Victorian Studies

In her ambitious study, The Crimean War and its Afterlife: Making Modern Britain, Lara Kriegel has produced a work that should bring this mid-Victorian conflict back to the attention of scholars. As Kriegel acknowledges overtly, she researched and wrote the book [End Page 522] in the shadow of the centenary of the First World War. It is also appearing in the midst of even more attention to the Crimea and its region as the site of a very modern twenty-first-century war with no end in sight. Both of these conflicts in some sense frame a book that challenges us to see this nineteenth-century, international war as one truly generative of modern Britain in a way that the First World War has often been credited. As such, it raises interesting questions about modernity and about Britishness, about connections between historical heroic actions and the lingering need for heroic figures in the twenty-first century, and about the uneasy ties that bound and frayed between Britain and the rest of Europe as its empire grew and diminished.

Untangling all the many skeins with which the Crimean War left traces into contemporary Britain is a task that Kriegel masterfully undertakes. She does so not by providing a strict chronological account that begins in 1853 and then takes us meticulously through the war and the experiences of participants, chroniclers, and descendants, but by dividing her subject into key thematic sections. Within these sections, six rich case studies show how legacies from the Crimean War remain in contemporary British society via an analysis of groups (such as those who wrote about their travels or those who fought in the war) or individuals (Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole each merit their own chapter). As a way of demonstrating the significance of the conflict for creating modern Britain, this works on the whole, although some case studies provide more convincing evidence of Kriegel's overarching aims than others.

The book's introduction lays out its major arguments—that the Crimean War can stand in for the Victorian era in all its rich contradictions, the combination of the "glory of soldierly sacrifice and the failures of national leadership" as emblematic of the military campaign and the "ingenuity, sacrifice, and humility" of notable individual Britons such as Nightingale as exemplars of the spirit of the age (8, 3). As a global war, the conflict in Crimea helped reorient Britain away from Europe and toward itself as an imperial power; it yielded both military and domestic reforms and gave rise to new forms of cultural expression and, specifically as she points out, cultural norms around gender.

Each chapter then starts in a wartime moment and follows the trajectory of "a figure, institution, or practice" originating during the war and how they contributed to shaping "a national ideal, a Victorian value, or a character trait" through to our own epoch (13). At its most successful, such as a heartrending and vivid chapter ("The Dutiful") on those who participated in the Charge of the Light Brigade, this technique enables her readers to see how myth making works, how an epic failure could become a subject of poetic and lasting fame (thanks to Alfred Tennyson). It shows how an idealized version of the now antiquated term "pluck" could turn a military disaster into something worthy of attention and even celebration into the present day (60). Other chapters help us to see the role of adventurers and the legacy of versions of masculinity that include caregiving owed to the dead as well as the living. The chapter entitled "The Custodians" thus centers not on the women (nurses) who famously cared for the wounded of this war (as one might expect) but on the "diverse range of actors [who] served as guardians to the dead and as comforters of the living," caring not only for the dying and their survivors but also innovatively for the...