![]() Lawrence told how “Europe woke up, like a giant refreshed, from the slumber of a forty years’ peace, and took down disused weapons from the wall and donned a rusty armour” (qtd. Initial enthusiasm for the Crimean War also stemmed from hopes that it might reunite the people behind a new generation of chivalric heroes, an alternative to the Great Exhibition’s bold industrialists. Disraeli looked to aristocratic “young England” to rejuvenate the nation’s Christian feudal past and bring the classes into accord. who are formed by different breeding, fed by different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws” (1.149). According to one popular perception, Britain had become a dangerously mercantilized country dominated by an ascendant middle class whose successes, paraded at the Exhibition, merely glazed over the social cracks formed during the “hungry ’forties.” Benjamin Disraeli, the future Prime Minister of England, had recorded in Sybil or, The Two Nations (1845) the widening gap between rich and poor, “between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy who are ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings. ![]() The glorious leaders of the earlier age were either dead or had become grizzled old men developments in technology had the potential to alter radically the way in which war was fought other changes, such as the arrival of the telegraph, would transform both how and how rapidly events in the East were viewed from the home front.įeelings about the war were deeply implicated in shifting attitudes towards class as well. Much had changed in Britain during the decades since Waterloo: the French were now friends instead of enemies, while, in a configuration of alliances that seems eerily to predict those of the twentieth century, Russia was the new foe. (See, for example, the following BRANCH essay: Audrey Jaffe, “On the Great Exhibition.”) In addition, as literary and visual representations of the war reveal, reactions to this conflict were both more nuanced and more ambivalent than might be anticipated by our preconceptions about Victorian jingoism (a term coined in the 1870s in reaction to a later Russo-Turkish conflict and in the context of a very different phase of British imperialism). ![]() It thus sheds light on mid-Victorian attitudes towards national identity, offering a counter-narrative to views of the 1850s dominated by responses to the Great Exhibition of 1851, with its contrasting, peaceful spectacle of British technological superiority and imperial reach. The two-year campaign represented the nation’s first major military engagement since the end of the Napoleonic wars. Figure 1: Russo-British skirmish during the Crimean War (anonymous plate)In 1854, in an effort to defend Turkey from Russian expansion and to preserve British access to eastern trade routes, Britain entered into war in the Crimea. ![]()
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