The Afterlife of Thomas Campbell and ‘The Soldier’s Dream’ in the Crimean War

Abstract

Studies of Crimean War poetry tend to focus on Alfred Tennyson’s celebrated war poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (1854), a civilian poetic rewriting of The Times’s despatches. While recent scholarship has highlighted the impact of modern forms of reportage on artistic representations of the Crimean War, this article will argue that the two-year military campaign waged at a long distance was not only a media war but also a literary one, during which civilians drew on established forms of war poetry to make sense of the pressing issues provoked by the conflict overseas. This literary war was manifest in the myriad ways armchair poets and artists rewrote Thomas Campbell’s ‘The Soldier’s Dream’ (1804) to address the reading public’s anxieties and expectations about the welfare of the common soldier. The rewritings of Campbell’s poem this article will consider include: Punch’s ‘The Soldier’s Dream’ alongside an accompanying cartoon by John Tenniel of 1 April 1854; the poem ‘A Night on the Heights’, penned by the pseudonymous poet ‘Private Jones’ in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in December 1854; a piece of commemorative pottery designed by George Eyre in January 1855; and Part III of Tennyson’s ‘Maud’, published in Maud and Other Poems in July 1855. By examining these works at specific moments of the conflict, I will demonstrate that mid-Victorians deployed Campbell’s dream-vision framework to negotiate the soldier’s public duties and private emotions, as well as the government’s responsibilities for the soldier and his family. While in general mid-century commentators utilized Campbell’s dream vision to foreground a benign government’s efforts to care for the soldier, Tennyson’s conclusion of ‘Maud’ offered an ironic rendition of this interpretation. Instead, a civilian’s dream of fighting a glorious war becomes a nightmarish vision of the government’s military incompetence and the suffering of the rank and file in the Crimea.