Conley, Jennine Hurl-Eamon, Isaac Land, Matthew McCormack and Michael Roper, which seeks to nuance our perception of military masculinities in Britain and to emphasise the emotional range and complexity of military experience. This book focuses on the specific context of the Crimean War (1853–56), a conflict which, as Furneaux proves, offers fertile ground for the exploration of these issues, but which has received rather less attention from scholars than other wars, most notably the First World War and the Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars.
Furneaux is a literary scholar, but one with pronounced historicist sensibilities. Thus, while the formal structure separates the book into six chapters it also possesses an informal structure that divides the book into two halves. The first three chapters draw upon the familiar literary terrain of contemporary fiction. Meanwhile, the last three chapters explore more conventional historical sources, including personal papers and material objects. It is a testament to Furneaux’s abilities that she reconciles these different approaches so successfully and that the book remains consistently relevant to scholars of both disciplines.
Military Men of Feeling opens with an Introduction in which Furneaux draws together some of the extant scholarship on war masculinity and emotion, as well as providing a broader cultural context for the Crimean conflict. Most importantly, perhaps, she also establishes her intellectual and methodological position regarding the ‘affectively complex materials’ (p. 25) with which the book deals. Furneaux is keen to present a more rounded picture of soldiers’ emotions and the affective experience of war than has generally been acknowledged. However, she is also wary lest such portrayals of sensitive, emotional warriors detract from the inherent brutality, cruelty and pity of war. In order to remain alert to such dangers, and to transcend the narrowly dualistic interpretation of texts as pro- or anti-war, she adopts an approach drawn from Eve Sedgwick (and in turn from Melanie Klein) denominated as the ‘paranoid/reparative’.
Chapter One offers a nicely contextualised reading of William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes (1853–55), demonstrating how the book’s eponymous hero, Colonel Newcome, became the most celebrated literary gentleman of feeling in mid-Victorian Britain. Although redolent of eighteenth-century traditions, Furneaux shows how such models of masculinity continued to resonate with readers in the Crimea.
Chapter Two considers secular and spiritual redemption in the war stories of Charles Kingsley and Charles Dickens. Her reading of the delightfully named character Private Richard Doubledick, the central protagonist of Dickens’s story ‘Seven Poor Travellers’ in the Christmas 1854 edition of Household Words, suggests that Dickens was keen to present the working man as a reformed character capable of bearing the responsibility of full social and political rights, a contentious topic of debate in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. She also draws out the ambiguous relations between Christianity and war, an association not wholly reconciled by Kingsley’s concept of ‘muscular Christianity’.
Chapter Three explores the literary trope of soldiers adopting children, particularly young girls. On the one hand, such stories suggest a level of familial and domestic care not conventionally associated with soldiers on campaign. On the other hand, Furneaux teases out the queasy sexual ambivalences of the regimental family, with ‘daughters of the regiment’ often expected to become ‘wives of the regiment’ on reaching maturity.
Chapter Four continues the analysis of the regiment as space for quasi-familial affection, focussing upon the paternal relationship between Colonel Thomas G. Egerton and Captain Audley Lempriere of the 77th (East Middlesex) Regiment of Foot, both of whom were killed in action before Sebastopol in April 1855. Through a reading of their personal papers and the public representations of their deaths, Furneaux considers the cultural celebration of soldierly sentiment as well as the more complex reality of Lempriere’s character.
Chapter Five explores the links between the military and domestic spheres through the practices of letter writing, drawing, the sharing of souvenirs and the creation of objects such as quilts. Meanwhile, Chapter Six, perhaps the strongest in the book, considers the cultures of male military nursing, contrasting contemporary literary representations of male tenderness and the complex experience of male nurses with the received image, shaped by middle-class female reformers such as Florence Nightingale, of male orderlies as uncaring drunkards. Furneaux has a particularly nice section in this chapter on the gendered politics of touch.
Military Men of Feeling is an insightful and highly readable piece of work that makes a very significant contribution to our understandings of military masculinities, the affective experience of war in general and the cultural history of the Crimean War in particular. It is also notable for the ways in which it combines literary and historical analysis, something that should be especially appealing for readers of this journal. If I had a reservation about the book it would concern its theoretical underpinnings. Aside from the paranoid/reparative reading borrowed from Eve Sedgwick, Military Men of Feeling is surprisingly light on theoretical and historiographical engagement. Most notably, it is completely disconnected from what is now a significant and highly developed historiography of the emotions. Thomas Dixon makes it into the Bibliography, but there is no room for such scholars and theorists of the emotions as Barbara Rosenwein or William Reddy. This is a shame because Furneaux is actually doing what is surprisingly uncommon in the history of emotions, that is, putting it into practice on a given case study as opposed to formulating new concepts or retracing the development of the field. As such it would have been nice to have had a sense of what Furneaux thinks she is adding to this literature and how her research might shape our understandings. Having said this, Military Men of Feeling is a very important work and will be required reading for both historians and literary scholars of war, emotion and Victorian masculinities.