A Family Business: The Bartholomews of Edinburgh in the First World War

Abstract

This article examines the lived experience of the Bartholomew family of Edinburgh during the course of the First World War. Families, as much as nations, empires and other communities, were important participants in the conflict that collapsed the boundaries between the various battlefronts and homefront like none before. The Bartholomews’ letters to one another were the chief means by which the shared experience of total war was mediated and constructed, as well as a vital source for ascertaining the role played by the family in their nation’s war effort. In them, we can see the way unpalatable truths were concealed beneath literary tropes, drawn from the language of glory and sacrifice, but also the way such sentiments were real and deeply felt to a generation not yet experienced in the cynicism and sarcasm that the war occasioned in the English language as much as the mind. These letters also represent a form of organically created propaganda that sustained the Bartholomews’ morale and commitment to the war effort, and also their collective identity as a family unit, despite the scattering of parents and siblings from Edinburgh, to Flanders, and northern Italy.