Military Relics: Soldiers and Sailors at Home in Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major

Abstract

Abstract Thomas Hardy’s 1880 text The Trumpet-Major, a historical novel set during the period of the Napoleonic invasion scares, is notable for its generic inconsistency and the strangeness of its plot and characters. This essay analyses the novel’s array of soldiers, sailors, members of the yeomanry focused on civil defence, and military veterans, arguing that Hardy’s novel’s formal strangeness grows in part out of its preoccupation with these examples of military figures at home – roles that, I suggest, focused a contemporary anxiety about social connectedness and the continuities and consistencies of life stories and identities. In highlighting the disquiet that these military figures register in the novel as well as outside it, in wider discussions of army reform and policies toward veterans and members of the military, I suggest that in Victorian accounts and in the ruptures registered in Hardy’s text we may find new insights into the languages of social connection – and their failures – that continue to vex us today.