Soldiership, Christianity, and the Crimean War: The Reception of Catherine Marsh’s Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars

Abstract

Abstract Recent scholarship has done much to illuminate the cultural significance of Catherine Marsh’s popular evangelical biography of Hedley Vicars, a British officer killed during the Crimean War (1853–1856). However, scholars have not systematically examined the ways in which Marsh’s hagiographical portrait of this officer – who, in the eyes of many contemporaries, was the epitome of the ‘Christian soldier’ – was drawn into religious debates following its publication in December 1855. A crucial part of its reception history thus remains incomplete. Building on secondary literature which has recently opened new avenues for the fruitful investigation of the interface between religion and war in Victorian culture, and employing hitherto untapped sources, this article advances fresh perspectives on the place of Vicars’s ‘Christian soldiership’ in wartime religious thought. The article situates Marsh’s Memorials of Captain Hedley Vicars within the context of debates on the lawfulness of war for Christians in general, and on the justice of the Crimean War in particular, before tracing the deployment of the religious and heroic themes of the Memorials by pro-war clergy against peace advocates. The article then explores the peace movement’s critiques of Marsh’s Memorials which sought to undercut the idea of the ‘Christian soldier’ and to demolish the argument that Vicars’s martial valour and fervent piety affirmed the compatibility of war, soldiering, and Christianity. The result is an account which demonstrates the centrality of religious debate to contemporary understandings of a war which helped to define the Victorian era.