Military Men of Feeling: Masculinity, Emotion and Tactility in Victorian Warfare

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The project explores a key, but previously unrecognised, figure in the history of masculinity: the Victorian military man of feeling. Using a wide range of cultural forms, including literature, reportage and exhibited visual art, as well as craft and writing produced by soldiers and their families and friends, the project makes a case for the cultural centrality of the ideal of soldierly gentleness throughout the nineteenth century. It augments a growing body of work on the diversity of Victorian masculinities, focusing on the previously unrehabilitated figure of the soldier, still held as an imaginative icon for the uncommunicative, stiff-upper-lipped model of nineteenth-century manliness. Recognising a widespread emphasis on soldiers' emotional articulacy and aptitude for physical care, this project deposes stubbornly persistent ideas about masculinity in this period as well as enhancing our understanding of the complexities of battlefield feeling. The central research is organised thematically, with sections each treating a different facet of felt experience, with feeling interpreted, through theories of affect and materiality, in its broadest sense, to comprise emotion, tactility and sensation:1) Reading War: Paranoid and Reparative Strategies and the Politics of AffectThe project begins with a self-conscious examination of its political implications, considering how far representations of the gentle soldier suggest a revision of attitudes towards to warfare and the extent to which they can be deployed in the service of militaristic agenda.2) "The company of gentlemen": Thackeray's Military Men of Feeling and the Eighteenth-century TraditionColonel Newcome, protagonist of the novel Thackeray published during the Crimean war, is inspired by Orme's bloodthirsty and imperialistic Tales of India, while his literary hero is Richardson's pacifistic Sir Charles Grandison. This section traces competing models and literary legacies of manliness, from C18th Imperialist history and sentimental fiction, up to Colonel Newcome's popularity with WW1 soldiers.3) Sentimental Soldiers: Dickens's Christmas Writings and the Heroics of EmotionDickens's Christmas number for Household Words of 1854, a tale of physically and morally restorative soldiering, participated directly in the journal's engagement with the Crimean war through detailed reportage. I consider how sentimental treatments of the soldier in fiction and art, responded to the journalistic representation of the Crimea and broader calls for army reform.4) "Our poor Colonel loved him as if he had been his own son": Family Feeling in the CrimeaHere I bring together literary and first-hand treatments of the regiment as family, focusing on an extraordinary, previously unstudied album held at NAM, which records responses to the death of Captain Lempriere in the Crimea, the diminutive "child of the 55th regiment". 5) Children of the Regiment: Narratives of Battlefield AdoptionThis section accounts for the extra-ordinary proliferation of the narrative of the soldier adopting a dispossessed child in the literature, art and music of the 1850s and 60s. 6) Soldier Art: Textiles and TactilityWhile 'Trench Art' of the First World War has received detailed treatment, the range of art and craft produced by soldiers in the Crimea has not been studied. I consider the non-militaristic felt experience of soldiers who knitted and quilted.7) Reparative Soldiering: Cultures of Male Care-givingNightingale's legacy has totally eclipsed the male provision of physical care in the Crimea. This section recognises the contribution of ambulance men, wound dressers and orderlies using previously unstudied material at the Wellcome library. Afterword: Legacies of the Gentle Soldier in the 21st CenturyA research group, which places this central project in an international context, and a range of Impact events will be central to the development of the thinking outlined here.