Zero Ground: Mapping Maritime Commemoration in the Age of Nelson

Abstract

As the Napoleonic Wars ended, deceptively simple forms of commemorative militaria attuned Romantic writers to the overrepresentation of officers in victory culture. This article asserts that the ideological biases of battlefield maps prompted William Wordsworth's radical critique of naval commemoration in “Benjamin the Waggoner.” Although the campaigns of the army created travel destinations for battlefield tourism, the naval battlefield occupies a strange space in Romantic commemoration. Lacking a “place” for tourists to stand, naval commemoration induced geographic simulations from victory arboretums to dinner plates adorned with tactical maps. Inspired by the assumed objectivity of simulations such as these, Wordsworth's poem mocks the discharged sailor's reenactment of the Battle of the Nile for its revisionist geography. By overinvesting Nelson in the battle's history, Wordsworth's poem reveals the limits of patriotic nostalgia and its tendency to elide the memory of departed seamen and the families that mourned their memory.